How Hired Hackers Got "Complete Control" of Palantir - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/how-hired-hackers-got-complete-control-of-palantir <comment><USER2> Shaming companies for carrying out pentests is counter-productive, i'm more interested in who is leaking against Palantir and why.

This is the third story now that William Alden has written about Palantir that appear to be based on internal documents[0]

His profile of the company a month ago opened with:

> A trove of internal documents and insider interviews has pulled back the > curtain on one of Silicon Valley's most secretive and highly valued > companies, Palantir Technologies.

There isn't much public interest in large parts of the profile nor the follow- up stories, so it has a feeling of a disgruntled employee. A really difficult class of threat to defend against and stop, but each additional story and leak provides a few more bits of data that can narrow down the suspect pool.

I really hope the leaker and journalist in this case know what they're getting themselves into - because based on the pentest report the infosec team at Palantir appear capable of tracking the leak down.

[0] [https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden?language=en](https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden?language=en)

[1] [https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/inside-palantir- silico...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/inside-palantir-silicon- valleys-most-secretive-company)

<comment><USER3> Surely it was the company who performed the pentest. It's the best publicity they can get.

<comment><USER4> 'Look at how great we are at finding security vulnerabilities. Almost matched by our utter lack of discretion and confidentiality!'

Hardly a good advert. I would have thought a pen testing firm would make client confidentiality an extremely high priority.

My guess is a Palantir employee who feels that due to the volume and nature of the data they handle that it needs to publicly known their security isn't up to scratch.

<comment><USER5> Well, I mean the whole point of confidentially leaking is to get something out there without having to put your name on it. This is a great advert for them no matter who leaked it, make no mistake about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think Palantir should be shamed for this. It's laudable that they invested in penetration testing - better they find out this way than by an actual APT/hacking group.

<comment><USER7> > It's laudable that they invested in penetration testing

I don't think they should be lauded for doing their jobs and discovering they failed at them. If your QA team discovers huge numbers of bugs, you don't laud yourself for doing QA.

If a leading accounting firm hires an outside auditor and discovered their own books were rotten, should they be lauded? I guess there's a silver lining in everything.

I guess I'd be willing to trust Palantir's advice on hiring penetration testers, but not on securing my systems.

<comment><USER8> To play devil's advocate: there is a reasonable expectation that an organization's accounting is legally and correctly balanced.

It is not a reasonable expectation that software, even security software or software developed with security expertise, is secure.

<comment><USER9> I would say you can reasonably expect that unaudited software is not secure and that unaudited books are not legally and correctly balanced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why we're reading this. Was it leaked? Pretty much every big tech firm does this twice a year, but nobody releases the reports.

<comment><USER11> I would not be surprised if this is related to the Gawker debacle.

<comment><USER12> Why at all? Because Thiel is an investor in Palantir? I googled a bit to try and something that relates Gawker and Palantir beyond that.

<comment><USER13> "... in the next phase, you too will be subject to a dose of transparency. However philanthropic your intention, and careful the planning, the details of your involvement will be gruesome."

[http://gawker.com/an-open-letter-to-peter- thiel-1778991227](http://gawker.com/an-open-letter-to-peter-thiel-1778991227)

<comment><USER14> Having tried to avoid that entire story up until reading that, I remain pitiless for gawker's position in every way and I hope it burns to the ground.

<comment><USER15> Having had no idea what made thiel hate gawker so much, suddenly it all becomes clear.

Holding the rich to account. How very non politically correct and unjournalistic of them.

<comment><USER16> "Having had no idea what made thiel hate gawker so much"

How about when they publicly outed him as gay, when he wasn't out to most of the general public?

Source, but don't visit it, in case you give those parasites a couple of dimes in the process: [http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay- people](http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people)

<comment><USER17> The wonders of adblock, wasting bandwidth and power while contributing a total of absolutely nothing to the companies in which you despise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honestly it's as if people have forgotten one of the fundamental principles of strategy and tactics. The attacker almost always has the advantage. Its true in the book of five rings, its true in the art of war, it's just a basic principle.

Now, thats not to say an adanced attacker still can't be defended against, but as a sysadmin who has seen the inside of companies from law firms to publicly traded big guys to the IT firms themselves... And that's that almost no managment has put forward the personell or the budgets or the culture needed to really secure things.

Hell, a family member of mine recently got a tour of spacex and was apalled at the security. If Musk and his money dont do it right or well, almost nobody is.

I've basically told people who run windows systems for business they're already comprimised most likely, and the best thing to do is to be doing hids and good log analysis so you catch it when it happens quickly... but you probably arent going to stop any kind of semi-advanced attacker.

So to be frank, it completely makes sense to me that a company like Palantir would be massively vulnerable from thr inside. The edge of the sword they live on cuts both ways. These days, its about response time and forensic afteraction.

"When Palantir's information security employees finally discovered the intruders, they "provided a rapid network response in which they identified and mitigated" the "majority" of the red team's actions within days, the report says. Compared with other large companies, this defensive response was unusually robust, the industry source said, based on a reading of the report."

<comment><USER19> The red team also had the big benefit that there would be no legal ramifications if/when they were discovered. That no doubt encouraged them to take bigger risks, and consequently get further, than a malicious hacker would.

<comment><USER20> Do you honestly think that state sponsored hackers care about the legal ramifications of being discovered?

<comment><USER21> In some cases, they do care very much. Just not from a legal standpoint.

Many nation states prefer not to be detected when conducting espionage. And if they are detected, they really prefer to not have the attack be attributed to their country. At the very least, they want some plausible deniability; ideally full-on anonymity or framing, if they can.

Sometimes they really don't care if the source of the attack is known. It depends on the political rationale behind it. But when they do care, they're definitely at more of a disadvantage than a hired red team. The red team has no real anxiety over whether they're caught or attributed, and can act more quickly and aggressively.

<comment><USER22> I think that if a state desires to engage in a cyberattack, there's really no way you can pinpoint it back, because there's no evidence to show why a hacker on a Chinese IP is associated with the Chinese government -- unless you're depending on sloppiness. It could be a private industrially motivated actor, it could be the actions of someone looking to embarrass the Chinese government, or it could be some nationalist.

The US can say "shame on you" because they feel they have enough evidence to support a narrative, and China will say, "How can you engage in such irresponsible rhetoric?" The Chinese government will condemn rogue criminals and perform a cursory investigation and that will be the end of it. And then all countries and all companies in the world continue operating as usual.

No political consequences. All nations understand it.

<comment><USER21> There are many different kinds of indicators left behind in attacks, even very sophisticated attacks. Way more than just IP addresses. The entire recon, infection, exfiltration, pivoting, and C&C chain can leave hundreds or thousands of host-based, network-based, and identity-based indicators behind.

Of course, those indicators can be intentionally or unintentionally misleading or ambiguous. But by finding a dozen or more consistent IOCs/TTPs without any inconsistent ones, combined with a motive, often you can start making some possible accusations. Those assumptions will often remain unproven, but keep in mind government APT groups are still run by humans, and humans can always be sloppy.

Also, in some cases one state may have so thoroughly compromised another that they could find explicit evidence that an attack was ordered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, this is sobering.

I've certainly heard it said that if you're a big tech company, you are already infiltrated by state-sponsored hackers. But since I've never seen one of these red-team reports, this synopsis provides a lot of color on how people can get around inside the network, once they get in, that I wasn't aware of (obviously I don't work in opsec).

Too bad for Palantir that this got leaked, but perhaps it can be instructive for many of us.

<comment><USER24> The truth is that when reputable information security specialists are engaged to perform a no holds barred internal network penetration test or red teaming exercise for a client, they will gain full administrative access of the network in more than 9 out of 10 cases. There are well known and documented techniques for escalating privileges and traversing through a network. This is just the reality if you operate a typical Windows corporate network of a sufficient size.

In the past, companies mostly just accepted this risk and focused on protecting their network perimeter. Over time, this attitude has shifted and organisations now recognise the insider threat (e.g. a rogue employee/contractor or an external attacker who has already breached the perimeter).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How does Palantir's response stack up?

Having read the article, I'm not sure whether to read it as: "The extent to which the red team was able to exploit the network is a sign that Palantir's network security is bad" or, "Despite Palantir following best practices and having a lot of smart people on their security team, the red team was still able to do a lot, which bodes really badly for other companies that don't have the same internal resources"?

<comment><USER26> "Our systems and our customers' information were never at risk.", their pr team is clueless. Security is not binary.

<comment><USER27> The fact that they had a specific team test their security is already evidence they aren't clueless.

Clueless would be refusing to have teams test your security.

<comment><USER26> I didn't say they were clueless. I said their pr is clueless. Some pr person said "there is no risk" relating to it security of a large organization. That is obviously false, and clueless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Every major company performs these sorts of "red team" tests and virtually no major company passes with flying colors... so it's not surprising that Palintir has its fair share of issues. What is surprising is that all this stuff leaks out about Palinitr while other companies manage to keep things under tighter wraps.

</comment><comment><USER29> This recent post from microsoft describes how to mitigate some of the risk that got Palantir.

[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/johnromsft/2016/06/14/wh...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/johnromsft/2016/06/14/why- you-should-use-rdp-restrictedadmin/)

"I can't stress how important this change is – an administrator who connects using "normal" RDP exposes his or her credentials to the remote system with every connection. RDPRA, on the other hand, ensures that credentials aren't exposed to the attacker on the remote computer being managed."

</comment><comment><USER30> > A Palantír is a dangerous tool, Saruman. They are not all accounted for, the > lost Seeing Stones. We do not know who else may be watching!

It's weird that this story is considered newsworthy. I skimmed over the article and it looks about normal for the industry. As sad as it sounds, they aren't doing much worse than many other companies out there.

</comment><comment><USER31> What is the standard measures taken to protect against spear phishing? Mostly educating users and trying to filter out the mails?

Palantir basically started the red team in a position where they had successfully spear phished someone and that seems to be common practice. Is trying to protect against it just a waste of time and should the resources be invested into proper segmentation to protect against the successful spear phis case? Or are people usually 80/20ing this and taking anti spear phish measures but only to an extend that covers a lot of ground at relatively low cost/time?

<comment><USER32> Phishing is generally 1. run a command or 2. give me your credentials. To prevent these you need good solid technical controls like U2F for password based authentication (which is origin bound). Similarly binary whitelisting will prevent most users from running rogue executables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So, who will take the bet that it was only the red team doing the pentest that managed to get this level of access?

The one saving grace here is that the red team had to be 'let in', in other words, they started from a position that is substantially different from being a complete outsider.

It also makes you wonder what else was leaked besides the report.

</comment><comment><USER32> With time, creativity and motivation a good offensive security team will always win. All we can do as defenders is to find ways to raise the cost of such an attack.

A bit disappointed they seem to have started on the internal network rather then coming in from the outside :)

</comment><comment><USER34> What a ridiculous clickbait title

</comment><comment><USER35> What does Palantir do, really?

</comment><comment><USER36> Gee, we have to wonder if some good anomaly detection

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880593)

would have detected that intrusion?</comment>


Tell HN: One key selling point Microsoft has over Apple: freedom of choice - <AUTHOR>

Microsoft doesn't seem to push this very hard but one of the key reasons to go Windows instead of Apple is freedom of choice.
Want to buy HP?  You can.
Want to put together your own machine? Yep - that's good with Microsoft.
Want to install on your existing machines?  No problem, Microsoft has your back.
It's not a selling point that Microsoft pushes very hard. <comment><USER2> One key selling point Linux has over everything else: ultimate freedom of choice. Freedom of what hardware you use, and freedom of what pieces of software you can use _and_ modify up to the level of source code to piece together your own personal user experience.

Which makes your point what, exactly?

</comment><comment><USER3> This selling point also causes many of the issues Microsoft and Windows is known for. With choice comes compatibility issues with often leads to crashes and blue screens.

Apple can ensure the latest version of their OS and Apps work on all their supported machines and hardware configurations. This sort of testing and assurance is nearly impossible for Microsoft

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting argument given that Microsoft is known for embrace, extend and extinguish.

<comment><USER5> Lately tho, they have changed their approach to a more user oriented one</comment></comment>


In a split second, clothes make the man more competent in the eyes of others - 1e-9 https://phys.org/news/2019-12-eyes.html <comment><AUTHOR> If I walk into a tech-related meeting and see somebody slickly dressed, I immediately think either "marketing droid" or PHB (clueless buzzword-filled Dilbert boss). The person who really knows what's going on from a tech perspective is probably rumpled and has a neck-beard or thick glasses. _Those_ are the ones I try to sit next to.

I suspect like-finds-like because communication is quicker. Marketing people will seek to communicate with other marketing people, etc. because they speak the same lingo.

But the survey seems to measure only competence versus incompetence, not "who's good at X" which may be more useful in an actual business setting.</comment>


Screen sharing on Linux: The state of things - <AUTHOR> https://anthony.som.codes/blog/2020-01-28-screen-sharing-on-linux/ <comment><AUTHOR> All of the troubles explained in the post are caused by a bug in Chromium which identifies all the monitors as a single one.

If you are interested take a look at the bug in the Chromium issue tracker: [https://webrtc-review.googlesource.com/c/src/+/165724](https://webrtc- review.googlesource.com/c/src/+/165724)</comment>


Reversing The Moral Decay Behind The London Riots - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903639404576516252066723110.html

<comment><USER2> I think this article touches on the real issue here but then abandons it for a more politically charged point.

The problem here isn't religion or morality per se. To make that argument you'd have to be making the point that the people rioting didn't know what they were doing was wrong. I don't see that as valid.

The issue, as the author says at the beginning, is self-restraint. Britain has seen a decline in religion and without the "fear of God" there's a certain segment of the population (the lowest class who have nothing to lose) who no longer see the need to restrain themselves. So the issue is teaching them why they should restrain themselves even without fearing God

Given that I see a very simple solution here. In societies where religion is losing favor schools and parents have to teach kids secular morality. Explain to them that a riot destroys businesses which deprives the government of revenue which in turn will come back to harm the people who caused the riot in the long run.

Basically switch the "Golden Rule" for the "Categorical Imperative" (which to be honest are virtually the same thing anyhow)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in hearing what HN'ers think about this:

"He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?"

<comment><USER2> I'm far, FAR more religious than almost anyone on HN (in my experience) but I don't entirely buy this. I think religion can give purpose. It can imbue someone who doesn't have a purpose with a strength of conviction. So in that sense I think the quote is correct.

But I don't think someone who has a purpose they truly believe in is worse for not having religion in a motivational sense. So what I think religion has done for the United States is to give the masses (people who are fine with a 9-to-5 day) more motivation to work diligently even when they aren't chasing their dream.

But the thing about countries like China and India is this: What Americans consider mundane work is the dream of many people in these countries. I've met people from India who dreamed of a job in a call center since they were a little kid. Meaning those people are just as motivated if not more so than their American counterparts who worked hard because they thought God commanded them to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Social capital ... has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race._

Struggling politically for more government action (and by extension, taxation) toward the same goals isn't altruistic?

</comment><comment><USER4> The folks at News Corp should do an internal house cleaning before they go on about "moral decay".

<comment><USER2> I actually don't mean to attack you here but can I ask what you expected to accomplish with this comment? It isn't relevant to the article nor is it really logical (since I doubt this low level reporter has anything to do with the high level scandal at News Corp).

I sincerely doubt anyone involved in the News Corp scandal reads HN so it isn't like you'd be getting a dig in and it doesn't seem like your comments were meant to be funny.

The reason I bring this up is your comment seems to be hate based. As if your hatred for News Corp is so significant that you can't help but express it even when there's no real purpose to doing so and that seems unhealthy to me.

Even if you aren't religious one of the tenants of judeo-christian religion is forgiveness. Not for the sake of the person being forgiven but for the sake of person with the hatred in their heart. Because hatred, even when justified, tends to eat away at you until you end up a bitter person.

Anyway, something to think about...

<comment><USER4> The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp — so the comment isn't about hate, but an observation.</comment></comment></comment>


Prowords - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedure_word <comment><USER2> My favorite part of this article is the reason for saying "SAY AGAIN" instead of "REPEAT".

      The word "REPEAT" should not be used in place of "SAY AGAIN",
      especially in the vicinity of naval or other firing ranges,
      as "REPEAT" is an artillery proword defined in ACP 125 U.S.
      Supp-2(A) with the wholly different meaning of "request for the
      same volume of fire to be fired again with or without corrections
      or changes" (e.g., at the same coordinates as the previous round).[12]

You'd think something as destructive as artillery fire might be given a slightly longer and less common word...

<comment><USER3> When it's bad, you want a VERY quick way of saying "shoot it again."

The "repeat" vs "say again" distinction is so ingrained that I've been out of the military for a decade and I still always, only say "say again." I don't do it on purpose, it's just part of me now.

<comment><USER4> My father, fifty years out of the navy, would still always say "Say again" if he didn't hear you.

<comment><USER5> I also use "say again" in regular conversation, and I've never been in the military. I picked it up from living in Singapore for a few years. Some of the short, simplified, not-always-grammatical phrases used in Singlish work great for communication - distinct enough to be understood despite the speaker's accent, few fluff words so that they can be parsed easily and spoken easily. Very close to the goals of the military and NATO in that regard.

<comment><USER6> Some Singlish vocabularly actually derives from nautical English. The port has been important for a long time.

See eg [https://www.angmohdan.com/origins-of- gostan/](https://www.angmohdan.com/origins-of-gostan/) (and also [http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/jacklee/singlish_G.htm](http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/jacklee/singlish_G.htm))

I lament that most people speaking to an ang moh like me code-switch to the Queen's English instead of sticking to proper Singlish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing that jumped out at me, and isn't explained in this article or the linked ones, is that all of the distress-related prowords are French and none of the others are. Specifically, they're French-derived but spelled as if in English ("MAYDAY", "SEELONCE").

Why?

<comment><USER8> See also PAN-PAN, from the French 'panne' meaning breakdown.

The story I was told behind the origin of these was that they evolved from British <-> French air traffic and was a reasonably logical thing that everybody agreed on and could pronounce intelligibly for the other party.

Edit to add: English is the official international language for naval/aviation communication. Having really important words in another language makes them stand out and hard to say by mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related:

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

I am of the belief that all adults should memorize this list (including pronunciation, they are slightly different than the normal words).

It's not onerous and can be done in a few minutes, and if nothing else will save you from sounding like a fool when spelling things over the phone ("a like apple, c like cat"). They are standard for a reason.

<comment><USER10> How exactly "a like apple, c like cat" is worse than "a like alpha, c like Charlie"?

<comment><USER11> It's worse because it's really easy to come up with a word that is hard to understand in unclear communications conditions and thus either remains ambiguous or, worse, suggests the wrong resolution of ambiguity to the listener. Standard phonetic alphabets like the NATO one are designed so that the words and pronunciations are very highly unambiguous even if the listener isn't familiar with the phonetic alphabet, and even moreso if the listener is familiar the alphabet.

It's also worse because if you have two speakers who are familiar with the use of a phonetic alphabet, you don't have to do "'a' is in...", you just spell out "Alpha Romeo Tango India Sierra Tango" (no, I have no idea why I picked that word for an example.)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure it's so great when the listener doesn't know the NATO alphabet. A number of the words sound very similar to other english words, and some of the words are obscure.

For example, Charlie (pronounced char-lee or shar-lee) could be confused with barley, Karlie, hardly, Shirley, etc. Mike rhymes with dozens of words.

If you don't know the word 'sierra' you might be wondering, "was that fierra? Ciara? Tiara?"

I think using longer, simple words like,

Alphabet, Banana, Computer, Direction, Elephant, etc.

would be better for lay people. They're unambiguous and well-known.

<comment> jagged-chisel > For example, Charlie (pronounced char-lee or shar-lee) could be confused > with barley, Karlie, hardly, Shirley, etc.

The beauty of the phonetic alphabet is that there's nothing else on the phonetic alphabet that can be confused with "Charlie" regardless of how a non- English speaker pronounces it. If everyone is using the same phonetic alphabet, then the confused entity learns that "Sharlie/Shirley/hardly" stands in for "C."

<comment><USER12> Yep, that's my point. It was designed assuming both people know the phonetic alphabet. It's not so great when you're trying to use it over the phone with a tech support person who isn't familiar with the alphabet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The 1980 movie "Airplane" spoofs prowords with this dialog between Captain Clarence Oveur, co-pilot Roger Murdock, flight navigator Victor Basta, and the airport tower: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/quotes/qt0484135](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/quotes/qt0484135)

</comment><comment><USER14> I was surprised that in the communications during the recent Dragon docking, they seemed to have the initial station designations reversed: first stating who is _calling_ , followed by who is _called_. Also when Dragon crew was reporting poor call quality over the hardline, I don't think they used the phrases listed in the article.

 _edit:_ and also how/why it took them so long to resolve the apparent misunderstanding at some point, where the Russian crew on the ISS seemed to believe they were being called out by the ground crew.

<comment><USER15> I unfortunately didn't get to watch the launch or docking, but I know in (american) ham radio and CW (morse code) usually on the opening/first transmission your callsign is the first thing you say. If you callsign was K1QT, for example, you might say:

      K1QT calling CQ CQ

or

      K1QT calling K1HTL

<comment><USER16> Is there a specific region where this is more common? I've only heard "<dest> this is <source>", never "<source> calling <dest>".

<comment><USER17> In Canada, can also confirm "<dst> <src>" is standard (I think it was one of the possible questions on the exam). And my understanding is that it's at least best practice in the US as well. At least the ARRL's "Making Your First Contact"[0] page lists it in that format.

The idea being whoever's on the other end is not actively listening until they hear their own call sign. If you say your own call sign first, you're just going to create confusion because all they're going to actually pick up is that they were called and have to "Person calling <X> come again..."

[0] [http://www.arrl.org/making-your-first- contact](http://www.arrl.org/making-your-first-contact)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the link -- I tried searching the web but couldn't find a canonical source, and my amateur radio guide book is at my office. :~)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My personal favorite from my time in the Marines didn't seem to make the list. Interrogative. Nothing more frustrating than to ask a time-sensitive question and be met with silence.

<comment><USER19> How is that used?

<comment><USER20> You just say "interrogative" before your question. See here, 0:17 [https://youtube.com/watch?v=oquZP7saqoE](https://youtube.com/watch?v=oquZP7saqoE)

<comment><USER19> Huh, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone comment where the common phrase "OVER AND OUT" comes from, if it is not used in this scheme at all.

<comment><USER22> Not 100% but I learned that it's bad form because "out" subsumes "over" so saying them together is redundant.

<comment><USER23> The linked page very clearly states they are opposites. Over indicates an expectation for response, out does the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting to hear a few variants from this used in the recent Dragon launch.

"good readback" to confirm that the other side has correctly readback the information just sent "go for ..." you have approval to...

but more often speaking relatively normally: they were having some problems with the hardline, at one point Dragon saying:

"that was an improvement but, uh, completely unreadable"

<comment><USER25> Most of the listed words/phrases are common in aviation so I'm not surprised to see them used in aerospace too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Since this is Hacker News, I can only assume that the one who posted this is suggesting that we should have incorporated some of this vocabulary into our network protocols --- which would have been utterly cool.

<comment><USER27> We have our own: the RFC language of SHOULD and MUST.

The obsolete TELNET protocol ( [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc854](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc854) ) has DO/DONT/WILL/WONT which match up nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > However, a few are used frequently enough in media to be memorable, > including ABORT, BOGEY, BANDIT, FEET WET, FEET DRY, NEGATIVE CONTACT, and NO > JOY.

These don't seem to be described in the article. Did I miss something? Does anyone have a similar description for these?

<comment><USER29> They are described in the linked article: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiservice_tactical_brevit...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiservice_tactical_brevity_code)

<comment><USER30> of which TALLY appears to go back to the XIII [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally- ho#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally-ho#Etymology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> People should also adopt the "five" vs "niner" idiom from aviation to disambiguate those two numbers.

Fun fact, the donkey that was the model for Donkey in Shrek was named Niner, and lived in Palo Alto.

<comment><USER32> > People should also adopt the "five" [sic] vs [sic] "niner" idiom

I assume you mean 'fife' _and_? Also not just from aviation, general (military) radio, and other uses of the NATO phonetic alphabet.

It used to be fi-ive (rhyming 'I seive') but changed, I believe/as I recall, due to sounding too close to 'fire'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting are also ACP-131 3-Letter codes (Q and Z). The CPO's favourite : ZBM: Place a competent operator on this link.

</comment><comment><USER34> Ah, that's where the name of Space Quest character came from :) .

</comment><comment><USER35> "It's more than 500 feet out? over."</comment>


How to Study Physics (1949) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/chapman.htm <comment><USER2> [http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses](http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses)

If you really want to study physics, and you don't want to get a degree, this is about as good as it gets.

<comment><USER3> Or you could go tackle the Landau & Lifshitz texts for the original theoretical minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> EDIT: After finally reading the text, I realized that my little rant below has little to do with the topic.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

The first thing I learned in my Physics undergraduate studies was Maths. Calculus. Scalar fields and vector fields, their derivatives and integrals, and differential equations of all kinds and flavours. Non-cartesian coordinate systems, transformations between them, fourier transformations. And a nice toolbox for beating the not-so friendly integrals.

Even for classical mechanics, that's the foundation.

If you want to talk about Quantum Physics you also need linear algebra, in particular Hilbert spaces and operators. And distributions.

If you don't understand the Maths, you are left with talking about interpretations. Especially in Quantum Physics, that means you are left with basically nothing.

Without Maths, you are not doing Physics. You are doing Metaphysics.

<comment><USER5> I almost feel that math ought to be learned through physics. At least, I remember my physics instructor explaining math concepts in a mich more terse and understandable way than my math professors.

<comment><USER6> I have a PhD in physics, and this is exactly how I learned the material. I mean, really learned it. I did fine in plain math classes, but never quite connected with the material.

Calculus and linear algebra both really only 'clicked' when applying them in my physics classes.

Physics is like the "word problems" we'd have in elementary sho, but for advanced math.

<comment><USER7> With no offense intended to mathematicians, a lot of the higher level material in my pure math courses tends to be of the "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" type. Debating the finer points of details that are mostly irrelevant minutia, yet which are given just as much text space as serious results that actually do things.

Physics' real-world origin prevents a lot of that sort of thing, and places emphasis on a practicality I find deeply appealing. Cauchy-Riemann equations are important, here's where they come from, here's what they do, bam done.

<comment><USER8> Although, there have been many cases where results from Pure Mathematics have found to elegantly describe phenomena in Physics, often years after the initial result which might have been regarded as the equivalent of "angels dancing on a pinhead" by physicists of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The "Feynman Lectures on Physics" are a great resource.

[http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu)

<comment><USER10> Can anyone who's read the Feynman Lectures comment on how good they are? I started reading them, but after a few chapters I didn't feel that I was actually learning physics. I get the feeling that the Feynman Lectures are like Knuth's Art of Computer Programming: few people have read it, but it's widely known as being amazing. I'd be interested in hearing if this is correct.

<comment><USER11> The material in the Feynman lectures is deceptively deep. When he originally gave the lectures at Caltech, they were not all that well received. They were aimed at undergraduates, but the undergraduates -- some of the brightest in the country -- would end up stumbling out of the lecture hall looking like they'd been hit by a bus.

On the other hand, the lectures were quite popular among grad students and faculty members, if that tells you anything.

<comment><USER12> This stumbling out of the hall sounds like folklore. There are contradictory claims about how well the students took the lectures. (I attended Feynman's last lecture for Caltech freshmen, in the 80s -- a reprise of the volume 1 lecture on general relativity -- and saw nobody reacting like that. Admittedly we weren't going to get tested on it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Physicists and physics students are referred to as 'he' not out of sexist > motivation, but is a reflection of the plain fact that at that period of > history almost all physicists and physics majors were male.

If all the students in my class but one are male, and I say "if any student in my class wants to pass, then he should come to office hours", then it seems to me that I am being sexist. In fact, I'd go so far as to guess that sexist language about a group is more, not less, harmful when there are fewer women in the group.

I don't think sexism in '50's-era work means that it should be shunned or ignored, but this kind of apologia seems both unnecessary and unjustified. (Why not just "I have not edited the pronouns in the original"?)

<comment><USER14> The interesting thing is that in languages with more explicit gender marking than English, and with no less claim to feminism than the US, this does not seem to be an issue. For example, in French, to use your example, if there were 50 female students and one male student in the class you would still refer to them using the _male_ plural pronoun ([http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexist-grammar- th...](http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexist-grammar-the-french- and-german-cases.html)).

<comment><USER15> I don't speak French, and am curious about this example.

If you have 50 women in a room, do you use the female plural pronoun?

In other words, are you saying that all it takes is one man in the room to make it male plural? Honestly (and I'm no gender theorist) this seems fairly sexist too. It's essentially saying psychologically that the man in the room takes precedence over any number of women.

<comment><USER16> Yes, in Portuguese (my native language) it is the same.

For instance, "amigos" means "friends" with at least one male (the example of 50 women in a room and 1 man). "amigas" would be "friends" with only women/females.

There is in Brazilian Portuguese (probably in other pt speaking countries as well) a movement of people pushing for the usage of letter-tokens to turn gender-specific words into gender-neutral. In this case, they would use "amigxs" or "amig@s".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This might be another useful resource for someone interested in learning physics

[http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index....](http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> > As a check on his aptitude, a serious-minded student will take courses in > several different departments to find out in what field he can do the best > work. This is quite distinct from finding out where he can get the best > grades...

edit: wording

Interesting, "[...] in what field he can do the best work" is given as the prime criterion, and not "in what field he can earn the most money" which is given a lot of value today.

Arguably, doing the "best work" leads to financial reward, but focus on the latter inevitably sabotages the former. What a strange paradox!</comment>


The Psychology of Moving - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/realestate/28cov.html <comment><USER2> "..moving is incredibly stressful and people don't realize it"

My family almost moved recently. We finally found a buyer for our house, and since we were moving across the country, we quickly took a short trip to pick out a new house. We had to decide on a place within days while not being at all familiar with the area. I think it was the most stressful time of my entire life - and I'm married and have a child!

Then the deal fell through on our house which canceled the deal on the house there, and for a moment it was a great weight removed! Except then we'd have to do it all over again because we were back to square one - despair and a whole new level of stress set it.

Finally, my employer decided that we didn't have to move after all and that working remotely was going just fine and it wasn't worth the effort. Suddenly the world was a brighter place, the sale sign removed from the yard, and the extended family was happy again.

How anyone could not realize all that stress is beyond me - and we didn't even actually move!</comment>


Wanted: First reaction to a math question - <AUTHOR>

Polls are currently temporarily disabled, so I'm having to put this in as a simple question.
I'd like your first reaction to this question, without you thinking about it too much, and before you read the comments:
What's the value of √9?
When (if?) you answer, it would be useful if you could give some indication of your academic or otherwise) backgound.
As you might guess, I do have a reason for asking this, and I'm also interested in your replies.  It's not as instantly obvious as you might think, as I hope will turn up in the thread.
So thanks in advance - I'm looking forward to a broad range of comments. <comment><USER2> Assuming you're talking about the square root of the decimal number 9: either positive or negative 3.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the replies so far. I don't like asking for upvotes, but if no one upvotes this submission it will disappear before I get enough answers to be useful.

Feel free to use this comment as a scapegoat comment - upvote the submission, downvote this comment.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3...</comment>


Git merges can be hard - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/1/699

<comment><USER2> I think that's better worded as "Merges can be hard". There isn't anything git-specific here.

<comment><AUTHOR> True.</comment></comment>


There Is Never a 'Free Market' in Health Care - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/07/there-is-never-a-free-market-in-health-care/#56a2d0081147 <comment><USER2> Given that 60-70% of healthcare is already provided by the government (depending what state you're in) from programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, the VA, and federal employee health plans, it'd be hard to imagine a feee market existing.

Layer the regulations at every level of _providing_ healthcare, and it's very hard to imagine any health related transaction happening without government approval.

<comment><USER3> One can also consider that of the remainder 55% or so is supplied through employers. I have the minority opinion that there isn't that much difference between 'the government' and 'huge corporation'. Evidence is a claim I read from someone that handled heath insurance for a fortune 500 corp. Large corporations don't actually buy health insurance, they pay insurance companies to handle claims. Key difference.

So remove the 65% of healthcare paid for by the government. And then 20% that is mostly corporate self-insurance, and you have 15% left over that is nothing but a poo bucket filled with market failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The current administration and its enablers in Congress are actively dedicated to the dismantlement of the Federal government. They _know_ these proposals aren't going to work and are just going through the motions while they consolidate power. The sooner people wake up to this fact the better.

<comment><USER5> If they are trying to dismantle the Federal government, that can't properly be described as consolidating power. A dismantlement of the federal government would be distribution of power back to states, localities, or individuals.

<comment><USER6> Or large organizations called corporations - though one might argue to include them with "individuals", I think they are sufficiently different, and wield enough power that they should be accounted for separately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Conservatives think that health care should be purchased by individuals like an automobile or a refrigerator. You should be free to get it or not, including insurance. And if you don't have the money to buy it, then it's your fault because you didn't work hard enough.</comment>


Rails Challenges Slides - <AUTHOR> http://railsapps.github.io/rails-challenges/

<comment><USER2> Hey, that's my presentation! Just talked through it at the SF Ruby on Rails meetup tonight.</comment>


Docker Shipped to AWS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/comsystoreply/docker-shipped-to-aws-17f94eb9e826 <comment><AUTHOR> We have performed an early check of the Docker to AWS feature. As an AWS partner with a lot of developers using Docker, we found it very important to check this feature, in order to have Docker containers running on AWS ECS Fargate very smoothly.</comment>


Human behavioral complexity peaks at age 25: study - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005408 <comment><USER2> Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"

<comment><USER3> it appears to be a way to measure complex behaviors, and higher cognitive functions, however - so I don't think the commenters are that far off.

<comment><USER4> I would call this test an analogue of IQ testing. Again, we see how mainstream thought places IQ on a pedestal. Mainstream thinking overvalues and overrates mental gymnastics, such as performance on IQ testing. But learned experience is in my opinion far more valuable and should be valued more by mainstream thought. At age 60, it is true that I cannot perform as well on IQ tests. But in my opinion my understanding of the world is much greater. I was like a child at age 25, even though I tested well on IQ tests. But I was just a child. Does mainstream scholarship explore this facet of human development? Not much....

<comment><USER5> Isn't the lower scores for older people just a result of the flynn effect? This doesn't mean a personal drop in "absolute" g, if it's really a thing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> yeah, but apparently barely declines untill say 60+. Speed suffers however.

"The adult years were remarkable in that complexity remained at a high level for a protracted period, in spite of a slow decrease of speed during the same period. This suggest that during the adult period, people tend to invest more and more computational time to achieve a stable level of output complexity. Later in life (>70), however, speed stabilizes, while complexity drops in a dramatic way."

and

"These speed-accuracy trade-offs were evident in the adult years, including the turn toward old age. During childhood, however, no similar pattern is discernible. This suggests that aging cannot simply be considered a "regression", and that CT (completion time) and complexity provide different complementary information. This is again supported by the fact that in the 25–60 year range, where the effect of age is reduced, CT and complexity are uncorrelated (r = −.012, p = .53). These findings add to a rapidly growing literature that views RIG tasks as good measures of complex cognitive abilities [21, for a review]."

<comment><USER7> It almost sounds like people try harder and harder to keep up with societal expectations of continued "sharpness"... until they hit some age where cultural norms say they aren't expected to be sharp any more. And then they stop trying, which causes an outsized decline as their lowered expectations of their own capability, feeds into lowered capability, which feeds back into further-lowered expectations.

<comment><USER6> could be, I really don't know. I can imagine perfectly benign scenarios too; if our long-term memory grows with time, maybe there's just more possible connections/associations to filter out with time too, so that decision just becomes harder, with only the deeper old age being simply tissue decline, the exhaustion of cognitive reserves etc.

Somewhat relatedly, I think I heard on some old Skeptic's guide to the universe episode about an experiment with some nootropic, maybe it was a racetam though I think it was mondafinil, and this kind of reaction time to response accuracy tradeoff was observed, on young healthy adults. Those with less correct answers slowed down, presumably concentrated better and gave better answers, but those already good at whatever the task was simply were slower and yet no better.

<comment><USER8> Is it possible to get a link to that episode?

<comment><USER6> ah, I'm sorry but I really don't remember. this was some years back.

<comment><USER9> Maybe [http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/530](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/530)

[https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_530](https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_530)

?

<comment><USER6> hey, that's not bad; didn't even expect SGU had such detailed transcripts.

But actually looking for it now, the particular study I had in mind seems to be from a science or fiction segment from this episode:

[http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2014-1...](http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2014-11-22.mp3)

Interesting to see how Steve's assesment of modafinil evolved between the two episodes

<comment><USER8> Thank you so much for your time. I was really curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ok, comments on fig. 2.

The 95% confidence intervals are plotted, but clearly the distribution of their subjects seems to sample heavily near where they find their peak (~25 to 40 ish), and correspondingly, the drop offs are away from that area...

Seems fishy to me.

<comment><USER11> Also, if you look at the right side of figure 1 there are lines on the bottom of the complexity chart for each of the tasks, presumably representing people who essentially did not do the task (although they still seem to have spent a variable amount of time not doing the task). It looks like this skews older, and just by eyeballing the chart some of the 75+ would be upward trends if not for that bottom line. I skimmed the article and did not see a discussion of this.

<comment><USER12> Furthermore, the poor sampling near the edges of the plots leads me to suspect that the trend away from a flat line is due to Runge's phenomenon. The peak may be nothing other than the oscillations from this phenomenon leaking into the interior of their data set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am conducting a survey as a first attempt to see what's going on. If you would be so kind, please take it here:

[https://j.mp/CoinFlippingSurvey](https://j.mp/CoinFlippingSurvey)

If I get about 100 more respondents, I will release the data and analysis at the same link.

<comment><USER14> It's not easy to click to the left or to the right 128 times. Can't you just replace it with a textbox where users type T or H, or something like that ?

<comment><USER13> I agree. It is so much easier and quicker on a smartphone though.

The survey is intentionally dumbed down so non-technical users don't have to type much. You can almost say it is geared toward the general population, many of whom use smartphones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how/if this relates to the fact that many mental illnesses fully manifest around 25 as well.

"Roughly half of all lifetime mental disorders in most studies start by the mid‐teens and three‐fourths by the mid‐20s." \- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925038/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1925038/)

<comment><USER7> A large part of this is that doctors are wary to diagnose mental disorders in children/teenagers, though. Often, symptoms of mental illness during development are just the brain doing the neurochemical equivalent of "one leg growing faster than the other"—it ends up balancing out.

There is still some element of truth to this, though, especially with bipolar disorder and psychosis. It puts me in mind of the fact that _allergies_ can also manifest around 25... and makes me wonder if there's a connection there.

<comment><USER16> FWIW, I developed a rather severe allergy to many types of fish out of nowhere at 31.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Authors' Reddit AMA:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6accnw/plos_scienc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6accnw/plos_science_wednesday_hi_reddit_my_name_is/)

</comment><comment><USER18> In high school, my math teacher once asked us to write down a random string of zeroes and ones, similar to what they did in the study to measure "cognitive functioning". He then asked us to count the number of times we alternated between 0 and 1. He told us that while most people try to have about a 50% split between 0 and 1, many alternate too often (0101101 instead of 0100011). Maybe there are other tests that one could learn to improve one's randomness, or at least write down a random string faster (they also measured speed).

In the introduction, they cite that "the complexity of a subject-produced pseudorandom sequence (…) is surprisingly resistant to practice effects". However, is it also resistant to teaching effects?

<comment><USER19> This is a great question. What are the speed requirements?

[https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-for-a-human-to- generate...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-for-a-human-to-generate-a- truly-random-sequence-mentally)

You could probably come up with a reasonably good, fast mental PRNG algorithm, and practice that.

<comment><USER20> Pick a phrase (name, address, phone number would do), discard white space, and convert the upper two bits to binary.

Example: "Pick a phrase" would become

      00 01 11 11 01 00 00 10 01 11 01...

That's certainly not random, but unlikely to be detectable for shorter sequences.

(Edit: it probably is a fun exercise to write a program that decodes this code that reaches >75% (lossy) compression)

<comment><USER21> That would hurt you on speed. It's much faster to just pull numbers out of your head as fast as you can write them down. That should be protection against using an algorithm. Even if you do have a fast algorithm, it would still get slower as you age, so you could use it to compare yourself at different ages.

The test might also be scored using randomness tests that would pick up the repeated use of the same algorithm, like the one you described. Distribution of letters and their (ASCII?) bits won't be perfectly random. You could also hand code exceptions for known algorithms as you discover them.

That's what interests me. Monitoring your own cognitive ability as you age for early detection and tracking of neurodegenerative diseases. For this, you need a test that's resistant to practice.

<comment><USER20> _" It's much faster to just pull numbers out of your head"_

I don't doubt that, but the context was to generate reasonably good (in the sense of "looks like independent samples from a 50/50 distribution") sequences.

Humans are notoriously bad at that (example: in the first 9 bits, one would expect four consecutive zeroes or ones. Try finding someone who produces that when 'just pulling numbers out f their head as fast as you can write them down').

I think this will be significantly better (as indicated above: for shorter sequences), even though it lumps a, e, i, n and r to the bit pattern '01'. It also can be quite fast, even if you do it by memorizing the mapping from letter to 1..26 doing 'mod 4', and conversion to two binary digits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps this has something to do with completion of myelination to the frontal lobes.

<comment><USER23> FWIW, I've been discovered with MS exactly at 25.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Previous discussion : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131086)

</comment><comment><USER25> I completely believe this. I was far more sophisticated in my late 20's.

In my late 30's I learned to stop being such a douche... and I became far simpler.

We all see through the Matrix as we get older...

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm 20 years old in my first year of university, and I'm probably going to fail the final exams next week. I don't think I'll be having the chance to take advantage of this peak.

<comment><USER27> When I was in first year (a long time ago), the computer science department was quite new. This meant that courses were held in various different places -- engineering, science, math, etc. Unfortunately, this ultimately meant that I had to pass by the campus pub between every class, with predictable results (drinking age where I lived was 18).

Whether you pass or whether you fail will not have as big an impact as you think now. What is important is understanding how to improve. For me, I staked out a chair in the library with all the foreign students who seemed to live there. I got in to school at 7:30 am and I went home at 5:00 pm. I watched what all those foreign students were doing and copied them.

Later talking with them, I discovered that the reason they lived in the library was because their tuition and living expenses were covered by their extended family. You'd have 20 people sending money that they really couldn't afford just so that _one_ person might get a foreign education and a high paying job to lift everyone out of poverty. If they failed their exams, people in their family would likely die of disease, etc as a result.

So I don't know anything about your situation, but probably it's not as bad as what my friends in the library had to endure. You've got a week. It might not be enough time to salvage first year (like I said, been there, done that). But use that time to understand what you need to do from here. Go to the library. Pick out a seat where you intend to live. Today is a good day to start to see what you can do.

<comment><USER28> Excellent advice.

At the end of my first semester at university, my Calc I professor pulled me aside after class for a chat. We talked about a bunch of things, but one piece of advice in particular stuck with me.

He said: "You are lucky to be so privileged - to study at a university for free, to have a supportive family, and to be such a smart and capable student - but you are also quite unlucky. Unlike other less privileged students around the world, you need to create your own drive. Without motivation, you'll have a tough time overcoming the inevitable difficulties you'll face in the future."

So that's what I ended up doing. Firstly, I started to imagine myself being from a much less fortunate background, and therefore treated my studies as a matter of utmost importance. And secondly, I put a target in my mind for what kind of person I want to be in the far future. I visualized this in quite a bit of detail, sometimes even imagining myself being interviewed! (weird, I know)

A little over 5 years later, I'm in a top 10 PhD program in my field. I'm still not certain this is what I want to do for the next 4 years, but I think I'm on top of it for now. Worst case scenario is I drop out with a MS and enter the workforce. Still, I'm immensely thankful that I have the option to think about this. Many people don't.

<comment><USER26> That's an interesting story, though I find that I oscillate between periods of perceived dread (though, as your Calc professor mentioned, I am privileged in this regard to not have it as much of an issue) and periods of a kind of laid back-ness in which I procrastinate and put things off as much as they possibly could be put off. This has been a recurring problem for me, possibly because the enjoyment of playing games or watching TV is an instant relief and pleasure.. the years of my life after university are distant and contingent.

On one hand I know that I need to work in order to get anywhere, on the other hand I pass it off by saying "you don't have to do this work to succeed". Couple this with the fact that whenever I want to start working there's a huge mass of things to choose from and I don't know where to start with it, or that I have very little willpower to stay with a question if I don't make progress.

It's hard, and I fear I may never learn. I tried to study in the library but alas no habit formed, even after a few weeks. I had diminishing returns by doing that.

<comment><USER29> One trick for breaking that is to get addicted to improving your craft. For me, it was originally starting an open source project, but there is something magical about a cup of coffee, a big stack of paper, and a math book that you have just the right prerequisite knowledge for.

<comment><USER26> My problem may be that I don't have much passion for the subject I'm studying (electronic and computer engineering), as I originally applied to do a different degree. Although I find some parts of the subject interesting (digital systems, perhaps some mathematics), others I find hopelessly hard (analogue electronics and physics). A bad part is that I don't even have a way to evaluate my knowledge against the standard which is expected of me; the course is new, and the past papers contain material which may or may not be relevant or taught before. Could I have an impostor syndrome, or do I really not know enough?

Motivation may be what I need, or perhaps it is discipline? I can't stick with things. I will relate an example without hyperbole; today I was trying to find three unknown variables in three equations (A), using matrices first by combining with the identity matrix (I), as (A|I), then forcing zeroes into the bottom left and top right corners of A, and dividing through to transform A into the identity matrix, what is left is A^(-1).

I repeatedly failed to get the correct answer, probably due to some silly arithmetic error. I gave up and started to watch old episodes of Simpsons and read HN.

<comment><USER30> Do some reading on how to develop willpower. Although I'm not a fan of the rest of the site, I found the Art of Manliness did a decent 3-part on how to cultivate willpower and hone it into productive pursuits.

I had it super easy in school. I was gifted enough to coast through with no study whatsoever. It was basically just an organised social life for me. Same with first-year uni, because school had taught me enough to coast through that. Come second year, however, it was new material and it wasn't forced down my throat with the structure that school provided. I crashed and burned miserably, failing 1 subject and barely scraping through 2 others (i.e.: pass by 2-3%).

It took me until 4th year to teach myself how to teach myself, and how to develop that discipline and willpower necessary to stay focused on a goal. It also took that long to learn _how_ I learn, that is whether I learn best through reading lecture notes, watching examples, doing problems, etc. You're never really taught any of that at school, but you're expected to know it by uni to do self-guided learning. It's a hard ability to pick up, too.

With your example, I'd encourage you to watch some Khan Academy lectures. Maybe listening to and watching exmaple problems works better for you than reading textbooks or lecture notes. Additionally, maths is in particular one of those things where tonnes of practice problems will help reinforce it until it just 'clicks'. In isolation the processes may seem simple as you watch them, but the practice is what helps you identify the underlying patterns and thus know which technique to choose when, and how to identify that you've executed the technique properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Poverty May Affect the Growth of Children's Brains [https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/03/30/2159247/poverty-...](https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/03/30/2159247/poverty- may-affect-the-growth-of-childrens-brains)</comment>


Higher Taxes Don't Cause Millionaires to Flee Their Homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-26/higher-taxes-don-t-scare-millionaires-into-fleeing-their-homes-after-all <comment><USER2> Why do people have problems with taxes? I don't. Never have. When taxes build schools and infrastructure and provide policing and social support it's a good thing. When taxes are misused (military industrial complex perhaps) that's an issue with the system of government, not taxes.

I do have an issue with the wealthiest people sheltering their money from taxation. This is the 1%. These people (at least the 0.01%) might just move for tax reasons.

The 2-5% top earners actually do seem to pay a lot of taxes (at least in the US and Canada).

I don't know exactly what the top 5% earn, but some cursory research suggests around $250k annually in North America. As someone who has been near there, yes, I paid a lot in taxes. But I also had spare money to defer some of those taxes.

My experience in Canada has been different than my experience in the US. In Canada, over about 120k in salary you start paying a bit more than you would in the US. About 43% or so on everything over 90k. (Please don't rip my numbers, I'm not a tax accountant and just want to make a point).

So we have a lot of people who appear to be doing pretty well, and join the rest of the middle in basically supporting the government programs for everyone else in the country to enjoy.

But these people are getting more than a 3rd of their income taken in taxes. At 200k per year for a family (look, I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them) that's a big hit.

But if you have $10m in assets in the bank, no mortgage, and are bring in 600k per year you might actually be getting taxed close to the person in the first example. But you are left with A LOT MORE money after taxes. And this is the issue for me.

<comment><USER3> Taxation is indistinguishable from theft.

Government forcibly takes money from hardworking people to spend on things that politicians think are good for us.

I am pretty sure if you donate your money to education, infra and other things it will be more efficient use of that money than you giving it to politicians.

The biggest reason why I will not pay taxes is because it increases the size of government. War on Drugs, Wars in foreign countries, Civil Forfeiture and other horrible things that government is doing is simply because our government has far more money than it needs.

Reducing government revenue is the best way to kill/starve this beast.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps when looking through your ideological lens, you fail to distinguish between taxes and theft. But that's a problem of your inability to distinguish, not anything inherent in taxes that obscures them from being clearly identified as a different thing from theft.

<comment><USER5> I don't see what is so ideological about this idea. If someone threatens you with violence or locking you away in a cell without your consent for not paying them that is by definition theft.

If I asked you if its okay for a citizen to do this you would obviously say no, now replace "citizen" with IRS swat team (yes these exist) and some how the answer should be that this is some how 100% okay?

<comment><USER6> >some how the answer should be that this is some how 100% okay?

Yep. Because governments are instituted among men and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. There are clear mechanisms for relinquishing certain freedoms (i.e., the freedom to keep all your money) through representative government.

If you don't like taxes, get 'em repealed through the way we repeal taxes. If you don't like the way the government collects taxes, we have a way to change that too.

<comment><USER5> In theory that would all be fine but this magical contract that I signed at birth some how which gives the IRS the right to commit violence against me some how doesn't sound as appealing as you make it.

When the three wolves vote to eat the sheep, the sheep is also 100% responsible because didn't you know? You signed this thing at birth that agreed to such a possible outcome!

<comment><USER6> Infants can't sign contracts, and we don't tax infants anyway because they don't meet the income requirements.

Your comparison to wolves and sheep is not apt -- the "violence" of taxation is only as punishment for reaping the benefits of previous payers and not abiding by the rules the common voters agreed on. You are under no obligation to reap those benefits -- in fact, society is perfectly happy to give them to you for free (albeit minimally) in the form of welfare, and charities are satisfied with giving you free food and shelter should you find the system of commerce and taxation too burdensome.

That you are not afforded the extended benefits gained by common taxation at your pleasure and rate without yourself contributing is not theft in the most basic sense; it's more like an obtuse mischaracterization. It makes an interesting civics thought experiment, but nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just because they don't move doesn't mean they aren't unhappy with higher taxes. Also doesn't mean they don't want to move.

A more interesting angle would be to track productivity and financial returns of the elites under multiple tax schemes.

<comment><USER8> In my (granted fairly limited) experience, very few of those hauling in the really huge paypackets (or the huge, huge bonuses or clever backhanders or whatever) are doing it for the actual money. They don't spend the money they have now. It doesn't seem to be about having the money. It's some kind of social status game involving bringing in the money. Coming up with ways to dodge tax doesn't seem to be about having more money to spend; it's another part of the game, and they're all playing against themselves and each other.

<comment><USER9> As a wealthy person once explained it to me: half the fun is making a ton of money, and half is finding a way not to pay (or just a tiny amount of) taxes.

If you have $20m in the bank and are living off of investment income, in a way it makes sense. You want the highest return, for the least effort and risk required. Taxes eat into that.

<comment><USER8> _As a wealthy person once explained it to me: half the fun is making a ton of money, and half is finding a way not to pay (or just a tiny amount of) taxes._

Exactly; that leaves none of the fun being in actually spending it.

Going WAY off-topic now, I split the very wealthy into two groups. Rich people, and poor people who happen to have money.

Rich people think differently. They've got a whole lot of money, and now they can stop worrying about that and get on with doing things. Bill Gates deciding to team up with Rotary International et al and see if we can't finally kill Polio stone cold dead with the extra help of all this money that seems to be cluttering up his bank account. This is the action of a rich man.

Poor people with money have the same concerns and same aims as they did when they didn't have money. They just buy a more expensive watch, a more expensive car, move their social status group to be around other similarly wealthy people and signal at each other, keep thinking about making more money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imagine person _A_ invoices person _B_ for services delivered. In such case, it is always possible to get _A_ invoice _C_ and then _C_ invoice _B_. _C_ would just be a middleman. There is nothing wrong with that.

Then, you could easily "chainify" the concept: _A_ -> _C1_ -> _C2_ -> _C3_ -> _B_

Now you turn _C1_ into a reservoir. It does not pay out to _A_ , because _A_ prefers to save his revenue inside _C1_. Therefore, _A_ never gets taxed on income that remains in _C1_.

Also, whenever reasonable, _C2_ and _C3_ pay for _A_ 's spending. That money does not hit _A_ either, and not even _C1_. Therefore, _A_ actually needs little actual money to be paid out to him. His expenses are taken care of by _C2_ , _C3_ , ..., while his savings are held up in the _C1_ reservoir.

Even though _B_ could pay millions for _A_ 's services, in terms of taxation, _A_ makes almost no money at all. The money remains legally stuck in the _C_ chain. Even though _A_ is a real person, the _C_ chain is not. It is a chain of virtual persons: "incorporations". They used to exist only on paper. These days they only exist on a computer screen.

Moving nodes in the chain to another state or to countries, pretty much amounts to just updating a field in a database. Depending on what you fill out in that database field, you pay more or less tax. Hence, the reason why they consistently fill out the cheapest choices on the screen.

In other words, there is never a valid reason to pay income tax for a "chainified" income stream. Therefore, income tax is in reality not a tax on income but on the inability to "chainify" income.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why move? If you are wealthy enough it isn't too hard to shield most of your wealth from taxes. It is not too hard, if you own your own business, to shield a great deal of your income from taxes. Setup a Trust that has a Holding Company which contains multiple LLC's. This is a very effective way to move money around while simultaneously reducing ones liability exposure.

Even if you aren't wealthy it is a great idea to have such a setup for ones home and other assets that you would wish to leave for others when you die. As it is in a trust you can buy pass a lot of taxes.

<comment><USER12> Or domicile your business in Delaware most other companies do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would look at the growth of millionaire by city:

1\. Huston 9% 2\. LA 8% 3\. NY 7% 4\. D.C. 5\. Boston 6\. Chicago 7\. Sf 6%

The real impact of taxation of Millionaires would be between "what is" v/s "what could have been". Should the financial capital of the world NY be third on that list ?

</comment><comment><USER13> The amount of people who moved for tax reasons is far lower than I would've expected. Only 2.2%

<comment><USER14> But if it's the _highest-earning_ 2.2%, that's a huge hit for states with high income tax.

<comment><USER13> True, but it is still far lower than I would have expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author of this article has clearly not played much SimCity.

</comment><comment><USER16> I remember when in school I was being told how bad was the life of people in feudal Europe because of all the taxes that kings, church and local lords took from people.. I wonder what would these people think about our, much higher, taxes.

<comment><USER17> The average feudal person from the middle ages would love to live in our world! Yes, they would have to pay a lot of taxes. But they'd have enough food, be free from the king's men raping them, have very low infant mortality. Did I miss your point somehow? I'd rather pay taxes than live in that world.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DropZap 2 v3.0.2 – free until Oct. 16, 2014 Apple event starts - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dropzap-2/id378977964?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> For the first time ever, DropZap 2 is available in all 155 iOS App Stores but only for a limited time while it is free.

In particular, DropZap 2 will be removed from 119 countries when the upcoming Apple event starts on October 16, 2014 at 10am PST.

Check it out and let me know what you think of it!</comment>


Hello 2012: Meet Digital Nomads - <AUTHOR> http://ivanasendecka.com/2012/01/25/hire_nomad/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting introductory post about digital nomads. Nice to have nomads around, however do we have nomad-friendly economy? Are businesses nomad friendly? What about the law?

Follow up: Hard times for nomads? Only for now... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3509589></comment>


PatchMatch: amazing interactive content-aware image editing (SIGGRAPH 09) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php <comment><USER2> As far as power goes, this technique strictly dominates the seam-carving method that took the 'net by storm last year. However, it can't top the simplicity (and hence elegance) of the seam-carving implementation. I doubt anyone but the original publishers will be able to get a good version of this going without significant effort. Which might be what they intend...

<comment><USER3> I think the basic idea of randomly trying patches, and hill-climbing around ones that fit fairly closely, is a simple technique - but potentially very slow, if there's a low probability of hitting potential matches that can be improved by hill-climbing. They might have heuristics to improve it: for selecting likely regions to try (i.e. a prior probability density over the image); for choosing which neighbouring regions to try to improve a match (direction & offset); and for various ratios and thresholds (such as when does a region "fit fairly closely" and tradeoffs between this converges "well enough" that we won't keep on looking.)

However, I have a feeling that that _haven't_ tuned these heuristics perfectly. They've just come up with the basic idea, and got it working. Images that hill-climb well, and user-selected regions that match up well will be very fast with this technique - the cool thing is that that covers most images that humans like to look at, and the kinds of edits that humans want to do. You could construct special cases that this method would perform terribly at: e.g. a user-selected region that only matches exactly one other region like that in the image, and such that these two regions do not "almost match" when they are "almost aligned", but only match when they are perfectly aligned.

But I bet it works great for most actual images and edits in practice. A few times, my eyes didn't register all the changes that have been made, because they look so natural. It also looks like fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks damn amazing. For a person that out of love spends hours fiddling in Photoshop, this would be a godsend as a filter.

</comment><comment><USER5> definitely very cool</comment>


Is 80-100k salary real? there's an app for that, a weekend project - <AUTHOR> http://geolary.com

<comment><USER2> In Houston TX, 80-100k for a job is pretty much a given if you can write code. .NET, Java and even PHP jobs easily pay that here, >5yrs experience can/will get you above that range.(sometimes by a large margin)

Yes, this is not an entry level salary, but its easily attainable in 5 years if you are someone that is attracted to a site like this. From the limited experience I have seen, its not uncommon anywhere in Texas or a large part of the US. I have seen some exceptions in Oregon(Portland had a bunch of 65-75k "senior" developer jobs when I looked into that city and North Carolina seems to have a strangely low market average)

I know that not everyone here is a developer or even technical but seems that those that aren't are more entrepreneurial which could lead to far higher pay when you get it right.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've been looking in Houston for at least a year now, and I'm finding virtually nothing here, let alone anything at that sort of range. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the development jobs I've seen around are only offering 40-60k. I'd be interested in knowing where these cushy jobs are hiding.

<comment><USER4> Wow. You should move to Indianapolis. There are companies here dying to give some qualified programmer money. A salary of 80-100k is being offered to experienced Java, .NET -- even Ruby/Rails developers. (I just came from a Rails job at that level.) On top of that, it's a cheap place to live, and is building an interesting little community of tech/startup-minded people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I haven't tried the app (I don't own an iPhone), but I suggest replacing average by median. Very high salaries can significantly bring the average up, whereas the median is more robust to outliers.

<comment><USER6> (Same for not owning the iPhone and not trying the app — hope the website version's coming) A histogram (on some separate screen/page) would be nice too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be interesting if this could aggregate in the data from Salary.com, PayScale.com and Glassdoor.com, to kind of generate the mean/range/etc.

Also, integration with the other-recent HN salary tool - <http://salaryshare.me/> \- would really be a nice addition and the complementary services could feed users to each other.

 _Insert obligatory Android app request_

<comment><AUTHOR> At least the web side can handle Android now. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What does this provide that glassdoor.com doesn't?

*edit: other than the app-ness, of course.

<comment><USER9> Focus on a good user story & a nice design, I'd assume?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a website for that.. vfxwages.com. Starting with VFX /anim/gaming industries, heading into general tech industries hopefully this year. Since 2009.

[http://www.ereleases.com/pr/industry-wages-arms-creative- pro...](http://www.ereleases.com/pr/industry-wages-arms-creative- professionals-salary-knowledge-17815)

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is brilliant. If you can get enough people typing in their current salary you could have a significantly better data source for affluency than the US census (which is what everyone uses now). That database (completely anonymized of course) that ties location to affluency would be worth a ton to advertisers and marketers.

Well done. Good luck!

<comment><USER12> I venture to say that even anonymously, people would exaggerate their salaries. Perhaps this could be curved downwards though to get a good estimate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> so you can actually do it online by inputting coordinates:

<http://geolary.com/salaries/139.793644,35.864778>

<comment><USER14> In longitude,latitude order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The example shown on the web page is nonsensical. Max 260k, min 2k? Obviously 2k ($0.95/hr) is bogus. One wonders if it is bringing down averages.

Or if not can someone please introduce me to these programmers working for < $1/hr? My startup could really use them : )

<comment><AUTHOR> Still using the screenshot with test data on an iPhone Simulator... Shame on me :-p

<comment><USER16> There was another post earlier today with all of the US H1-B salary data for the last 10 years.

<http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH1B.aspx>

I downloaded it all the second I saw it with the thoughts that I'd just be able to "find something to do with it somehow"

Seems you're alot further along the path of being able to do something with it.

It's literally* a bajillion salary data points that are probably very reliable because the companies are likely taxed on the amount they've entered in that list (or something).

Roll it in! (maybe with a "Source" flag)

*not really literally.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is huge! We'll have it in! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unrelated, but did the developer of this application go to Lynbrook High School? I recognize the map location on the home page. That would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really don't understand why this is an app. Out of interest, what process led you to developing it as one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I tried to answer this: "If average salaries are 80-100k why does everyone keep getting 40-60k offers?" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2453174>

We used many cutting-edge things like node.js, expressjs, mongodb, mongoose, pjax and a lot more in this project. We learned how to put these things together and how to move it to a production box.

Even if no one use it, we learned a lot. And if people really love it, another great PLUS!!

<comment><USER19> I think he was asking why it is a phone app and not a more appropriate website format.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! AppStore can be a good traction for getting people to use it, which is a chicken/egg problem for this app. I'll try to make it work on the web ASAP. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where does the data come from?

edit: It appears one source is from the app users.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think that using the median instead of mean might be more meaningful. If you have someone put in a really high salary, the mean will be skewed to a point potentially above most of the population.

Given a mostly normal distribution with only a few extreme outliers, the median will be a more realistic number.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice! We are using median now, although it shows avg in the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it's an excellent idea. However, the app never worked for me. I've got an iPhone 4 with the latest firmware, and just after opening all it does is crash.

</comment><comment><USER23> This app uses a number of private (or at the very least, semi-private) APIs. I'm surprised Apple approved it.

<comment><AUTHOR> errr. for example?

Pretty sure we didn't used any ourselves. And for the libs, we actually used: ShareKit/asi-http-request/Admob/regexkitlite/JSONKit

All great open-source projects used by tons of apps.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone found the easter egg?

<comment><USER24> Can you give us a clue? :P

Anyway pretty good UI, a few suggestions: Perhaps you could add a graph of the normal distribution and where you lie on it. Choosing the location of your workplace is a little confusing at first, it might be more intuitive to make it similar to the Facebook checkin sections, show a list of places nearby. Just curious if you are making any ad revenue yet? :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I will never use an application that makes me tell it my salary on the first page.

<comment><USER26> Well, considering the fact they need more data points to make it more accurate and meaningful...

Now I can understand why employers want to keep them a secret, I have never understood why individual employees want to keep their salaries a secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why not make a website that could take my zip, or use smartphone location services? you've reduced your potential user count, espectially since it's a free app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! we'll make it happen. A website is much more agile than the app. Thanks a lot!

<comment><USER28> This seems like an instance of putting the solution before the problem. I imagine you went in knowing you wanted to write an app and came up with one, not that you wanted to help people find out salaries, and then decided the app was the way to go. You are not alone.

<comment><USER29> It's a weekend project and he hasn't charged anyone for it, cut some slack here.

On my weekend projects, the thinking is usually "What's the most fun I can have building something?" and then I go build it. We don't need to apply deep level strategy to everything, sometimes it's enough to just build fun things. If it ends up being useful, damn, what a great weekend. Either way, your skills and experience by Sunday have grown relative to Friday. Any benefit derived by others is just a bonus.

OP, keep on jammin' on the weekends doing whatever makes you happiest. :D

<comment><USER30> I wish I had those kind of skills to bust out something like this in a weekend.

<comment><USER29> The beauty of weekend projects is that if you do enough of them that are _fun for you_ (and not freighted with intense strategy) one day, you will have those skills.

I started off with a kinda boring job, mediocre graphics skills and the tiniest grasp of C syntax. Now I get paid to design and build iPhone apps. It's awesome. But it all started with little side projects to sharpen me up. Start practicing, you can do it if you commit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> You know what I am waiting for, and maybe with the Linkedin API this could be easily accomplished with your app:

I install the app, and I tell you my linkedin profile, zip code and current salary.

I want to know people in my area with similar skills in their linkedin are paid XXX, how many there are and the high-low range.

I would like to see comparison of what skills I lack to those who make more money than me.

<comment><USER32> _I would like to see comparison of what skills I lack to those who make more money than me._

That would be fantastic. How cool would it be to have an app/site that tells you where you are, and where to go for the best return? "If you add an open source Ruby project to your profile you may gain $10k/yr on your next job."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Aside from confining it to zip code and metro area vs. address, I think there more data points that need to be added in order to get a more accurate picture of the job market. Just a suggestion, but:

1\. Industry 2\. Specific job title/function 3\. Education level 3a. College(s) attended 4\. Years experience 5\. # of jobs held a different employers within the same industry 6\. As a bonus, what type of discipline within the job function: enterprise, startup, consulting, freelance 7\. Benefit level to include bonuses, healthcare, equipment/education reimbursement, travel

then sell job ads based on what the user inputs, because after all, isn't that we're looking for? Those admob things do nothing for me.

<comment><USER34> I agree. Especially concerning industry. You can have all things equal (Title, Education, experience, etc) and one industry will still pay way more than another.

Besides, does it really make sense to be downtown and have your salary being compared to the guy working at the McDonalds in the food court of your building?

I like the idea, and with a few tweaks it could really be a big thing. There are some companies who pay a very large sum to see how they compare against others in terms of pay/benefits/long term incentives.</comment></comment>


Clocks and Economic Growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/study-clocks-economic-growth-productivity-work-culture/ <comment><USER2> If you completely ignore the violent history of the industrial revolution and reduce prosperity to statistics like population growth, it's such a happy story!

I for one am totally happy that the day is accurately cut into precise pieces so that the best time can be sold off so that I can eat.

Economic history doesn't need to be tinged with a teleological and moral angle-- unless you got something to sell.</comment>


Show HN: Common Form – Federal 1040EZ Tax Preparation - <AUTHOR> https://common-form.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I started Common Form with two very good friends and it's been a hard grind to get live in time for this filing season!

Some high level milestones: we started on Nov 22 2013, finished our final acceptance testing with IRS on Feb 13 2014, launched closed beta on Feb 17, and successfully transmitted our very first customer's tax return on Feb 18 (100 days to the day from when we started the adventure).

We're open to the public now and I'd love feedback not only on the product itself, but our scope (1040EZ only), and whether or not you think the existing players are disruptable.</comment>


Startup Theory – Hulu for rocketship pilots - <AUTHOR> http://startuptheory.huzzaz.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A video archive of anecdotes, lectures and talks about startups and how to build them</comment>


Sim-To-Real: Learning Agile Locomotion for Quadruped Robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_UXK0OTIk <comment><USER2> Do you have a paper link?</comment>