Ask HN: How to find a job in the bay area quickly? - <AUTHOR> So i'm in a little bit of trouble. I was fired from my previous job as a software engineer, and I have an H1B visa - that leaves me about 30 days to start working at a new job before my status in the US is endangered.<p>HNers, do you have any tips on how to find a job as fast as possible in the bay area? Is it useful to work with recruiters and tell them the situation here? <comment><USER2> We ([https://underdog.io/](https://underdog.io/)) might be able to help. No guarantees, but if you want, apply ([https://underdog.io/candidates](https://underdog.io/candidates)) and then email me (josh[at]underdog[dot]io). We might be able to feature you to our startup network as soon as next Monday.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Start by reaching out to recruiters. Let them know your situation. They will be happy to work with you as the chance of you taking some job is very high.

Also, I would do what's below. I would reach out specially to the company and see if they can send out ~500 resumes / week instead of 100 for 5x the $. Or just outsource this to ODesk instead.

[https://medium.com/@calcsam/outsource-your-job- search-3e9909...](https://medium.com/@calcsam/outsource-your-job- search-3e990967a1f3)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you get really desperate you could try walking into the offices of some small companies and telling them about your situation and then offering to work for below market rates in exchange for a quick hiring. This would probably only work if your resume is good enough to interest them.

<comment><USER5> Don't H1B visas require that the workers be paid market rates? Of course there's bound to be wiggle room but be careful with that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Power Network: Get out, meet people, there are worthwhile events daily > [http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ca/san_francisco/](http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ca/san_francisco/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Consider [https://hired.com/](https://hired.com/) to apply to many companies at once. Create a good profile and send notes to to people on AngelList.

</comment><comment><USER8> Try lookin gat startup companies, it's much easier. Good luck!</comment>


Three hospital worm infection dubbed 'substantive failure' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/02/nhs_worm_infection_aftermath/ <comment><USER2> "....after administrators disabled Windows security updates, which were blamed for causing computers to reboot during surgery..."

I HATE!!!! that windows does that. When I saw that the first time, is when I was certain that windows has no place running a professional machine.

Someone told me you can disable it on the server versions of window - but why should I have to? Why can't I click "Don't reboot - ever"?</comment>


The future of healthcare: electronic brain implants - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/487fb69e-db1f-11e1-8074-00144feab49a.html

<comment><USER2> Registration is required to read. Boo.

The article seems to not be available in Google's cache, either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry -- here are excerpts:

"Imagine a pharmaceutical company 20 or 30 years from now. Moving beyond conventional drugs that interact biochemically with the body, it will have built a big "bioelectronics" business that treats disease through electrical signalling in the brain and elsewhere.

Neurological problems, from stroke and epilepsy to depression, will be treated through electronic implants into the brain rather than pills or injections. Even diabetes and obesity will be attacked in ways that seem like science fiction today, by sending electrical signals to malfunctioning cells.

That remarkable vision comes from one of the world's most powerful pharmaceutical executives, Moncef Slaoui, head of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug company.

"At present every pharmaceutical and biotech company makes chemical or biological molecules that target [biochemical] structures such as proteins in the body," said Mr Slaoui. "No one is designing medicines to interact with the electrical signals that are the other language of biology."

With enthusiastic support from Sir Andrew Witty, his chief executive, and other senior colleagues, Mr Slaoui wants GSK to become the first large company to make bioelectronics a central plank of its long-term planning.

"The sciences that underpin bioelectronics are proceeding at an amazing pace at academic centres around the world but it is all happening in separate places," he says. "The challenge is to integrate the work – in brain-computer interfaces, materials science, nanotechnology, micro-power generation – to provide therapeutic benefit."

...

Today, only a minuscule fraction of the electrical activity in people's brains can be read by computer. Even so, recent experiments have given spectacular results.

Perhaps the most remarkable was a recent US clinical trial in which tetraplegic patients used their thoughts to direct robotic arms. The research team, led by John Donoghue and Leigh Hochberg at Brown University, released a video of a 58-year-old patient called Cathy, whose mental activity drove a robot to pick up her drinking bottle from a nearby table and move it up to her mouth so that she could sip some coffee. A heartwarming smile illuminated Cathy's face after she had drunk without help from a human carer for the first time in 15 years.

The BrainGate system developed by the Brown University team has a sensor, about the size of a small aspirin pill, with 100 hair-thin electrodes implanted into the top of the patient's motor cortex, the brain area that controls movement. It is connected to an external computer, which translates the neural activity into commands to drive a robot.

According to another paralysed patient called Bob, hard thinking is not required: "I just imagined moving my own arm and the [robotic] arm moved where I wanted it to go."

...

Some of the best bioengineers in the US, including John Rogers of the University of Illinois, Brian Litt of the University of Pennsylvania and Jonathan Viventi of New York University, are developing a new generation of soft computer interfaces, made with flexible silicon circuitry that can bend and stretch to match the curves of the brain.

...

Although bioelectronics research currently focuses on the brain, its potential extends much wider. "Electrical signalling is not confined to the central nervous system," says Mr Slaoui. "We could make use of signalling in the peripheral nervous system too."

...

"The beauty of electrical signalling is that it has only a local effect," says Mr Slaoui. In contrast, even a well- targeted drug drenches the whole body in unwanted chemical."

(small percentage of article excerpted under statutory fair use, 17 USC 107.)</comment></comment>


An amateur astronomer became one of history's greatest solar observers (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sunspots-japanese-amateur-astronomer-sun-science <comment><USER2> What a nice article, that touches on a couple of issues in solar physics:

o Because you have a big object, and a lot of photons, it's possible for amateur or less-equipped astronomers/departments to make a significant contribution. You can do a lot with a sub-1m telescope in a good location.

o The solar cycle is 11 years, so in the career of a solar physicist, they might see 3 full solar cycles. You might work for a decade to get an instrument in orbit to observe, and see a solar cycle that is kind of underwhelming (like the just-ended solar cycle 24).

o Given the above (time scale of instruments vs. Sun), there is a hard inter- calibration problem of _critical_ time series like activity or irradiance. You need to keep consistent daily measurements over decadal time scales. This timebase spans the observing lifetime of telescopes, people, and even groups of people -- university groups come and go over a 30-year time span.

Sunspot and active region determination is automated now, of course -- but this kind of historical record is really important. And, just because it's automated for one instrument, does not mean this carries over to the next one with different spatial resolution and spectral/temporal sampling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of how Kepler made his infamous discovery of elliptic orbits by staring at the data collected by his mentor Tycho Brahe. Without 20 years of detailed observations and calculations, Kepler probably would have either never come up with his theory or never have it taken seriously.

And of course Newton's principia devotes large portions to proving Kepler's laws using Newton's laws.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are the first (1947) and last (1996) observations that are digitized. The last, one the spots are very faint, in the lower-right-hand side of the Sun.

1\. [https://www.kahaku.go.jp/research/db/science_engineering/sun...](https://www.kahaku.go.jp/research/db/science_engineering/sunspot/sketch/47/2kimg/s2k_j_470122.jpg)

2\. [https://www.kahaku.go.jp/research/db/science_engineering/sun...](https://www.kahaku.go.jp/research/db/science_engineering/sunspot/sketch/96/2kimg/s2k_j_961231.jpg)

<comment><USER2> Here is a movie of automatically-identified active regions covering 1996, as a comparative:

[http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/mdi/mdi-tarp/mdi-browse/ql- mta...](http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/mdi/mdi-tarp/mdi-browse/ql- mtarp/harp.mdi.fd_Marmask_1996.114_TAI_253d_mask.mp4)

This movie was made from the science data products, but it's just a browse product for convenience. See also:

[http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/mdi/mdi-tarp/mdi- synoptic/](http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/mdi/mdi-tarp/mdi-synoptic/)

1996/12/31 is in Carrington Rotation number 1917.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Automatically get data from any email or attachment - <AUTHOR> https://taskpipes.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Chris, co-founder of TaskPipes. I'd love to hear your feedback. We're also happy to get people set up with the service.</comment>


A Note on the Use of Dictionaries (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenbag.org/v16n4/v16n4_articles_scalia_and_garner.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> For those looking at the comments first, and thinking this about programming dictionaries, it is not.

This is about dictionaries in the domain of legal definitions, and how sloppy use of dictionaries, or dictionaries from the wrong era can lead to the wrong interpretation.

I think this might be of interest as NLP and AI is applied to legal documents – and I would enjoy to see a discussion around those with experience in the area.</comment>


More Code Trainer Chrome Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/ <comment><AUTHOR> More info at: [https://g.co/morse](https://g.co/morse)</comment>


Secret Code Phrases to Get What You Want from Your Graphic Designer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kissmetrics.com/design-code-phrases/ <comment><USER2> > _I want to show this to my <spouse/friend/child>._

I've never accepted a graphic design proposal that I didn't run by someone outside of the company to be sure, from a usability standpoint, we weren't taking a step backwards using symbolism, layouts, etc, that someone outside of the project would be confused by. Or where their initial reaction would be "that site reminds me of a spammer/virus/porn site". Such a "spammer" comment killed one design right away because until then I didn't realize it, but they were very much right.

 _Edit:_ I wanted to note that this applies to designs my teams make, the design that I make, or designs we get outside designers to make. I'm confident that it helped us make better products by getting external sanity checks on designs before rolling them out.

<comment><USER3> Why would you feel that someone from the outside would be a better judge?

<comment><USER4> Because graphics designers _usually_ are not the target audience. Usability testing outside of a clique isn't always a bad idea.

<comment><USER3> Usability testing on anything that is just design and not done yes is _always_ a bad idea.

Designers are trained for designing for other people. So unless you are only hiring shitty designers then I would say usability testing isn't bringing you any value what so ever.

You are welcome to prove me wrong, but you will be hard pressed to find any evidence.

<comment><USER5> Designers also are typically not around to feel the repercussions of their designs, so they may _think_ they are designing for other people when they are really going off of their own intuition. And let's face it, even those with the best design/marketing/usability/branding etc. intuition are often wrong (eg Steve Jobs/The Cube).

I tell my clients that results-oriented design is the way to go. Interfaces are never "done," and it pays to pay a designer to stick around and iterate after real-world testing is completed. Casual focus groups are a great way to start this process, often ensuring that you don't launch with a poor design out of the gate.

<comment><USER6> The Cube was not a bad design. The problem with the Cube is that its features and price point didn't match up — even by Apple standards. It was priced like a pro computer but severely underpowered. The design was actually the only great thing about it.

Personally, I think this lesson was how the conceptually similar but significantly cheaper Mac Mini was born.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Before you start your project, it's important to know how your graphic designer prefers to communicate, and then do your best to accommodate it._

Really? You want your customers to accommodate you? If a company is at the point where they're hiring a graphic designer, then they probably have many outside parties they need to communicate with. Assuming that the graphic designer is of such importance that _they_ should accommodate _you_ is presumptuous. The ideal, of course, is for both parties to explain how they prefer to communicate and figure out a compromise.

<comment><USER8> I fail to see how what you just said is substantively different from the advice prevented in the article. The article was about how to best keep a graphic designer happy. If you prefer compromise, just bear in mind that you could make things easier for your designer, and the easier you make things for your designer the more likely you are to get something good.

<comment><USER7> The article's author seems to invert the relationship the designer has with their _customer_.

<comment><USER8> Especially if your business is web-based, you should probably be thinking of your designer as a team member, not a vendor that sells something called 'design.' It's really not that simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to be overly critical, but the phrases to use start out at #7, as if they are a continuation of phrases to avoid. When really they are a separate idea. As a designer, make sure you address details like that, as critical clients will see them and judge accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, basically, you want participation and guidance from your client because vague guidance is not enough (#1), except that you want them to not tell you how to do your job and to trust that your judgement will automatically result in acceptable work (#2, #6, #7, #10). Moreover, you want to work with an open- ended budget (#5) and timescales (#8) and communicating on your terms (#9).

Here's another theory: If I'm outsourcing part of a project, I will provide a specification for the work including any constraints I require, you will submit a proposal including estimates of how much it will cost and how long it will take, and I will consider your proposal and decide whether to accept it. You will be available at reasonable times for me to communicate with you, you will provide regular updates as the project progresses, and you will inform me immediately if your estimates are going to be incorrect, or I will not pay you. This is what is known in the business world as "how things actually work if you're the one providing the service and the other guy is the one paying the bills". Final hint: if you don't like being asked for a ballpark figure because it's hard for you to give one, then you were right about one of us being a beginner, but you have misjudged which of us it is.

(Edit: I would agree that co-operative discussions and effective communication are the best way forward in most business relationships. I just think the ideas in this particular article are so obviously one-sided in favour of the designer that no serious client is likely to employ the designer's services on that basis, so they aren't really very useful at all.)

<comment><USER6> I agree that the tone of the article smacks of entitlement, but the "don't" list actually does cover some big pain points I think a lot of designers are familiar with. I just think the article doesn't explain them very well.

"Here, I made a layout for you": Unless you really believe you are as good as the designer you're hiring, it doesn't make sense for you to actually do any designing yourself. Guidance, yes; clear specifications and limits, yes; a concrete design, no. If you could do that, you wouldn't need to hire anyone. It's like hiring a photographer and telling him, "Here, I set everything up. You just push the shutter button." Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur. It's trouble for me and it usually does mean a worse product for you (not out of spite, but because I'm hobbled by an ill-thought- out design that the client drew up in 10 minutes on a napkin and insisted be followed exactly).

"How much does X cost?": This isn't about having an open-ended budget. It's about providing a clear specification. Asking for a budget without any kind of specification is asking for disappointment later on. For example, a business owner asked how much a blog would cost. I gave a relatively low number to set up WordPress and do a simple theme. After further questioning, it turned out that when he said "blog" he meant something more like "Facebook competitor." Even better is "How much does a website cost?"

"I want to show this to my <spouse/friend/child>": This isn't unreasonable, but you shouldn't treat any one person as "the public's opinion." Unfortunately, many people do. For example, I worked with a guy whose wife thought it would be awesome to put pictures of her poodle all over a business website because the dog was so cute. Everyone _else_ who saw a design with the dog was completely perplexed by it, but she loved it.

<comment><USER10> > "Here, I made a layout for you": Unless you really believe you are as good > as the designer you're hiring, it doesn't make sense for you to actually do > any designing yourself.

I respectfully disagree.

For one thing, a (graphic) designer can provide a variety of related services, and some of them may overlap other experts on the team, such as the user interface team or a web usability specialist.

For another thing, this presupposes that the designer is the only such expert involved in a project. For larger projects, this may well not be the case, and there may be someone setting the parameters for the overall system and then a number of designers responsible for implementing the general rules in specific areas.

> Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your > buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur.

You imply a false dichotomy. I can't speak for others, but on several projects I currently work on we might outsource things like graphic design, artwork and typography to a specialist, but want to retain direct control of the overall layout and interactive elements. In one case that comes immediately to mind, that is because we have extensive knowledge of usability issues from a previous version of the software that no designer joining the project fresh would have. In another case, we have web-based access and various apps for mobile devices, and we want a consistent overall look and feel across all versions of the service, so while the designer is free to fit the branding to the natural style on each platform, they don't get to move everything around in a way that could confuse our users. These decisions are not made by amateurs, they are made by specialists whose job is to analyse hard data and make these decisions. I wouldn't ask these people to decide what kind of antialiasing to use on the web buttons, and I wouldn't ask a graphic designer without the relevant knowledge of our products to lay out the user interface.

<comment><USER6> I agree with everything you said here, but we're talking about different situations. I never meant to suggest that what I was saying are universal truths, just that the OP reflects common problems that come up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Recently had a local politician use this beauty, right after he asked my rates: "Well I have this guy who will do it pro bono, but he's got a pretty busy family..."

Like a) the rest of don't have families and b) it's going to make me want to compete with free. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> When delegating any work, it's more productive to focus on the problems you want to address rather than the solutions you had in mind. Solving problems is fun. Don't steal their thunder.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a few more phrases:

"Here's 50% up front."

"I'll pay upon delivery."

"Let's set up a retainer."

These phrases get ya top priority. Fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> And from the designers perspective

[http://000fff.org/design-discussion-principles-how-to-get- yo...](http://000fff.org/design-discussion-principles-how-to-get-your-client- to-love-your-design/)

</comment><comment><USER13> These come across as ridiculously elitist- of course those are useful tips, but if i have a client who's going to say those code words, he's going to sound like a chump.

Definitely lean toward that side of the fence, but honestly, for any designer/developer, the most important thing you can have as a client is a clear idea of the direction you want to take. Have your idea prepared, write notes, know your competition - write it down. do your research!!

once that's done, it's easy then to go ahead and deliver. before then, you are stuck in the loop of domain discovery which is just a time sink with no easy- way-out.

</comment><comment><USER14> Apparently the secret code phrase is "500 Internal Server Error"

</comment><comment><USER15> 500 -- Internal Server Error? I wish that would get graphic designers working...

<comment><USER16> It's a secret code to tell blog readers that you don't know exactly how to run a webserver...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _"Here, I made a layout for you." On the other hand, we don't want you to do our work for us._

Too bad. Here's a layout. Make it work.

 _asking for a "ballpark figure" before giving details just makes you look like a beginner_

Boo hoo. Now give me ballpark figure.

 _How much time do you need? It takes a lot of thought, back-and-forth, and revisions, all of which take time._

Yes, it's a common practice in Fantasyland to afford content creators all the time they desire to go off into the forest and think about fonts and palettes ... no, please take all the time you need, and tell me what it costs after you're done taking three weeks to decide what the exact border radius for my site should be to convey just the right sense of whimsical Gestalt but not too pretensious, and don't even bother giving me an estimate, and please tell me how to run my business while you're at it too.

<comment><USER18> Or I guess you could just do it yourself and save all that time, money and frustration... And make your designer that much happier.

<comment><USER19> Since I can't down-vote snorkel I'll up-vote you instead. Here's hoping he forgot his '/s'.</comment></comment></comment>


After switching 37K PCs to Ubuntu, FAF says open source cuts costs 40% - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/apps/after-switching-37000-pcs-to-ubuntu-french-armed-forces-says-open-source-cuts-costs-40-percent-1572233/

<comment><USER2> Give me a break. This is a single data point, in an industry (and country!) not known for its efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER3> A more scannable version of the title would use 'reduces cost'</comment>


Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/yc-funded-snapjoy-will-organize-your-photos-for-you-and-make-sure-you-dont-lose-them/ <comment><USER2> My feature requests (as they have been for every service I've tried from Flickr, to 500px, to Smugmug):

1) Let me upload my RAWs. Better if you can display them as is, but at least do what Adobe does and show the embedded JPEG if not.

2) Allow me to edit online with HTML5 compatible tools (Adobe's online service will let you edit, but uses Flash for some odd reason). With that I can edit from the road using my iPad.

3) If you want to make money, help me make money too... i.e. better to take a share of sales (win-win) then charge me and I have to hope I make enough to justify paying you. Even better if you can help me market.

4) Killer option even if you fail on the previous three - identify the things I can't. Wildflowers are number one on this list, but animals can be an issue sometimes as well. It wouldn't hurt if you can take my location from the photo, figure out which way I'm facing (time of day and angle of sun), and identify that peak in the distance as well (though supposedly the military is working on that one).

5) One I am surprised I don't see more of on the photo sites - run some juried contests. Great way to spark interest in your site, as well as let folks know they can find the up and coming photographers with some help (sort of like 500px's "editor's choice", but with benefits.

6) One more "killer" feature - tell me what I did wrong. If I ask you to look (programmatically) at my photo, take a look at the curves and the EXIF data, and tell me what I should have done to get a better picture.

7) Final request - give me a way to take what you have organized, and pull it back as those same albums onto my PC. That reduces guess work of what I have or haven't backed up, and lets me not worry as much about whether you will still be around in two years.

<comment><USER3> #6 sounds like a really great idea. Does a version it exist anywhere in any form? Plugins for Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture/whatever? Standalone desktop software? Anything?

<comment><USER4> For professionals there's <http://www.imatest.com/home>

<comment><USER3> Thanks. It definitely seems like where a super-super-simplistic version for amateurs would be of great value, especially if it can work across multiple images, spotting mistakes you tend to make regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Both Kicksend and Snapjoy insist on Real Names, very irritating. (Is it a YC trend?) Will you purge accounts that don't use them G+ style? Will I upload a bunch of files, have them no where else (your average person) and then find out they've disappeared one day because of an inane real name policy with no recourse? How about if I don't have a last name, and have to make one up to fill out your form? You'll get real names with payed accounts, but it's otherwise unwelcome.

<comment><USER6> True Names, broken though the model is, are the fad of the hour because Google is hell-bent on them. And since it is the fondest wish of many funded startups to be bought by Google, nobody is going to get fired for doing exactly what Google is doing at any given moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been looking for something like this but as a desktop photo backup app with cloud option. With two young kids I have tons of pictures and videos to wade through and its just not cost effective to store it all on the cloud when 2TB drives cost $100. But it is _such_ a pain for my wife and I when we consolidate pics from our various devices and then do a backup to multiple USB drives. And its just going to get worse over time.

What I would love is an app that would analyze my library, eliminate exact dups, and backup automatically to each drive when I plug them in. Kind of like iPhone sync but from devices->comp->external storage. Super Bonus Points if it can auto-level pics.

But the biggest time sink is winnowing down the raw photos to a best-of list suitable to upload to an online photo sharing site. Usually we take 4 or 5 pics that are all about the same and then have to go through each 'group' and pick the best. Having so many usually means we just skip it and store them all for later. But that's really just delaying the pain, someday when we want to show them off its really gonna hurt. Its generally more important to me to get an OK pic that conveys the idea of the 'memory' rather than spending the extra time to pick the absolutely best shot.

Fancy algo's to the rescue?

<comment><USER8> Actually, even very dumb algorithms totally destroy the problem you describe in your third paragraph.

Even if all you do is organize by date and show the first few photos for each day ("featured" photos), that's enough to vary the stream of photos people browse through.

I speak from experience, as someone who runs a photo-sharing site that organizes by date. I also make it easy to switch between featured/non-featured for any photo, but doing such switching is not a prerequisite. You already have a nicely varied collection just by uploading.

From what I've seen of Snapjoy so far, their format also guarantees variety. I haven't seen the fancy algorithms in action yet, but I imagine there are techniques one could use to make the initial set of "featured" photos more likely to be varied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea, definitely need a Windows client though. I think you should also release pricing pretty soon, I don't want to go through the effort of uploading photos if its going to be very expensive all of a sudden. I'd also like to point out that 'a few gigs' is not very many photos these days. I'm not photographer but I had 3-4 gigs of photos after my recent 3 week trip to the USA on just a fairly basic digital camera.

Your price point is going to be a tricky one to pick. Dropbox charges around $10 for 50gb, which if I was only using it for photo backups, would be too much, and I'd not do it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Feature request: allow me to pull all of my photos from my current Flickr account via their API.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a lot of great ideas brewing around pulling your photos from other services. Stay tuned!

<comment><USER11> The feature to avoid duplicates will be a huge help when importing from those other services.

<comment><USER8> It will be tough to detect duplicates from Facebook, where they recompress and strip metadata.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glad that the TC article touches on it, but with the track record of YC company acquisitions and killing products (yes yes, I realize dropbox is an exception), it really feels like a leap of faith to trust a YC associated backup service.

I can deal with having to export my files in case of acquisition, but it will keep me from suggesting this service (which sounds awesome, by the way) to non-technical friends and family.

<comment><USER13> Have there been companies that were acquired and just shut down/deleted everything? The ones I've seen just said "we're ceasing operations in 90 days, please back your data up".

<comment><USER12> My concern isn't their vanishing overnight.

My concern is recommending the service to my 70 year old father and getting a confused phone call from him about why his bookmarks are broken and instead lead to an acquisition notice and then having to walk him through the export process.

In other words, the value to me in recommending these services to my friends and family is 1) that they'll use them and see some benefit and 2) that I won't have to support it.

And, at the risk of getting all patio11, you know who spends a lot of time organizing photos? Older folks and housewives; NOT Silicon Valley wunderkinds who are trying out the latest and greatest YC company which got a mention on TechCrunch. The problem this team will face is that you have technically literate people like me standing between them and the non-technical friends and family who will shell out $20/mo until the end of time to organize and share photos of their grandkids.

If this is just a tech demo before a FB acquisition, disregard the whole thing though. :)

<comment><USER14> That's one of the things I've loved about Smugmug over the past 5-6yrs: they're profitable, they're independent and they don't have any intention of selling out. They're a brand I trust and believe in, which is why I give them my money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I saw this at work, signed up, and uploaded a few pics. I wanted to check it out later when I had more time. By the time I got home, I had forgotten the name of the service. I checked my email to see some kind of welcome message, but I didn't get one.

While I appreciate your efforts not to spam, a simple email might help your users find you, learn know how to use your service, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there anything else on the market that is similar to this? I'm just curious for comparisons.

I'm definitely hesitant to use this because of lack of pricing, and I also have no idea what's "smart" about this besides it being organized by date. I don't want to upload 1,000 photos and see it in action. Show me examples on the site.

There's no easy way of sharing photos either which is a deal breaker for now.

<comment><USER8> My site <http://ourdoings.com/> also organizes by date, and there are samples on the front page you can click through to see different people's timelines.

However, I think Snapjoy's right to tell people to upload their own photos to see it in action. To me, 2005/December means Puerto Rico. For it to mean that to you I have to tag/caption/etc. Upload 1,000 of your own photos and you'll see how easy it is to have a navigable, varied, enjoyable collection. (That sentence applies to any site that organizes by date and uses any algorithm to mitigate the too-many-redundant-photos problem).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks terrific, I've begun the task of uploading photos. Funny question to be asking on my first day I guess, but has anyone figured out how to delete photos once they're already up?

<comment><USER17> aha, figured it out. Hovering over the picture in certain bulk modes shows a check mark, clicking this checkmark brings up a bulk editing view where you can send to trash. I don't believe it's possible to delete single photos

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Grats guys, I love Snapjoy's ease of use.. and the desktop uploader app is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks amazing!

Does it let me use one account across several computers so that all photos end up in the same cloud account?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. We're going to be pulling your photos from web services and other devices soon :)

<comment><USER19> wow. I think you've just solved my "photo problem".

What about if I have more photos than hard drive space?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool. We can provide you virtually unlimited storage for your authoritative photo collection on our servers.

<comment><USER19> _We can provide you virtually unlimited storage for your authoritative photo collection on our servers._

That is what I've been looking for, along with a way to have multiple computers "own" the photos and use them off of the local hard drive as needed (such as to order prints, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For public photos (if you ever add them), it'd be great if there was a clean way for the poster to assert copyright; and, if they do, a way for 3rd parties to contact them for image permissions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am not sure about the backup your photo pitch. I _think_ the way they are showing pictures in a horizontal + vertical timeline is very very nice. If I were a photo person, I would like to have this app talk to Instagram, Picplz, FB, etc... grab all my pics and show them in such timeline.

<comment><USER22> We agree ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is so good. Anybody else feel its way better than Path?

The introduction on the homepage is a bit vague though. Maybe mention that it organizes by date or some more clue. I had no idea what this service does unless I visited the live demo.

</comment><comment><USER24> How do I view all my pictures into one single stream? I like them group for information, and I also want to see them as iPhoto does it. contact me for more feedback john {} gabaix.us

</comment><comment><USER25> I uploaded couple of pictures and it said that they are being processed. When I clicked on the "Dashboard" button to see the progress, it took me to the welcome page again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. We probably haven't fully processed a single image from your queue yet, so sorry about the confusing circle it's throwing you in during that case... will fix on our end

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can not upload my pics that have extension JPG instead of jpg.

jpg == JPG?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah I believe that issue occurred before when you're on Linux only. It should be fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Could iPhoto and iCloud be something of a threat here?

<comment><USER28> I was just thinking the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> And by "organize" they mean "sort by date".

What's the real breakthrough here?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot more than that meets the eye happening beneath the surface. When you have a thousand photos up there, you'll get a better feel of our algorithmic clustering.

<comment><USER29> Well, can you just tell us what the features are?

<comment><USER30> Why can't you try it instead? It's free...

There's at least some work by the algo to recognise different moments of the same day, I still need to upload more pictures to try to understand it correctly.

<comment><USER29> You want me to upload a thousand photos to see how it works? :)

<comment><USER8> As someone who runs another photo sharing site that organizes for you by date, I can say yes.

First, it's important to know that uploading a thousand photos is way easier on such a site, since you do no organizing work. Try uploading a thousand photos to Flickr without culling, organizing into albums, tagging and captioning, and see what your result looks like. It doesn't have to be like that.

Second, they have to be your photos for you to appreciate chronological organization. When I look at my own, I can say, "Wow, I just click 2005, then December and I see my Puerto Rico pictures. And I didn't have to organize them myself." You don't get the same effect looking at someone else's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I manually sort my photos by Date Pictures Taken into their own folders. I don't see a big deal about this as a separate service.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't bother you that photo-sharing web sites don't use the same simple organization scheme you use locally, but require you to create albums, etc.?

<comment><USER31> Not everyone know how to name their photographs. The proper photograph naming scheme is simply the biggest missed opportunity since the dawn of digital cameras. Using the naming scheme of Dates Pictures Taken, along with a word or two of the event, people can save themselves from aggravation in managing their thousands of digital photos.

Generally, photos are taken of an event and on a particular day. You may have multiple events in the same day, so you can further nest by time as well. But that's as far as an average user go.

It should be user's own responsibility to manage their naming schemes and sorting. You can then upload folders to any web service (or don't even bother if you use Sugar Sync or Dropbox etc).</comment></comment></comment>


Why I am not worried about Japan's nuclear reactors. - <AUTHOR> http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/

<comment><USER2> It appears that there is some disagreement in the comments section as to the veracity of the posters claims.

Particularly as to whether Fukushima 1 is actually built to the standards the doctor is claiming it is, i.e. whether it actually has a core-catcher or not.

The wikipedia entry for Fukushima 1 is pretty sparse. Does anyone have any information they can weigh in with on this?

</comment><comment><USER3> There are more points that are questionable in that article: <http://bit.ly/fWCuAV>

<comment><USER4> The counter points don't hold up.

1) The 'core catcher' is the bottom of the containment building. This reactor was built by GE.

There is a diagram of the reactor in Google Books: [http://books.google.com/books?id=y20F8Yt6UcMC&pg=PA34...](http://books.google.com/books?id=y20F8Yt6UcMC&pg=PA34&dq=general+electric+reactor+design&hl=en&ei=e5B-TbzOOI76swODysyTBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=general%20electric%20reactor%20design&f=false)

Not sure if that will make it through the HN editor but its worth a look. Would love to get a scan of that diagram online. In 'flask type' reactors the re-inforced concrete pad under the reactor 'catches' the core (if necessary)

2) Its important to understand that since the reactor is shut down, its only source of heat is the decay products from when it was running, minus the heat they pulled off while running on battery power. Further the engineering design target (one assumes they test to that target) is that if you integrate over all the heat you generate from all the byproducts from a reactor that was running at 'full' and now has all of its control rods inserted, is less than the heat you would need to add to melt the containment vessel (the flask) You won't be able to restart it but you won't have the core melt through the vessel either.

His third point, he doesn't understand that long lived radionuclides aren't aerosols. Which is to say they stay in the containment vessel they don't exit with the steam. The impurities in the ocean water need understanding here but we're not talking a significant long term threat.

Number 4 he missed out on what radiation was measured, what the relative value of that radiation was and the how it won't persist. These are gamma rays that can make other things radioactive.

Anyway, if you have the book (I don't) it apparently describes the reactor in question in some detail.</comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Atlantic City - <AUTHOR> http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_4_atlantic-city.html <comment><USER2> "A long experiment with legalized gambling, launched in 1976, has failed to reenergize this once-iconic locale"

It didn't fail exactly in the way this sentence seems to want to imply. It did work (and it significantly built up the surrounding areas). What killed Atlantic City post gambling 1976, was other states legalizing gambling and cannibalizing the market that they had to themselves and Las Vegas. Also gaming on Indian reservations. And a decision early on not to move poor people out of Atlantic City [1] (similar to what Las Vegas did) making it less attractive as a vacation spot. There is blight all over and close to the equivalent of "the strip" for lack of a better way to put it.

[1] [http://articles.philly.com/2010-07-29/news/24970511_1_casino...](http://articles.philly.com/2010-07-29/news/24970511_1_casino- atlantic-city-entire-city)

</comment><comment><USER3> Much longer article about same subject [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-death- and-l...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-death-and-life-of- atlantic-city)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not mentioned in the article is the effect air conditioning had on where people go for vacation. Atlantic City was one of the escapes from the hot summer heat. Now you just turn down the thermostat.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting read for me in special. I happened to be there for the first time this past Saturday. What an awful place. Truly shady and scary. Dirty, it seemed like a ghost town.

</comment><comment><USER6> +1 for City Journal, love that stuff.</comment>


Main Linux problems on the desktop, 2015 edition - <AUTHOR> http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html <comment><USER2> Can definitely confirm issues with touchpad drivers.

Lack of basic features such as ignoring a thumb that's resting on one of the buttons (which works in Windows) makes using Linux on a laptop a very unpleasant experience.</comment>


Survey of Commonly Available C System Header Files - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.owlfolio.org/header-survey/

<comment><USER2> This could be really useful for me but the presentation breaks (at least on Chrome). By the time you're halfway down the list it's hard to tell which header's row belongs to which compiler's column.

<comment><USER3> Scroll down works in FF (20.0) but not in Chrome (26.0...) on a Mac.

<comment><USER4> Does not work in FF 20.0 on Ubuntu. (The header shrinks so that the labels no longer line up with the columns.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised by the small number of "unusably buggy" headers. Maybe it's due most platforms being reasonably recent.

Otherwise I'd say bringing msvc to c compiler comparison is like bringing knife to gunfight.

<comment><USER6> MSVC isn't a C compiler. It's a compiler for The Language Formerly Known As C.

<comment><USER7> MSVC does not exist.

The only product Microsoft sells is called "Microsoft Visual C++".

<comment><USER5> yeah, and GCC is gnu compiler collection. that doesn't stop everybody calling microsoft visual c++ msvc and gnu compiler collection gcc.

<comment><USER7> The issue is that GCC was once upon a time only "Gnu C Compiler", whereas Visual C++ was always named like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice to see a POSIX.1-2008 section too -- many of the headers listed as "POSIX.1-2001 optional" are required in POSIX.1-2008. (e.g., <aio.h>, <cpio.h>, <dlfcn.h>, <iconv.h>, <langinfo.h>... and <pthread.h>, which is probably the most commonly used 2001-optional/2008-required header).

</comment><comment><USER9> Useful reference, and whilst controversial - i'd like to have seen ssl.h/openssl.h aswell. But anyway, thanks. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> It'd be great to see a metric of "completeness". For instance, while <semaphore.h> declares support for unnamed semaphores on OS X, the platform does not have them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice, although I find a few issues:

\- A few commercial compilers are missing.

\- How much of POSIX does SUA in Windows support?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hello.

This is really nice, I just have one question, ( maybe I have overlooked it), where is the test-suite for gathering the data?´, as to which headerfiles are workable or not? Is there a configure script there? I mean, I am on Snow Leopard, and I have no trouble using unistd.h which is marked as flawed on the graph.

<comment><USER9> See the second paragraph, where it states..

<https://github.com/zackw/header-survey/>

<comment><USER11> Hello.

All I see that is that it is a survey, I wonder what kind of tests that are used to draw the conclusions. I also see for instances that the regexp.h file is absent for OS X Lion, which is reworked to work wide wide characters. But, the header files may fail in ways I don't know about, that is why I ask for the tests that makes up for the results.

<comment><USER12> If you'll look at the code in the link posted previously, it appears that it is testing for the presence of the headers rather than functionality inside of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does Cygwin GCC include the same set of posix headers as Unix GCC?</comment>


Introducing Comsat and the Parallel Universe Stack - <AUTHOR> http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2014/01/22/introducing-comsat/

<comment><USER2> I was really hoping this was some kind of parallel internet that ran on CubeSats, or something.</comment>


Oxford's Recovery Trial: Malaria drug hydroxychloroquine does not save lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52937153 <comment><AUTHOR> The Lancet affair set a really bad precedent and now I find myself distrusting every study on HCQ. The mortality differed by 2.2% which translates to ~30 extra deaths in the treatment vs. the control. Given the stakes here, Oxford should publish the data and protocols.

Can any Biostatisticians comment on the sample sizes and power analysis?

"'A total of 1542 patients were randomised to hydroxychloroquine and compared with 3132 patients randomized to usual care alone. There was no significant difference in the primary endpoint of 28-day mortality (25.7% hydroxychloroquine vs. 23.5% usual care; hazard ratio 1.11 [95% confidence interval 0.98-1.26]; p=0.10). There was also no evidence of beneficial effects on hospital stay duration or other outcomes."

Source: [https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/hcq-recovery- statement-0...](https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/hcq-recovery- statement-050620-final-002.pdf)</comment>


Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/08/microsoft_ceo_steve_ballmer_retires_a_firsthand_account_of_the_company_s.html Pretty accurate summary, from a manager's point of view, of how performance ranking happens at Microsoft. <comment><USER3> Here's a commentator at Mini-Microsoft explaining why it probably became more toxic over time, and it looks like these changes happened before the author arrived:

[http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is- going-...](http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to- frickin.html?showComment=1377372530878#c2642513338204621608)

Anonymous said...

My memory is really good - [ current head of HR ] is the one who did away with the "life-time performance average" which let people take huge risks and made Microsoft great.

THAT, was huge BillG wisdom. You could look at your score over time and do some really simple math to see what kinds of risks you could take. And then suddenly, a 15-year running average of 4.0 turned into "your current manager doesn't like you, and he's required to fire one of his 10 no matter what, so you're fired".

She also did away with the standing rule that you could take any written standing offer - NO MATTER WHAT (unless you were actually fired for cause) - which was Bill's way of ensuring that great engineers couldn't be tossed out by one horrible ass-kissing manager ... which is pretty much all of them today.

The day that it became possible for a single crappy manager to fire someone for saying "I disagree", or "That's Wrong". Microsoft died.

And when's the last time you saw that lovely deck of laminated cards that started with "a passion for technology" ... and a really logical employee development plan? yea, right, somewhere around 1995.

[ People who need to leave. ]

<comment><USER4> I think the problems started when they hit their monopoly phase and Windows became a cash cow. It probably looked at that point like they had "won" and all they had to do was keep the upgrade chain going. Don't need to innovate; that would rock the boat and risk the cow.

<comment><USER5> Strictly speaking, a monopoly / cash cow phase creates a context in which bad practices will not kill your company and are not removed by natural selection. It allows these bad practices to survive and thrive, but it does not create the practices themselves.

I think the distinction is important, because removing the cash cow will not fix the problems, but instead let these problems run the company into the ground. RIM is probably a perfect example of this process, and Microsoft is not, which gives credibility to the idea that, for all its failings, Microsoft has in fact been able to embrace a number of innovations and new markets (Xbox, Azure, enterprise...).

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, some classic monopolies, like the old AT&T and Xerox, innovated tremendously but would fail to capitalize on those innovations (Bell Labs & Unix, Xerox and the Mouse/Menu/etc GUI).

<comment><USER7> I think this is the more common failure mode - a lot of innovative work happens at big companies, but those innovations never make it to market because commercializing a product requires a large investment in, well, finding customers, and the innovators at big companies are not empowered to do this.

There is still a _ton_ of innovative research work coming out of Microsoft, Intel, and even IBM, but typically instead of being commercialized and profited from, it languishes until the company shuts down the research lab and the scientists involved get jobs elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember one comment at a perf review from my boss when I worked at MS. There were two of us on the team of 35, who were working on a certain tenet. My boss said "next review season, I'm going to go around and ask people who's the [tenet] expert. It should be you, not him."

So although we were working together, we were also competing. And yeah, when he asked, I was the expert. I think a large part of that was because whenever the two of us got together to ping people about our tenet, it was in my office, so the emails came from me, and the bug updates were under my name. I did that half-intentionally, and feel a little bad about it.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for reminding me that "tenet" is one of those words that has a weird MSFT-cult meaning, and an entirely separate meaning to those who are more sane of mind. :-)

<comment><USER10> "ask" is my least favorite. "performant" is my most favorite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That sounds exactly like the hell I went through at Raytheon. In fact, I may have heard that visibility quote verbatim during one review.

Raytheon didn't have the problems described by Microsofties, though. The long- term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger. If you didn't drink the Kool- Aid yourself the stack ranking system would be the least of your worries, though it was a useful tool for managers to deal with subordinates who wouldn't comply.

<comment><USER11> > _The long-term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked > in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, > part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger._

Whoa. "Interesting" combination. More details, please?

<comment><USER12> I don't work for Raytheon, but I use a lot of their equipment and deal with their engineers fairly often when stuff doesn't work.

The government is _weird_. Especially when it comes to contracts. There's a massive process that goes on come procurement time - years are spent deciding who is going to get the contract, who is going to develop the technology, who is going to do the manufacturing, etc. Thousands of questions get asked and trillions of dollars are on the line. Contractors spend lots of money bribing, er, "promoting" their companies and explaining why they should be the ones to get the contract.

Then the contract gets awarded.

And, well, the oversight pretty much stops there. Once you have the contract, you've won. You're in the money. And there's very few checks and balances going on to make sure that your product actually works. They're going through this problem right now with Lockheed Martin and the F-35. They've gone through three failed deadlines and massive cost overruns... and nothing has happened. Nothing adverse. Just, "Here's more money, please fix it. Oh, and you're very bad people." Don't worry, though - when the next plane needs to be built, you'll still be on the short-list for who gets the contract.

The culture in an organization that exists off of this system is also really, really weird. It's not "Make a good product." It's "Make something that, at a cursory glance, looks like a good product." The two are treated the same, but the latter is rewarded much more because it's easier to put sham features onto something and takes much less effort. An engineer who works his ass off and perfectly fulfills three features in a system gets overshadowed by the engineer who makes a garbage implementation of ten features.

Then comes testing time, and the thing is obviously borked to shit. Well, here comes redesign time! There's no punitive measures on it - after all, design is completely different from the field, right? This stuff happens. So here's another 120 billion dollars, let's fix this thing. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you do it right, you can make a product that requires incremental improvement over its entire lifespan instead of making it correctly the first time. The result - everyone makes more money. And the government doesn't really care because it's playing with Monopoly money anyway. It's the end of August in my shop - my captain and master sergeant are sitting there saying, "We need to spend the remaining 20% of our budget on something. No, I don't care what it is. Justify it and figure it out, otherwise our budget will be reduced and we'll be fucked when something big comes up next year."

Now - inside this company, no one is actually saying to bork the project and show the 5th consecutive overfulfillment of the Five-Year-Plan. But you'll find that the engineers are not as good as they pretend to be, (their massive achievements are either flawed or completely made up) the managers are competing with each other for these massive made-up achievements, and the people in charge of the company are doublethinking making a good product and borking the shit out of it so that they can say, "We built this thing, so we're obviously the best choice to keep improving it."

It's completely batshit insane, and if you value any sense of reality, stay the hell away from any company that deals with the government. The benefits are really, really nice though.

<comment><USER13> Too Big To Fail. So it went from being applied to defense contractors to banks and certain brokerages.

<comment><USER12> In this case, it's just due to sunk costs. You've already given this defense contractor a trillion dollars. Ten years later, the contractor has a flawed project with a lot of holes in it... but what can you do? If you cut them off, then you have this shitty product that you've already spent a trillion dollars on. Getting someone else to fix it (or develop something else entirely) would cost even more. So you grit your teeth and pay them the 200 billion that they need to redesign and fix it. And then, when they still have a fucked up product a year later, you're facing the exact same problem... except now you've spent 1.2 trillion dollars.

The interesting thing is that in the long-term, it's actually a good idea to tell the contractor to fuck off. The contractor then goes out of business, and the rest of them change their tune really fast. Meet your fucking deadlines, or we'll cut you off regardless of the cost. The end result would be much more realistic cost estimates, better timelines, and a much smaller chance of fuckery. Of course, tell that to the project director who is getting hounded by Congress and is looking for the most cost-effective (short-term) way out.

In the brokerage and bank case, it's due to the government saying, "Well, we can go off of principle and tell them to go through bankruptcy like everyone else. But if we do that, then the economy will tank and we'll be looking at trillions of dollars in damages. So we'll pay the couple hundred billion dollars that we need to keep that from happening."

Unfortunately, that leads to the exact same thing as the contractors - <USER2> banks say, "Well, then all we need to do to get free money from the government is to get into the position where it costs more money to do the right thing than pay us off for making bad decisions!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> An interesting variant of this system is one where executives give or take points away from organizations based upon team performance. Assume that individual rankings go from -2 to +2. The CEO gives each VP points according to his whim and/or how well their organization did in the quarterly objectives. A favored VP may get +20 points. An underperforming one may get -3. Now he has to assign points to his directors, who get to give points to their managers, who give points to contributors. Now the sum performance review score at each subtree has to match the allocated points.

So you have fixed stacks, but they're at least relative to team performance and/or political favor. This system tends to depend on the initial allocations, so you should really get in the favored part of the organization.

Throwaway so you don't know which company I'm talking about.

<comment><USER15> Fifty points for Gryffindor!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All stories about how bad stack ranking goes like this: "I was a manager at X and all my subordinates were above average/great and the system forced me to give them lower grades."

But it stands to reason that since the system measures performance _relative to the average_ exactly half of the managers should have had the opposite problem: "all my subordinates were worse than average but I had to give them higher grades than they deserved." I think the former problem is much more common because people tend to overvalue the people they are directly in contact with.

I suspect that if the managers could set the grade freely from 1-5, the an unreasonable amount of 4's and 5's would be given. In a large organisation like Microsoft's the skill of the engineers and the ratings should follow a normal distribution.

<comment><USER17> And if they were all ranked within one company-wide group, that might not be so bad. But in the organizations I've worked in that used stack ranking, that wasn't the case. You were ranked within much smaller groups.

So group A, which, company-wide, would have had all average to above employees now has to drop some person(s) down to below average, within the group. That "below average" person - who would have been average company-wide - now gets a "performance improvement plan" or worse - shown the door.

And group B, which, company-wide, would have had all average and below-average employees, will now rank some person(s) above average. That above-average person - who would've been only average company-wide - now gets a bonus.

Should it work like that? No. Does it work like that? More often that it should; I've seen it - in mid-size and large companies.

<comment><USER18> Now that I think about it, Princeton University now has this sort of problem (since 2004) with its Grade Inflation policy, where there are quotas for the number of A's and A-'s that can be given out.

<comment><USER19> Academia is one of the few places where the bell curve should be applied diligently...because you want the students to see some sort of top to aspire to.

<comment><USER3> Not at top schools where most of a class may well deserve an A or B.

Outside of a period in the '60s (the draft) MIT never suffered from serious grade inflation (I've looked at the numbers), and the general rule is that if you've picked a suitable major you'll make As and Bs unless you're having personal problems.

It would be stark raving mad to grade its students on the curve ... and I've heard of serious pathology in schools that mechanically do, e.g. premeds sabotaging their peers taking organic chemistry (one tale had one deactivating many of his peers' alarm clocks). You just don't want to set up the wrong incentives, and I can attest that at least in the '80s MIT students were generally happy to help each other.

On the other hand there are state schools that by law have to accept every applicant who meets a random external threshold ... they don't have much choice but to flunk out large fractions of their freshman. But after the courses that do that, and often do that for a major, they shouldn't obsess on the curve.

<comment><USER19> MIT accepts only very smart people, to apply differentiation at that level wouldn't work very well: the motivation and aspiration has already been satisfied by the MIT selection process!

But even a good hard-to-get-into department (computer science) at a good state school (UW) has a fairly diverse-ability student body, so curves are quite useful in creating some top to aspire to. Even here, since the students got into the department and the bell curve is fairly fat in the middle (hard to fail), it doesn't create for such a toxic environment as being at the top is nice but definitely not necessary (even if you want to go to grad school). The trouble starts where being at the top is necessary (pre-med).

<comment><USER3> It also matters a bit more in the sciences, where an undergraduate degree is just a ticket to get a Ph.D. unless you want a career as a lab tech.

Also, this is in the context of Princeton, one of the best of the Ivies, I'm told the most academically rigorous. I suppose ... ah, here's the key: the Ivies have to admit _way_ too many "legacies", children of alums. Enough that it makes a _massive_ difference in their student bodies compared to MIT, where being the child of an alum doesn't hurt, but is no help at all if MIT judges you can't do the required calculus and calculus based physics. So maybe it does make sense to grade on a curve ... still, MIT grades on mastery, and I know if I found myself in this situation:

 _The undergraduate student body president, Connor Diemand-Yauman, a senior from Chesterland, Ohio, said: "I had complaints from students who said that their professors handed back exams and told them, 'I wanted to give 10 of you A's, but because of the policy, I could only give five A's.' When students hear that, an alarm goes off."

[ Followed by the dean of the undergraduate college admitting they've got a fixed quota system. ]_ ([http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html))

I'd find another school to transfer to, or at the minimum work out an arrangement for a great grad school recommendation from the guilty faculty (would not be hard since I can/could do research).

<comment><USER19> I agree that the curve should really be at the discretion of the instructor, not administrators, who is best fit to apply it reasonably. One of my colleagues was actually told the opposite in a class he taught recently: that he was failing or not giving A's to enough students in the classes he was teaching! It definitely goes both ways, but instructors are reasonably fit to decide how to do their curves.

<comment><USER3> The latter happens more than a little at MIT, and I've witnessed a department head tell a professor you've very possibly heard of that he'd never be allowed to teach a particular course again. That was after making him read every student evaluation, were were uniformly negative except for a single special case, which wasn't exactly positive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just to be fair here, the practice of applying stack ranking to very small populations was not standard across the company. I worked in Office for about 8 years. During those years I found that:

\- Stack ranking is communicated up front and the process is very transparent. Managers let you know how the process works, what they're doing, how you get bucketed, what they talk about behind the door, and will discuss your "calibration card" with you (the 3-5 high and low points they'll bring into stack ranking meetings).

\- The curve is not enforced on the level of a development team. It's not enforced in a product group. You don't see the hammer starting to come down until you get to populations of at least hundreds of employees.

I disliked the system (despite generally getting strong reviews) but it was not everywhere as demonic as it is depicted here.

<comment><USER19> Stack rank has not always been acknowledged publicly. Anyways, its fairly well known that the process is necessarily political, at each level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lived through this as an ex MSFT manager myself. The reality was having to throw direct reports under the bus and explaining to them the outcome was "relative to their peers". Then they'd look at a smaller team and see people with much less impact getting good or great reviews (less competition in those teams). Its an aweful system and firmly believe it factors into MSFTs stagnant innovation. Lifetime average, peer reviewing and open transfers are what's needed.</comment>


Ask HN: I got a coding assignment I don't think is reasonable - <AUTHOR> I interviewed at a place that wants people to be able to work full-stack but said they were willing to accept that not everyone was able to do so at the beginning.
The middle layer is implemented in a language and framework I haven't worked with since 2013 (the language I have used but only because a well known testing tool uses it for scripting so that's what I use it for).
When first approached I specified to the recruiter and to the company my limitations with the language and framework, in the interview I said I believed I could still do maintenance level coding in it (framework is MVC so maintenance is add some stuff to controller etc. ), but it would take me some weeks to a month to be able to contribute meaningfully. I said I was strong in Frontend, and I could of course do middle layer / backend work in other languages / frameworks I have used more recently.
So the take home assignment is to implement a financial payment api (with validation of Iban etc. ) in the language, framework I have not used since 2013. A '4 hour' assignment, from scratch.
I think this seems a little bit more unreasonable than the normal 4 hour assignment that actually takes 6-8 hours. How do you think I should approach this particular thing - I'm thinking call the recruiter and say not that interested in doing it. Other suggestions?
on edit: as always they don't "expect" you to finish the whole thing, but given what I told them I find it weird they would expect me to do much more than make some boilerplate. <comment><USER2> Then don't do it?

If I were you I would propose a counter-offer: "Sorry, I can't allocate time to a take home assignment, but here are links to an mvc application I've built in <language>: <github link> I think it demonstrates my expertise and I'd be happy to discuss the source code and how I implemented it!" If they take you up on the offer, awesome! If they don't, you'd probably not want to work there anyway. Especially if it's some bullshit like "We expect all applicants to complete this test." Fuck that.

I've been burnt many times by take home assignments. I.e I've aced them and still not gotten an offer. So I don't do them out of principle.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to say how unreasonable it is without knowing what the API you're supposed to implement looks like. Regardless of how objectively unreasonable it is, there is also the issue of how much you want the job, and if that is outweighed by the unreasonableness of the request. Perhaps you should also consider this an early red flag that XCorp might not be so great.

I would look at it this way: if you want the job and can spare the time, give the assignment your best shot; otherwise if you could spend 4 hours looking for other jobs to apply to that have more reasonable application procedures, do that instead.

However, whether you decide to do the assignment or not, you should tell the company that you consider the assignment unreasonable and why. Our sector is filled with shitty/unreasonable hiring practices, and I think as candidates we have a responsibility to provide feedback about those practices to provide pressure on the industry to change them. If XCorp starts hearing from a lot of their candidates "Sorry, that's unreasonable, I'm not proceeding", then they will need to revise their hiring process if they want to keep their potential talent pool open. If you decide to continue with the process and do the assignment, then the feedback also works to your benefit by signalling that you are an independent thinker who is willing to give constructive feedback on internal processes: if the company doesn't like that then, well I really wouldn't want to work there anyway.

<comment><USER4> I have a sneaking suspicion that some firms use this as a filter, to see if you can be pushed around. If you'll do an unreasonable assignment then you're more-likely to work unpaid overtime etc. If that's correct then doubly important to avoid those like a discarded facemask ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd say anything over an hour is unreasonable unless paid at consultant rates. If feasible say not interested.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I get take homes I usually timebox them to the recommended duration and then send in what I have, along with a note explaining that. So I might say "This may not be the most elaborate solution you've seen but I did it in strictly under X minutes".

4 hours as the declared time seems to be pushing it though - once you get beyond 2 I have seen the complexity explode, and a 4 hour assignment as you noted can easily balloon. One option might be to show off your project management skills and push back on the scope to negotiate something that fits your schedule.

</comment><comment><USER6> Really depends how bad you want the job. I've seen lots of companies with multiple layers of filtering including rigorous take homes.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would never spend 4 hours on a take home assignment for a job!

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know, this is what companies in my experience claim their take home tasks take - 2-4 hours, but it always turns out to be about 4 hours if you're lucky and absolutely nothing goes wrong at all (counting git clones, and pushes, and reading task description etc. etc.)

<comment><USER8> Most of the take-homes I've done were all-day (8+) tasks if you wanted to do it right (dealing with all edge cases, full unit tests, good UI if need be, etc. etc etc.) The company says not all of this is necessary, but you know the competition is going to go above and beyond, so you're screwed if you don't.

Also, take home assignments are usually _in addition_ to the whiteboard/leetcode round, not instead of.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just going to refuse any company that gives out take home assignments unless it's a FAANG-level (or similarly prestigious) company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> DocuSign tried to pull that shit on me a few years back. I politely declined and proceeded to get several offers at companies that didn't force ridiculous tests.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are 3 types of candidates:

1\. Need a job bad and would do almost any assignment to get that job.

2\. Want a job bad (not need it necessarily) because it is at their favorite company, unicorn etc etc.

3\. Just looking around for an opportunity and unless it checks a lot of boxes, won't change.

If you are #2 or #3, then you have choices. Otherwise, I would say go back to them and offer "I can do this in language x since I am more comfortable" and then see their response.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some companies deliberately give you too little time, to see how you handle it. Do you push back? Do you do as much as you can? Do you cut corners, and if so which corners, and why?

This is likely only partially an assignment to prove you can code, but the real question is what do you do when under a time crunch?

</comment><comment><USER12> It sounds like you're free to make your own assumptions and constraints. I would create an API with a payment endpoint, validation endpoint etc. Then I would have a basic web page calling those endpoints. I would not implement security, auditing, logging etc

</comment><comment><USER13> Send a reply saying that you've completed the challenge.

Say you've hidden the repo somewhere in the interwebs and in order to find it the recruiter will need to solve three riddles, each one more difficult than the last.

Then include just one final line of random characters and an encouraging "good luck!"

<comment><USER14> I must say, I love the way you think!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What language is this that you haven't used since 2013? Without this piece of information the whole thing feels abstract. Is it Ruby?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's Ruby, and api should be written in Ruby on Rails. I didn't want to specify but I figured could be guessed :)

</comment></comment><comment> d--b Just forward everything to Stripe

</comment><comment><USER16> Sub the assignment out on Upwork.

It's not cheating. This is not an academic exercise.

Simply, getting the job done through others.

<comment><USER10> Don't do this. Instead, reject the assignment and move on. Getting it done on upwork is unfair to both employer and employee in my opinion.</comment></comment>


USB 'critically flawed' after bug discovery, researchers say - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28701124

<comment><USER2> Seems like that would be more of an OS flaw than a USB flaw.</comment>


Using Waifu2x to Upscale Japanese Prints - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/using-waifu2x-to-upscale-japanese-prints/ <comment><USER2> The "cleanliness" of the resulting images is undeniable, but once you get past the sheer awe at how crisp and clear the upscaled image is, you'll immediately notice the loss of detail. It completely does away with any and all texturing, which is especially noticeable in the last image ([1] vs [2]) - look at the scales and patterned lines on the snake (?) around his neck and the white strands in his hair, and of course, the letters have been turned into (unrecognizable?) squiggles.

Still, in terms of pure shock and awe - they're jaw-droppingly nice for upscaled versions, to the point where if you didn't have the original, it wouldn't occur to you that this wasn't it.

1: [http://ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc165440](http://ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc165440)

2: [http://i.imgur.com/541uG5t.png](http://i.imgur.com/541uG5t.png)

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the demo site provides a configurable level of artifact reduction. This article uses the highest level. Here it is with none and some:

[http://imgur.com/a/cVVnC](http://imgur.com/a/cVVnC)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, on second thought, after seeing the low noise reduction result again, I suspect that may be an even better result for what I'm looking to achieve. Many of the details in his rope are preserved and the calligraphy appears to be in better shape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Waifu2x is not actually the first or only image scaler to use neural networks - NNEDI3[1], an Avisynth[2] filter used for deinterlacing can also do really nice image upscaling (and it's a _lot_ faster than waifu2x). Here's an example of what it can do to the images in the blogpost:

Image 1: [http://i.imgur.com/4cXr51v.png](http://i.imgur.com/4cXr51v.png)

Image 2: [http://i.imgur.com/PZAXeM8.png](http://i.imgur.com/PZAXeM8.png)

It doesn't come with any noise reduction, but nothing stops you from doing that separately from the upscaling process itself, and that way you should be able to control it better anyway (I find the reduction options provided by waifu2x really aggressive even with the low setting, it just kills tons of detail).

As a sidenote, when talking about something like image scaling, it would be a good idea to avoid saying something like _" image scaled 2x (normally)"_ as there are lots of ways to scale images and what's "normal" can vary a lot depending on what you're using.

[1] [http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kes25c/](http://bengal.missouri.edu/~kes25c/)

[2] [http://avisynth.org](http://avisynth.org)

<comment><USER4> NNEDI3 is fantastic - thank you for providing a link and some samples!

You're absolutely right that I shouldn't have said "normal". I update the post to clarify that this was using "OSX Preview". I did some hunting but didn't find any obvious pointers as to which algorithm they're using. If anyone knows offhand I'll be happy to include it!

<comment><USER6> Talk with the imgix.com folks about the CoreImage stuff. They're using the built-in re-sampling in their product.

Also chat with @deepbluecea who's done a lot of image processing stuff, including for Apple.

<comment> TD-Linux I looked at what imgix was using a few weeks ago on HN. The resampling they do is really poor. You can do much better with imagemagick.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501601)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, why they're going through all that hardware effort, I dunno. Simpler developer workflow I guess. Would be interesting to do a cost/benefit vs. just using a Linux stack.

<comment><USER7> The 'hardware effort' is to get dramatically improved processing time by using the GPU since they're trying to do it on a much larger scale.

I have/continue to use imagemagick and similar software-based solutions and they're pretty slow for multi-MB images (but most servers don't have good GPUs so it's the only solution unless you're building custom racks as imgix does).

<comment> TD-Linux Yeah, I'm not super sure about the dramatically improved processing time. Especially compared to a SIMD-optimized scaler. You have to spend some time sending the image to the GPU and reading it back too.

Especially if you set imagemagick to use the much worse scaler that imgix uses, I imagine it'd be pretty fast.

On the other hand, if you replaced imgix's stack with the high quality scalers from mpv (written as OpenGL pixel shaders), and then compared to expensive CPU scalers, I would expect a GPU solution to be a win.

Note that imgix also has to recompress the image as PNG or JPEG at the end. This has to be done on the CPU and is probably more resource intensive than any of the scaling.

<comment><USER7> You can upload 100s of MBs of texture data to a GPU in milliseconds. Sending and receiving from GPU doesn't actually take that long in comparison to the time it takes to process a multi-MB file in software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The NN was explicitly trained for artifact-free PNG sources of anime fanart. Which it handles quite well according to my own testing[1]

Its benefits are questionable if used on anything else.

I've also tested it on anime screenshots and in that case it's it pretty much is en par there with NNEDI3 (which is computationally much cheaper) because real world encodes actually have compression artifacts and those get scaled too if you disable noise reduction or everything is smoothed out too much if you leave it on.

So if you want to use it on anything else you really do have to retrain the NN first, otherwise you get results you could also achieve by other means (e.g. warpsharp, NNEDI or Photoshop Topaz)

Also, waifu2x only scales luma. Its chroma handling is just regular upscaling (whatever imagemagick uses by default. I think), so even that part could be improved.

[1] [http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1722990&postcount=3](http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1722990&postcount=3)

</comment><comment><USER9> Related, this really cool project:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks like it could be applied to a real-life "ENHANCE" button. By training similar algorithms with photographs instead of anime prints, would this be a feasible means of approximating detail from enlarged photographs CSI-style (not quite to the extreme one sees on TV, but perhaps enough for a police sketch or something)?

<comment><USER11> Something to keep in mind is that when upscaling, you are actually inventing (fabricating) detail. Tools like the one presented here are content to invent detail that looks pleasing to the eye, but if you tried to do something like this for photographs you wouldn't get anything that would hold up as evidence. You also wouldn't want to use this to guide a police sketch, because the "enhanced" image actually contains _false_ information compared to the original.

<comment><USER12> This upscaling can be considered a form of lossy compression. The pixelated images, while ugly, contain more information - the process cannot be reversed due to this loss of information.

> You also wouldn't want to use this to guide a police sketch...

You would, could and can. Take a look at police sketch software, it is a very manual version of this process. There are a very limited number of potential variations of the human face, that is why eigenfaces work for facial recognition. Consider the scenario where you have a photo of a human face, where one half is occluded. In manually reconstructing the image, you wouldn't place the reconstructed eye an inch above the chin - because human faces don't work that way. Neural networks pick up on that. There is software that tailors use in fitting suits, where a few measurements (like weight and arm length) can be used to extrapolate the rest of the measurements (like chest size and torso length). This works because of the limited number of potential human dimensions.

As far as use of these techniques for evidence... I'd actually prefer it to reliance on eye witness accounts, as the algos are open to exact measurement - unlike most of the other stuff that passes for "criminal science" (humans are still in the loop for fingerprint analysis, wtf?).

<comment><USER11> Yes, I'm not trying to say that software is useless for assisting in approximating detail for facial recognition, but software like this, where in goes a single image and out pops a single "clean and enhanced" image, with no manual guidance in between, sounds like it would be fantastically misleading. Somehow you have to express to the decision-makers (investigators, prosecutors, jury) that there is error and guesswork involved in this process, lest you end up with techno-magic like polygraph tests that are popularly understood to produce evidence that they really don't.

<comment><USER12> The "manual guidance in between" is where CSI is so incredibly screwed up though (toolmark and fingerprint examiners, polygraph operators, etc). The only criminal science that is actually reliable has cut humans out of the loop (dna, forensic document analysis, computer forensics). Even with the reliable methods, they are still probabilistic, which is exactly how the software we are discussing would work. As far as misleading decision-makers, well that is a more fundamental problem with the justice system... we really need to cut as much human judgement out of the process as possible. I'm looking forward to the day when speech recognition and language parsing are solved problems, because formal logic will fix this situation pretty quickly.

<comment><USER11> It's great to cut out humans from the loop where we can, but we cannot do so here. As you say, upscaling is lossy (de)compression, and no amount of math is going to reveal information that fundamentally does not exist in a source image. Furthermore, neural networks are trivially fooled: [http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool- computer...](http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool-computer- vision-raise-security-concerns) . I'd actually trust a trained neural network far less than a human, just like I'd trust the upscaling technique in this article far less than a human artist. Speed and automation are their advantages compared to trained humans, not quality.

<comment><USER12> > As you say, upscaling is lossy (de)compression

As are eye witness accounts, which have been demonstrated to be pretty useless.

As are fingerprints, a tiny sliver of (maybe?[0]) uniquely identifiable information.

As are autopsies, where the state of the corpse is maintained only in whatever the examiner writes down, x-rays, or snaps a polaroid of.

As are bite marks...

So you've got all that, plus your lawyer's sweaty appeals to emotion in a group of 12 people - of whom four will express a belief in haunted houses and two will claim to have actually seen a ghost [1]. You'd prefer that over an application of math that can be challenged and rationally discussed?

> Furthermore, neural networks are trivially fooled...

 _A_ neural network was fooled with the equivalent of a hash collision, one guess as to how to fix that :)

> I'd actually trust a trained neural network far less than a human...

I can't think of a single person I'd trust over math, once maybe Bill Cosby - but not anymore.

> Speed and automation are their advantages compared to trained humans, not > quality.

Well in this context I'd say that impartiality and repeatability are pretty important, which are characteristics more likely to describe a math model than an individual with the qualifications of a mailing address - and all the training that can be packing into a 20 minute vhs about civic duty played on a wheeled TV.

[0] [http://www.academia.edu/447251/The_Current_Position_of_Finge...](http://www.academia.edu/447251/The_Current_Position_of_Fingerprint_Evidence_A_Literature_Review)

[1] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/30/18-of- americ...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/30/18-of-americans- say-theyve-seen-a-ghost/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting! The effect looks quite similar to warpsharp ([http://avisynth.nl/index.php/WarpSharp](http://avisynth.nl/index.php/WarpSharp)), a sharpening filter that seemed to have some vanity among anime encoders back when video sources were not as crisp as they are today. There's quite a lot of detail loss in Resig's ukiyo-e example, but I imagine for most people the most striking part of it will be how much smoother the result appears.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great use case, upscaling print thumbnails.

Norman Tasfi made a Neural Net upscaler for Flipoard [http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling- convnets/](http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/)

I expect video upscaling next.

<comment><USER8> > I expect video upscaling next.

There is a directshow filter (madvr[1]) for windows that already offers a neural network scaler {NNEDI3, simpler network than waifu2x) in realtime.

[1] [http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228](http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228)

<comment><USER15> Interesting... If a Neural Network can be used for up scaling a video it means that you need to send less data over the wire for getting the same quality. This means neural networks can be used as a compression algorithm.

<comment><USER16> from the flipboard article:

"The final use case that we thought of was saving bandwidth. A smaller image could be sent to the client which would run a client side version of this model to gain a larger image."

Can be applied to gifs and videos, but this really depends on the usage case and if the client would tolerate such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It performs better on larger features.

Anime is almost never drawn with finer detail than the output resolution, so artifacts are not a problem. This is a low resolution scan of something with very fine detail, something which it is not trained on.

</comment><comment><USER18> He forgot to comment on how the filter destroyed the letters.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say "destroyed". Compare the text in this cartouche: [https://imgur.com/7fGJg4s,iWf4pXG](https://imgur.com/7fGJg4s,iWf4pXG)

At worst it seems comparable to the previous result. At least to my eyes.

<comment><USER18> For example, 4th character, two lines were converted into a stain.

<comment><USER4> Great point. FWIW, I've updated the post to include some of the cartouches, along with a cartouche at the "low noise reduction" level. The two lines in the fourth character appear to still be relatively distinct in this case.

<comment><USER18> That being said, I don't want by any means to disrespect the work, because it's clearly impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd just like to express my appreciation for Waifu2x's informative name. More projects could do with such evocative labels.

<comment><USER20> My neural network sarcasm detector is confused by this post. I was going to complain about it being the same kind of dim unintentional sexism as the original choice of Lena as reference image.

<comment><USER19> It was a backhanded compliment. The name is a bit... unprofessional.

On the other hand, it does help you grok its function, and I suspect the 'memorable' name is at least partially responsible for its popularity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I did a quick comparison between ImageMagick and Waifu2x using a common anime- style image: [http://imgur.com/a/teKVY](http://imgur.com/a/teKVY)

</comment><comment><USER22> The scans look to have jpeg artifacts?

If you really are working with the original source, you should rescan to png or tiff or even just higher rate jpeg?

</comment><comment><USER23> for comparison sake, can someone share the time taken to upscale some of these images?</comment>


"Technology abuse" – Rant opportunity here - <AUTHOR>

"It was then abused beyond its capabilities. It just happened, like many other silly things"
I have quite a couple in mind, but I'd like to let you first
Don't miss the chance, this thread is for it! <comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I start:

1\. Using the build tool ant for installing software

2\. Using the stylesheet language xslt for message transformation

3\. Using SQL for message transformation

4\. Defining the Web for machines (w3c)</comment>


Dayfie – automatic selfie every time you open the app, sent to all your BFFs - <AUTHOR> http://www.producthunt.com/posts/dayfie

<comment><USER2> Great job, guys! I have a lot of fun with this app. Something about the 3 second countdown when you open the app actually gets me to take selfies whereas I usually hate taking selfies.</comment>


Review My Startup: Recruitly - <AUTHOR> http://recruit.ly/

<comment><AUTHOR> Recruitly combines helpful tips with rigorous, step-by-step job application tracking. For now, the key features are:

      * Single-screen application: see and work on everything at once
      * Consistent structured approach to each opportunity
      * Step-by-step workflow, emphasizing "what I can do right now"
      * Tracking of key contact information and interview times

The goal is to job seekers to parallel-process many simultaneous job opportunities, with the result hopefully being a shorter job search time. This is my first HN soft-launch. I'd appreciate any feedback! Thanks for taking the time to look. The questions I am pondering are:

      * Is the workflow logical?
      * Does the sales funnel function effectively?
      * Does the product pitch resonate?
      * Is the current product a complete MVP? What's missing?

</comment><comment><USER2> 1\. The mystery sign up was a little annoying.

2\. I think overall you need to do a better job at telling me what this thing actually does, and why it's worth nine bucks a month. From what I can see, it just records notes about the companies I'm looking to apply too.

3\. I don't like the cuteness of the language. Say what you mean; accurately, precisely. (eg: Saying you weren't a good fit actually deletes the record.)

Other than that, it looks good. I've seen some others in this space that are a little ahead of you, but that shouldn't discourage you at all. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

In your opinion, are there specific others I should keep an eye to?

<comment><USER2> To be honest, I couldn't tell you. I do remember seeing some of your competitors in this space through HN a few months back . Search YC may have more details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a thought - You might want to extend the free trial for a month at least or offer a free version with basic features that people will be able to try out. Job searching is a long and tiring process. Not to mention, the process hardly ends in 14 days. So a 14 day trial would be hard for someone to truly experience the "personal assistant" value proposition that is being advertised.

<comment><USER4> I see the 14 day trial as a strategic "encouragement" to get users to pay. If I'm two weeks into using this service, have experienced the value it brings, yet have not found a job then I would be more than willing to shell out $9 to continue for a while longer.</comment></comment>


Grox, a library to help you maintain the state of any application - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/groupon-eng/grox-the-art-of-the-state-b5223f48d696 <comment><USER2> this is pretty cool! will give it a go!</comment>


Ask HN: Facebook browser? - <AUTHOR>

Many online giants have created browsers after establishing a significant presence or before in some cases (ie. Netscape, Aol, MSFT, Google, etc.). Has anyone heard of, or do you all see potential for Facebook to follow this trend and create a social network integrated browser? I have to believe many individuals, especially university students and less techy facebook addicts, would use a browser by FB. Undoubtedly productivity would go down, but I doubt that's what Mark Z is concerned about. I am interested to hear your thoughts. <comment><USER2> If FB really wanted to do something like this, I would think they would have a better chance by writing extensions to the existing browsers, rather than writing a whole new browser.

People do not switch browsers on a whim. But people install new extensions all the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Valid point: seems that a "social browser" of sorts, from within FB's walled garden, would accomplish with far greater effect -- and success -- the idea behind Flock and RockMelt.

</comment><comment><USER4> Flock (<http://www.flock.com>) is one such social web browser.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could see this being chalked up in the "bloatware" category on new Windows machines.</comment>