The Link Between Startups and Privilege - <AUTHOR> https://daily.jstor.org/the-link-between-startups-and-privilege/ <comment><USER2> THANK YOU. Privilege plays a huge role in entrepreneurship, and it does a disservice to the vast majority that do not have privilege, to pretend like startups are a true meritocracy.</comment>


I'm sorry, but PHP sucks - <AUTHOR> http://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/

<comment><USER2> I've personally encountered the 64 bit integer problem, but back before it was well documented. The suggested solution on most sites I found involved string operations. We of course did it right (and similarly to the article's solution), but c'mon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't worry! The BWAAAAAAMBUALNCE is coming!</comment>


Google speeds up end-to-end encryption to prevent direct NSA fiber taps - <AUTHOR> http://sdt.bz/64082

<comment><USER2> That's an honestly laughable PR measure. It's the equivalent of a robber putting your belongings in a plastic bag before taking them.</comment>


Trump's attorney general pick could restart the encryption fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13677798/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-encryption-san-bernardino-trump <comment><USER2> Encryption laws should be the least of your worries when it comes to that guy. Intercept has a piece on him.

theintercept.com/2016/11/18/career-racist-jeff-sessions-is-donald-trumps-pick- for-attorney-general/

Update: Spelling correction

<comment><USER3> Give me a break.

[http://www.weeklystandard.com/in-alabama-jeff-sessions- deseg...](http://www.weeklystandard.com/in-alabama-jeff-sessions-desegregated- schools-and-got-the-death-penalty-for-kkk-head/article/2005461)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A little tired of election news on HN, but I know that encryption and privacy is important to HN community. This article should serve as a heads up to be weary of encryption laws in the next few years.

<comment><USER2> Tired of election news!

Tired of news that's going to affect your life for at least the next two decades?</comment></comment>


So, you want to study computer science - <AUTHOR> http://thevc.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/so-you-want-to-study-computer-science/

<comment><USER2> > Broadly stated, computer science involves designing hardware (such as > laptops) and software (such as Microsoft Word).

No. Computer science is not about designing hardware. It is not about designing software. It is not about design.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are many ways to define computer science. Please keep the target audience (high school kids in India) in mind. I could have defined it as the study and design of abstractions instead, but I don't think it would have made a whole lot of sense to high school kids.

That said, I agree that this may not be optimal way to phrase it. What would be your way to get it across?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > You don't need to know a lot of advanced math... Google has developed a > self-driving car. IBM's artificial intelligent system, Watson, has defeated > human champions on the quiz show Jeopardy.

Selling computer science as needing little math, then excite the reader with applications that are literally swimming in math.

Here's the truth: if you want to be in the group of people who make breakthroughs in technology and computer science, you're going to need lots of math.

<comment><AUTHOR> I partially agree with you: computer science definitely requires math, but the amount of math required is generally over-estimated (at least in the target audience in India).

There are plenty of interesting things you can do in computer science without needing a lot of math. The goal was to motivate high school kids in India, and to tell them you don't need to afraid of the math. Many of these kids will obviously not end up doing research or breakthroughs, and that's entirely OK.</comment></comment>


Satellite Tracks Carbon Polluters from Space - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/aerospace/satellites/tracking-carbon-polluters-from-space <comment><USER2> Interesting! They mention [1] that they use a spectrometer and innovative algorithms to detect CO2. I would expect that to be hard.

1: [http://www.ghgsat.com/?page_id=42](http://www.ghgsat.com/?page_id=42)</comment>


A rich new JavaScript code editor spreading to several Microsoft web sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ARichNewJavaScriptCodeEditorSpreadingToSeveralMicrosoftWebSites.aspx <comment><USER2> Every once in a while Microsoft still does something exactly right. And it makes me wistfully sad for all of the missed opportunities.

Yes, I was one of those who did an all-nighter outside a store waiting for win95.

<comment><USER3> Re: 95, turns out it was easy to just get on to the beta list. Reminds me of a funny story...

Summer of '95, I was sitting at the weekly roundtable meeting of our IT department (at an R&D lab I used to work), and explaining to the boss that I could get my hands on a new beta of it from a friend so we could kick the tires. The whole team seemed interested and leaned in. "So," the boss says, "Who is your friend... he must be some VIP at a big operation, eh?"

"Nope," shaking my head.

"Well, who?" asks the boss.

"He's a high-school student."

"BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAahahah...."

<comment><USER4> Apparently I was not the only high school student on the 95 beta.

I wonder now if i was the only one to crash our entire novell network by trying to use Microsoft's version of the novell client.

<comment><USER5> I used to crash a Novell network by doing design changes on MS Access tables with lots of rows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoy typing with this text editor. It feels just right: nice colorscheme, nice cursor width, nice bracket matching and code highlighting. I hope MS makes a native windows 8 app using the code editor or give it under a free licence it so that other can make the app.

</comment><comment><USER7> Have they announced this anywhere? If not, when are they firing their marketing department?

<comment><USER8> Suprisingly enough, this really is the release announcement. This is their marketing department.

 _Scott Hanselman ... Microsoft employee._

It's Microsoft's new marketing strategy - they try to promote 'organic growth and acceptance' of new products through social media and viral advertising. I don't believe it works very well - it always comes across as a bit false and pollutes the real comment environment, giving viewers the strange feeling that something is wrong. It also creates a lot of antagonism when paid employees actually argue with detractors, etc.

<comment><USER9> Respectfully, that's nonsense. I don't even work in their department. I've been online for 20+ years, blogging for like 12 years and I've worked at MS for 6.

The blog is a blog. This post is just a post. I get in trouble for blogging a few times a year, and that suits me just fine. It's just a job.

<comment><USER10> OT, but do you think you could point me in the direction of whoever's responsible for WPL/AntiXSS? It's been broken for ages [1] [2]. There seem to be no reliable HTML sanitization library for .NET right now. It looks like the best I could do is to copy and paste a bunch of code and hope that it works [3].

[1] [http://wpl.codeplex.com/releases/view/80289#ReviewsAnchor](http://wpl.codeplex.com/releases/view/80289#ReviewsAnchor)

[2] [http://wpl.codeplex.com/workitem/17246](http://wpl.codeplex.com/workitem/17246)

[3] [http://eksith.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/whitelist-santize- htm...](http://eksith.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/whitelist-santize- htmlagilitypack/)

<comment><USER9> Let me ask around. It's handled by a group that isn't ASP.NET.

<comment><USER10> Any effort is appreciated. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just installed SkyDrive to try it out. I already had an account for my VS Express 2012 so in under 30 seconds I was editing a file and trying the code completion. It looks good and works well, so it's a nice offering from the Microsoft coders. (Gee, I sound like a marketing shill but I'm not, I just happen to love TypeScript and Visual Studio, although TS failed me in a surprising way today - but this isn't the post for that.)

</comment><comment><USER12> How does it compare to Ace and CodeMirror?

[0] [http://ace.c9.io](http://ace.c9.io)

[1] [http://codemirror.net](http://codemirror.net)

<comment><USER13> That's hard to say until they actually release documentation. When I first noticed it [1] 10 months ago, it seemed very flaky and slow, but it appears to have improved a lot in the meantime.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/252814288891285505](https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/252814288891285505)

Still, it's closed source, so for now, not very relevant for the rest of us.

<comment><USER12> So, no tern.js for them until it's open source :)

I'd love to know their motivation for writing their own instead of contributing to Ace or CodeMirror.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazing.

Has anyone used this? Does it reference symbols across files? I imagine it would be rather expensive to actually have a compiler front-end running live in the cloud across my project.

<comment><USER15> What exactly is "amazing" about it?

This is the sort of functionality that has been made available by numerous text editors and IDEs for numerous programming languages for many, many years now.

It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody else was decades ago. It'd be one thing if JavaScript and web development were new creations, but they're not.

While this may be useful in some cases, it's surely not "amazing".

<comment><USER14> Did you also look at Google Docs when it first came out and remark that gamers have been playing together online in the same arena for years?

IntelliJ is my IDE. I'm excited about this because it's in a web application, not because I've never seen code completion before.

<comment><USER16> I looked at Google Docs when it first came out and it reminded me of something I saw in 1968.

<comment><USER14> I'm intrigued. Can you describe this 1968 product? What was it called?

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1]

That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market.

A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment (multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the time comes.

[1]The video(100% worth watching) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) Wikipedia: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks like the (very impressive) editor on their Try F# site (which serves as a great introduction to the language, providing you with a scratchpad/REPL and output window for in browser coding): [http://www.tryfsharp.org/](http://www.tryfsharp.org/)

<comment><USER19> Yep, that's the same editor (Monaco). This can be easily verified by checking the HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Related discussion on codeplex (typescript specific): [http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/401549](http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/401549)

And a ACE/typescript integration with code validation and autocomplete: [http://guillaume86.github.io/ace/kitchen- sink.html](http://guillaume86.github.io/ace/kitchen-sink.html) (switch to typescript mode in the left panel).

</comment><comment><USER21> There's also this one based on node.js and Ace... There is a github and you can install on your own server.. I'm using it as a private interactive pastebin/code snippet editor etc on a vps of mine.. Just need to put an apache ssl reverse proxy with basic auth in front of it and I'll be good to go..

[http://codeintune.com/](http://codeintune.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Tried the editor at [http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/](http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/) and there is one very annoying thing. I cannot type the closing curly brace ("}") on a non-us keyboard layout (Alt Gr+ N). Other than that, it's good.

<comment><USER23> I talked with someone internally that works on this, he said:

I can type { and } on a Swiss keyboard which is a AltGr + ä and AltGr + $.

What keyboard layout were you seeing issues with? Looking at Wikipedia it looks like it would be South Slavic Latin based on your mention of Alt Gr+N?

You can mail me privately if you wish (mail in profile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The inline threaded comments look like an awesome feature, would be amazing to have an inline widget like that in Code Mirror. Submitting tiny local patches this way might be useful, too :D

</comment><comment><USER25> Editing is good and fine..but can i preview my changes directly??

</comment><comment><USER21> The code editor does not appear to work at all for me with IE 8.

</comment><comment><USER26> doesn't have vi mode

<comment><USER27> Any good online editors with vi mode out there?

<comment><USER28> There needs to be a good online editor before there can be a good online editor with vi mode.

<comment><USER26> right

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As Admiral Ackbar would say: "It's a trap!"

Unless you're committed to MS anyway.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great.. How even more script kiddies can practice...

<comment><USER31> Are you opposed to practicing?</comment></comment>


Nintendo in Motion - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2013/09/nintendo_in_motion <comment><USER3> So Nintendo has not chosen to take their world-renowned franchises and use them to crop-share on iOS, and we're calling this a failure to capitalize on an opportunity?

I don't think I could disagree more.

These franchises are a tremendous draw and guarantee a large amount of device lock-in for Nintendo, presently. They have made the games Nintendo produces a renewable resource, where oftentimes the company can re-release game content with a newly polished engine and be critically acclaimed for it.

If Nintendo gives Apple any amount of access to these franchises, then the lock-in is diluted and so, consequently, is the Nintendo brand.

Not to mention that in exchange for diluting their brand and sacrificing their lock-in, they will also be diminishing their profits by 30%.

This is effectively just handing it over to Apple even though there is no obvious marketing or distribution advantage to having their applications available on iOS.

After all they'd lose from the arrangement, it almost feels ludicrous to suggest that Nintendo pay Apple for the honor of diminishing its brand, don't you think?

<comment><USER4> Not only that. Imagine Super Mario with just touchscreen controls. It would be a disaster. That would hurt them too!

Nintendo makes gaming hardware and software. Apple makes multipurpose hardware and software. These two worlds are meeting right now with some intersections that are great i.e. Cut the Rope, Tiny Wings, Ridiculous Fishing, etc. - <USER2> the really great titles have all been very 'casual'. Eventually these worlds will probably collide but Nintendo's firmly decided that now's not the time for that, for them.

I don't have any trouble with that as long as they keep producing great hardware. And has anyone seen the handheld console business lately ? They are ruling those numbers these days, so why the criticism ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with this whole premise is that iOS i.e. the iPhone/iPad are assumed to be great platforms for gaming. Maybe this will change with the new gamepad options in iOS 7 but iOS devices so far have not been really good for gaming. Personally, I found several interesting games on iOS but all of the ones I enjoyed playing were strictly in the 'Casual and fun' category. There's something about the pure touchscreen interface that doesn't work for me. (maybe I'm old fashioned and the new generation of gamers are okay with just touchscreens)

This isn't to say that iDevices aren't viable gaming platforms - the hardware does have the punch. Could Nintendo make more money by releasing games on iOS ? Yes. Should they ? Well, I don't know if Mario for iOS will get the same kind of reviews it gets on their platforms. Do they want to take that kind of risk with their flagship icon/mascot ?

I know that Square Enix did pretty badly with the Final Fantasy re-releases on iOS. I couldn't take the controls.

Also, Nintendo makes money on hardware. Why forget that ?

I find the following questions interesting:

Why don't other major game publishers, who are ONLY in the business of making software, make kick ass games for iOS ? Why are we begging/criticizing Nintendo for not making games on a platform that most AAA publishers are rejecting anyway ?

<comment><USER5> Not solely related to the Nintendo-on-iOS idea, but I really hope the gamepad support catches on in iOS 7. Just one or two really good gamepad implementations would make more in-depth or "traditional" game experiences on iOS so much more appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't played an ios game that has come anywhere near the quality or fun of a Nintendo game, and the lack of physical controls is the primary reason for that. I absolutely do not want Nintendo to develop phone games. It will take resources away from them making actual good games, and dilute and weaken their brand. This advice sounds like it's coming from a person who does not play or does not understand nintendo games.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The iOS game I've spent the most time on is the port of Final Fantasy Tactics, which is an ancient PlayStation game. Even original Gameboy games have more depth than most iOS titles.

<comment><USER6> After thinking about it, turn based RPG games sound like they would work well. My main problem with touch is for any kind of real time game that isn't a 1 to 1 swipe game like bejeweled. The problem is the lack of constant dedicated controls are simply not responsive enough, and you inherently cover up the screen while using the controls. Mario, Zelda, Metroid. Almost all top tier Nintendo games need dedicated controls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was recently playing with a GBA emulator on my iPhone and I quickly started searching around for some actual GB hardware, because a touchscreen d-pad is complete bullshit. I'm especially fond of the old Game & Watch collections. Simple, brilliant mobile games, but they need hardware buttons.

I'd buy the heck out of a Nintendo-designed gamepad for 4" iOS devices. They could charge a premium for the hardware and the games, and they've already got the sales channels in place. And if it doubled as a Wii U controller then I'd buy a Wii U too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't understand why Gruber is still making this argument, even when Satoru Iwata has flat out said "no" to it. If Nintendo puts their games on other platforms, there goes any reason to buy Nintendo hardware. If Nintendo had absolutely no chance for another hardware generation, then sure, publish multi-platform. But otherwise, it makes no sense for them to do so.</comment>


The wow of water rendering - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/120475526 <comment><USER2> Does anyone know if this accurate when compared with observations of flows at this scale? It certainly looks realistic, but I wonder if that's "just" a trick of the eye rather than it accurately reproducing the processes which generate these patterns.

<comment><USER3> The truth about all flow and especially turbulence is that it is not hard to make it look convincing to the human eye. Capturing the motion on various length scales and presenting it in a plausible way is not all that computationally intensive (the algorithms to make them can still of course be challenging). Making simulations that are numerically correct, however, is incredibly computational intensive (in addition to being algorithmically complex). This is why CFD is still run on massive clusters for transient simulations. There is also a whole field in itself for "sub-grid" turbulence models that allow for the spatial resolution of a simulation to remain coarser than the Kolmogorov microscales ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_microscales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_microscales)). (As a side note, Kolmogorov was a true polymath/genius in areas outside information theory and complexity theory.) Cutting edge basic research on turbulence will perform calculations at such scales (direct numerical simulation). Suffice it to say, most graphics work does not waste too many cycles on physical accuracy. Hard to know for sure, but since the video has words "cinema" and "rendering" in the description as opposed to "simulation", it is probably just realistic enough to pass muster in terms of human perception. Also accurately simulating the formation of foam requires a two- phase simulation of both gas and liquid as well as considering cohesive forces.

<comment><USER4> Small nitpick... my understanding is that these simulations are _numerically_ correct- they are, however, numerical approximations to simplified versions of the Navier-Stokes equations. So the mathematical equations are incorrect in that they do not accurately model parts of physical phenomena they represent. They are _accurate enough_ if your objective is to create pretty (moving) pictures. They are not accurate enough if your objective is to determine forces on objects.

<comment><USER3> Point well taken. They are not numerically unstable in the sense that the term is most often used with ill conditioned matrices or floating point weirdness, but yes, they are significantly oversimplified and will not converge with reality if you measure them by a meaningful metric.

<comment><USER4> Excuse my curiosity- do you work in CFD? I did quite a bit of CFD work for my degree- then I made the mistake of becoming a programmer :).

<comment><USER3> I worked for a CFD HPC company for about two years doing a mix of traditional engineering and programming, and I realized that I like programming and learning about computer architecture way more than the mechanics. So I went back to school for CS/CE and just like you fell into the trap!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't help but feel the water in nearly all simulations I see is more viscous than water in real life, it looks more sticky and solid to my eyes.

It still looks amazing and quite convincing though.

<comment><USER4> This _may_ be because the viscous effects are not modelled or not modelled correctly in order to simplify solving the governing equations for fluid flow numerically. I'm not sure if these effects or the absence of them would be visible to the naked eye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Incredible!

The only thing that seems to be missing is the movement of sand as water sloshes over it. But I guess it would be more difficult to simulate tiny solid particles suspended in turbulent water. For now, let's just say that this beach is made of cardboard :p

<comment><USER7> The sand looks like simple geometry at the moment, I imagine it could be (relatively) easily implemented as a second particle type as part of the same simulation. The granularity of sand makes it pretty similar to liquid, it would just need adjusted properties (weight, friction, appearance)

<comment><USER8> >The granularity of sand makes it pretty similar to liquid

Sand behaves _much_ differently than liquid. The friction between sand grains is not like viscosity and it lacks surface tension too. I don't know any continuous model that describes the movement of sand similar to Navier-Stokes for liquid.

<comment><USER9> I lost touch with the CGI industry, but sidefx latest release of houdini includes a dry and wet sand (snow, ...) simulator.

[https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie...](https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3042&Itemid=66)

They used to be on the fore front of this kind of R&D, so I guess it's pretty state of the art (as a CGI package of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Beautiful bit of rendering.

Does anyone have any estimates as to how far we are from having this rendered realtime?

<comment><USER11> Difficult to estimate as there are always optimizations which can make real- time rendering orders of magnitude faster, for almost the same work.

But naively this is 30 min per frame render time, which is 1800 sec, wanna get that down to about 1/25th of a sec, that's a 45000x improvement in computation required. How long will that take? Well assuming GPU's get twice as fast every year, then it will take still 16-17 years! Luckily we have those shortcuts.

However it's possible we may have a quantum leap in computer performance if the new Memristor architecture ever takes off, which could speed things up.

<comment><USER12> Nvidia's next architecture (Pascal?) will move GPU memory into the same package as the GPU itself, giving an instant ~3x boost.

[http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/25/gpu-roadmap- pascal/](http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/25/gpu-roadmap-pascal/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> when i look at it, it looks "fake"... I couldn't really describe why, until I saw the foam from 2 waves collide between the rocks at 0:20. The foam shifts down the screen (perpendicular to the two waves).

Funny how the brain can perceive "issues" without being consciously aware of them.

</comment><comment><USER14> How much time did this take to simulate and render, and on how many machines?

<comment><USER15> according to a comment on the video, 12.5 days, not clear how many machines.

<comment><USER14> Ah thanks, I was watching with the sound turned off :)

<comment><USER16> FWIW jstr was referring to the text comments below the video. There is other info there too about e.g. rendering settings.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We are unable to offer you a job because your name doesn't work with db schema - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944 <comment><USER2> Seems like they have another jeffery. then their database raised an exception: cannot create unique index, duplicate keys found. it's easier to discard the applicant than fixing their db schema.

<comment><USER3> But then they'd say "We can't have multiple people with the same first name", here they claim they can't have anyone named Jeffrey.

Maybe they created a tool called Jeffrey, and it's too integrated with the DB...

<comment><USER4> I think you're overestimating people and their ability to be precise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm picturing it more like this:

Clueless intern: "So what about this guy Jeffrey"?

Mean/Pissed/Annoyed/thinks-he-has-a-sense-of-humor boss: "Tell him that we don't hire anyone with that name"

</comment><comment><USER6> The most logical explanation is that someone came to work drunk after night long party and produced that mail barely seeing what he/she is writing. Auto correct might have contributed.

<comment><USER7> Angry disgruntled HR person trying to get the company sued?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am just curious for what reasons can above happen.

The most obvious one seems that someone decided to make first name the primary key and now they are stuck with the problem but still that doesn't feel right to me.

<comment><USER8> The other obvious one is that what the company rep said is not the actual problem. Because what the company rep said is ludicrous.

<comment><USER9> Maybe, but why offer an explanation at all. Most companies that rejected me gave me a bland "we've decided to pursue other candidates".

<comment><USER10> Option 3 is that this is a shitpost and isn't a real exchange at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "What does it even mean?"

It means the company has just saved you time. You are free to pursue another company that is competent enough to store a name in a database record.

Please, leave them a thank you note on your way out, maybe link to one of reoccurring articles here on HN: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Companies can only get away with this type of behavior in a labor market flooded with candidates. Of course they will claim they can't find anyone and need to government to search the four corners of the Earth to find someone for them. No company that rejects candidates for a reason like this should ever be allowed access to candidates beyond the local labor market until they stop this type of behavior.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reddit says the company is run by 4 high school students.

Which I'll just take as true since the fact that they are actually more polite than most companies in replying to job applicants just adds to the humour.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this behavior can be considered to be discriminatory?

<comment><USER15> My friend Jeffrey thinks so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The company name according to one of his screenshots is 'Tech for Good.' On their careers page the only opening is a Data Scientist... if it's real this is a hilarious way of weeding out unqualified applicants.

<comment><USER16> Tweet with company name: [https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249265056275021830/photo/...](https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249265056275021830/photo/1)

Tech for Good careers page: [http://www.techforgood.global/jobs/](http://www.techforgood.global/jobs/)

A data scientist would be expected to understand how databases work. They want the applicant to respond back and say why that response doesn't make sense so they can weed out the 99% of people who apply to jobs on Indeed that are unqualified. It's also a good barometer of the applicants temperament. 300 IQ move.

The alternative explanation, that they're unable to hire people with the name 'Jeffrey' (and know exactly what the problem is but don't fix it), is just too absurd to actually be true. If one of their systems actually had this limitation they would have started naming people Jeffrey1, etc, by now.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps they're low on disk space and were hoping for a Bob.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> fake. I also love this tweet from him

>Jesus shit, you guys love my failure. follow me to see more of my unfortunate life and ily all</comment>


How to Spam your Facebook Friends for a Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexmedearis.com/how-to-spam-your-facebook-friends-for-a-week/

<comment><USER2> I've been noticing these a lot recently, and I think the algorithm needs a lot of work because these companies can essentially be paying to damage their brands. When I see "So-and-so likes X" at the top of my feed every day, I get annoyed, and I instinctively direct my ire at the advertiser (or worse, my friend) rather than Facebook. I've seen a bunch of comments like "why do you keep posting this shit," and the reply is of course "I don't know, I'm not doing anything!"

I mean, even the first time I see one of those ads, the whole thing just rings cheap, and I dislike that my friends (and possibly myself) are unwittingly participating in these ad campaigns. It really doesn't seem like effective marketing (but I'm no guru, maybe getting the impressions turns out to outweigh the annoyance?).

I wish this article had continued to the conclusion of "what if I put very negative or outright offensive text in my sharing of this page, which could then be propagated as an ad?"

<comment><USER3> This. I recently paid a small amount to advertise my app (promoted post) on Facebook and while I was pleased at the number of likes, comments and impressions, there were a disproportionate number of comments yelling in all caps for me to stop spamming their newsfeed.

<comment><USER4> The number may have been high but I'm sure there are some that may think even 100% yelling in such a way may be proportionate.

If you want to persuade Facebook not to spam the newsfeed making it unattractive to advertisers is the way to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing is, despite it being "pretty good business" it is not what most people _want_ from Facebook. Facebook's "good business" practices are basically conflicting (inverse relationship) with the quality and usefulness of the product from the user's perspective.

That is the big difference and why people are complaining that Facebook is too much noise, because everyone goes there just to see what their friends are up to - not what they just bought on amazon.

The perfect product is one where the company's monetary interests are aligned with the user's experience. By offering the user something they want, they mutually benefit and make money. That is just not the case, at least for what I personally want from Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER6> As I understand it, for this to work, Amazon (to use the author's example) would have to be paying Facebook specifically to show these domain sponsored stories. The author is essentially leveraging off Amazon's advertising budget, correct?

<comment><USER7> Yup, you piggy back your message/ad on someone else's payed ads

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty much the same method a user can use to provide a negative comment using the Like Button comment feature on a company, though actually a lot worse and a bit more annoying. This also appears in "X is posting about Y" which I wrote about a while back [1], grinds my gears really.

The ad push is more aggressive than I am comfortable with

On the flip side, because how these sponsored stories/posts work, if you are able to chain together an exploit with either click-jacking or otherwise you can get a pretty decent worm [2] going using their very own sponsored stories feature against them.

[1]: [http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/tupac-is-posting- about-...](http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/tupac-is-posting-about-lil- wayne-sponsored-stories-evolved/) [2]: <http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/make-it-red-and-viral/>

<comment><USER9> "against them"?

They would get paid either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So you could send out amazon links to products with your referral id, have amazon pay facebook to pin it to the top of people's news feeds, and cash in if anyone buys something from amazon after visiting your link? :)

<comment><USER11> I would be very surprised if Facebook doesn't strip the referral out and replace it with their own.

<comment><USER6> Well, if so, you could just use a link shortener to hide the tag from FB...

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't that also have to hide the Amazon-ness of it to work? (Meaning that FB wouldn't make it a promoted post)

<comment><USER6> Aye. I need to stop posting before having my coffee...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Woah that's my facebook post! About Daily Rituals.

My only regret in life is that I didn't use an affiliate link.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this still works if you include an URL in the description / post text..

</comment><comment><USER15> this is awesome, does this work with sponsored stories too?</comment>


Stats without Tears (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://brownmath.com/swt/ <comment><AUTHOR> The intro is promise:

DON'T PANIC!

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy bore a "large, friendly label" with those words, and that's also my message to you.

I don't see any reason for students to be afraid of statistics. It's no more difficult than any other technical course, and it's much more practical than other math courses. The mathematical details are here for those who want them, but I lean heavily on technology to relieve students of the "grunt work".

<comment><USER2> "Don't Panic" is generally true when learning most bodies of knowledge. Well any situation really, but especially math and science.

I did my PhD in Physics, and I've found it's _very easy_ to become overwhelmed by a new field of math, physics, or even a large new code base.

But eventually after you bang your head enough on the math or the code base you realise it's not nearly as hard as you first thought.

Everything comes down to a large number of small steps. Each baby step makes sense on its own, like each single line of code.

But the feeling of being overwhelmed can cause panic and anxiety, leading people to lose their confidence that they can understand the new baby steps present in whatever they're looking at.

When I was a TA back in my PhD, I would sometimes tell my students that studying physics is like jumping off the Empire State Building. If you try it in one big jump it's likely to end in disaster, but if you break the 1000 foot height into 2000 steps you can easily get down to ground level.

Unfortunately some sub-par professors and teachers, or poor text books, can exacerbate this feeling of inadequacy by resorting to complicated definitions or explanations when simpler ones would suffice. Sometimes I think it's people wanting to sound smart and toot their own horns, other times it's just poor communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does it compare/contrast with:

\- Wasserman's All of Statistics? (which I haven't read/worked on)

\- Downey's Think Stats and Think Bayes? (which I've read in bits and pieces and have found amazing)

\- Any other well known Stats or Probability text?

<comment><USER4> I'm a non-mathematician stats newbie but here is my take:

Strength of this book seems to be that it is very approachable in a "plain english" kind of a way. This is the first time I have seen it and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Strength of _All of Statistics_ is that it is fast-paced and approachable even though it is essentially a math textbook. You only need a bit of algebra to make sense of it. That book exudes the feeling that the author wants to get through all this theory as quickly as possible to move onto other exciting things. (_All of Nonparametric Statistics_ by the same author is actually less approachable and shouldn't be taken as a simplified "the good bits" subset.)

The stats book that I have had the most value out of is _Statistical Modeling: A Fresh Approach_. It's fundamentally about making sense of different kinds of data using a computer. [http://www.mosaic- web.org/go/StatisticalModeling/](http://www.mosaic- web.org/go/StatisticalModeling/)

<comment><USER5> Regarding All of Statistics, the author states that the 'reader is assumed to know calculus and a little linear algebra'. It's a good book, though think you'd have a tough time with only 'a bit of algebra'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like a good intro, has reference links to keywords/definitions, problems with solutions, text-searchable.

References TI-83 or TI-84 feel dated.

<comment><USER7> You might think that, but high schools in the United States are largely still using these devices, even purchasing new ones.

<comment><USER8> At the university I work at, these calculators are a common item on students' desks because graphing calculators are verboten (until calculus II).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks nice. Did anyone read it and have an opinion?

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel like the impact of this e-book would be magnified if the author simply took the effort to improve its design and layout.

<comment><USER11> Isn't it trivialising the effort it takes to figure out the best layout, by adding the adjective "simply"? It's a little offensive considering this looks like an amazing resource out for free.

<comment><USER10> You're right. My bad. It takes a significant amount of effort to design a nice/beautiful layout for an online book. Definitely not something to be underestimated.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge upholds San Francisco's plastic bag law (pdf) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfcityattorney.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=1058

<comment><USER2> SF has supposedly banned plastic bags for some time, however you can still be handed your loot in a plastic bag in nearly every little corner market, as well as any restaurant where you are taking something to go.

What i think SF should require, as opposed to banning plastic, is to require that instead corn/vegetable based bags should be used.

Plastic bags offer great convenience at a pretty significatant environmental cost.

For pretty much 100% of single-use, temporary applications, we should be using vegetable based materials.

Look at how much plastic is used simply as packaging for even single-use products; plastic covers on straws, most food is all wrapped in plastic.

We should be looking at reducing these types of packaging materials that simply gets thrown away.

<comment><USER3> Did you read the linked PDF? SF probably did exactly what you suggested; they banned _non-compostable_ plastic bags.

<comment><USER2> That's not working too well. :(

All the bags in the city are still plain old plastic.

<comment><USER3> The ban _just_ went into effect -- and after a legal challenge even. It will take some time for everyone to switch over and enforcement to begin.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Any depth in Open Source ERP's? - <AUTHOR>

Follow these threads and you will see many an open source ERPs being hammered for lack of depth, usability, completeness etc
We went down that path ourselves, trying to implement some of the leading open source ERPs for large clients (>10k employees) and realized halfway through we had to do a lot better to provide something that can be used by large companies.
Let me throw a challenge, how about this http://www.A1.iO, http://Academia.A1.iO;
Our promise is Depth, Ease Of Use, Open Source, but are we there yet? Let us know... <comment><USER2> This is nice, from the online demo, this is good stuff, when are the downloads coming on?

<comment><AUTHOR> In a bout 30 days, check A1.iO for updates...</comment></comment>


The Universal Design Pattern - <AUTHOR> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pattern.html <comment><USER2> While he is focusing on Javascript and only makes a passing reference to Lua, it's worth noting that it has a very flexible and efficient implementation of property maps (called "tables") as its primary abstract data structure. You can quite easily set up inheritance behavior for prototyping, along with read- only tables and several other things, by defining access hook functions in "metatables" (property tables for the tables themselves).

See also: Chapter 16 (OO) in _Programming in Lua_. The first edition is available online: <http://www.lua.org/pil/16.2.html>

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Lua lets you do practically anything you want, because it only gives you the building blocks of an object system.

<comment><USER2> It's not an elaborate undertaking, either: you can make an object system in just under a page of code.

Here's a good example, with lots of commentary: <http://www.erix.it/progutil/gpeddler2/help/oo.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _...none of these modeling schools is "better" than its peers. Each one can model essentially any problem. There are tradeoffs involved with each school..._

Who are you and what have you done with Steve Yegge!?

 _The Pulitzer Prize it won doesn't nearly do it justice. It's one of the greatest and most unique works of imagination of all time._

Ah, there he is :)

</comment><comment><USER5> A thing I have noted is that every time I code in Java I feel handicapped for the lack of proper syntactic sugar for maps (I mostly code in JS/Python where maps are used for _all_ kinds of things (and hacks)). Anyway, great post.

<comment><USER2> Ditto with Lisp, actually. Maybe something good could be done with read macros, but |(table 'key) -> (lookup table 'key) just doesn't do it for me. Any ideas? Lisp has alists, but (as noted elsewhere) they search in linear time.

Python, Lua, and JS all have syntactic sugar for maps, and I think it makes a really big difference. They're quite versatile. Lua's table.key -> table["key"] sugar for all string keys is particularly nice.

<comment><USER6> Don't know if this will do what you want, but these two reader macros add syntactic sugar for Common Lisp's aref and gethash forms. You should put these definitions in an eval-when. Disclaimer: I haven't used these in a while (not programming in Lisp at the moment, alas), so they may have some limitations which I have forgotten.

      (set-macro-character
        #\] (get-macro-character #\)))

      ;; Array syntax: [array-name array-references] is equivalent to
      ;; (aref array-name array-references)
      (set-macro-character
        #\[
        #'(lambda (stream char)
            (declare (ignore char))
            (destructuring-bind (array-name &rest array-references)
                (read-delimited-list #\] stream t)
              `(aref ,array-name ,@array-references))))

      ;; Hash table syntax: #[hash-table hash-key &optional default] is
      ;; equivalent to (gethash hash-key hash-table &optional default)
      (set-dispatch-macro-character
        #\# #\[ #'(lambda (stream subchar arg)
                    (declare (ignore subchar arg))
                    (destructuring-bind (hash-name hash-key &optional (default nil))
                        (read-delimited-list #\] stream t)
                      `(gethash ,hash-key ,hash-name ,default))))

<comment><USER2> Actually, would there be any real problem with keeping the map in a closure, and passing around a function that gets (or, with a second optional argument, sets) the value for a given key?

      (h 'key) and (h 'key 'new-val)

That's not too bad syntax-wise. Or, taking a cue from actor languages:

      (h 'get 'key) and (h 'set 'key 'new-val)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I read one of Steve's blog posts, I realize how little I know about software development.

<comment><USER2> Here are a couple more links with good discussion about prototype-based programming:

* <http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrototypeBasedProgramming> * <http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ClassesPrototypesComparison>

SY is mostly talking about prototype-based programming in terms of Javascript, but it is also well-supported in some other languages, especially Lua (The chapter on OO in _Programming in Lua_ is IMHO the clearest explanation of prototypes I've found.), and it's probably possible to implement an inefficient-but-good-enough-for-brainstorming version in most languages.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the links... I love the old c2 wiki.

There are some real gems in there. :)

<comment><USER3> It's only old in the sense that it has been there for a long time. It's still active and updated frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hooray! Some of my faith in Hacker News is restored. Every time I see a Yegge posted with a couple comments, I'm afraid that they will be complaints about how long it is. This time, they're about the article. Thank you for keeping it positive!

<comment><USER10> but well, it is looooong, isn't it?

;)

<comment><USER9> Be grateful:

 _"I considered splitting it into 3 articles, but instead I just cut about half of the material out. (Jeff and Joel: seriously. I cut 50%.)"_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You should look at "Io," a language based entirely on this modeling philosophy: <http://www.iolanguage.com/>

I have to disagree with people who say class based modeling is "intuitive". It only seems intuitive after you've been steeped in OO practices for years. (It certainly isn't intuitive to many first or second year CS students!) But prototype based modeling, on the other hand (prototype modeling is Io's term for yegge's Universal Design Pattern) is something that I think _is_ intuitive, because there are no classes, only objects, and making a new object is just a matter of cloning an object you already have and adding to it.

<comment><USER12> What I have always thought is dangerous is that class modeling only seems intuitive when discussing everyday concrete objects. Your average CS student does not have a problem understanding that a Car has an engine and 4 wheels and is a type of automobile. However, when modeling more abstract concepts getting the design correct is usually very nuanced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a neat post, the talk about Wyvern gets me really excited because game programming is my primary domain of interest.

Someone please enlighten me; is the property model pretty much just reverse or non-hierarchical OO? Instead of saying "J.T. inherits from football player" you say "football player doesn't really exist, J.T. just inherits from a bunch of objects which are instances that have the properties of a football player"? The difference here is that inheritance is more like a node graph and a not top-down hierarchy, where the only real root object is the super-generic "object" object.

If this is true, what about the "Chieftain" example Yegge said he left out? Is there a prototype called "Chieftain" which objects can inherit, but which alone doesn't fully implement a game object? Is it the case that you can't have "Chieftain" objects running around, as they only have all the properties needed when they are, for example, an "Orc Chieftain"?

<comment><USER14> If game programming is your interest, you might want to also look at Scott Bilas presentation for a "data-driven object system": <http://www.drizzle.com/~scottb/gdc/game-objects.ppt>

They implemented pretty much what Steve is describing for Dungeon Siege. (Presentation was in 2002, so they started on it probably around 2000. Take that for "no earlier references", Steve ;)

I vaguely recall that Thief used a similar system, too. There's also at least on "NextGen" game that uses that system that I'm aware of. It's pretty powerful (and makes it incredibly easy to shoot yourself in the foot)

As for the "Chieftain" example - it's usually solved by providing multiple prototypes for an object. With all the ensuing uglyness.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the link! I actually saw something almost exactly like this by someone who was working for Looking Glass, but it didn't go in depth about the scripting layer, it just mentioned that you could either go with "static" classes, "data-driven" classes, or a hybrid. In my own development, I've generally gone with hybrid just because the value of flexibility surpasses any sort of performance hit, but I still keep some of the very simple stuff (object position, velocity, etc.) in the static layer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whoa, what a coincidence. I thought of using this for a major programming project I'm doing, without any idea whether it was a good idea or not. I've been having some serious doubts as I've been implementing it, so this article gives me a sense of validation.

</comment><comment><USER16> I just bought GEB cause its the 3rd time I've been suggested to read it.

Good ol used books.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just a note, there is a python library implementing something very similar to this. It's quite nice, I use it regularly.

<http://code.enthought.com/projects/traits/>

</comment><comment><USER18> The post reminded me of Will Thimbleby's MISC, an experimental Lisp-like language with maps instead of lists.

Linky: <http://will.thimbleby.net/misc/> (Java alert!)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is very informative... great post.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Unfortunately Emacs doesn't support any notion of prototypes._

Sure it does - just cons stuff onto assoc lists. I think PG mentioned this at the end of his "Arc lessons" essay.

<comment><USER2> True, but note that alists run in linear time. They're great for some things, but you probably don't want one with thousands of entries.

You could use hashtables instead, but the syntax for hashtables in Emacs Lisp is cumbersome.

<comment><USER20> I've only had a small amount of experience with Lisp, so I'm just curious: would macros solve syntactic problems like that?

<comment><USER2> Not really. There isn't really any major reason why you'd need to wrap it in a macro, because it's not enough code to be worth running at compile time, and you don't need to control evaluation order.

The bigger problem in elisp is that it doesn't have any kind of _remotely sane_ namespacing, so instead of being something like Hashtable.make and Hashtable.set (which you could alias to HT.make and HT.set if you like), functions are either scattered all over the one global namespace or are _all_ prefixed with cumbersome-package-name-. You could alias them all individually, but at that point it really doesn't contribute much to readability.

The potential solution probably involves read macros, which (for example) convert 'STATE to (quote STATE) _at read-time_. Having read macros that could convert e.g. x[23] to (nth 23 x), x['key 'val] to (puthash 'key 'val x), etc. would be quite enough, but read macros are prefix, and [23]x really doesn't do it for me. (I'm experimenting with adding postfix read macros to a Scheme-ish interpreter of mine, but I haven't found a good way to make it fit the rest of Lisp comfortably yet.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps Greenspun's Tenth Rule ("any sufficiently complex C program contains an.. implementation of half of Common Lisp") applies as well to Java programs containing JavaScript. The question is whether Lisp and JavaScript contain each other.

</comment><comment><USER22> My comment on how this is related to epistemology:

<http://curi.us/blog/post/1339-steve-yegge-on-epistemology>

</comment><comment><USER23> Damn, did someone actually read this whole thing?</comment>


Test Driven Development Is Overrated – Level Up Coding - <AUTHOR> https://levelup.gitconnected.com/test-driven-development-is-overrated-ad9f0491c11d?gi=968e420ad67c <comment><USER2> As a full-stack engineer, I'm a huge proponent of TDD in _certain situations_. Specifically, when given a very well defined problem-set (e.g. "create a report, which, given X, returns Y"), but less when given a far broader task (which, in my experience, I find much more with front-end tasks).

The cognitive load required __up-front __is big, and I think that puts many off who 've never felt the benefits. But it's very rewarding to be able to define a clear set of tests and then have the confidence that when the lights go green that your mission is accomplished (less refactoring). In being forced to write tests first (and endure the cognitive load), I regularly find edge- cases and requirements not originally spelt out, and so avoid having to later re-write having discovered them later.

Much like many things (including "Agile" at the OP mentions), when applied pragmatically I think TDD is an awesome principle to adopt.

<comment><USER3> I despise TDD. It just does not fit with the way I think about solving problems. I will do what is needed of me but I just hate thinking this way about writing software. I enjoy imagining how the whole system would be in mind's eye and then just code it asap, then refactor as needed.</comment></comment>


Things to Avoid in C - <AUTHOR> http://www.gidnetwork.com/b-56.html

<comment><USER2> This series of posts should be labeled "things to avoid in C". There is nothing specific to C++ there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed. (Well, at least the HN post title is changed. I can't do much about the title of the article.)</comment></comment>


8 biggest "enemies of the Internet"  - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/03/22/united_states_joins_china_north_korea_and_iran_as_worst_offenders_of_censorship_and_government_surveillance_partner/

<comment><AUTHOR> "This year marks the first time that the U.S. has earned Reporters Without Borders' dubious honor."</comment>


Ask HN: Geolocation - Google & Linode - <AUTHOR>

I just noticed something strange and thought I'd throw this out there to the world.
As I was doing a google search, I noticed that Google knew that I was in Portland, OR.  That's not that surprising, of course, until it hit me that I was surfing through ssh, and the IP address that Google saw should have been in Dallas, TX, where my Linode server is.  How did Google know I was in Portland?  I don't have the google toobar (hmmm, I am using Chrome, perhaps it's built in?)
So, that's the first strange thing.  The second, which is much less mysterious, but still worth mentioning, is that, as I was confirming that other websites saw my linode ip address and not my actual one, I noted that they all thought I was in Absecon, New Jersey, rather than Dallas.  It occurs to me that I have no way to know if Linode actually put my server in Dallas or at one of it's other data centers, even though they tell me it's Dallas, I have no way to check.  I thought about ping times to various Dallas and New Jersey businesses, but that doesn't help, since who knows where they are actually hosted.  How does one find out where a server they are logged into is actually located? <comment><USER2> Do a trace route. It should end up at "theplanet", which is a data center in Dallas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yes, it does.

So, there's just a database error for some Dallas Linode IP addresses that puts them in New Jersey.

Now, about that Google thing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have any other web services connected to google that are not proxying through the ssh connection?

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered the fact that I'm logged in to Google on the ssh connected PC, and I have an Android phone sitting next to me, logged in to the same account.

I logged out of Google on my ssh connected PC, to break that connection between phone and PC, but my location still said Portland. Of course, perhaps it's slow to update, or not so easily fooled.</comment></comment>


What It's Like to Report on Facebook - blinding-streak https://www.cjr.org/special_report/reporting-on-facebook.php <comment><AUTHOR> _With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.

Though Newton hadn't witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg's account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila "was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely."

Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn't gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing._

Interesting episode! It would be interesting to know if this was intentional deception or incompetent ignorance on Zuck's part.

<comment><USER2> More interesting, I think, is why a "reporter" reported as fact something that they didn't witness and had no way to verify except from the words of one very biased source. And what added value this kind of "reporting" provides - if we wanted to know what Zuckerberg wants to say, we can read the press release?

This is all too common a pattern nowdays - instead of reporting something that happens the press reports something that somebody (usually extremely biased and frequently anonymous) said about something that might happen, or, as frequently turns out later, didn't happen. It's much easier and cheaper, but its contribution to the society is net negative.

<comment><USER3> When it comes to things like internal R&D projects, military and government matters, and a huge amount of the tech industry's goings-on, the only source is the company itself. This is a serious challenge facing press in many industries.

How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the Aquila flew as well as claimed? Any data about the craft would come from FB, any paper describing it would be published by FB, any researchers who worked on it would work at FB. Anyone else who might be an "objective" source would be under NDA. Companies are very thorough about this sort of thing.

A journalist doing an investigative piece on the Aquila would not take Zuckerberg's words as gospel, but that doesn't mean those words are unimportant. This was a news piece, and CEOs speaking publicly about an R&D project, and answering questions and so on, is an opportunity to provide a different kind of value. Readers are curious about details companies don't always provide, and also require context that isn't always obvious. Reporters do this work too - it's not all cloak and dagger stuff, whistleblowers and top-secret dossiers.

Aquila was a solar-powered drone that FB wanted to use to create a laser- powered internet for developing countries. That's an interesting story that should be told - and not just by the company, which would leave out important parts like opposition to Internet.org or indeed the unfinished nature of the aircraft. That's important work for reporters as well - filling in those gaps so that readers' understanding of a topic or event is more full than it would be had only people with a stake in it done so.

I also have not seen the pattern you describe and am not sure it's as endemic as you suggest.

<comment><USER4> > How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the > Aquila flew as well as claimed?

How did Bloomberg do it? By not publishing immediately, checking other sources. Also known as journalism.

<comment><USER3> Bloomberg covered Aquila at the time (a couple times) citing Facebook claims, using Facebook b-roll and Zuckerberg interviews.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/facebook- unveils-web-connected-aircraft-with-wingspan-of-a-737)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/after- goo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/after-google- grounds-drone-project-facebook-ramps-up-flights)

They, like every other outlet, covered the news with the resources immediately available, then followed up later when information became available that led them to question the completeness of Facebook's account and details of the project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169)

Case in point, here's a HackerNews link to an article by Nick Clegg, the former British Lib-Dem party leader now FB VP of Global Affairs and Communications, using AdAge to impart some semblance of legitimacy. The article's headline is complete BS: "Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate" my ass. They benefit from hate speech every damn day that shit's on their site, because eyeballs == $$. The article ends with the ridiculous notion that "We may never be able to prevent hate from appearing on Facebook entirely, but we are getting better at stopping it all the time." A company with the resources of Facebook can do practically anything it wants. If hate speech was look at with the same level of disgust as child porn, would the above statement still hold true? And getting better all the time? By what measure?

<comment><USER6> Oh, it was that Nick Clegg. The one who destroyed the Lib-Dem party by voting the Tory party into power, without getting anything meaningful in return. I thought perhaps the name was a coincidence.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, he should have insisted on a different voting system as a condition of coalition, instead of the referendum.

<comment><USER6> Given that the referendum failed by a 2:1 margin, I don't think he'd have been any more popular even if they had gotten their alternative voting system.

Maybe it's one of those things that voters would have liked once they had experience with it, but if Clegg thought it was something voters were clamoring for, he was very wrong.

<comment><USER8> Clegg's mistake was agreeing to "alternative vote" being an option instead of a proper system of proportional representation which would have made a victory like Johnson's in late 2019 near impossible (though not impossible, as the Scottish system _designed_ to keep the SNP out of power showed).

In terms of moderating an otherwise horrific bunch of people (see every action since 2015), Clegg and the Liberal Democrats did a reasonable job.

Do not read this as a defence of his employment at Facebook, where he has shown himself to be for sale to the highest bidder at any available opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish there was a way for tech to handle the underlying problem. Facebook is the big massive cherry on top of everything, but we've been optimizing and hacking society ever since the 24 hour news channel became a thing.

Once we crossed a few critical milestones - 24 hour news, concentration of news agencies, buyouts by large firms - the templates for the current predicament was writ.

Human minds are hackable.

Violence, sex, and bias sells. "News", "truth" are too slippery and malleable as concepts to hold corporations to.

This will always create a race to the bottom, of the same nature as willful pollution of the environment.

Facebook is the obvious target, but so is YouTube, Twitter, Reddit. What's horrifically worse is that this is America talking about excesses with social media it identifies.

There's no space in most of the discussions on HN which consider the global scope of this problem - and it is a global issue.

The model of captive news channel spraying crazy fodder to build up stories and tilted facts so that crops of confused and opinionated voters can be harvested is a global phenomenon.

This isn't a problem as easy to solve as techno utopists thought. The internet doesn't route around censorship (as well as it did).

But it's still a problem to solve. There has to be a way to break the attention economy while also doing justice to newsworthy content - not simply censoring Mexican gang violence news because American/UK friends of Facebook Employees come online and tell them to remove it (Custodians of the internet.)

Edit: Sure - the internet is a (Many) step changes away from the cable news era. It's a whole different beast.

But the more I spend time looking at the problem, the more it seems to be a function of tools/ecosystems with a faster rate of revolution than our native ability to process. It's still the Fight for attention span and ad dollars driving the race to the bottom.

Anyway, this is one of those useless rants that describes a problem (hopefully fairly) without any solution. I guess getting the problem definition right (or separated) would be a good enough start.

<comment><USER10> I think part of the problem is that people lack the imagination, or the cynicism, to see that their tools will be turned against them in due time.

Activists get a huge rush from influencing social media platforms by dishonest means, and the people operating those platforms are all too happy to oblige, because of the precedent it sets, and in part because they agree.

Media companies got too used to manipulating this phenomenon when the ad money was there, now they're just left there holding the gun, with an itchy trigger finger and a target-rich environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This page took upwards of 20 seconds to allow me to scroll (or do anything) on the page. Shockingly bad performance.

(just checked again in an incognito window, and counted 33 seconds).

I checked the network tab and weirdly it was downloading the same image over and over again. Very strange...

<comment><USER12> It loaded immediately here. Is your ad blocker properly configured?

<comment><USER11> Yep, both uBlock origin and privacy badger. Btw, loading the page finished after a couple of seconds, but scrolling wasn't possible for over 30s. I checked the performance metrics in chrome out of interest but couldn't figure out why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The Aquila drone was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program > scrapped

Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right? Presumably it was scrapped because they decided that it wouldn't be profitable, not because they couldn't fix whatever made it crash.

<comment><USER14> > _Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test > flight, right?_

That depends entirely on the nature of the problem revealed during the test. Some tests may reveal that an idea won't work and the whole project is unsalvageable.

Facebook were trying to build a very large (43m wingspan) very light (400kg) aircraft, with the intention of using it for ultra-long endurance missions (90 days) in remote areas. For remote endurance in the field you need durability. Evidently more durability than was possible given the lightweight construction, since it was destroyed by the wind. I can easily see that sort of failure damning the whole project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" The company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two and a half billion people."_

That's scary.

Facebook used to be useful as a way to keep track of what my friends were doing. But the front page filled with more and more off-topic junk. Now I don't use Facebook at all.

<comment><USER16> Yep, deactivated my account just the other day and deleted the facebook app from my phone. I don't need a constant stream of advertising and political propaganda.

I can seek those things out on my own if I want them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's no question that Facebook attempts to shape the media narrative. But there's no need for any careful journalistic exposés to show that. The fact that there's a corporate PR department is enough.

But Facebook is not just another company that's being objectively scrutinized by journalists who are acting in the public interest. Among other effects, Facebook threatens the practice of journalism itself, and much of the reporting is intended to craft that narrative. That's indicated at the bottom of the article:

> What Facebook has become is the press's assignment editor, its distribution > network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through > corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism's core mission of > democratic accountability.

The problem I have is with this claim that the press is a democratic institution that acts in the public interest. In reality, the press is owned by billionaires. Influential journalists and editors come from a particular class of society through elite universities. No mechanisms for democratic accountability exist and the public has no real input into the agenda or topics that are covered. At the same time, journalists maximize their own power by relentlessly promoting the idea that (at least nominally) democratic institutions like government and politics are always untrustworthy and corrupt.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://archive.is/NYrtV](http://archive.is/NYrtV)

</comment><comment><USER19> _" [Casey] Newton's professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of journalists in recent years."_

This is the natural progression. And the bigger story.

I'm barely interested in Facebook or their antics. Maybe because I had already lived this story a few times.

Like most geeks in my cohort, I started as a technophile, which is Neal Postman's pejorative, steeped in libertarian and transhumanism ideology. Then I started to notice the ledgers kept not adding up, promised advances failed to materialize, people of poor constitution repeatedly gobbled up all the resources.

At some point I read Technopoly and Design of Everyday Things. Those and many other skeptics gave voice to my misgivings. Then I learned about prior technological waves causing mass social upheaval and what kind of people ended up on top. (The French have a cliche for this...)

The hero worship and suspension of disbelief was the problem. People are still just people. I'm glad the Teflon coatings are starting to wear off. So we can resume talking about this stuff like adults.

<comment><USER20> Technopoly ought to be considered in that group of books held as 'mandatory reading', alongside 'Mythical Man Month', 'Clean Code', and 'The Soul of a New Machine'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "A similar tactic was employed in 2018, after George Soros criticized Facebook as a "menace" against which society needed to be defended in a public speech in Davos. The company hired a firm to produce incendiary pro-Facebook research that contained anti-Semitic tropes about Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, as the shadowy funder of anti-Facebook groups. The documents were then passed around to journalists with the urging that they look into Soros's financial interests. In the ensuing controversy, Elliot Schrage, Facebook's head of comms and policy and already on the way out, was blamed, while Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg stated they had no knowledge of the affair."

How does Facebook get away with this kind of stuff?

<comment><USER22> Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish, and Soros really is a billionaire who funds all sorts of NGO's and has financial interests in all kinds of things, so I think it would be pretty hard to make something stick.

<comment><USER23> Someone's membership of <identifiable tribe or social grouping> does not confer a specific additional moral obligation to defend a fellow member of their tribe/group more than they might deserve otherwise.

Indeed this myth is actively invoked by bigots & bullies in conjunction with a counterexample as a twisted justification for ongoing persecution.

<comment><USER22> I was not saying it does - I'm saying it's harder to go after someone for anti-Semitism when they're Semitic.

Although now that I've seen the document in question, I must say there's really nothing there anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What kind of a journalist publish a story without corraborating it? Facebook is scum. But on the flip side these so called journalists are a sham.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Several reporters told me that Facebook, like other large tech companies, makes aggressive use of off-the-record sourcing to obstruct the reporting process. "It's pretty standard for a tech comms person to give you an on- record statement, they'll talk about the story with you on background, and then when it's published, they'll come back to you and try to undermine it off the record," says Biddle."

I must say, I never thought of it this way till today. Big Tech and Donald Trump are basically two peas from the same pod.

<comment><USER2> Journalists are lazy and PR people are sneaky. Whose fault is that? Why, of course, Donald Trump's!</comment></comment>