Do the right thing, wait to get fired - <AUTHOR> http://brendansterne.com/2013/07/11/do-the-right-thing-wait-to-get-fired/ <comment><USER2> I'm not exactly disagreeing, but don't forget the other side too -- that you might not know what you're doing, that you might not understand the good reasons that certain rules are in place, that you might not understand the big picture and that your actions might backfire and/or be counterproductive.

Don't forget to be humble too, and realize that what you _think_ is the right thing, isn't always the right thing. There's no inherent valor in "breaking the rules" \-- if you can, it's much better to gently persuade, bring people to your side, and talk things out.

Again, not disagreeing with the article, just pointing out that life isn't that simple always.

<comment><USER3> In further support of these points... Thinking outside the box, breaking the rules as a last resort to do the right thing and other similar actions _can indeed_ produce the extraordinary results, in certain situations, the organization is hoping for after all. Yet this strategy will work only for the very top performers: Those who can sense and _actually produce_ the truly largest "contribution" to their company (as opposed to what seems right, interesting or cool to them), even when it more or less eludes their higher ups; those who can do this while also being politically savvy enough to contain the consequences and sell their actions as actually in line with everyone's goals; those who are almost magical in being able to produce the kind of results others are very unlikely to do etc. It can work, I've seen it work, but I think it is important to realize that not everyone can or should do it. When it works, it is certainly a great boon to the career of the said top performer.

Know that by doing this, you may be counterproductive both to your organization and your career. If you take it to the extreme, you may become a friction rather than a "problem solver".

The most common pitfall I've seen is a highly technical person considering things like "refactoring", "getting it right" more important than getting to the finish line fast. Remember that you may be missing what's really the most important thing for your company at the time.

I've also seen commonplace "complaining" about inconveniences that are actually quite legitimate. It's just that you don't know all the facts or haven't been put in a position to produce the bottom-line results. Things look different when you're the one navigating the ship.

OTOH, I've seen this strategy work best when the very formal scope/objectives/deliverables of an effort are clearly wrong and would indeed lead to a subpar outcome for all involved. Implemented successfully, this strategy could produce outstanding results by forcefully course-correcting and then actually delivering great results. Remember though that you'll be blamed for everything if your course-correction isn't great, even if the original direction would also have been equally bad.

<comment><USER4> I always think that whenever a new rule or procedure gets created there should be sufficient reasoning as to why it had been created, what conditions prompted it, and what it's designed to solve.

With that information people can see why something needs to be done a certain way, and additionally they will know when rules and procedures should be eliminated. In my mind this would allow people to deduce when exceptions to the rules are applicable, and hence be more effective.

Unfortunately I have not actually seen this happen in real life.

<comment><USER5> Googles coding guidelines does exactly that, I imagine because they would otherwise spend too much time debating them over and over again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At my last company, I earned myself the unofficial job of Employee Advocate because of this philosophy. The company (which I won't mention by name, but can be easily determined) was set up to be a great place for developers to work, and for the most part succeeded in that goal.

But as time went on, there were some failings in a few areas, so I decided that I would be the one to push the founders to continue realizing their goal. I know I became a thorn in their sides on several issues, but I could also tell that other employees appreciated me speaking up, especially the non- technical staff, which often did not receive the same benefits as developers.

I always figured that if I got fired for speaking my mind on an issue, that would be okay, because it would be a clear indication that the company was too far gone and it was time to leave. Fortunately, for me and the company as a whole, that never happened.

Despite being a thorn, I remained on good terms with the founders. They seemed to understand where I was coming from, even if they did not agree.

<comment><USER7> Heh, out of curiosity I clicked on your link and for a second there I was thinking "wait a minute, I've seen this guy before... in some documentary" :)

<comment><USER6> They were _filming_ that?!

All joking aside, I only avoid mentioning the company by name to avoid linking it to any search results. Otherwise, I'm glad to talk about it because I consider it a strong trait of the company.

<comment><USER8> I guessed the name of the company right away when you said "well known for treating developers right, but I still needed to make sure it was what I thought it was.

Could you provide a little bit more of details on how the founders disagreed with you? I'm very much interested in knowing more about it.

<comment><USER6> Email me, it's not the sort of stuff to discuss publicly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As could be posted at the top of just about every HN article this is highly situational.

If you are in a prototyping, web advertising, etc etc business - sure, your probably just feeding your employer new business strategies to make everyone money. The business is typically fine with experimenting with new ideas hoping to uncover a new money machine - obviously Google's business model is a great fit for this and they seemingly encourage it.

If your doing what Ill call "real engineering" (to ruffle some feathers) on large intricate system this could be a very bad idea. Perhaps you even think your doing the right thing but if you're working within a highly technical environment with many participants you are just going to look immature.

In other words, imagine if everyone at Boeing adopted this strategy as individuals - I think we'd all be opting for taking the Greyhound bus.

<comment><USER10> I didn't take it that he was referring to making your own choices on every technical decision - but rather about ethical decisions.

<comment><USER9> "I do the Right Thing for Google and the world"

I think it pertains to technical or ethical or anything else. The risk is that what you think is the right thing may be the right thing for one person but the wrong thing for another - in fact Id say most decisions fall under this umbrella.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In general, rules are for under to average performers--to keep them from causing harm. If you're a true expert, you can break the rules in your areas of expertise to get a good result.

If you break the rules and get a worse result...probably you weren't actually the expert you thought you were. So practice some humble introspection before breaking all the rules.

NOTE 1: A "good result" can include a failed experiment, if you learn something and the failure mode is predicted and mitigated. Surprise disasters are always bad though.

NOTE 2: I said "in your areas of expertise." Being a top engineer does not mean that you can break other rules like expense reports or sexual harassment. Too many people make that mistake.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. One should refer to the rules when one's in doubt. However, this assumes that everyone in company is equally humble, excellent at communication, and proficient at their job. Since most companies are unable to hire that well (maybe it's impossible), no one would admit that rules are not mandatory.

This leaves an expert in a complex situation: everyone says you have to follow the rules, but you also know that The Right Thing is not in 100% compliance with them.

If you're humble enough, you choose to follow the rules, because—well—you naturally assume that people who wrote these rules are more proficient. Then, after a while, you become very disappointed when you see that you didn't do The Right Thing only because people who hire and make the rules didn't do their job properly.

If you choose to break the rules, you wait to get fired. If you don't, that may mean simply that nobody has noticed you. Or maybe they have, but chose not to speak to you about it—you can't tell, but you feel like you're an outlaw. And if you do get fired in the end, you become not so inclined to break the rules from now on (unless you have OP's self-confidence).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Rules of thumb are there to prevent error.

If you know the reasons behind the rules of thumb, you can ignore the rules and work from the reasons for the rules. This is expertise.

When someone questions your 'breaking of the rule,' you can then cite the reasons for the rule, and show how you did not break the rule in terms of it's deeper meaning.

However, it is polite (and prudent) to CYA with discussion of your justifications with your colleagues. Either way, this makes you look good. If discussion renders you correct, you appear ever so smart and expert. If discussion renders you incorrect, you appear thoughtful, prudent and working in good faith in everyone's best interest. This is the essence of healthy collaboration.

All too many people are unable to grasp that working on teams is never about being 'right,' it is about having the discipline to actively seek out collaboration.

Being 'right' helps in that people will actively seek your opinion. Being 'wrong' doesn't actually hurt you, because you went ahead and behaved properly with regard to collaboration. Either someone else was right, and you used their idea, or everyone else was just as wrong, and in that case... ya know, fuck it. :)

I'd add to this that if people are unable or unwilling to collaborate maturely (including admitting their own failings), it is time to quit.

Waiting around to get fired is stupid, petty and passive-aggressive. If you are that sure of your correctness, you should be able to make a jusitfication.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are worse things than being fired. You could be routed to a series of useless assignments, or worse, actively destructive ones. Then you wind up having to fire yourself for your own sanity.

Of course, this all assumes you have sufficient privilege to be able to carry it off. There's a reason it's called FU money.

<comment><USER15> Welcome to the world of "banishment rooms" in Japanese companies, made for employees they'd like to fire but would prefer to "coerce" into willing resignation.

[http://ajw.asahi.com/article/economy/business/AJ201305300011](http://ajw.asahi.com/article/economy/business/AJ201305300011)

Not unlike the NYC school district's rubber rooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Disagree and commit is a better strategy. Having done a short stint as an engineering manager, sometimes there's disagreement, not everyone agrees on what the right thing is, hopefully not everyone goes and does their own thing and waits to get fired. This is not a good strategy for collaboration and compromise. If you say the right thing is to know when to collaborate and when not to, you've created a tautology.

</comment><comment><USER17> > You've got to recognize that companies are schizophrenic. They build > process, and rules, and structure and they ask you to follow them:

> [...]

> But greatness rarely happens by following rules, process and structure. That > is why companies also want to find employees ready to take risks, make > decisions, try new things, move fast and even break things.

The inconsistencies and contradictions you describe are not symptoms of schizophrenia. If you need a medical label, how about dissociative identity disorder?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Positive_and_neg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Positive_and_negative_symptoms)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder#Signs_and_symptoms)

That said, I believe that these opposing goals are normal, expected, and desirable, so your mental illness model doesn't really work for me.

<comment><USER18> It was clear from the context that he was not using 'schizophrenic' as a medical label (since he was not applying it to a human), but rather as a metaphor that most people would easily understand. Picking nits does not contribute to the conversation, but rather diverts from it (as we can observe happening in this very comment). Since you seem to have an opinion on the conversation, namely that the goals he lists are desirable, it would benefit everyone significantly more for you to explain your basis for that opinion rather than go off on completely irrelevant tangents about mental health.

<comment><USER17> [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/schizophrenic](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/schizophrenic)

What can I say, the informal usage of the word irritates me.

I'm sure if he said that companies are kind of gay, and then proceeded to list a bunch of qualities that had nothing to do with homosexuality but rather the informal usage of the term (as we all know all too well from high school), it would be a problem. Same thing.

<comment><USER19> Would it also be a problem if they listed qualities like happy and frivolous? Or is that a legitimate definition of gay in your eyes?

<comment><USER17> Totally illegitimate and you won't find those meanings in any respectable dictionary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To his credit though Chade-Meng Tan earned some infamy by intercepting celebrities walking through the door and getting his picture taken with them :-) Not exactly "Good for Google" but not something that generally got you fired either.

I'm all in favor of encouraging self empowerment but recognize that it means you will get fired more. It is the cost of doing what you believe. Not everyone is ok with that and I respect that.

<comment><USER21> Say what? I've always followed that course of action, and so far - knock on wood - I have not been fired for it. And that spans about 25 years.

If what you believe in and what the company believes in are not aligned, you realize that usually _well_ before there's any talk of firing. Just go look for a new job that is more aligned with what you believe in.

<comment><USER20> Its the challenge of the argument in the large vs the argument in the small. Specifically not everyone has taste.

I have met people who follow this mantra and have been fired repeatedly, I know folks like the one in the parent who have operated this way their entire career and have been quite successful at it.

Think of it as the "Don't try this at home" admonition. They say that because _not everyone_ will understand both the risks and the implication of the risks, not because as reasonably cautious and intelligent person could not pull off exactly the same stunt "at home."

As with all things, if you find yourself getting fired a lot for doing the "right thing" in your estimation, then its time to take a look at your compass.

<comment><USER21> Well said. And lest we forget, "doing the right thing" _does_ include compromise. It's not a synonym for "my way or the highway".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Beware of "also want to find employees ready to take risks, make decisions, try new things, move fast and even break things."

Doing the above can be a sure say to get the bad kind of fired from a job, especially for large corporate environments. I have worked at places where they claimed that innovation was rewarded, when in practice they were so risk adverse any out of the box thinking was punished.

By all means push the boundaries but don't claim that your issues of climbing the ranks or being overlooked for interesting tasks is because you are a square peg in a round hole.

<comment><USER23> Meng's point is that getting fired is a _good_ thing, if it happens because you did the right thing. It shows you that the company you work for does not share your values, and hence you shouldn't be working for them.

His point isn't that you won't get fired, it's a different way of looking at getting fired. A lot of people assume this is a universally bad occurrence. He's telling you that it's an important opportunity to find the place where you can act in accordance with your values _and_ climb the ranks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've worked at a couple of companies where this was a winning strategy, but I've worked at more companies where attempting this sort of thing on a regular basis will cause problems that are more complex and "worse" than being fired.

At a lot of places you'll have a small group of really talented engineers who would all support the idea of doing "the right thing" even if it flies in the face of established process, and then you have everyone else, particularly people on other teams (sales, QA, project management, general management -- but sometimes also engineers that have grown accustomed to the familiar process, even if it is objectively broken), who will fight you tooth and nail on any deviation from the process simply because "that isn't how we do it here" and the end result is usually that you end up in a situation where you don't get fired outright (if you're recognized as a great developer, it usually takes quite a lot of boat rocking for you to actually get sacked), but things get politically poisonous to the point where even the engineers who support you in theory just want you to stop to ease the tension being created.

As others have mentioned, this advice is very situation and probably serves people much better in companies that are smaller or that at least have a more dynamic company culture. At many companies you'd save everyone (including yourself) a bunch of time and heartache by just quitting when the process becomes unreasonable and entrenched.

<comment><USER15> If you're using this strategy with the secondary purpose of determining whether the company is beyond the point of repair and that it is time to move on, then even if the employment of the strategy results in the situation you describe, it can still be used for its intended effect.

I've soon a great engineering manager get his team taken away from him after continuing to stand up for "the right way to do things" (from a technical perspective). He moved on and is at a much better place now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A fine approach, as long as you don't have bills to pay and no realistic chance of securing another job in the time you have to pay them. Not everyone has that sort of freedom that this sort of risk makes sense.

<comment><USER26> This is HN, though. Most people here have technical skills that make them valuable in the job market. It's easy to market this article to them.

Everyone else is in the mercy of their employer and don't have much choice but to follow the rules to avoid being seen as a troublemaker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Everyone works differently especially in the world of programming. Whether you're a web developer or code in C++, you most likely do not work the same way as your counterparts. You have a different thought process, you are unique, you know intricacies others don't, you're efficient at some things and slow at others. You are human and if you get fired for doing the wrong thing, you're damn straight you're in the wrong workplace and it's not your fault.

While I definitely believe you should follow tried and tested company policies on deploying software, coding conventions and even naming conventions because it's what has been working up until this point. I think sometimes a company needs a fresh perspective or opinion on something that could work better, maybe something has been working good enough, but could be better. You need to take risks, don't play it safe, but always remember to know when you're crossing the line between contribution and destruction. If you get fired for taking risks you are damn right you should be fired, because the company you are working for doesn't deserve an employee like you.

Doing the right thing doesn't mean be another follower. Doing the right thing means you always have the best interests of your employer in mind when making a decision that could affect your colleagues or direction of the company. I believe ignoring broken processes isn't doing the right thing.

Some people prefer roads already paved and others prefer to make their own way somewhere by paving their own way, taking risks to get there. Inevitably all roads lead to Rome. Unless you're going sideways through an airport door, then you're probably going to Bangkok.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have seen too many believe that refactoring code was "doing the right thing." One guy I knew attempted to rewrite Boost's build system because it wasn't "the right way".

<comment><USER29> Heh heh, yeah, there's definitely a ditch on both sides of the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I follow a similar strategy when I'm interviewing for a job. I play it a little loose and speak freely. If they don't have the good sense to realize that questions about my resume or github code are more important than white boarding and programming riddles, then I don't want work for or with them. When I'm interviewing to hire someone, I reverse the situation and try to get them to loosen up. The interview process is a window into company culture.

Same goes when I'm setting up partnerships for STEAM classes with schools. Schools can be strict with their staff and their students. I don't ever want to put forward a persona that suggest I will also be strict or by the book because that will never work out. No one will be happy.

I suppose if I can't ever find a job and no one will let me teach, it's time to re-examine my personality. Until then, no reason to keep my disregard for bureaucratic norms and fake corporate civility a secret.

</comment><comment><USER31> I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with this post.

Though Google might be the pinnacle of employment, at most jobs, if you leave, you can often get a salary or rate increase. On top of that, some employers will ask if you got fired and you have to explain that, even if you were only laid off.

Terrible advice!

<comment><USER32> Its a matter of temperament and skill set. If you fear getting rehired somewhere else easily, then yes it may not work for you at all.

But if your skills are easily marketable then yes you can do a lot of good this way, behaving fearlessly and with integrity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Somewhere about 3/4 of the way down the article, I drew the connection between this line of thinking and what drove Snowden to whisteblow against the NSA's surveillance techniques.

Some organizations, it seems, don't reward coloring outside the lines very much at all...

<comment><USER34> I thought it was quite ironic that this article brings up Google's point of view in the wake of the surveillance scandals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Or, you could just work for a company that won't fire you for doing the right thing. I've turned things upside down a number of times, but if the outcome was correct, I never felt even remotely that I would be fired.

<comment><USER36> The point is that a good company won't fire you for making good or well- informed decisions even if they turn out to be Wrong decision! And if they do, it's their loss, not yours...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > "Do the right thing and wait to get fired"

I use this strategy whenever I am given a bullshit deadline!

</comment><comment><USER38> In any big company, I'm sure that _anything_ you do which is not based on manager's request is potential career killer. I understand that some new initiatives might be good for the company as a whole but, from employee perspective, upside is so small while downside can be disastrous.

On other hand, if you do have initiative to do things on your own then a big company is probably not a place for you.

<comment><USER39> The skills required to _do_ a job and the skills required to _keep_ a job are very different. Not many people possess both types of skills: one skillset means you need be quite profound, while the other means you need to be quite petty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think his reasoning is a great way to get fired, regardless of how smart you are technically. It is fun to think about how you could rage against the machine and do things your way.

But the simple reality is there is always someone smarter than you. If you can come to terms with that, and take the time and effort to be the guy that someone looks up to, then you won't be fired.

<comment><USER29> Well, hopefully. But there are some messed up situations out there, so you still might be fired.

I think the original post's main point is to face that possibility unflinchingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'd change the dynamic a bit. Do the right thing, and (continue to) network and explore alternatives.

If "they" do come after you, they may think more before attempting to lower the boom of "punishment" and "example". Particularly if your skills are still needed/valuable. You're that much closer to "fuck off", and it can be useful for them to know -- or intuit -- it.

TL;DR: Don't wait for "them" to "do something" vis à vis termination.

This also applies to some degree to waiting for them to address the original problem; however, there is a chance you are wrong, and the commonly cited problem that "people think they are smarter than they are".

Good outfits take the time to have open, involved discussions on such points. It's _good_ to have your people proactively thinking about and attempting to mitigate bad scenarios.

If that's not what you're getting, do yourself a favor and move on (assuming you're lucky enough to have a career that allows this).

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a variant of "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission", but with a more positive bent. Getting all the right permissions from everyone can be a monumental task, but just going ahead and doing things, then waiting to be corrected as needs be... gets more done.

</comment><comment><USER43> As a consultant of 5 years, this guys sounds like the type of cat I'm called in to clean up after.

"Make the call to assume some technical debt..." More like: "Build shit I know will be expensive in the long term because I won't have to deal with the fallout."

</comment><comment><USER44> I wish more people would follow this philosophy. There's nothing more annoying than people that follow the letter of the law without thinking about why it was established in the first place. Most (good) companies will easily forgive breaking the rules if you're doing it for the right reasons with good results.

The point of "the rules" is to protect the company in case someone does something really stupid on their own ("oy! it was against our rules!"), but I don't think competent executives are /that/ tied to them if people break them for a good reason.

<comment><USER45> I've always found the "letter of the law" types to be the most dangerous sort around, and that's not at all limited to programming. They're the ones who make authoritarianism work, the ones who tattle at the first sign of "not following the rules", the ones with absolutely no imagination, no curiosity, and an unwillingness to think for themselves.

If there are too many of these around or too many in your management chain you should get the hell out. But maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER44> Completely agree, the sort of person that puts process ahead of people in such a mechanical way creeps me out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, I _LOVE_ that. It is the only antidote I see to the kinds of dysfunction that often exists in the business world.

Part of the time, it works -- you do the right thing, experience fulfillment, AND despite some heat you come out smelling like a rose and get rewarded.

The other part of the time, you still experience fulfillment, and you leave happily.

You basically become invulnerable to politics and dysfunction.

But ... to be able to do it without flinching, you have to have your finances in order and your living expenses manageable.

</comment><comment><USER46> "I do the Right Thing for Google and the world, and then I sit back and wait to get fired. If I don't get fired, I've done the Right Thing for everyone. "

No, you just did the right thing for Google. Because the rest of the world can't fire you.

</comment><comment><USER47> If you are not working on the right thing. It's offen a systemic issue with the whole company. You need to figure out the deep reason and evaluate your options from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER48> Didn't Apple's Tim Cook say/recommend (to Duke MBAs) to "break the rules"?

</comment><comment><USER49> Is the implication that doing the right thing is almost always a firing offence?

</comment><comment><USER50> If you follow this strategy, then in a fairly decent environment, the first thing that will happen is that you will eventually be promoted or be given more responsibility. This sort of leadership is generally rewarded -- at least at first, within certain limits, and at the lower levels of a company.

This strategy will not work at the higher levels of a largish company, ultimately for reasons that would be politically incorrect to point out.</comment>


Let's bring friction back into computing - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/5/163774-fricative-computing/fulltext

<comment><USER2> _The adverse effects of frictionless computing are all around us. Email is the first example that comes to mind. It is simply too easy to send email messages, so we all send too many (I am famously guilty of this) and receive too many. It is also too easy to add recipients._

My first thought: 'Tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

Then at the end I discovered the author is the editor-in-chief of CACM. <Sigh>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this article is dumb. And I think it is dumb in a way that many articles are dumb: it bounces from anecdote to unrelated anecdote--from 17th century French letters! To Facebook! To the Flash Crash!--and expects readers to tag along, mistaking the textual proximity of data for relatedness. But just because you put two things into the same paragraph does not mean they arise from the same root cause.

I believe these shortcomings result from iconoclastic writing. Rather than observations leading naturally to a thesis, the iconoclastic writer starts with a popular opinion and inverts it into a thesis as the first step--"hey what if instead of _reducing_ friction like everyone says, we should be _creating_ friction?? What if friction is actually good?"

From that point the thesis transforms into a research filter. Anything that shows that frictionless is bad (like the Flash Crash) is in; anything that shows that frictionless is good (like telemedicine) is out. The result is a pile of unrelated things that need to be sewn together. Like Frankenstein, the finished product is not pretty.

<comment><USER4> I totally agree with you. I could barely finish reading the article myself and you have put into words perfectly why it was subconsciously painful to read.

Good points about bad articles in general. =)</comment></comment>


Twitter Polling in the Cloud in 30s using PiCloud - <AUTHOR> http://blog.picloud.com/2010/08/12/making-a-twitter-bot/

<comment><USER2> As cool as PiCloud looks, I haven't found a use for it in days. I am itching to try it out, but it can't (as far as I know) run web apps, and the uses I have for a computationally intensive, stateless (or with little state) program are nonexistent, really...

On top of that, to make the API call worth it, the computations need to take orders of magnitude more time than the network latency... Does anyone have any good ideas of what one could do with it? This Twitter bot wasn't really a good example, as I can run this sort of thing on any of my home computers. It seems to me as if even the PiCloud guys are struggling to find uses for their service...

<comment><USER3> PiCloud dev here.

Currently, our users are mainly scientists and researchers that leverage PiCloud's parallelism to expedite their computation. A lot of the use cases are simulation and equation solving related - in areas such as finance, geology, hydrology, and biology. Many of the algorithms(especially monte-carlo methods) used in these fields are computationally intensive and embarrassingly parallel (<http://bit.ly/dj3qQm>) and benefit from PiCloud's compute power.

On web apps, wile we cannot host web apps, we can benefit them. Some of our customers are using us as a web scraper for their backend. Encode videos (<http://bit.ly/9JkLph>) also works. Ultimately, any background task can use PiCloud; we for instance used it for an automatic Facebook photo tagger app. If your app is already on the cloud (esp. on AWS), you will no latency difference between your own machines and PiCloud's ; PiCloud will save you though from the headache of managing servers for background processing.

With crons, we are aiming to offer the community an easy and realiable way to run periodic work. While you can run a twitter bot on your own computer, it stops working when you power-off your computer or disconnect it from the internet. PiCloud's cron scheduler will always be running 24/7. And if you have multiple compute intensive crons, each will run much quicker by being spread horizontally across our cluster.

<comment><USER2> Hmm yes, that's basically exactly my point above. It's well suited for scientific work or MC methods, but I would instantly have an order of magnitude more uses for your service if there was a data store I could write to, even if that were just a queue (so I could upload a bunch of data and not have to go back and forth through the entire internet all the time).

All in all, it sounds like a very useful service, and I'm really looking forward to you guys adding more and more features. Hopefully one of these days I'll find something to use it for, because my invitation code has been gathering dust (it's been that long)!

<comment><USER3> We do offer cloud.files (<http://docs.picloud.com/moduledoc.html#module- cloud.files>), which allows you to store data. It is an S3 wrapper rather than a full-blown relational db, but you may find that it fits your needs.

You can also connect to any service with us. Amazon SQS works well if you need a highly scalable queueing system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, a simple bot to feature a cloud platform. People might get the wrong idea about your service.

</comment><comment><USER5> Twitterbot isn't working.

<comment><USER3> Whoops, looks like twitter's real-time search is less than real-time; turns out there can be 10+ second delays. The bot's first search (after you posted) failed to return your tweet - and when your tweet showed up in the next search a minute later, the more than one minute old tweet was ignored. Updated code is on our blog.</comment></comment>


Ash HN: Short of Building One, Any Available Quadrotor One Can Buy And Program? - <AUTHOR>

I am interested to experiment with Quadrotors, but I am not sure what options are out there for quadrotors that one can program instead of just controlling them with a remote. Short of Building one from scratch, does anyone here know if such "hacker friendly" quadrotors actually exist? <comment><USER2> You might want to check out this: [http://www.parallax.com/Store/Robots/FlyingPlatforms/tabid/9...](http://www.parallax.com/Store/Robots/FlyingPlatforms/tabid/964/CategoryID/96/List/0/SortField/0/Level/a/ProductID/799/Default.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> > I am interested to experiment with Quadrotors, but I am not sure what > options are out there for quadrotors that one can program instead of just > controlling them with a remote.

Google is still a verb:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial- robots/sp...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/spiri- programmable-quadrotor-drone-kickstarter)</comment>


Ask News.YC: Is anyone building a desktop application? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You know, eventually the line between the desktop and the web is simply going to disappear. Web apps will cache more data on the user's hard-drive and run more code on the user's CPU. Meanwhile, desktop apps will store/backup more data online and offload more computation to servers (or maybe other desktops). There's huge potential for libraries or tools that make developing half- desktop / half-web apps easier.

Question is what form will those tools take. I wouldn't be too surprised if the OS just became a ginormous browser that could talk directly to hardware like the graphics card and a huge cache for storing "installed" web apps.

<comment><USER3> The real division is whether you have to install anything.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if it's that you have to install anything, or if it's just a "click cost" -- for every extra click you ask of the user, you lose potential customers?

Kind of the same thing that we see in web sign-up forms where for every extra piece of information you ask, a huge number of potential users drop off.

<comment><USER5> Click + wait, probably. Java applets give you the ability to do nearly everything without installing software, but never caught on because the JVM takes so damn long to start. Flash has been somewhat more successful because it loads faster, and AJAX even moreso because there's virtually no up-front cost if you do it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does any code which people download and run locally count? I'm building an online backup utility -- but I'm planning on giving the code away for free and charging for the storage space, so it's not a "pure" desktop application like a word processor.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious how you plan on implementing your open source/free business model. Are you going to use a BSD license? GPL 2 or 3?

Let's say I had a company that wanted to compete with your company -- how do you prevent me from making a different GUI for your software and aggressively marketing my version, perhaps with in-house developed features that aren't open source? Is this difficult/undesirable to prevent?

<comment><USER8> I'm going to answer this too because we are in the situation you are describing. We are writing a platform that we intend to release under a liberal no-strings-attached free software license (ie: not GPL).

We're not worried at all about people taking our code and using it to build proprietary products. In fact, we are going to encourage people to do exactly that because, as far as we can see, other companies having a vested interest in our platform is pretty much a win-win situation for everybody.

Of course as a business, we have revenue generating activities with the platform planned for ourselves, but it really seems unlikely that another company would choose to compete head on with us about that. We wrote the platform after all, so there are many different ways we could rain on their parade if they decide to use our software in an antagonistic way.

<comment><USER9> In which ways could you 'rain on their parade'? stop supporting your software? change the license? They could just hire talented coders to use and update your base from the last point that you did update, or the last point that you had that license. Right? I'm not trying to antagonize you, just trying to understand the legalities of the open-source side of capitalism.

<comment><USER8> We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform.

But yes, they could then pick up that development on their own by forking the platform from an older version.

The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else.

We only want to reserve a small number of commercial opportunities for ourselves out of a large number of possibilities. Cooperating with us to develop one of those other possible product ideas is going to seem a lot more attractive than competing directly with us.

Please don't worry at all about challenging our ideas about this stuff. We are trying to understand the same things you are and our open source business strategy is largely theoretical at this point.

<comment><USER10> > We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly > license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the > platform.

Why not doing it in the first place, then?

> The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just > by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform > since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else.

If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that case, once again, why bother releasing the source code?

<comment><USER8> > Why not doing it in the first place, then?

We don't want to do it at all and probably never would. I'm only mentioning it as something that somebody evaluating risks from the other side might imagine that we could do.

> If the internals are not well-designed and not well-documented, yes. In that > case, once again, why bother releasing the source code?

No, we're not going to deliberately obfuscate anything because that would be against our goals of encouraging as many people as possible to adopt our platform.

I think it's not really necessary to create artificial obstacles for us to have an important advantage. Very large systems take time and experience to understand even when they are both well designed and well documented.

Linus and Alan Cox have an advantage over newcomers at extending the Linux kernel, right? Hypothetically, if Linus, Alan, and say Rusty Russell got together and created a startup to implement a Linux kernel based idea, would it make sense to compete against them on exactly that idea?

<comment><USER10> It would make sense: while they would spend their time debugging and fine tuning their beloved baby of a kernel you would just use their work and add value on top of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Im making music apps, to make my own music ... im still not really good though.

[edit]

I'm pursuing the idea that a programer can do art with his programming (and his programs), and actually be good art, not just "look what i did with some code because I'm cool and can write some lines of code just like that" kind of crappy art, but something that a regular person listens, and say, "wow, thats sounds great", without explaining them first how the piece was made and trying to win some points with that explanation.

I know that if the music doesn't sound good then i have to get better at it, else I'm just fooling myself ... pretty much in the same way you just can't make a web app and say "i code it myself!", and then expect it to be a success.

[/edit]

I think the hardest thing is to actually get a good sounding thing (synth, efx, etc).

Is very exciting, to be a programmer and a "music maker", to be able to come up with crazy ideas for music instruments and then actually build them. Just wanting to know how will they sound is a very strong motivation.

You can listen to some of what i've been doing (music tracks) if you are that curious:

<http://myspace.com/rugoso>

Most of it its done with my software, i just use audiohijack and logic to masterize - add "punch" - and to do some edits - cut the bad parts, put together the good parts.

The track called "Setup Seeker" is an exception, there i only used a sequencer and a midi controller I made, but the sound actually comes from commercial software.

I realize its not really good, I'm working on getting better at it ;)

Some one else doing music apps here?

<comment><USER12> <http://salavon.com/work.php>

<comment><USER11> nice, is that your work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I seem to be one of the sole dinosaurs of this group. I am building desktop SW. It is a 3d visualization tool heavy on OpenGL. It can't be done on the web the way we want it w/o a java applet (which I think is a terrible alternative.)

I know everyone here is game-set-match convinced that web apps are it and that's that. I think that apps involving LOADS of data like youtube, facebook or (my absolute favorite) fuzzwich belong on the web. But I'm really not that into the notion of replacing previously desktop based apps w/ web apps.

I've said this before, but it feels like a camping trip. You can survive, just not comfortably. I used fauxto the other day to edit some images and it was great. But it was only really great b/c it was free and b/c it was there when I needed it. But... I picked on tool to suck a color from one place and put it in another. I was confused for a long time b/c I was so used to the mouse pointer changing to represent eye dropper thing but it was still the arrow. Maybe they're new, and maybe this can be done through a browser but it brought home the feeling that I was on a camping trip carving meat with a swiss army knife. Take gmail, amazing interface, amazing search but how do I sync the contacts w/ my iPhone? I'm sure there is a 3rd party app that does it but you'll still use the desktop crutch.

I think that the tendancy toward web apps is more of a move away from microsoft than toward something better. But ironically you actually don't avoid the x-platform problem b/c browsers are all different.

The thing that's great about web apps is that you get:

1) automatic updates.

2) no install.

3) works from any machine.

4) access to reams of data.

5) collaberation.

But:

1) no iPod.

2) no graphics card.

3) no digital camera.

4) no phone.

5) no clipboard for anything but text.

6) if I want to email my image from fauxto or flickr to someone via gmail I have to download them it upload it. (Nobody ever mentions this elephant in the web 2.0 living room. How do you get data from one web app to another? An un- started startup perhaps?)

7) Half ass interfaces. I really give props to the fauxto guys for pushing the limits but only half ass users like me will ever see it as a worthy replacement for photoshop.

8) No OS integration. I like how Address Book, iPhoto and iCal can talk to Mail.app.

The tack we're taking is having the desktop richness along w/ a web component that allows publishing and sharing of data as well as intrinsic backups. A user can log in from another machine (w/ our app installed) and see all of his data as if he was on his own box. He can also access loads of data that other users have generated and made public. We use Qt for easy x-platform w/ native feel. We don't touch the registry. Users don't even need to be admin to install. The only thing we don't get is auto-updates. But we're taking the firefox tack and having them download in the background and install on the next app boot.

Much of my direction was inspired by a number of Steve Jobs speeches. Once my phone is a computer, when am I gonna need "my apps" on another person's computer? I'll never touch another person's computer. Thus partially negating the need for web apps.

<comment><USER14> You can't do good 3d in a web browser at the moment thats a definite.

Re: But 6) and 8): at the current stage there hasn't been a lot of interaction between web apps. There isn't a reason why this can't happen. I'm not sure about images in gmail (why not send a link?) but applications like fauxto can get your images from links. All these i-products are made by one company, a web company can make its programs just as intertwined. As a parallel to your example I think a fair number of web applications work with google calendar.

Re: But 1-4: If your company wants to work at the stage people get data off their devices then a web startup makes no sense. Once they've done that though - the first things they want to do is share it. Thats why the internet is huge, there are other people on it.

<comment><USER15> Great 3d, no. But check out unity 3d, which is a very small plugin, and quite impressive for what it is:

<http://unity3d.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes, as long as 'building' includes 'extending and maintaining an application that's been in service for 12 years'.

The whole thing's a financial application written in Smalltalk, interfacing to pricing libraries written in C, with the same type of image working as both the desktop client and distributed compute node.

The Seaside web development framework (<http://www.seaside.st>) has attracted a lot of attention and there's a drive to push as much reporting through there as possible, but the day-to-day book and portfolio management looks to be desktop software for at least some years to come.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love desktop apps.

However, I love good Internet-enabled desktop applications, not the Visual Basic crap that wannabes did before.

I hate that flash 'apps' never have proper scrolling. No mouse wheel support, non standard behaviour, etc, etc.

And I hate that flash 'apps' can't use the right mouse button. See Portal flash version for the stupidity of it.

And most of it: I hate that a single stupid RIA eats all my CPU cycles in what a desktop application would not even use a 1% of it. Ugly flash video included (I see my Internet videos in stage6, thanks).

</comment><comment><USER4> I have in the past.

Nothing wrong with 'em. Depends on what you want to do, where the market is, and how your business model is going to work.

People are infatuated with the web: it's easy, it's universal, it's cheap. But everything has good things and bad things, and I could see the case for certain types of software being on the desktop. The way to make money is to make the user happy, not follow the herd. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes but as a day job. I can't say enough bad things about desktop software. I like the platform a web browser provides rather than seeing it as a disadvantage.

<comment><USER10> I know neither desktop programming nor web programming (I do embedded stuff) but as I see it, web apps require an awful mess of ad-hoc technologies (XHTML, CSS, Javascript, some server-side language and framework, SQL, a webserver, etc.) whereas there are powerful, well-designed tools to easily develop desktop software (Visual Studio, Delphi, Python + Qt or wxWidgets, etc.)

When you develop embedded software you can choose between a grab-bag of tools (using open source tools like the GNU toolchain; very configurable but rather complicated) or an IDE.

It's interesting to have both because, usually the learning cycle is the following: you generally start by using IDEs (when you're at school), then when you start working you like to configure the complete toolchain to learn how everything works and finally, after some time, you're getting really tired of having to do all this stuff manually so you start using IDEs, libraries and the like.

That's why I don't understand the idea behind toolkits that let you write desktop apps using web technologies; it seems like you get the worst of both worlds!

<comment><USER17> You're right. The good solution would be to be able to create network-enabled distributed applications with standard GUI using normal and sane languages and widget toolkits, or even better a very high level language.

Using HTML + JS + CSS + Flash to develop desktop stuff is a PITA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Xobni is an example of this.

I myself work in the game dev industry, currently providing services of game dev, and it's not for the web but for heavy desktops.

</comment><comment><USER8> My startup is building a desktop application which gives security administrators convenient access to a suite of integrated network security tools.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Aren't ask YC questions depressing when pg doesn't answer?</comment>


Show HN: ZPDer – informs you when an NPM package you use is upgraded - <AUTHOR> http://zpder.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> Seems like [https://greenkeeper.io/](https://greenkeeper.io/) is a similar idea with more polish (and with paid options). No affiliation, I've just seen GreenKeeper in action on the Kube Dashboard repo.

<comment><USER3> +1 for this. We've been using Greenkeeper on a number of projects and it's amazing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I run 'npm-check -u' [1] every morning on my develop branch and then I run my tests. I never thought about automating that part of my workflow. Sadly I don't host on GitHub.

1\. [https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm- check](https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-check)

</comment><comment><USER5> And the duct-taping of the NPM ecosystem goes on and on and on...

<comment><USER6> How do you mean? There's some simple native support for checking if packages are outdated (npm outdated), and there's additional tooling that ties into various exposed APIs. If this is a comment on npm not just doing everything for everyone as part of the native package then... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of my frustrations is updating submodule deps. The above link seems interesting, but most projects I work on are small enough that hovering over the dep in pckg.json file in vscode lets me know what is the latest. At the top level, I don't have much trouble managing updatea, however what about deps of deps and so on? It is hard to update these, and sometimes it breaks/is manual. Then it is overwritten when a new npm install ia run.

</comment><comment><USER8> How often does it send an email, and where is the changelog pulled from?

So if 10 things update tomorrow will it get 10 emails? Can it be setup to run weekly or longer?

<comment><AUTHOR> A good thought. It sends an email on each upgrade, however in my experience it doesn't happen SO often, tops two-three times a day, depends of course on the volume of packages you use. But it's a good idea to have a daily digest, thanks for that.

<comment><USER8> My only request is that the email "digest" be configurable. Being able to set this up to notify me once per week, or even once per month would be awesome. I could spend that one time to upgrade my deps, then lock them back down again until the next one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> is this related to libraries.io by any chance?

<comment><AUTHOR> not at all. didn't even know it existed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the source code, might be worth linking to on the page too: [https://github.com/TikalLab/zpder](https://github.com/TikalLab/zpder)

</comment><comment><USER11> Good execution.

Does this scan private repos?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it does. This is btw why we ask for the "repo" permission and not only for "public-repo" permission.

<comment><USER12> Love this idea, but can't connect a private repo to grant access to all our code. Any plans to allow uploading a package.json to achieve the same thing (understanding that it's my responsibility to keep it up to date)?

<comment><AUTHOR> no plans for that yet but now that you raised the point...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Obligatory: dependencyci.com, which does the a very similar thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> is it only when a package is have wild cards like *, ^ in versions or all the time?

<comment><AUTHOR> All the time. Even if you use a specific version, wouldn't you like to be in the know about the latest version, so you may consider upgrading?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how many posts a day is OK to submit on HN? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, hackers. Could you advise if there's any limit on number of posts that can be submitted daily? Sometimes I submit 10-15 posts a day (mostly news), so curious if I can be banned for overposting. <comment><USER2> You made an account 18 days ago and you're posting 10-15 posts a day? Maybe you should try to get involved in the community a bit.

I consider HN a place to talk about news. Not post it. You post it if you happen to be the one who found something interesting. I can't imaging you're finding 15 news stories a day on your own that are worth reading unless your goal is to just post stuff on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I think it was an addiction in some way, because I often received points for my posts (usually 2-5 points and several times I got 30-60) and kinda liked that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've posted 2 or 3, maybe as many as 4, in the same day before. But it's pretty uncommon. While it may not be a written rule, the unstated sense of etiquette here seems to be to avoid posting just for the sake of posting, or for the sake of gaining karma gratuitously.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking at your profile, there are 48 submissions counting this one. Over 18 days, that's not unreasonable considering that they often are receiving upvotes and several have generated meaningful comment threads.

I tend to submit articles in clusters, so I suspect that it is not an uncommon pattern. So long as your submissions are not getting heavily flagged you should be ok. If you find yourself banned, take a few weeks break and work on your comments.

</comment><comment><USER5> Measure the community's appreciation on the upvotes your submissions get. No upvotes? Don't post articles like those, since the community doesn't want them. Lots of upvotes? Post more like those, since the community wants them.

<comment><USER6> > Lots of upvotes? Post more like those, since the community wants them.

I wish I could agree but sometimes articles with many upvotes are lousy articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah! Yes, very soon, you may be banned for overposting. Then you will only be allowed to submit two or three posts a day! That is what happened to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. I'll limit myself to 1-3 posts then.

<comment><USER2> Based on the number of upvotes your submissions get, I would just step back a while and try to understand what the community likes to read. You're really thinking about it all wrong. Don't limit yourself to 1-3/day. Limit yourself to participating in the discussion and only posting good quality links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Learning always takes some time, right? You've been here for 2 years , while I've registered just 18 days ago (started posting on HN about a week ago). I was a bit obsessed with karma accumulation, at the same time I was learning the community. Reading a lot daily I often find interesting articles or news, that I'd like to share with others. Don't blame me for my passion, I've already realized myself being overposting. However that has helped me to figured out fast what's interesting for people here. I'd say that was my small marketing research which gave me quick results. So now I want to step back a while, as you've said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Posts a day? I'd say only one a day MAX, although I have no idea what the real number is.

If you're posting 10-15 a day, go outside and get a hobby.</comment>


Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) – Financial Services Annex - <AUTHOR> https://www.wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/ <comment><USER4> Secret agreements are automatically suspect but this seems like more of the same rather than a change in direction.

This is partly a result of the move to multi-lateral trade talks (bad idea but when WTO rounds take a decade it's not unexpected), and partly inertia - <USER2> is little common agreement on how to prevent the next crash, so without a better idea we seem to follow the inverse of Einsteins quip - "the definition of insanity is repeating the last mistakes but hoping for a different outcome

Minor thought : this leak is still a pretty big deal. But it feels like wikileaks is the wrong place for this - like the main media organisations should have already got their investigatory acts together and made wiki leaks irrelevant.

Just wondering ...

<comment><USER5> _...like the main media organisations should have already got their investigatory acts together and made wiki leaks irrelevant._

On the whole, the "main media organizations" are an entrenched part of the system they'd need to be reporting on in order to do that job. That's a pretty major "biting the hand that feeds them" sort of impediment.

<comment><USER6> There's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like multilateral trade agreements.

It's much easier to shout, "It was Bush's fault!" or "But what about Benghazi?"

<comment><USER7> > _There 's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like > multilateral trade agreements._

Financial institutions, macro-oriented asset managers and companies with multinational supply chains and long-term assets are each affected by these dynamics. Gaining intelligence on the nature and implications of trade negotiations is huge business.

I spent a good amount of time, as a trader, trying to anticipate how sundry domestic political variables constrained international actors, thereby predicting the odds of various trade structures arising from a forum (or of a forum even materialising in the first place).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services > markets.

But...

> The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the > expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, > London, Paris and Frankfurt

These multi-nationals are purely a product of regulaiton (in this case, more specifically, regulatory capture). Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in the US, as there apparently used to be.

Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports maintaining the status quo through confusion.

<comment><USER9> > But...

International rules that enforce a reduction in national rules (deregulation) which will empower multi-nationals is not the contradiction you appear to think it is.

> These multi-nationals are purely a product of regulaiton (in this case, more > specifically, regulatory capture).

Well they're _purely_ a product of regulation only in the broadest sense: without regulations (rules and laws) you wouldn't have international trade, and so there would be no multi-nationals (or civilized societies).

Your more specific case ('regulatory capture') is an example of weakened regulation through infiltration / corruption so your statement appears to read: Multinationals are a purely a product of regulation (more specifically, weakened regulation).

> Without regulation, there would be thousands of healthy medium-size banks in > the US, as there apparently used to be.

What do you mean by 'Without regulation'? If taken literally it would be impossible to define what a 'bank' is, so I assume your definition of 'Without regulation' involves regulations - which makes for a very confusing definition.

You imply there is an optimal outcome (thousands of medium-sized banks) being suppressed through regulation. What regulations force all banks to move quickly to a few larger banks? Usually these sorts of market regulations are about stopping that practice: for instance in Australia there is a 'four pillars policy' which stops mergers of the four largest banks. Without this regulation there would be less competition.

> Overall, to characterize this as "deregulation" is completely sloppy > thinking. We are never going to get a better situation when people think > sloppily like this. To do so is, in practice, a moral crime. It supports > maintaining the status quo through confusion.

Characterising deregulation as deregulation is sloppy thinking? Let's back up: there is an international agreement which aims to enforce further deregulation of nation states... and characterising this as deregulation is sloppy thinking?

<comment><USER8> You are conflating two different and commonly-used meanings of the word "regulation."

In (fairly) common parlance, "regulation" means governmental rules that violate individual sovereignty. For examples, laws like Sarbanes-Oxley. These are laws under which the government initiates force against market participants to try to force a desired outcome.

Proper laws merely _protect_ individual sovereignty. For example, you can't use force against someone, whether physically or through possessing something that violates a contract with them (which is fraud). Only the government can use force, and only in retaliation to protect sovereignty.

The ethical basis for this distinction is that it is in everyone'e self- interest to be protected from the initiaion of force in general, while it is against everyone's self-interest to be vulnerable to the initiaition of force, in general. Thus, regulatory laws are wrong.

P.S. If Australia only have four banks, instead of forty or four hundred, it is because of regulation (in my sense of the word).

<comment><USER9> > In (fairly) common parlance, "regulation" means governmental rules that > violate individual sovereignty.

Common parlance is found on Wikipedia: "A regulation is a rule or law designed to control or govern conduct."

The narrower, ideological definition you supply may be to your liking but isn't (even fairly) common parlance.

A clearer term for you to use would simply be 'bad regulation'.

Your definition also implies that governmental rules that protect individual sovereignty (or don't impact upon it) are not the 'regulation' you protest against, and a clearer term for that would simply be 'good regulation'.

There are obviously regulations which protect individual sovereignty: environmental laws stopping anyone or any entity dumping toxic waste which impacts on the health and well-being of those individuals is but one of many obvious examples.

So there are good regulations and bad regulations, and you are against bad regulations, but you choose to call them simply 'regulations' which is rather confusing.

You also conclude: 'Thus, regulatory laws are wrong'.

Better to use the clearer, more correct statement 'Thus, bad regulatory laws are wrong'. Very uncontroversial and agreeable.

I think it could actually be argued that redefining a term like 'regulation' as you are doing is actually harmful to individual sovereignty. The common meaning of 'regulation' also covers regulation that is protective of individual sovereignty, and trying to promulgate a pejorative sense of the term merely enables moochers and looters to further hijack the term to weaken those regulations which protect individual sovereignty.

<comment><USER8> My usage is absolutely common parlance.

For instance, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are not considered to be "regulation."

Your proposed terms of "good regulation" and "bad regulation" ignore my explanation of support or violation of sovereignty and are just a poor attempt to discredit my (correct) position.

<comment><USER9> > My usage is absolutely common parlance.

Maybe in your particular social or intellectual circles, but not in common parlance. This is obvious by comparing the dictionary definition with your definition: the former is general and widely understood, while the later is values-laden and requires an appreciation of a particular philosophical position.

> For instance, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration > of Independence are not considered to be "regulation."

They are by definition regulations. If you read the definition of regulation, you would have to agree they are regulations.

> Your proposed terms of "good regulation" and "bad regulation" ignore my > explanation of support or violation of sovereignty and are just a poor > attempt to discredit my (correct) position.

They specifically acknowledge and address your points around individual sovereignty - your assertions to the contrary indicate you haven't properly read what I wrote.

I called out an example of a 'good regulation' by your definition - <USER3> environmental law - to show how regulations can support individual sovereignty.

Leaving this point unanswered is what discredits your position. However it's clear to me this contortion around the meaning of 'regulation' is something impossible to honestly defend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who are the people negotiating and agreeing to these 'agreements'(this, ACTA, etc) and what could their justification for keeping them secret possibly be?

<comment><USER11> Elected government officials from democratic countries and non-elected from non-democratic countries together. This is decided by politicians or bureaucrats representing government. I believe advisors from universities, think tanks and businesses are invited to speak.

Why they keep it secret, I don't know.

<comment><USER12> > Elected government officials from democratic countries

Such secrecy is incompatible with democracy, why refer to some of the countries participating in this as "democratic"?

<comment><USER13> The term "democracy" is kind of a fuzzy and abused word but if we limit its definition to include only the governments run by civilians voted in by fair enough, regularly occurring elections you could do worse. Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests. I am not sure why this would surprise anyone.

<comment><USER14> _" Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests."_

I can see how certain things can be justifiably kept secret in a democracy, like matters related to national security (military, intelligence, etc.). But secrecy in business and financial regulation is just corruption. Especially when the interests in question are those of private businesses and may not be in the best interests of the country as a whole - and if the deliberations are secret, how can we and our elected representatives decide whose interests are actually being promoted?

<comment><USER13> I believe in this instance they're only secret while under negotiation, when congress votes on it, it will be open.

<comment><USER15> "the draft has been classified to keep it secret _not just during the negotiations_ but for five years after the TISA enters into force"

<comment><USER16> It's the draft that will be secret, not the final agreement.

I don't understand why this is so confusing: It's much easier for negotiators to propose a series of concessions and trade-offs in private, knowing that they'll only face political heat for those that actually make it into the final agreement.

<comment><USER17> It's also much easier for them to propose a series of trade-offs and concessions that primarily benefit their rich donors/friends rather than their electorates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apart from the secrecy yadda yadda yadda ... is there anything in the content that might be of concern?

<comment><USER17> Plenty. It's very clearly intended to restrict the exact kinds of regulations that national governments would put into effect to clamp down on too big to fail institutions.

The kind that required humungous bailouts and are STILL taking outsized risks because the regulatory framework is still insufficient to prevent them from causing yet more systemic crises.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did anyone from India got Google Cr-48 laptop? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Though I have applied with INDIA address, have not received any communication. I wish they deliver in India, but seems its US only as of now.

<comment><USER3> on Twitter Someone from Google told that, They can not ship because of some custom rules. They have no time to do all the papper work.

<comment><AUTHOR> That really sucks. Its only India or other countries too?

<comment><USER4> Only available in the US for now. Was mentioned in another thread.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pretty URLs with .htaccess Rewriting Tips - <AUTHOR> http://9lessons.blogspot.com/2009/11/pretty-urls-with-htaccess-file.html

<comment><USER2> simple and usefull</comment>


Aamber Pegasus - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aamber_Pegasus <comment><USER2> Not sure why this is posted today. Interesting home PC that I hadn't heard of, much like the TRS-80 Color computer (not that closely related to the TRS-80). Same CPU (6809) and I believe the same huge speed up when you disabled the display.

Not sure why it was posted today, but it's the earliest case I know of adding DRM. The pegasus has a set of diodes on the board (hidden under putty) that forms a 8 bit ID. So an EPROM update for one computer only had a 1 in 256 chance of working on any other computer.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was also this education computer in NZ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly-1)

</comment><comment><USER4> What a name! I expected some distant galaxy when I clicked on the link...</comment>


Choosing VIM Color Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://captsolo.net/info/blog_a.php/2009/01/08/choose_vim_color_scheme

<comment><USER2> I suppose it's a preference by some, but I've always found it perfectly fine to just run "vim" in a terminal. It seems to me that an editor doesn't need to provide features that a terminal already has: I can set the terminal colors any way I want, or have buffers open in multiple windows or tabs, etc. And when the terminal handles this, I have the same power and flexibility over any program, not just the editor.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point and often use vim w/o customized color scheme (but might pick a custom color scheme for MacVim's fullscreen mode to resemble WriteRoom).

However, editor color schemas allow for finer customization. For example, to specify colors for code-highlighting: keywords, statements, strings, ...

Terminal itself would not know anything about these things.

<comment><USER2> I agree that it's useful if there is a way to customize a program's "markup". Once the markup is there, though, anything can display it.

For instance, in an xterm-color or linux terminal, you could type something like ":colo darkblue", and you'd still see custom colors. This is using vim's color path (e.g. "/usr/share/vim/vim72/colors", "~/.vim/colors").

But the colors are there because the text includes things like "make this bold", or "make that green". And in a terminal, I might have customizations for this markup that apply to everything, which can be nice. For instance, maybe I make all bold text red, and that holds in everything from editors to man pages. It's convenient to not have to make these settings in _every_ program that I run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What is people's experience on choosing colors that are easier on the eyes? Any preferences or suggestions?

<comment><USER3> I switch between "desert" and "vibrantink" depending on how much contrast my eyes can handle at the moment :)</comment></comment>


Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science? - <AUTHOR> http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/achenbach-text

<comment><USER2> Florine: [http://www.newsweek.com/water-fluoridation-linked-higher- adh...](http://www.newsweek.com/water-fluoridation-linked-higher-adhd- rates-312748)

Climate Change: [http://www.nipccreport.org/](http://www.nipccreport.org/)

So the question isn't why do people doubt science, but why does the media confuse scientific hypothesis with 100% tested and understood fact? I would say that if you believe in science, you understand these things are not facts and that consensus != truth.

The our bodies and climate are some of the most complex and least understood systems in the universe. To think we understand them enough to say with certainty that Florine is good for you and CO2 is the only factor in climate change is naive.

<comment><USER3> > only factor

I wonder if someone has done a study how many strawmen it takes to put doubt into sciencey things.

Clearly, we should keep pumping stuff into our bodies and the atmosphere and until science proves with 100% testable consensus that it could have bad consequences.</comment></comment>


Superintelligence: The Idea That Smart People Refuse to Think About - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/superintelligence-the-idea-that-smart-people-refuse-to-think-about-be9dae3b8d62#.in3snbp5v <comment><USER2> I could be misrepresenting Maciej here (idlewords, please correct me if so), but my understanding of that talk was that "superintelligence is not worth worrying about" was only part of it. A lot of it was more about the deleterious knock-on effects that seem endemic to AI worriers, developers, SV bigwigs, and the rationalist community. A lot of the shitty behavior of these groups, that Maciej has been hammering on for some time now in previous talks, is closely correlated to belief in AI X-risk. He seemed to be claiming that this correspondence is not just correlative but causative. That may or may not be true, but even if not we should focus on improving it all the same. To wit:

1\. Stop treating every problem in the world as an engineering problem to be solved with clever software, and realize that people and social problems are more complex than that. This is one of the motivating factors behind wanting AI (so we can turn social problems into programming problems) and leads to megalomania on our part and deep resentment on everyone else's part.

2\. Similarly, stop thinking us developers are the noble heroes who are going to save the world from the ignorance of the masses. This is both dead wrong (we are in a rapacious capitalist industry that mostly wants to eliminate anything that stands in its way, whether or not the impediment has good reason) and again is building resentment toward us.

3\. Start worrying more about the extremely serious problems that are being caused by data retention and machine learning _right now_ , like the permanent loss of privacy, increasing wealth consolidation in the hands of a few capitalists, and the "laundering" of human bias through supposedly-but-not- actually-neutral algorithms.

4\. Realize that whatever neurons in our brains are lit up by religious belief don't necessarily require a "religion" in the traditional sense of the word, and that a lot of this eschatological transhumanist and AI X-risk stuff seems to slot into the same pathways, especially for very smart engineers. That doesn't make them _wrong_ necessarily, but it does mean their claims should be analyzed with the same bias toward extreme skepticism that most of us would automatically use with religious claims.

I suspect Maciej would be much less distressed by AI worry if the AI worriers also concerned themselves more with 1 through 4. At that point it would be at worst a harmless distraction, and maybe even beneficial if AI X-risk is in fact a legitimate concern. That, I think, would be best for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the argument about AI overtaking humanity is wrongly framed. Sci-fi has taught us to be on the look out for an all-powerful machine, robot, algorithm, turning against humanity. A single, united swarm of machines that only needs humans for energy. This is unlikely to happen soon.

But if we borrow an idea from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, things look differently. He argues evolution is not about the success of individuals or even species, but about the proliferation of their DNAs. The organisms are just the vessels for DNA's replication.

Let's look at the corpus of AI technology as an evil machine's DNA. It already claims a lot of human energy and capital for its evolution and proliferation. Our top researchers invest their time into making it better. We burn fossil fuels to provide the power for its computational cycles. What's the primary fuel for its evolution? Money. Which comes from stock markets and VCs, which use AI models. I'm sure a lot of fundamentals-based financial models, based on very different lines of reasoning, end up valuing AI-based companies higher. It is in no way a deliberate conspiracy, just a result of the AI doing it's job well.

Of course, self driving cars, painting funny moustaches on your faces, or playing Goare all benign, non-threating abilities of AI. But it is easy to see how falling into the wrong hands, they might lead to not-so-great results. Our stereotypical AI researcher is surely very careful about AI's potential dangers. But do you think Uber, a notoriously profit-driven company, would invest this much care if it doesn't help the bottom line?

The cat in a cage argument is surely convincing, but AI is already taking a lot of decisions in place of humans. Be it mortgages, crime detection and prevention, or what information reaches us through our news feeds. And it is easy to see how a single imperfectly-configured algorithm can lead to real- world effects.

For example, imagine a threat assessment AI, as already used in some shape and form by police forces around the world, which is configured not to minimize deaths and injuries, but to minimize damage to the economy by an individual. A benign sounding setup. Imagine such a system has to evaluate the threat level of a known researcher, who specializes in AI safety, thus reducing the profit of a bunch of the world's biggest companies. Is he a threat to the economy? Should he go to jail?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the fundamental difference of opinion--between those who worry about the existential risk of gAI and those who don't--is not whether or not gAI _can_ pose a risk to humankind, but rather whether it _will_ , and if so, whether there's anything meaningful we can do about it _now_ to prepare for it.

This article is written as a rebuttal to another article ([http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)) adapted from a talk. That article reconstructs the gAI-is-risky argument and then provides a series of counter-arguments that show that the gAI future is not guaranteed--that there are many ways in which it might not come to pass. The point it's trying to show is that the gAI-dystopia is not a given, and therefore we should question its plausibility. In particular, it raises the notion that there may be something about very high-level thinking ("being smart") that makes causes very knowledgeable people to overestimate the probability of gAI-dystopia. It then suggests that the indirect consequences of promoting the gAI-dystopia theory might outweigh any possible benefits we get from worrying about it right now.

Then this article responds to each of those arguments (about how it might _not_ come to pass) with an argument about how it _might_ come to pass. It closes with a remark that any engineering discipline should ask what the consequences are if we succeed.

Obviously, the two camps could go back and forth all day, both being completely correct, neither making any progress, because these arguments are based in rhetoric, not analysis. There's nothing wrong with rhetorical arguments, but any two sufficiently skilled rhetoricians can push their point infinitely far; the real question is which premise you accept:

After hearing the arguments put forth by the gAI-dystopia group, do you think the dystopian scenario is likely and that we can meaningfully prepare for it at this time, or do you think it's unlikely or that we can't meaningfully prepare for it?

The gAI-dystopia crowd is not necessarily wrong, but it's a minority of the community because it can't attach any meaningful risk analysis to its claims without making shaky assertions for the prior probabilities. There are infinite ways we could end up in a gAI dystopia, and there are infinite ways we could not. Existential threats are hard to accept, so until we have more evidence that such a future is at all likely, it will be hard to convince any significant number of people. In this sense, it _is_ just like a religion (but I don't say that as an insult).

<comment><USER5> The problem is that, unlike atomic bombs, we can't calculate and make predictions of what will happen, because we would need precisely the same machines that are required to make higher-than-human intelligence. Therefore we don't know, we can't know, so we should at least understand the risks with the best of our very limited understanding, to at least be somewhat prepared when we are able to predict the possible distaster shortly before it happens.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This isn't a dupe. It's a response to the other article with a similar title. I've reposted under a less-confusing title.

</comment><comment><USER6> How exactly does "refuse to think about" fit with the existence of OpenAI[0] and the Singularity Institute[1]?

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute)</comment>


H. R. 4901: The "Flamethrowers? Really? Act" - <AUTHOR> https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4901/text <comment><USER2> _The term 'flamethrower' means any nonstationary or transportable device designed or intended to ignite and then emit or propel a burning stream of a combustible or flammable substance a distance of at least 6 feet._

This bill is clearly in reaction to The Boring Company flamethrowers ([https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a- flamethrower](https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower)), yet their definition of a flamethrower doesn't even cover those flamethrowers. From the videos that Musk has posted none of the flames from the boring co. flamethrowers shoot out 6 feet...

</comment><comment><USER3> Sugar cane farmers will not be pleased.

<comment><USER4> Don't they tend to use drip torches on ATV's? I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be covered under this law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _SEC. 2. FLAMETHROWERS TREATED THE SAME AS MACHINEGUNS FOR PURPOSES OF ALL FEDERAL CRIMINAL LAWS RELATING TO FIREARMS._

Why? With a real machine gun you could level a whole crowd in a minute. With a flamethrower, you can mostly make an ass of yourself unless the people you want to harm are in a pillbox. They're not equivalent threats to others, and frankly a flamethrowers is mostly a threat to the carrier.</comment>