Ex-Engadget Crew Starting New Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/business/media/04carr.html?_r=1

<comment><USER2> What makes things like this interesting is we don't quite know how the web world works in this regard yet. In the publishing world it didn't matter because what was important was the subscribers and the physical assets (printing press, building, etc...). In the software world people are everything. If the people walk out of an acquired startup the software dies.

But web publishing is different because it's not like software which requires exclusive use (most people won't use 2 different word processors for instance) and it's not like publishing where you have to pay for the product.

I'm reminded of people like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley who both broke off from Techcrunch and created successful sites without hurting the site they broke off from. At the same time there was a mass talent exodus from TVGuide.com a while back (they created their own site at TVGuidemagazine.com) and those people failed completely (eventually re-merging with tvguide.com)

So every time something like this happens it goes further towards answering the question of what is more important, the URL or the people

<comment><USER3> The GameSpot.com to GiantBomb.com migration was/is a similar situation. Many of GameSpot's top editors left around the 'Gerstmann Incident' to form Giant Bomb. It hasn't had a long term effect on GameSpot's traffic, and despite great content, GiantBomb hasn't really taken off[1].

My feeling is that for established media style sites, unless the people breaking away are doing something _very_ unique, it's the URL that's more important.

[1] I'm not privy to their data and goals, but traffic wise they aren't getting closer to GameSpot. It's just my impression.

<comment><USER4> The traffic isn't all that relevant. It's what you can do with that traffic. GiantBomb is where the content is. Sort of like Digg may have the traffic, but places like HN have the conversation.

For example, GiantBomb has something like 6,000 (at least) members willing to pay $50-$60/yr to subscribe to the site. That's fairly significant for a two year old site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is the reason they left - it's not a great idea. Engadget was fairly well regarded before they came on board and quite frankly, after Peter Rojas left it has continued to do quite well. In fact, I'd argue that his next venture - gdgt - hasn't really gained much traction. Brands are NOT easy to build. The NYTimes will remain the NYTimes, despite the fact that many editors will come and go. I think Engadget is in the same place - a new editorial group will replace the old, and they will be forgotten.

<comment><USER6> The thing is, this team at Engadget has a really tight bond with its core fans ... their podcasts were more like listening in on a conversation between best friends rather than formal tech podcasts. It was just their style -- they/Josh wanted to up the game as far as they could, I mean, take a look at The Endgadget Show. Hell, compare their progress with Gizmodo's. I just feel like I have lots of faith in this team and Josh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you read carefully, this is almost a technology decision. They specifically mention the cms they had to use at aol as being very old, and that the cms in use at SB Nation has great support for live-events and ad-hoc tabular data.

<comment><USER4> One of the biggest problems with AOL content sites (other than the crappy content) is the discussion system. It's a step up from using something like Facebook Connect/Chat stuff, but it's still miserable. I never post to their sites (even on the MMO and the Joystiq sites that I even give a slight damn about), because I'm never sure exactly who it is going to say that I am.

A couple years ago, I made a post on one of their sites and was surprised to see it use my real name. I'm not sure how it did that (no, I've never had an AOL account). It disturbed me and I've never touched it, since.

I know the content creators have always despised the forum system, too. It supposedly was completely redone this year, but when I looked at it, it seemed exactly the same to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's Topolsky's blog post on the issue: [http://joshuatopolsky.com/post/4327161218/this-is-my-next- pr...](http://joshuatopolsky.com/post/4327161218/this-is-my-next-project)

 _"Of course, the natural question I'm sure a lot of people have is: why SB Nation? The easy answer is that the people at SB Nation share my vision of what publishing looks like in the year 2011. They think that the technology used to create and distribute news on the web (and mobile) is as important as the people who are responsible for the content itself. And that's not just pillow talk — SB Nation is actively evolving its tools and processes to meet the growing and changing needs of its vast editorial teams and their audience communities. They're building for the web as it is now. From the perspective of a journalist who also happens to be a huge nerd, that's a match made in heaven. SBN isn't just another media company pushing news out — it's a testbed and lab for some of the newest and most interesting publishing tools I've ever seen. In short, I was blown away when I saw what kind of technology they're using to get news on their front page and engage audiences, and even more blown away when I started talking to them about what could come next."_

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a huge fan of the Angels and I've been a part of Halos Heaven for several years now. That's the SB Nation fan site / blog for the Angels. It's a great platform for building a community, and there have been moves to further legitimize the platform.

It's great to see this Engadget exodus ending up at SB Nation. I have a feeling they'll do very well there, and have the cachet to make positive changes to the site as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't wait to see what the crew (now with Bankoff) will be able to do. Engadget is not and will not be the same without its core editorial staff and it is a shame that AOL ruined such a great property.

The article seems to suggest that the new site would exist as part of SB Nation, but I highly doubt that. Like the article suggests, there isn't much relation between the two sides besides a relatively similar demographic. Otherwise, that was a decent read.

I digress -- this news wasn't especially shocking but it's very nice to know that they aren't done with tech blogging yet. I'm very excited to see what the new site will bring to the table.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ryan Block did the same a couple of years ago. I'd have guessed gdgt.com would have more users than it now has.

<comment><USER12> GDGT is a bit of a different product. Peter Rojas launched Gizmodo and then Engadget, which are both news sites. When he and Ryan Block left to form GDGT they didn't build "tech news site #3" but a community-driven discussion board around individual products.

Maybe the site hasn't reached the user numbers of its "grandparents" - it has a different mission. Through the GDGT Live events Block and Rojas have created mini electronics shows for the users of tech products. It's also a bit of a party atmosphere, but all in nerd fun.

I went to the Boston event in September and saw some interesting products, including a Boxee box. What are the odds one will be set up to test in, say, Best Buy?

The people behind Springpad and SCVNGR were really cool/fun to talk to. You don't get that experience on the web. GDGT isn't Engadget and I don't think it needs to be.

<comment><USER11> Knowing what gdgt is, and knowing that it is not engadget, I'd have still guessed gdgt to be bigger and better than it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To ask a stupid question - what does the SB in SB Nation stand for?

<comment><USER14> Sports Blogs

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the big things this group has going for it is the public persona Topolsky has been able to create.

If he continues to do his tech segments on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, he can quickly get the brand for the new blog out to a huge audience.

<comment><USER4> It can't be that much of a public persona. I've never heard of him. Then again, I've never watched Jimmy Fallon (I know it's a late night show, but that's it). How much traction is that going to have with a general public? Not much, I suspect. I don't argue that some sites have a very distinct personality behind the content, but from the little I could tolerate of Engadget's very repetitive and unoriginal content was that the personalities were largely irrelevant. Maybe that's a misread on my part, but that's the impression I've come away with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Predictions on how long it will take before AOL acquires them?

My guess: 6-10 months.

</comment><comment><USER17> We knew this coming, not a big surprise but I am looking forward to seeing what they will re-emerge with.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wonder how soon before AOL buys them out...

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish these guys luck but I'm skeptical about how much traction they'll get.

There is a lot of inertia with Web properties. Big sites take years to die. Hell, Myspace still has ~60 million users (You can't explain that).

Despite all the clamour about the "AOL Way" all evidence seemed to point to AOL being fairly hands off when it came to Engadget (according to Patel and others) so I'm not sure there was ever really any problem to solve other than chafing under the corporate yoke and a "grass is greener" desire for something smaller they built together.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Like I said: good luck guys. It's a crowded space so you may well need it.

<comment><USER20> >Big sites take years to die.

Engadget does not have to die for the new venture to succeed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to save my browsing history to access it later? - <AUTHOR>

Browser: Google Chrome "Objective: to save the each URL i visit through the browser"<p>is there any extension that can be available or programmed to do the same. or any other effective technique? <comment><USER2> Hey, you may want to check this out:

       https://stack-todolist.herokuapp.com/

It's an application I wrote as I was learning Go.

It's a "bookmark stack". You want to save a link? You push it in the stack.

You want to read something interesting ? You trust your past self and pop something from the stack.

One of the ideas is not to know what's on the stack until you've popped it out, and get used to read a page carefully once it's popped, and not to stack links "indefinitely".

It a bit WIP, but feedback are welcome.

Next thing on the to-do list is bootstrappizing the general look&feel.

<comment><AUTHOR> the push thing...can it be done automatically, so that the stack saves each address i visit through the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sign into Chrome with your Google account. They give you the option to save your history, bookmarks, apps and other things across browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> for how long they'll keep our browsing data?

<comment><USER4> It is a rolling 90 days. It resets if you manually clear your browsing history though. Also if you use incognito mode it will not save your history.

There is also this extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better- history/obc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better- history/obciceimmggglbmelaidpjlmodcebijb?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> pinboard.in offers this as a paid service.</comment>


Where Digital Mars (language D) gone? - <AUTHOR> http://dlang.org/index0.html

<comment><USER2> The submitted link goes to "index0.html". The link "<http://dlang.org/index.html> still works.

<comment><USER3> moreover, <http://dlang.org> works fine. is index0 significant in some way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was there ever actually a problem? The given link is to <http://dlang.org/index0.html> (note the '0'). Both <http://dlang.org/index.html> and <http://dlang.org/> seem fine.

</comment><comment><USER5> seems like hosting company problem. all their hosted domains are down.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://web.archive.org/web/20110520132636/http://www.digital...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110520132636/http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> At least the forums are working, <http://forum.dlang.org>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Instead of language D I see digitaldaemon.com.

What does it means? Another "info suicide"?

Weird.

<comment><USER8> Digital Daemon is their hosting company. They've just messed up their vhosts and everything is going to the default one.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My post-YC-rejection start-up - <AUTHOR>

http://invincibilitee.com<p>Me and my co-founder submitted an app for YC W11, with a web site that would help college graduates figure out what jobs they could get with their chosen degree. We got a rejection email, and already had this as a back-up idea in case we did get rejected. So in the month between rejection and today, we found a printer, found some graphic designers, and got enough done that we felt comfortable with it as a first iteration. I know there aren't so many non-web app startups on HN, but I thought y'all might like to see how 2 guys rebounded from YC rejection. <comment><USER2> You should design some shirts and submit them. Don't wait for users.

<http://www.invincibilitee.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=88>

Empty page.

When Reddit was starting out, one of the founders was submitting stories all day for a couple of months, under different usernames. Just saying.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have, but they are under the Limited Production page: <http://www.invincibilitee.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=101>

The link you posted is for legacy shirts, that have proven to sell well and will be available permanently.

I know the 3-tier system might be a little confusing, and we are trying to make it as intuitive as possible. That's why I posted this, so thank you for the suggestions!

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's that intuitive. After see the awesome shark picture I went looking for more and clicked the T-Shirts link under invincibilitee.

If you're not going to put something under the first link in your side bar maybe you should have a message on that page directing the user to the non immortal tees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good point. Doing that now. Thanks again everyone for the suggestions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The stock photo with the Live Chat button. Please get rid of it, thanks.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that corporate happy face clashes with the rest of the design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken. I'll see about getting it changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.zazzle.com/> is already very dominant and vertically integrated in that space. Did you knowingly launch a clone? Or, think that this was an original idea? How do you hope to compete with them and the others doing the same thing? What's your value add?

To me, this space seems too cots, low margin, and crowded, to even build a lifestyle business in. But, good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Zazzle is a large custom t-shirt company. We do not make custom tees for people, we are our own brand that offers select designs created by artists around the world.

If I was to compare us to an already established company, it would be much closer to Threadless, Design by Humans, or Uneetee than Zazzle. We are aware that we are not the first to create a shirt company in this manner, but we believe that there is plenty of room in the market, and that our original and exclusive designs will help us cave out our own niche in the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I checked the FAQ briefly and didn't see this mentioned -- what happens in regards to the design rights of something I submit? I see that I get a royalty payment and a one-time lump sum, but do I retain the rights to my own design? Can I post it on your site and then sell it on my own site or another (Cafepress, etc). Or is part of the agreement that I am transferring ownership over to you guys?

<comment><AUTHOR> On the submission page, there is a large font link to the Submission Release form which answers any questions like that. (<http://www.invincibilitee.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=125>) As long as it's just a submitted design (as in we have not accepted to use the design), you give us a 60 day window of not offering it to other sites or vendors. If we don't ask to use it within that 60 days, you can do whatever you'd like with it again. If we reach an agreement with you to use the design, you retain ownership of the design, but transfer exclusive rights to use it to us. So, basically, you can't let anyone else use it, but we can't take it and sell it either.

The Submission Release form explains it in a more "legalese" way. We use LegalZoom for our legal documents such as the Submission Release form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see you're back at it again and weren't afraid to publish your first iteration. I prepared some feedback for you at <http://www.sparkmuse.com/feedback/Invincibilitee>, I hope you find it helpful.

</comment><comment><USER8> Did you give up on your 1st idea just because YC rejected you?

I've had a similar idea in the past, and I think there is a market for a such a site. I think it's a shame you gave up on something because of one rejection.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have not given up on the college degree idea yet, but we see it as a longer-term project in terms of setup, so we put it on the shelf while we were able to get this setup in a relatively quick order (a month).

So no, we haven't given up, and we too think there is a market for the site.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://invincibilitee.com></comment>


Ask HN: What is the modern equivalent of monster.com these days? - <AUTHOR> what do people use to find full stack development opportunities, hacker rank?  i am targeting us market. <comment><USER2> monster.com is still in operation. Also: Hacker News has jobs at YC companies LinkedIn.com Glassdoor.com indeed.com simplyhired.com anglelist.com

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, any success with these either for hiring for finding jobs? i ised monster in 2003-2004 to find an opportunity and i've been with that company for the last 13 years. my network's mostly in this company.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is what i've found: hackerrank.com, angelist.co, dice.com (not so good), lever.co.</comment>


Viaweb: Create your own secure online store (old Viaweb site) - <AUTHOR> http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/ <comment><USER2> And the jackpot: More pg essays!

<http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/secrets.html>

<http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/se.html>

<comment><USER3> I stumbled upon this link while digging around for some history on Interleaf:

<http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/com.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's awesome. Their site has withstood the test of time design-wise. For the most part it looks like any other good modern site: clean and simple. It's remarkably free of the classic 'made-in-the-nineties' characteristics. I guess that goes back to the viaweb team's aversion to 'fashion'.

My favorite part is:

"Over 1000 Users!"

<comment><USER5> When the cost is $100 - $700 per month that's pretty good.

<comment><USER4> Amen to that ;)

Once I get my app launched it'll be mostly free accounts w/ advertising and some pro accounts. With competition I'll have to get quite a few users to make anywhere near what they were making!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> interesting bit was RTML ~ <http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/ov.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> It looks a lot like the yc site.</comment>


A Modern Movement to Exonerate a Medieval Serial Killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gilles-de-rais-bluebeard <comment><USER2> > _perversions that cannot presently be expounded upon by reason of their > horror, but that will be disclosed in Latin at the appropriate time and > place_

Priceless! I have to use that in a comment, or piece of documentation.

<comment><USER3> Why are you reading my code???

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Court of Cassation" was the expression used in English language newspapers of 1992. The actual retrial was, admittedly, a publicity stunt. But it was based on proper research, some of it dating back to an earlier attempt at a retrial in the mid-1920s.

I defy anybody to read the translations of the trial documents thoroughly & not notice a) clear evidence of evidence extracted by torture & b) serious contradictions in the evidence. For instance (& noted by Georges Bataille, the most hostile of biographers) a string of missing children at Machecoul when Gilles was living at Tiffauges...

</comment><comment><USER5> Some bold assertions made here (eg no witnesses and no victims) directly contradict those on Wikipedia. Further, I fail to see a movement. The article is mostly about a book author who was so "intrigued" by ""one of the blackest sorcerers in history"" as a teenager that reading about his retrail was the ""greatest adrenaline jolt of [her] life"" and "who calls herself "Gilles de Rais' representative on Earth"". The other relevant person being the researcher that brought about the retrail.

<comment><USER6> No shit wikipedia contradicts what Margot Juby is saying. Wikipedia would just be repeating the official (and potentially fabricated?) narrative from a kangaroo court. Juby is trying to update that official record. I think your "hierarchy of sources" is out of wack.

<comment><USER7> It's on Wikipedia so it must be true! /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _A Court of Cassation, the highest court of appeals in France, was conducted and Rais was fully exonerated later that year._

That didn't happen. The "court" had no official status and no real jurisdiction, and didn't hear any professional historian.</comment>


NASA To Hold Media Call on Evidence of Surprising Activity on Europa - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/nasalive <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20an...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't get your hopes up. NASA has a long history of pre-teasing these announcements, and then it turns out to be some announcement that while marginally interesting scientifically, is really no big deal as a news story.

E.g. last year they pre-announced that they were going to make some big announcement about Mars, and everyone was thinking "evidence of life?". And it turned out to be that they'd just found evidence for brine flowing on the surface in some cases[1].

While that was certainly interesting in itself if you follow what's going on on Mars, it was just an incremental addition to the knowledge we already had about water on Mars.

My prediction is that this Europa announcement is going to be something similarly mundane.

1\. [http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence- tha...](http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid- water-flows-on-today-s-mars)

<comment><USER4> I think deep down, we all know it is going to unwrap that way, but still want to hope it's something beyond that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Additional material on the plumes found: [http://www.nasa.gov/europa- activity](http://www.nasa.gov/europa-activity)

</comment><comment><USER6> > ... surprising evidence of activity that may be related to the presence of a > subsurface ocean on Europa

Not that it's _not_ exciting, but the title of the post and page leave a little wiggle room that certainly made me think "evidence of life?"

<comment><USER7> It's certainly worded in a way that allows for the possibility that they are hinting at evidence of life without giving it away. Based on NASA's recent record though, it's not at all beyond them to try to get a little extra press by hinting at a bigger discovery than they actually have. My money's on some interesting tectonic action but wouldn't an oxygen atmosphere be something!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is kind of big: sampling Europa's ocean from space would give us a very easy way to get a lot of data

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one hoping that "evidence of surprising activity" means the plot of "Europa Report" is making its way into reality? (minus the deaths of course...)

I seriously believe that if we ever find life in other planes it will be on the form of aquatic creatures not on the form of intelligent life.

</comment><comment><USER9> Juno is _there_ \- with a camera. I look forward to better local pictures!

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but it's in a highly eccentric polar orbit very specialized for taking photos of Jupiter, not its moons. I doubt it will get much decent footage of Europa, if any.</comment></comment>


Windows Phone 7 development: reading RSS feeds - <AUTHOR> http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2010/03/28/windows-phone-7-development-reading-rss-feeds.aspx

<comment><USER2> People, get your names straight. It's Windows(R) Phone 7 _Series_ ; leaving out the Series is like calling Apple's desktop computer an iMa.

<comment><USER3> I really hope you meant _Microsoft(R)_ Windows(R) Phone 7 Series</comment></comment>


Firefox Marketing Head Expresses Concerns Over 'Only Be on Chrome' Push - <AUTHOR> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/05/25/2019259/firefox-marketing-head-expresses-concerns-over-googles-increasingly-only-be-on-chrome-push <comment><USER2> I'm concerned about this as well. But yet I still predominantly use Chrome. Why? Because Mozilla seem completely incapable of delivering a browser that doesn't Hoover up every ounce of available RAM at the earliest possible opportunity. Chrome also uses more memory than one would consider acceptable, but it seems to suck it up more slowly than Firefox. And, even in a somewhat RAM starved state, Chrome seems to perform better. Net-net, I keep using Chrome.

My advice to the Mozilla group: drop ALL new feature development and dedicate every man, woman, child, cyborg, dalek, c'thulu, earthworm, or rock that you can round up, to one purpose: improving Firefox performance. Specifically, try to decrease RAM and CPU utilization. Don't do anything else until you're consistently better than Chrome.</comment>


Joe Kraus - Confessions of a Startup Addict - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendonwilson.com/blog/2006/04/30/joe-kraus-confessions-of-a-startup-addict/

<comment><USER2> Joe Kraus is among my favorite speakers. He's smart, humble, enthusiastic, and funny. Well worth paying attention to. (Not just because he built a multi- billion dollar company.)</comment>


Glutton-C a Pac-Man-like game you can play from the browser's address bar - <AUTHOR> https://gluttonc.chesterdoran.com <comment><USER2> I knew about the ability to change the url dynamically without reloading as it's commonly used nowadays but never seen or thought of anything like this! Really creative :3</comment>


CS 189: Introduction to Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.eecs189.org/ <comment><USER2> Took this class with Prof. Sahai last semester when they redesigned the syllabus. I would recommend to anyone who wants to understand ML with some math rigor. The class notes: [http://snasiriany.me/files/ml- book.pdf](http://snasiriany.me/files/ml-book.pdf) is excellent. The hw problems are pretty fun too

</comment><comment><USER3> The SSL certificate used here does not match the domain name as it is Github's wildcard certificate.

<comment><USER4> You're right.

I looked into this a little further. The data is encrypted with Github's private key (thus decrypted with their public cert). I then wondered how he got a copy of Github's private key...but as it turns out, the IP does belong to Github.

In either event, definitely misconfigured, but I added an exception as it all seems legit in the end. It looks like he's just hosting his site (with his own DNS) on github's server and didn't get an ssl cert yet.

<comment><USER5> disclaimer: i work for berkeley EECS, but have no association w/these faculty or class.

TL;DR: they probably wanted to save some money by not paying our instructional group to do the hosting, and instead are (most likely) paying github for hosting. because they're doing this themselves, it means that things like real, working SSL certs are their responsibility, and most likely were "too hard" or would take "too long" to set up properly.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER6> Github is free for open source

<comment><USER5> point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I took a CS189 course, was Wilensky's "Artificial Intelligence".

I have never quite followed the numbering of Berkeley courses. Whereas MIT's numbers evoke a regular taxonomy, like Library of Congress numbering. Any ontology is eventually broken, I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> In Berkeley EECS is one department and classes are numbered as levels of abstraction (that was the original idea, it kinda works but somewhat derailed). 100 to roughly 140s are EE courses; 150 is CPU design, machine design, embedded systems etc; 160s is systems (security, operating systems, compilers, networking, software engineering); 170s is theory (algorithms, theory of computation, stochastic algorithms, computational biology); 180s is ... I guess misc high-level stuff (graphics, databases, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning). So from 100 to 189 goes from lowest level (semiconductor physics) to highest level.

190s are reserved for university-wide courses like research, experimental courses, deCal (classes offered by undergrad students) etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I took this course last year with Professor Shewchuk. It was excellent.

</comment><comment><USER9> this works fine over http instead of https. is there a way to fix the link?</comment>


No. 1 utility in Apple's App Store steals browser history, sends to China - <AUTHOR> https://out.reddit.com/t3_9dxz4s?url=https%3A%2F%2F9to5mac.com%2F2018%2F09%2F07%2Fadware-doctor%2F&token=AQAAtUOTW3nW-2hm26Bw4UTvSnXYsBOAwn4BVgo57IYPSRhcCT4s&app_name=reddit.com <comment><USER2> Title should say "Mac App Store".

</comment><comment><USER3> nothing is free. either pay to be lazy, or get educated. the middle way will just get u bummed</comment>


Everything you need to know about Yahoo's security breach - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-yahoos-security-breach/#

<comment><USER2> This type of thing happens all the time and is the only reason I run AdBlock software in Chrome. Three years ago I got a virus from a reddit ad while using Chrome and it took me several hours to clean it out. The reddit team made jokes about it:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/e7988/a_numbe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/e7988/a_number_of_reddit_users_have_reported_finding/)</comment>


Startup Bootcamp at MIT - <AUTHOR> http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu

<comment><USER2> You should attend just to come see Adam Smith (Xobni) and Drew Houston (DropBox).

It's going to be an instructive day (and my time is limited to 20 minutes, so I won't be able to do much harm).

<comment><USER3> I was planning on being out of town as it's a long weekend for me. Is this worth shortening a long weekend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i'm going, too. anyone want to do a hn meet up, at least briefly? feels kind of silly, what with being surrounded by tons of startup folks already, but might still be fun.

since not much of the schedule is known, i'm giving the following shoutout:

         meet in the middle of the oval at 8:50am. the oval is the circular green between kresge, the student center and the chapel. i have an inverse mohawk and will likely be wearing patch-work shorts and tshirt.

<comment><USER5> Like to do an HN meetup. The kresge oval beforehand works. Maybe we'll get another thread going closer to the event, when the schedule is actually set. Also, HN meetup will be handy, since I'm sure there will be a significant crowd of people that are just coming to check it out, and haven't really plunged into the startup community yet. I'll probably be wearing a backwards UK (University of Kentucky) hat. I'll be impressed if anyone remembers that detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this hard to "get into"? Well if I get to go, I'm going. I'm from L.A. and never have been farther than tempe, Arizona; this sounds like a perfect excuse.

Anyone want to share the cheapest hotel we can find? Anyone want to explore MIT/Boston with me for a couple of days?

email is in the profile!

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason they don't link to where the Kresge Auditorium is, but to 77 Mass Ave (the start of the infinity corridor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Corridor>).

Just so you out-of-towners don't get too lost here's MIT's map of where the auditorium is (across the street from 77 Mass Ave): <http://whereis.mit.edu/?selection=W16>

If you need to access public transport use the T's site, which is pretty decent at giving directions: <http://mbta.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Damn this is tempting. I have a free plane ticket I need to use. Anybody up for a meetup?

</comment><comment><USER8> All registered. Looking forward to hearing Aaron Swartz speak.

</comment><comment><USER9> All signed up, looks like there are going to be a lot of good speakers.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's also on Columbus Day, so if you're off, you should go. I'll be up in the NE, so I'd love to swing by and hear Adam and Drew, and also share our experiences at JamLegend.

</comment><comment><USER11> any chance this is going to be recorded? (I'm not in the US)

<comment><USER12> yes. there will also be a live video stream! details will soon be posted on the website-

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know what the top right logo is based on?

<comment><USER14> vimeo?

<comment><USER15> vimeo - [http://www.davidthomasgreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/v...](http://www.davidthomasgreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/vimeo_logo_header.jpg)

<comment><USER13> ok, thanks, they don't seem to use that background anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd like to go, but I won't be around

</comment><comment><USER17> definitely going</comment>


China's All-Out War on the Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/health/coronavirus-china-aylward.html <comment><USER2> This:

> China's counterattack can be replicated, Dr. Aylward said, but it will > require speed, money, imagination and political courage.

> For countries that act quickly, containment is still possible "because we > don't have a global pandemic — we have outbreaks occurring globally," he > added.</comment>


Implementing VisiCalc (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc <comment><USER2> FTA :

>>> Since we didn't want to be beholden to Apple, I had to reverse engineer the low level I/O operations for the disk drives and implement a compatible file system.

So Apple was already quite a commercial entity

>>> Eventually the copy protection become too much of an impediment and we dropped it.

And DRM was already not quite convincing...

Some things never change :-)</comment>


Ask HN: Imgur Alternative? - <AUTHOR> I am seeking for a simple alternative to host my images. <comment><USER2> A private twitter, flickr?

</comment><comment><USER3> How about Google Photos?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's working perfect as of now.</comment></comment>


Coronavirus: A third of hospital patients develop dangerous blood clots - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52662065 <comment><USER2> Misleading title and misleading article. Better title would be "One of the major complications facing hospitalized coronavirus patients is blood clots".

There is one line that quotes a doctor stating, "He believes the number of critically ill coronavirus patients developing blood clots could be significantly higher than the published data in Europe of up to 30%." No mention of the percentage of cases that require hospitalizations in the first place, let alone any non-anecdotal evidence to back his claim.

I wish we would stop sharing articles that are not backed by any scent of a scientific study or peer review. It leads to fear, like others have pointed out.

<comment><USER3> A quick Google seems to indicate that the title is fair:

From news article:

> Up to 30% of patients who are seriously ill with coronavirus are developing > dangerous blood clots, according to medical experts.

(One doctor anecdotally thinks its higher)

From journal article [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01403-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01403-8)

> Studies from the Netherlands and France suggest that clots arise in 20–30% > of critically ill COVID-19 patients. 1,2

But yes, rounding "20-30%" up to "one third" is a bit odd. The news article seems to leave the reader to do their own discovery of sources. So you're not wrong to be skeptical, but you're not right that it's wrong :)

<comment><USER4> There's a significant difference in hospital patients vs critically ill hospital patients. So yes, the article is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's good that doctors and scientists are learning more about the virus, which will help them improve the standard of treatment, so I welcome this discovery.

On the other hand, I find that the style of reporting contributes to the irrational panic and fear around COVID-19.

Only a tiny fraction of those with COVID-19 are admitted to the hospital, a third of those develop blood clots (assuming the reporting is accurate), and, presumably, in some unknown fraction of those cases, the blood clots cause death or permanent injury.

However, people will focus on this "1/3 of people get blood clots!" number, and their intuition about the risk of themselves or people they care about being maimed or killed by COVID-19 will increase irrationally.

<comment><USER6> It is currently the leasing cause of death in the US, I feel like there is legitimate reason for concern, if not alarm. No, it's not going to kill 5% of the population, especially not if hospitals remain at or below capacity. But give it time and people will become less cautious Regardless of government orders, especially months from now when cold and flu season start back up. So things are mostly still "fine", despite 80k+ deaths, but that is not guaranteed to hold.

<comment><USER5> I never said COVID-19 is not serious, so I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment.

I think it's a cause for concern, yes — and the current reaction is miles beyond what can reasonably be described as "concern".

I think heart disease — the #2 cause of death in the US — is serious too, but I still don't think sensationalism and panic about it is helpful.

<comment><USER7> Heart disease is the leading cause of death because heart stoppage is the definition of death and the "default" value when the actual cause of death is unknown.

Marking cardiac arrest as cause of death is like filling in the blank with "died by not living anymore".

Therefore it is not a meaningful stat to say the heart disease is the #1 or #2 cause of death. I cringe when that is used by fitness gurus to justify their videos or when scientific discussions are derailed by making the comparison.

<comment><USER5> Sure. Replace that with the third, fourth, or fifth cause of death, and my point is the same.

<comment><USER7> Not really. You'd have to replace it with the third, fourth, and fifth COMBINED. Since your point is that Coronavirus concerns are overblown, you might want to reconsider it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf has conducted autopsies in more than 190 people who died from corona, although German officials recommended not to do any autopsies.

Their findings are similar. In the first 12 cases they found thrombosis in 7 cases[1]

They recommend prophylactic treatment with Heparin, even in ambulantory care.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32374815](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32374815)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am definitely an anti-lockdown person. I wanted to see the numbers for myself so I used data from the CDC's site and the WHO's site. Please check my math and reasoning [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3668979/is-this- an-...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3668979/is-this-an-okay-way- to-calculate-covid-19-death-rates)

My calculations for the Coronavirus death rate:

<5 0%

5-14 0%

15-24 0%

25-34 .04%

35-44 .12%

45-54 .37%

55-64 .9%

65-74 2.1%

75-84 5.5%

85+ 16.9%

Based on this data I think the lockdown is an absurdly heavy handed approach. Subjective opinion increases -> It's about older voters. In Eric Weinstein's words "they are hoarding well-being on every front" to the point that they will gladly screw over the younger generations.

We need to end this nonsense ASAP.

<comment><USER10> Consider that the first-order effects of just _older people dying_ may not be everything entailed with this outbreak:

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-disease-coronavirus- il...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kawasaki-disease-coronavirus-illness- possible-covid-19-link-blamed-children-deaths-new-york/)

A _novel_ virus means we don't know what it does to everyone yet. At a minimum, closing the schools globally probably has saved millions of children from this "new polio"... for now.

Perhaps also maybe grandparents would like to live long enough to see their _healthy_ grandchildren again.

<comment><USER11> It is a novel virus, but not a magic virus like the press says. Take for example the brain infections: it's a feature of other coronaviruses (and I only found out by reading the literature), not just this one.

The school closure was criticized basing on _current evidence_ in an editorial[1] on Disease and Childhood (sister publication of the British Medical Journal). They also go over the reports of Kawasaki disease saying that there needs to be more evidence to support the claim.

Also a limited test in two schools in New Wales, where contact tracing was used, there was one reported infection of a student by another out of 853 recorded contacts. There are indications that a. grave effects are rare in children (rare does not mean zero) and b. children aren't as good "spreaders" of this disease as adults.

[1] [https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-20...](https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/05/archdischild-2020-319474)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad to see information on the blood aspects of the condition getting some press. That's another way that blood oxygen levels can be suppressed and blood issues suppressing oxygen levels would help explain the terrible figures associated with ventilator treatments, where people are dying at shockingly high rates and ventilators aren't doing what they normally do for patients put on them for other conditions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have a look at this video and the previous from the series. He indicates which episodes are related. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOlVkES_kC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOlVkES_kC8)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think nitric oxide gas and L-arginine may help prevent blood clots.

[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2003/10_17_03...](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2003/10_17_03.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Many hospitals are pretty awful about patient care in normal times. I'm sure many of these clot situations are neglect due to understaffing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sitting on long haul flights also SIGNIFICANTLY increases the risk of blood clots, just like thousand other things in life. That's why it's important to not be a fat McDonalds eating potato and be active in life and look after your health so when a virus makes you ill you're not gonna crumble and die.

No news here, just normal life, everything has consequences, unfit people die earlier, that's how nature works in general.

EDIT: Just to clarify, not saying that any death is less tragic, just that this is really not news worthy. It's pretty well understood that blood clots can happen when people are ill and even when they are not ill, and the fatter one is the higher the chance of this happening. Journalists really scrape for any BS to write about recently.</comment>


'Super Polluting' Trucks Receive Loophole on Pruitt's Last Day - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/us/glider-trucks-loophole-pruitt.html <comment><AUTHOR> _One year's worth of [these] truck sales was estimated to release 13 times as much nitrogen oxide as all of the Volkswagen diesel cars with fraudulent emissions controls, a scheme that resulted in a criminal case against the company and more than $4 billion in fines._</comment>


How to quickly test the performance and scalability of your web applications with Tsung - <AUTHOR> http://beebole.com/blog/erlang/test-performance-and-scalability-of-your-web-applications-with-tsung/

<comment><USER2> Is a bunch of traffic from one machine really the same?</comment>


Duck Duck Go's Experiences with ad.ly - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-experiences-with-adly.html

<comment><USER2> I'm an angel investor in Ad.ly, so I'm not 100% aware of everything going on there, but I at least thought I'd chime in.

First, Ad.ly wants to make sure the ads stay high-quality. That's why they have pretty strict rules that everything must be marked as an ad, nothing is written in the first person, everything must be approved by publishers, etc. It makes it harder--as Gabriel saw. They're working on ways to make publisher approval better (there is an email that is sent to handle approvals; I'll ask the ad.ly guys if there's an unusual error rate).

Second, I know they're working on lots of tools to make it easier to choose appropriate publishers. Everyone wants to use different metrics for how they choose, so it's a tricky problem, but the feedback is useful. Pricing is based on several measures of influence, and they tend to correlate well with CTR from what I understand.

As Gabriel noted, the CPC is usually significantly better than almost any other high-quality ad network. So, it's cost-effective on a click basis. I hope with the tools to get volume as well, they'll make it easy to get volume.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pick a few people and maybe create special profiles that come up when someone searches for them. Have the profiles feature a headshot, Twitter profile, Facebook page, website, etc as the top search result (a bit like Google's World Cup stuff - [http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=brett+holman](http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=brett+holman)).

Make them interesting enough that when the people in question find out about them, they want to show their friends.

Find some way of notifying them, either through a Google search or ad, or even just contact them and explain that you're interested to know what they think about the profiles idea. (In truth, you will have chosen them specifically because they talk/post fairly often to a broad audience.) Make sure they know that you're fine with them publicising the link, it's not secret or anything - in fact, the more feedback the better. They might be more likely to spread the word if they feel that they've been chosen ("I wanted to choose some of the best designers around to get initial feedback.").

If not profiles, find some other way of presenting DDG that is unique to them. You probably don't want to follow in Google's semi-aborted footsteps of mimicking Bing's background image, but that could be a way of getting designers on side - background or masthead or sidebar. "Hey guys, I got picked to design one of Duck Duck Go's unique mastheads - they're the new Google. Check it out here..."

(Thinking aloud.)

Of course, you'd want to be honest with the feature you were involving them in (not a masthead that'd never be used live, etc). Otherwise, it reminds me of a publicity method some dodgy guy I knew wanted to try. Build a site for a start-up and then email thousands of web developers asking for quotes to redevelop the site (then never proceed with the project). Then email thousands of accountants and explain your business and say you need help with your accounts and ask if they take on this sort of work, but never follow through. And then thousands of office cleaners, and IT supply companies, and graphic design companies and caterers (to cater your launch party, of course), removalists and so on.

<comment><USER4> Thx for thinking about it. I do make profiles of people, from Crunchbase and other sources, e.g. <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg>

But I haven't ever written anyone about them. I know people search for their names, so I can only imagine they are not compelling enough right now to share. Not sure if there is a way to make them so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it shows how immature a platform is when a customer does all of the data crunching that the host should do for you:

       1. Downloading the full list of top influential twitter users from trst.me (~22K users).

       2. Hacking ad.ly's URLs and then downloading a big list of people you can advertise with.

       3. Cross checking with the trst.me list to only keep top influencers.

       4. Cross checking that output with the twitter API to only keep people recently retweeted.

       5. Taking that subset and downloading ad.ly info including price, followers, & avg tweets.

       6. Filter out people > 10 tweets/day and then sort by price/follower count.

(Granted this is what I do with Google Adwords and Adsense all the time, but you would never see me calling them immature [or maybe just complacent?])

</comment><comment><USER6> Being one of the people that Gabe sent the ad request to - i can attest ot the fact that the adly spend rates are just not good enough to present value for money.

There's a very high threshold in which i'm willing to take money (say, 3-4 figures minimum) to advertise a product via twitter -- you simply lose followers.

Also, now that people are following more than 1000s of tweets per day, you simply cannot pay attention to it all unless you are focused on twitter 100% all day.

So it's not worth an advertiser spending money on advertising either.

Gabe- ping me back, i have some experience about clickthru when celebs tweet your stuff.

\-- james

</comment><comment><USER7> Why does the first table have 71 clicks, but the second has 20? While the cost looks like it might be $31.88 in the second table, but only $24.83 in the first one? I ask because the re-tweet experiment got 73 clicks, and the relative performance is potentially interesting.

[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/twitter-rt- test-...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/twitter-rt-test- results.html)

<comment><USER4> The spend was $24.83. The second picture was a possible spend for one campaign, but since most were denied then it didn't actually spend that money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So Ad.ly is still operating on Twitter even though it blatantly violates their TOS? How does that work?

<comment><USER9> That's what I thought too based on all the press (TC, RRW, Mashable), but the next day Twitter clarified that sites like Ad.ly and SponsoredTweets aren't in violation. Their change was aimed at services that show the Twitter stream intermixed with ads based on the content that aren't from Twitter. Since Twitter is rolling out their whole "in stream ads" platform that app developers can use soon, this seems to target that - and other places that try to target ads based on the surrounding Tweets. (note: I work on SponsoredTweets, so we've obviously been watching this closely. :)

<comment><USER10> If I saw this sort of ad coming from people I follow, they will be unfollowed pretty sharpish.</comment></comment></comment>


Functional Finite-state Machines using Akka - <AUTHOR> http://akisaarinen.fi/blog/2012/05/13/functional-finite-state-machines-using-akka/

<comment><AUTHOR> On a related note, this recently trended article does a good job of explaining what state machines are: [http://blog.markwshead.com/869/state-machines- computer-scien...](http://blog.markwshead.com/869/state-machines-computer- science/)</comment>


modwsgi: Python WSGI adapter module for Apache - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/

<comment><USER2> We're using this with apache on schoolrack.com. A couple of application servers running mod_wsgi behind HAProxy and Nginx. Works like a dream. Our site is pretty snappy =)

This is fairly common knowledge but if you use Apache with Keep-alive off and serve all your static content with something else (such as Nginx in our case), and only use Apache for dynamic requests it isn't such a dog. I'm not a computer scientist and haven't really bothered to get real solid statistics and reasons behind why mod_wsgi outperforms mod_python, but right off the bat you'll notice it uses significantly less memory.

I'm also experimenting with straight up nginx -> fastcgi for a few other projects but am not using it in production for no reason other than Apache + mod_wsgi has proven itself to be reliable and fast as hell.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use this instead of 'mod_python', especially if you're going to use Django.

<comment><USER4> Why should I use it (I'm especially interested in the Django case)?

<comment><USER5> 1\. the primary maintainer of mod_wsgi is the primary maintainer of mod_python and his focus is on wsgi

2\. WSGI is a standard interface defined for python programs in PEP 333 so you should in theory be able to run your program against the builtin wsgi server that ships in the standard library and get the same results as you would running it on any of the webservers that support the WSGI protocol

<comment><USER6> 3\. With mod_wsgi, you can easily restart a django app without restarting apache, by touching the wsgi file.

<comment><USER3> touching the settings file works as well, and almost all of the regular pages will be reloaded as well as soon as you've saved them.

Rarely do you have to do anything other then just saving the file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using it for the past couple of months and absolutely love it. It's fast, a lot less memory usage, and a lot stable.

</comment><comment><USER8> And remember kids: WSGI rhymes with Whiskey.

<comment><USER9> That is so SCSI!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've used this before, and I highly recommend using fcgi instead. Modwsgi (at least when I tried it) was less stable and not as performant.

</comment><comment><USER11> At one point we did a lot of testing with different Django deployment setups. We ended up using mod_wsgi. It was fast and stable.

It would be sweet if you could point it at your virtualenv in a configuration parameter (to make it use your project specific Python binary and site- packages).

<comment><USER12> Here you go then: <http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/VirtualEnvironments>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm actually a fan of reverse-proxying to a production-ready appserver like paste.httpserver.

</comment><comment><USER14> <3 nginx + fastcgi

<comment><USER15> Personally, I've had some issues with fastcgi (for PHP) when you get a lot of simultaneous requests. It would hang, and eventually lock up with no exit except a killing of processes. Not sure if it's just my setup, or the software, or what have you but that's my experience so far.

Needing to make some time to try PHP-FPM and see how that works out.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Girl Talk's All Day, Annotated - <AUTHOR> http://adereth.github.io/oneoff/girltalk-v2/

<comment><AUTHOR> I just finished up this project... any feedback would be appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Not bad. Might want to check out [http://www.mashupbreakdown.com/](http://www.mashupbreakdown.com/) and see how they did it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! I hadn't seen that before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My first thought was: nice a transcription of what a girl talks during an entire day.

My second thought was: where is the transcription?

</comment><comment><USER4> Way too gender normative for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I wish there was an epic mash-up of non-misogynistic tracks, but this is what I've got to work with.

<comment><USER4> oh jesus, I posted this on the wrong thread.</comment></comment></comment>


Effortless Two-Factor Authentication in Rails - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heapsource.com/post/55696145680/effortless-two-factor-authentication-in-rails

<comment><USER2> I haven't really looked into this, but is this really more secure than passwords? Ok, ignoring the majority of passwords are something like `password`, given you store the secret key in plain text, if your database gets hacked, doesn't that mean you can access everyones account?

<comment><USER3> Isn't a good use of 2 factor authentication is that you log the machine that a user regularly logins in from and if they try to use a different machine, it asks for the one time code?

<comment><USER4> yes, it's. that is the wayGoogle, Facebook, Twitter.. use it</comment></comment></comment>


Atom 1.29 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.atom.io/2018/07/31/atom-1-29.html <comment><USER2> Not sure who downvoted me, but I'd like to hear why you did.

First, my comment was to get a laugh.

Second, you'll notice that emojis aren't allowed on HN, and there is probably a good reason for that.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find a "Founder Friendly" rental apartment? - <AUTHOR>

My friend recently finished graduate school in design, and was excited to move to Boston to finally start his own company.  He had lived in Boston previously without issue, and had great references at his previous apartment, so he figured coming back to town would be cake.
What he found, however, was that the landlords he hoped to rent from were not thrilled at the idea of a tenant without a "real job". When landlords inevitably asked "what he did for a living" he quickly learned to answer "I'm a software designer" rather than "I'm an entrepreneur" (even though for me and for him, the two can certainly be one and the same).
In fact, even the rental brokers he used were wary of taking him on - they insisted that without an actual paystub or an offer of employment from somewhere, they wouldn't be able to refer him to any of their clients as "qualified". It was only when he showed the broker his bank statements - showing he had enough to support himself and his rent for a year, in cash - that they agreed to run the credit check and let him apply to rent.
I had nearly exactly the same experience when I first moved to DC, and people I've spoken to seem to agree this is a common problem. Luckily, I had a job offer I could display, but without one, I wouldn't have had any luck at any of the places I was looking.
So, my question for HN is - while you're founding a company, how do you find places to rent that are ok with you being an entrepreneur? Could you perhaps post any leads you have for apartments you like that are "Founder Friendly"?
I've set up a spreadsheet and Google form here: http://bit.ly/bMBOlW
I plan on taking the results of it and mapping it to make it useful (if you specify I can use your info in that manner) for everyone else too. I'll post this on HN in a few days. <comment><USER2> I don't know if you have this in the US, but in the UK we have a concept of a guarantor for the rent for people who can't verify their income / landlord doesn't trust.

They are then legally responsible to pay the rent if you don't. However of course, if you have no problem knowing you can, then that's ok.

Does a similar thing exist in the US? In that case just ask a good friend, parents, siblings etc to be your guarantor - problem solved

<comment><USER3> In Denmark almost everybody pays three months of rent up-front and what amounts to three months of rent in deposit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been through this exact issue myself on many occasions over the years. To most people, "self-employed" translates very simply as "unemployed".

Your best bet as an entrepreneur is to find places that are owned by individuals rather than property management companies. Alot of families have rental properties like duplexes that have been family-owned for generations. Individuals with rental properties usual don't care about your situation as long as the rent is paid on time. You can also work out deals to avoid deposits. Individually owned places also like if you can pay cash, because then they can pocket the money and avoid declaring it as income on their taxes.

Another great option is month-to-month places, even weekly rental places. Those places are a good bet because not only do they not care about your income, but they also don't require deposits. Avoiding an upfront deposit gives you more cashflow to pay rent longer. For example, saving $800 on a deposit gives you $800 worth of rent money to keep a roof over your head an extra month. You also don't have to deal with the hassle of getting utilities in your name.

Here's how you deal with big apartment complex property management companies: just lie. Seriously. And give a friend's phone number as your "employer". Make up some fake paystubs in quickbooks. Big property management companies usually hire stupid people that sit in the office all day, do nothing, and collect a paycheck. They don't verify income, or any of the other things they request. Since they don't care, neither should you. Fuck 'em.

Another final comment about big apartment complexes: at a certain point, if you know you're going to move, just quit paying rent. Apartment complexes take a hands-off approach to evictions and actually file real eviction proceedings. As such, you can sit there and live rent free for an entire month or more while they file the legal paperwork against you. Save that rent money you're not paying and save it for when you do find another place.

About moving: It's a better deal to sell your stuff on craigslist instead of move it. You can recoup some cash from the sale plus people will pick-up the stuff for free. That not only makes you money, but it also saves you from having to pay for a moving truck or the hassle of moving the stuff. Better to sell your stuff, get some cash, and then get new stuff after you move. You can get decent stuff on craigslist after you move for cheap. Plus selling your stuff lets you re-assess how much of what you had that you really want to re- accumulate.

<comment><USER5> _Individually owned places also like if you can pay cash, because then they can pocket the money and avoid declaring it as income on their taxes._

 _Here's how you deal with big apartment complex property management companies: just commit fraud._

 _if you know you're going to move, just quit paying rent... you can sit there and live rent free for an entire month or more while they file the legal paperwork against you_

I know startups often skirt the bounds of legality, but encouraging tax evasion, committing fraud, and violating contracts is a bit further than I would want to go.

<comment><USER4> I'll take address all three issues: 1) What the guy does with the cash after you give it to him is his business. 2) I was (sorta) joking with the property management companies and the documentation. But if you don't have the documentation they request, your options are either not tell the whole truth or find another place. 3) As for the contract issue, that's entirely a civil matter. I assure you that the big property management companies don't care whether you walk out on the lease nor will they miss your money. So don't feel obligated to sit there and break your back just to pay a lease. As I stated at the beginning, the best rental deals are those that don't require a lease at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The easiest thing to do is to secure a cosigner prior to apartment hunting. I've never had an issue presenting a client that wasn't personally qualified by the landlord's standards if they had a cosigner. For reference I'm a broker in Boston.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://bit.ly/bMBOlW></comment>


Five myths about Chinese hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-chinese-hackers/2013/03/22/4aa07a7e-7f95-11e2-8074-b26a871b165a_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

<comment><USER2> Nice to see a tech security topic in a large publication. So many companies think thier golden while the truth is most companies have blatant security holes. The more we talk about hacking and security threats, the less mysterious it becomes. There is no magic or sorcery, just simple deductions and planning for a wide range of attacks both internally and externally.</comment>


Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility - <AUTHOR> https://daedtech.com/transmuting-low-value-programmer-cred-into-high-value-status-lllegibility/ <comment><USER2> The only way to win the game is not to play at all. Do good work, don't let the company take advantage of you, make promises you can keep, and then KEEP THEM, treat your colleagues nicely, teach when you can, learn when your colleagues have something to teach you, say "I don't know" and "I was wrong", and "Thank you", study and practice servant leadership, and remember that your worth as a human is not very closely related to what's written on your paycheck.

<comment><USER3> > is not to play at all

It's one of those games where your decision not to play it is just another move. Not always a bad one, but still a move.

<comment><USER4> I'd say it's usually a bad one. By staying out of politics, you're electing to be at the mercy of others, who can (and inevitably will) take advantage of you.

<comment><USER5> Which is a better use of time: staying in the same place and contending with assholes who want to take advantage of you, or shrugging it off and going somewhere else with fewer assholes?

We are always at the mercy of others, and I prefer not to negotiate with terrorists. Let them squabble over their petty ambitions; I'd rather spend my time among people who are more interested in collaborating with me than exploiting me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The concept of "status illegibility" is certainly an interesting one that coincides with some experiences I've had. In a former role in which I reported to the VP of Engineering, due to his lack of ability to directly evaluate work, he would base performance reviews on a weighted average of your teammates' assessment of your work. As such, it was very much, as the linked article on status illegibility states, that the "illegibility of the status of any member of a group is proportional to his/her distance from the edges of the group." In other words, performance near the median was widely praised, but performance both near the bottom or top received criticism. It was not a pleasant experience.

Another hard-learned fact that he mentions is that being good at your job is overrated. Few of us would like to admit that, but as he explains, the benefits of some automation vs. no automation greatly exceed the benefits of some automation vs. better automation. The only workaround that I've found for that is evaluating roles for their need for technical excellence. Building a CRUD app to "revolutionize the [insert favorite industry here]"? It's not going to require or reward technical excellence. Unfortunately, the kinds of projects where technical excellence is legitimately required and rewarded are relatively rare.

<comment><USER7> > Unfortunately, the kinds of projects where technical excellence is > legitimately required and rewarded are relatively rare.

I find that this really depends on the situation one is in. Its true that building a CRUD app may not really require excellent technical skills, but building a highly available app that can be updated without outages, able to serve traffic in sometimes strange patterns (e.g. Lyft's traffic pattern v/s Walmart's) while being resource-efficient is still a challenge.

I'm still astonished at how much interesting, practical innovation continues to happen in our Industry. I somehow assumed that once things got standardized around certain environments, interesting things to do would stop. That has not yet happened and I am very grateful for it.

<comment><USER8> CRUD apps might require business domain knowledge and good process logic but they don't stretch your architectural skills, they don't stretch your systems skills, nor your language skills. This is because most CRUD applications generally boil down to 1) data IO plumbing/scripts 2) SQL and DB architecture, 3) reporting. The pure technical aspects can be mastered in a few years. They are not a route to becoming a brilliant software engineer.

<comment><USER9> Sure for some no-true-Scotsman definition of "CRUD app" this is 100% true.

However even for the most boring CRUD app there is still unlimited applicability of intelligence and skill to build the right thing balancing speed of delivery, performance, UX, maintainability, and requirements compromise for simplicity. Doing this well is a path to business success far broader than winning a dick-measuring contest at FANG.

<comment><USER8> No one is saying CRUD developers are not smart. It sure takes intelligence to build good CRUD processes. Each one is a slice of a business process. Goodness knows you can spend many lifetimes doing that, and you would accumulate more and more business process know-how. That's very valuable, and can be very highly rewarded, especially if you are the only person who understands it well. But like I said your software knowledge would quickly plateau, compared to someone who is building new green field applications that are more broad. This is just my perspective after 25 years of doing both types of work and seeing what effect they each have on your technology skills over a ten+ year period.

<comment><USER9> My problem—hinted at in my opening sentence—is that "CRUD app" has become a vague pejorative with no clear definition. All software reads and writes, there is some hand-wavy sense that software becomes interesting when it has massive scale, or in interesting domains, or embedded, or has tight performance constraints, etc. But what is actually "boring CRUD", it ranges between 5-99.9% of all software depending who you ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the article is reading far too much into this whole "positions we don't hire into" thing. Usually, those are just roles invented to keep key people aboard who are refused the conventional hierarchical rise (and raise) due to Peter Principle awareness and/or not fitting in with the execs.

Walking repositories of the history of in-house technology, software archeologists who know where to dig because they've been there when it happened. It's impossible to hire that kind of knowledge. Usually, when a position invented to keep that kind of knowledge aboard gets vacated, the hat won't even be handed on in-house to the next best candidate, it will just get abandoned.

Unfortunately, the premise of the article comes off a bit like someone sitting on the fat spoils of strategic job hopping being unreasonably envious of the modest rewards of staying put, wishing to get them on top. I do like the humble use of "programmer cred" as a non-substitute of actual performance/ability.

<comment><USER11> Some of these roles are also where some very talented engineers end up who have decided they do not want to graduate to management positions. So it's quite possible they weren't refused advancement, they were offered it but turned it down because they wanted to keep working on [X] project instead of other products they weren't interested in, or managing people where that is a skill they know they don't have.

<comment><USER12> _So it 's quite possible they weren't refused advancement, they were offered it but turned it down_

Absolutely!

Anecdata: I have 30++ years of experience. I enjoy programming. I do not enjoy managing people. I do OK managing projects, but don't enjoy it.

Especially in the first 10++ years, when I had my yearly performance review I would tell my boss "whatever you do, don't make me a manager." They tried talking me into management roles quite a few times (and succeeded occasionally getting me to fill a technical management role in projects) but have mostly honored my request.

If I had gone into a (technical) management role I would likely have made a little more money but my stress level would be a lot higher and my enjoyment would have been way way lower. I've watched other engineers that went the technical management route and have been very happy with my choice.

Staying heavily technical isn't the right choice for everybody, but it was absolutely the right choice for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These types of highly-specific, broad scale, psycho-social analyses can be interesting and insightful, but should always be taken with a large grain of salt.

After all, the fields of psychology and sociology are still searching for fundamental paradigms, so it shouldn't be surprising how difficult it is to make strong, specific claims of this sort.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would argue that there is very little correlation between a programmer's perceived skill level and their actual skill level. I know some programmers who used to be considered rock stars because they created a lot of popular libraries and modules at an opportune moment in history but years layer it turns out that their code was full of security vulnerabilities.

Also some programmers are highly optimized for certain things to the point that they're terrible at everything else - I know programmers who are really great when it comes to writing performant code, but they are unwilling to make compromises to make that code more readable.

</comment><comment><USER15> It is interesting how this article assumes programmer skill has little overall business impact, whereas PG famously argued the opposite. Does the conclusion hold without this assumption?

<comment><USER16> I think it matters greatly whether we're talking about the first programmer (like pg was), vs the tenth, vs the hundredth

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> is this "the best is the enemy of the good enough" and "I don't want it perfect, I want it by Thursday" (J Pierpoint Morgan for the latter, I have no idea for the former)

Feels like it is. If you aren't obviously slacking, and aren't so good you're in the wrong place you score evens from your peers. And, cohesively, you get there, for some value of there, which may be below optimum but sometimes, the local optimum is what you want.

<comment><USER18> Voltaire?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me significantly of (and probably draws inspiration from) "The Gervais Principle"[1]

[1] [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or- the-office-according-to-the-office/)

<comment><USER20> Indeed; the author linked to this midway through the article and credited it with the "illegibility" idea.

<comment><USER19> Ah, missed that.

<comment><USER21> More specifically, in another post [1] he's admitted outright that his "opportunists, idealists and pragmatists" are just a more polite renaming of the Gervais Principle's dark triad.

[1] [https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate- hierarchy/](https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> from my experience it isn't "the role we don't hire into" \- it is "the role we typically don't hire into" :) I.e. the former is just a hi-tech version of the dealers' "we don't sell cars below MSRP".

</comment><comment><USER23> How do I get into top 5% pay when working in a satellite office?

<comment><USER24> 100% of your salary in a satellite office is about visibility from the main office. You should be giving talks to groups of people in the main office, partnering with top people in the main office to share best known practices, and having strategic catch ups with top management in the main office.

In most large corporations (with some notable exceptions) the way pay rises are determined is that your boss will have a budget for his team (possibly $$$ but possibly just 'ratings' that fit a distribution). Then their boss will review all the teams under him to make sure the distribution and budget for their organisation is satisfied and this goes up and up until you reach departmental level.

So you don't just need a good rating from your boss, you need everyone in each of those hierarchical discussions to know who you are and back your value. Because if not, it's very easy for them to cut 10% off the pay rise of drone 7b to give to Johnny star performer.

As well as that there's another dynamic. If the people in those conversations think you are good, then your boss is under pressure to say you're good in order to demonstrate (s)he is a good manager who can identify talent and take the hard decisions necessary to keep the best people.

Basically, you have to demonstrate value rather than provide value.

<comment><USER25> >Basically, you have to demonstrate value rather than provide value.

This was one of the most painful things I've had to learn. Finding ways to account for it in your work can be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wasn't 8th Light "Uncle Bobs" sons consultancy?

<comment><USER27> yeah highlighting "Uncle" Bob as a "10" with respect to programmer cred was a weak point of the essay. He is basically a one trick (TDD) evangelist pony and I doubt he has any serious _developer_ cred outside the agile methodologies circlejerk groups. Not like he is Linus or Carmack or Jeff Dean.

That said, the actual phenomenon that the author was trying to highlight with example is pretty valid imo.

"Companies like this don't hire 10s because a single 10 will single-handedly raise their margin or even land them clients. They do it to grease the skids of recruitment. That hire is neither about clients nor about work product — it's about recruiting."

Pure Gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This entire attitude just feels gross. Rating one's credibility on a numeric scale - who thinks that way?

Only assholes win these sorts of games; I'd rather ignore them and do something interesting with my time instead.</comment>


Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Promotion? Ignored - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html

<comment><USER2> very interesting, i wouldn't have guessed that people would have a hard time seeing the number written in big bold letters but it seems to make sense</comment>


Nuclear Power Won't Survive Without A Government Handout - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nuclear-power-wont-survive-without-a-government-handout/ <comment><USER2> Since competition from natural gas seems like the main hindrance toward big capital investments in nuclear, nuclear could probably survive without handouts if we had a proper carbon tax. Which we should: natural gas might be better than coal, but it's still a CO2-generating energy source and should have its externalities priced in accordingly.

<comment><USER3> Every energy source should pull its own weight, including the costs of its negative externalities.

We should not be subsidizing electric cars or solar or nuclear. The success of a solution should not depend on convincing 51% of the legislature of its benefits.

Plenty of people disagree about the dangers of carbon dioxide, but we tax many things that are beneficial. Can't we tax something that might be very dangerous instead of something we KNOW is beneficial?

Like hard work. Why do we tax people at a higher rate if they work 10 hours in a day instead of 6? I'd rather tax CO2 more and hard work a little bit less.

But that is just one positive thing we could tax less to balance any tax on CO2. One possible tradeoff.

Couldn't such a tradeoff help sell this to people who object to taxing CO2? Or is taxing hard work as much as possible MORE important than reducing this risk to Earth?

<comment><USER4> We need to separate the idea of taxing CO2 from the idea of making nuclear viable.

There are many, many good reasons to tax CO2. It's just that even if you do, it's likely that nuclear will still not fare very well in the overall generation picture. If you consider China, which kneecaps CO2 generating technologies in fairly draconian fashion, those technologies still dominate China's generation sources. Nuclear comes in way behind sources like hydroelectric and wind. (And that's even with the Chinese government propping it up.)

Nuclear is simply a very costly technology to implement compared to throwing up some windmills in Texas and Oklahoma or something. It's just much cheaper. And the infrastructure is already in place for a lot of the CO2 generating sources, so investments don't have to be as large. I suspect you would need a fairly huge tax to make nuclear beat natural gas for instance. And even if it did, what about all the other sources? Wind/pumped storage hydro? Solar where appropriate? Geothermal or hydroelectric? It's just not as easy a thing as it seems.

But taxing CO2 has numerous other benefits, even if saving nuclear is not one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Some are shutting down. New ones aren't being built. And the ones still operational can't compete with other sources of power on price._

Capitalism at work then?

<comment><USER6> Not really. One of the things prohibiting the market is the Price-Anderson Act, which stipulates, irrespective of the sort of reactor (and since there have been newer and cheaper reactor designs) a level of insurrance that nuclear plants need. Effectively, this has made it impossible to enter the market with reactor designs that are smaller and safer and do not require the insurance proscribed by the act. I don't personally know operational costs for these other sorts of reactors, but suffice it to say there are artificial limitations in place that skew this market.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't skew the market, it just prevents externalizing of costs.

<comment><USER6> How does it not (potentially) skew the market? If one such alternative plant had a higher operating efficiency and therefore lower cost, wouldn't the fact that there is a law preventing the lower cost from being reached skew the market? Am I missing something?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's the fastest Linux web browser? - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/03/02/twitter-scrambles-those-anonymous-account-eggs/ <comment><USER2> What has this title got to do with the linked article? Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Nothing. Total misfire. My apologies.</comment></comment>


Three Ways to Hack Your Commute - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Three-Ways-to-Hack-Your/23534/

<comment><USER2> Author says that 80% of accidents are caused by driver inattention.

But, this doesn't apply to him because he became "comfortable" with his route.

So now, he "hacks" it and records his thoughts while driving, listens to audiobooks, and talks to his friends on his cell phone.

Wonderful.</comment>


Show HN: Uber API SDK for iOS, "Aubergine" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tomj/Aubergine

<comment><AUTHOR> First OSS I've ever published - and it's only just started :) First post I've made to HN too. Hope people can make some fun products which hook in to Uber's API

</comment><comment><USER2> Good example of how to use mantle, too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers! I've always been a little skeptical of Mantle but it works for now. Might move to Core Data a few versions from now (I like NSFetchedResultsControllers).</comment></comment>


node.js weekly - free node.js development newsletter - <AUTHOR> http://nodejsweekly.com

<comment><USER2> Very interested in this... would be nice if, like javascriptweekly, the archive was freely available... I know it seems counter-intuitive, but having the archive for jsweekly helped reassure me that the content was worth sharing my email... if I could see that the content in this weekly was of equal or better quality, I would be willing to share my email...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (first issue is going to be delivered tomorrow)

</comment><comment><USER3> +1 subscriber. Might want to turn the input to type "email" and hook up the default form event handler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Email field has been fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool ! I hope this goes on for ever

</comment><comment><USER5> design bug on ios!!!

possible to submit links to u?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the hint, gotta fix that bug

right now there is no form for submitting links, but i will add it on the weekend

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yay. Another email harvester..

<comment><AUTHOR> Yay, another hater troll with -2 karma.</comment></comment>


TripAdvisor Redesign - <AUTHOR> https://www.tripadvisor.com/ <comment><USER2> Is there a special designer school you go to, to learn how to draw those colorful, generic human figures (behind the search)? Reminds me a bit of the "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" style. Seems like I see this pop up as a design trend everywhere recently. Does it have a name?</comment>


Invisible Apps: Who needs an app anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-17/who-needs-an-interface-anyway- <comment><USER2> Commerce over text also remains a largely unexplored idea. I'm glad a friend is doing [http://commerce.io/](http://commerce.io/)

<comment><USER3> In Africa, Bitpesa is doing a great job of commerce over sms[1]. A third of Kenya's GDP flows through Bitpesa[2]. With people more people having access to a cell phone than proper sanitation[3]; commerce over text will increase faster in the developing world than in the west. It is definitely a trend to keep an eye on.

1\. [https://www.bitpesa.co/](https://www.bitpesa.co/)

2\. [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/31-kenya-gdp-spent- mobile-1759...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/31-kenya-gdp-spent- mobile-175954101.html)

3\. [http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/11/18/on- un-...](http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/11/18/on-un-world- toilet-day-more-have-access-to-cell-phones-than-toilets)

<comment><USER2> definitely agree that the developing world is much faster in adopting commerce over text products. I think it's partly due to the high rates of data in India & Africa</comment></comment></comment>


Open letter to Microsoft on specs for obsolete file formats [2012] - <AUTHOR> http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/open-letter-ms-obsolete-formats/

<comment><AUTHOR> MS response: [http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/response-...](http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/response- open-letter-obsolete-ms-formats/)</comment>


Amazon's "two-pizza teams": The ultimate divisional organization - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jasoncrawford.org/two-pizza-teams <comment><USER2> So, if fitness functions are not used, why were they abandoned, and presumably there must be a metric to which teams are held accountable - what is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know; but knowing Amazon, my guess is that two or three metrics are used if needed, rather than trying to artificially coerce them into one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> pizza and fitness don't mingle in the same rooms</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do VCs need? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1\. Discovery: Product Hunt, Angelist, Mattermark etc

2\. CRMs: There is a CRM built specifically for VCs - Affinity. But Salesforce, Hubspot etc would also work.

3\. Portfolio Management: Carta

I'm definitely missing a lot of tools and stages. Hope others can fill the gap.</comment>


Did three men actually survive the escape from Alcatraz? - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11927025/Did-three-men-actually-survive-the-escape-from-Alcatraz.html <comment><USER2> I got nailed in a lower comment for suggesting that Betteridge's law applies here (I know I know.. Betteridge's law isn't hard and fast and it's SO over/passe), but we live in an age where bullshit reigns and I'm willing to double down...

This is from the Telegraph, a paper who at this point basically reprints press releases on science and history with sensational titles (Not that they're the only guilty ones). Other major sources of this specific spin on the article are the Daily Mail and the New York Post (SfGate takes a slightly less sensational approach to the new evidence).

Clearly your crap detector should be tingling when you see these sources as the main sources and then bang! you find it: There's a new History Channel show premiering soon about this very escape - Alcatraz: Search for the Truth.

Gee I wonder why this is making the rounds? Will it end just like any other search for history show in the annals of television: "inconclusive evidence: the mystery is still out there and we'll keep searching we promise"

This is a different form of PG's Submarine PR hit [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) and frankly it makes me mad/sad that its so high up on a site like HN.

Feel free to continue downvoting me into oblivion and I'll continue shouting into the void.

<comment><USER3> _frankly it makes me mad /sad that its so high up on a site like HN_

I don't get that mindset. Who cares if it's a "quality" story or not, so long as it sparks an interesting discussion? And the thing about the HN crowd is, even the most banal articles can, and often do, spark a really interesting discussion.

I would argue that upvoting this isn't upvoting this specific link or this specific story...it's just upvoting the general topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think they would have found traces of the bodies had they not survived. Yes, I know there are extenuating circumstances, but they have eventually found bodies such as Scott Peterson's wife and child many months later. Even a femur found on the shore would lead to an investigation, so I just find it hard to believe that body parts weren't found.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say it's "hard to believe" that no bodies were found. The bay currents generally tend outward; and Alcatraz Island sits basically right in the middle of the outward flow, not too far out from the Golden Gate Bridge. It's pretty much a straight shot out the bay, actually.

Meanwhile Scott Peterson seems to have made the mistake of dumping his wife's body somewhere around Richmond, where currents are more stationary. Her body was also dismembered, increasing the chance that parts of it -- such as the fetus -- would eventually be found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> Driving home she would often resort to fast food because she was hungry and exhausted after a 15-hour day slaving over a hot grill.

This bit stuck out to me. How is this even legal for her to work 15 hours a day?

<comment><USER7> I think you meant to post in this thread - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393477)

<comment><USER6> Hmmmm yes, thank you. I don't understand how this happened though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the excellent book: On the Rock: Twenty-Five Years in Alcatraz, Karpis claims they did survive

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the pointless poll at the end of the article. What?

<comment><USER10> There's loads of that sort of thing in the Telegraph these days. All those retired Colonels must find it bewildering.

<comment><USER11> They should have a poll on when the Telegraph is going to close for good. Last legs.

<comment><USER12> It looks like they made a profit last year:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/11639407/Telegraph- Media-Group-delivers-operating-profits-of-54.9m.html)

<comment><USER11> Yeah but they have utterly alienated their core readership. You can make a profit during a fire sale, but not every year.

<comment><USER13> my dad is their core readership, has read it for decades - isn't alienated, doesn't use their web site.

<comment><USER11> well it's pointless dropping anecdota but for what it's worth I know people who are apoplectic at how trashy it's become online and offline.

Here is some actual data showing readership dropping:

[http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/after-decade- decline-c...](http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/after-decade-decline- could-daily-broadsheet-circulations-be-leveling)

Doesn't look like it's leveling off to me!

Also the Telegraph had a lot of internal conflict recently culminating in their politics head quitting. Read this and tell me it's not in trouble coupled with the above data:

[https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter- oborne/why-i-...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i- have-resigned-from-telegraph)

The last article clearly shows you can make money on advertising and trash your reputation in one swoop.

They are trying to rebrand to trashy. The recent stuff on Corbyn every day is simply mental. Clearly they are willing to run it into the ground to curry political favour.

<comment><USER14> The telegraph was always "trashy" back when it was the "Butlers" Paper they used to publish detailed reports of society divorces where the times used to bowdlerize its reports.

And the DT is to the left of the Kippers (Ukip)

Edit: Interesting I worked on the first version of Open Democracy nice to see its still going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Betteridge's Law of Headlines:

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER15> Except in this case the answer seems to be 'yes' (or at least 'quite possibly').

<comment><USER2> How many of these stories get written this way? Treasure at Oak Island... The reporter's father killed The Black Dahlia... D.B. Cooper is alive etc... They're written mainly to sell papers. Until the men are uncovered, the answer is most probably: No.</comment></comment></comment>


How to use urllib2 in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.pythonforbeginners.com/python-on-the-web/how-to-use-urllib2-in-python/ <comment><USER2> Requests is awesome, but this is for urllib2.

</comment><comment><USER3> pip install requests?</comment>


The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature's Most Epic Road Trips - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-obsessively-detailed-map-of-american-literatures-most-epic-road-trips

<comment><USER2> Missing here is Peter Beagle's _I See By My Outfit_ relating his 1993 trip from the Bronx New York to Menlo Park California with his childhood friend, Phil Segunick.</comment>


Make Firefox Developer Tools better - <AUTHOR> https://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> More information at [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/launching-feedback- channel...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/launching-feedback-channels-let- us-know-your-ideas-for-firefox-developer-tools/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Great to see some action here. I would love to get away from my beloved chrome developer tools. But they're just so darn tasty.

<comment><USER3> Can you explain why you'd love to get away from Chrome Dev Tools?

<comment><USER4> I personally have run into issues where the document wouldn't update after I made changes to the CSS in the developer tools. I had no problems making the exact same changes in Google Chrome. It only takes a few inconsistencies to destroy trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Firebug exists and it is great, I think there are other stuff that is much more important to fix/implement in Firefox.

<comment><USER6> Firebug exists and is great in some ways, but it is dog slow for complex apps. Chrome's dev tools blow it out of the water.

The Firefox team has been doing an awesome job on the native dev tools lately, and they're fast. If you haven't tried them out recently, you should.</comment></comment>