Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/taking-off-with-ita.html <comment><USER2> Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50 miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time for an answer if I potentially stand to save a couple hundred bucks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine.

We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to <http://matrix2.itasoftware.com>, put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights".

Many of our customers have something similar, but it's not always on the front page.

<comment><USER3> From the page you linked:

 _Note: Tickets cannot be purchased directly from ITA Software. If you find a fare you like, you can give the information from this site to your travel agent or airline when making a booking._

This is a deal breaker. I do not want to contact travel agent OR airline customer rep for booking my tickets. I want to find the best fare, enter my credit card and be done. Also, why should Travel Agent OR airline honor the fare which you posted when we all know that flight ticket pricing is highly dynamic?

<comment><USER4> ITA Software provides the back-end for other online travel companies. They don't actually sell tickets, so if someone is misinformed about their site and tries to buy a ticket they are told where to actually do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.

<comment><USER6> ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases.

Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a outline and link to the talk see: <http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html>).

RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time, which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC.

The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer. In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.)

This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.

<comment><USER7> That, and google has an aversion to common lisp... so it would need to be a rewrite.

EDIT: Mind you, I've only heard of the aversion to lisp, so have no data to back my claim up. That said, it has been mentioned several times on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023>

<comment><USER8> The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No".

That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700 million whose core tech is written in Lisp.

<comment><USER9> I don't think they'd have an aversion to buying a piece of legacy software written in Lisp if said software had a proven revenue stream and was part of the core underpinning to a major category of search they want to get into more.

However, it's reasonable for them to be averse to writing totally new projects in Lisp, in-house, because when you're at a huge company as a general rule you don't want dozens of different languages in use: it's inefficient and you lose out on a lot of opportunities to leverage skills across teams and across service layers if you do that. Lisp, from what I heard, didn't make the cut, despite it's strengths. They still allow a few though, and I believe they are Python, JavaScript, Java and C/C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but few people have heard of.

Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything else on the web in terms of travel search.

Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.

<comment><USER11> What are the others?

<comment><USER9> He could tell you but then Google would have to buy them out. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the FAQ:

 _ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site._

That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel.

<http://matrix2.itasoftware.com>

<comment><USER13> That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was something like that for a while.

I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).

<comment><USER14> Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the travel market pronto

<comment><USER15> I would expect it to be fully integrated into Google Maps. You can already find a route from A to B using other forms of public transport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead?

Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money.

Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain.

I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility to create values for its shareholders. But that doesn't mean it should keep expanding into anywhere "consumer-facing problem that can be solved with huge amounts of (needs for) computation". Just like Microsoft keeps on expanding into any desktop software market that has a rapid growth.

There are so many important questions that are yet to be solved. The search is still a pretty dumb statistics engine. Google still can't distinguish between "who wrote python" and "when was python written?". Wikipedia's Python entry shows up in both cases and other results are irrelevant. Why wouldn't the company who invented "20% time rule" continues to make the web better?

Maybe that's the nature of public company and maybe this is just another case where human gets sucked into the rules of wall streets.

<comment><USER18> "I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C." Well you have to remember more of the Unix Wars of the 80s. AT&T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix. The main thing that stopped that was showing that many of the code segments shared by BSD Unix and SysV Unix were due to AT&T lifting code from BSD (not the other way around). Plus in that era people started removing the C compiler from Unix distros as it was "too valuable" to give away. A very different world than now.

<comment><USER6> " _AT &T tried to sue everybody who had any dialect of Unix._"

Perhaps. They started with BSD (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi>), suing the initial commercial BSD vendor and the university proper. They utterly lost when it was shown they hadn't followed the BSD license with BSD code they'd incorpated in their own versions, that had been licensed to others and that were used for their own operations (they were thrown a face saving bone in the settlement that required a relative handful of BSD files to be re- written, but were otherwise skunked).

I'm not sure why they stopped doing this, although it's telling that Novell bought UNIX(TM) in the middle of the year in which AT&T settled with Berkeley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic.

Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.

<comment><USER20> I'm working for kind of a big travel portal and yes, we are shitting ourselves to the point that at least I am considering switching industries. I'm not even sure they did it for the content as much as for access to the raw data.

<comment><USER6> Raw, _massaged_ data. From everything we've been reading ("the industry worships syntax, not semantics"), turning those data flows into something comprehensible is a major trick.

ITA's start in this reminds me of the FU MIT delivered to Xerox when MIT bought their first big mainframe Xerox laser printer in the early '80s. Xerox wanted $100K to reveal the format, so instead a group just took one or more output tapes (a normal data flow was the mainframe wrote to tape and the printer read them) and decoded it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...

<comment><USER22> I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.

<comment><USER23> A tip I picked up from one of pg's essays for finding out what technology a company uses: look at their job listings; they don't lie.

In the "Operations" part of the company it appears you're right, "most work is in Python": <http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167>

In "Engineering", Lisp tops the "particularly valuable" list at the bottom of "Knowledge and Skills" for <http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130>

Farther down the same page they ask you to solve puzzles. "Puzzles submitted in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because those are the languages we use every day"

<comment><USER24> we should add ruby to that.

<comment><USER25> We really shouldn't.

<comment><USER26> If you (or someone else) wouldn't mind taking the time to explain it, I'd really like to know why your unsupported and vaguely anti-Ruby statement is so popular. I'm assuming that it means that the problems with Ruby are so widely known that you don't even need to spell them out in order for people to agree with you, but I guess I didn't get the memo. Why "really shouldn't" we? (Serious question - thanks.)

<comment><USER27> One thing, of all the dynamic languages the default Ruby implementation is by far the slowest. For anything that is slighty computational expensive, the default Ruby implementation is poor. Also think green, if you have lots of computation in a slow language, that easily adds up in a large data center in form of wasted electricity, which adds to cooling and is generally expensive. Some Ruby implementations try to get in the direction of, say, a Lisp implementation like SBCL - which is used by ITA. SBCL provides since quite some time a compiler that can generate reasonably fast code.

<comment><USER6> In Dan Weinreb's "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" talk he mentioned that SBCL was being used for QPX because of the quality of its compiled code (as I recall they started out with CMU CL so this was a natural choice).

For REs, Clozure CL was being used in part because faster compile times were more important and run time preformance was more than adequate; stateless business middleware is a very different beast than compute intensive route construction, where we can be sure the cutoff in optimizing choices is based on response time.

There were other reasons for Clozure CL, including the fact that it has a company behind it, one who's principles Dan and others have had long relationships with and ITA was buying one (man?)day a week of their services to support RES. SBCL is (has always been?) a volunteer effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you Google "google travel" no quotes, the number 3 result is:

<http://maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/> (Watch the video. It's priceless)

Number 1 and 2 are Google Directory entries.

So I guess they finally realized they need to take a $2 Trillion/year industry a little more seriously than they have been.

<comment><USER29> a very microsofty video indeed

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> strong move - shot across the bow at Bing/Farecast. I wonder where we'll start seeing integrations.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online.

 _FEWER THAN HALF?_ Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?

<comment><USER32> Corporate travel agents make up the majority of the other half, I bet.

<comment><USER33> Yes, corporate travel is a huge market, but service companies like Christopherson are probably becoming less relevant in light of all this new competition. Wouldn't be surprised if Google took this on..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Some funded sbcl work would be good.

</comment><comment><USER35> Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future assuming Google will take this to a whole new level.

I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz

<comment><USER9> In the near term, may be no major impact (visible to their respective users anyway, though there will be ripples under the hood.) Longer term, generally some flavor of bad. However, as others have mentioned, one silver lining in this event is that it may increase demand for some sort of pseudo-ITA replacement company upstart to slide in sideways and takeover providing this service. Perhaps new ventures will be formed to do exactly this. But there will also be chilling effects on other enterprises and projects. So it's really hard to say.

It definitely takes Google one step closer to a position where they can make Kayak/Orbitz-like sites a little more irrelevant. Are they all the way there yet? Of course not. Also, Google has a track record of being pretty shitty in certain areas (like customer service, especially human contact, voices and bodies, etc.) and so those are areas where they can still differentiate. Plus, there's still no sign of Google wanting to get into taking the booking orders. Just the fare/trip search. Search of any kind is something that clearly their infrastructure and scale is going to have massive competitive advantages in delivering. Booking: not really. And many OTA's and metasearch sites make their profit on booking fees and kickbacks, not really on search itself, which for them is more of a cost center (though they do sometimes monetize those use cases too in various ways as well -- this is where they will hurt the most, in medium term).

Also, Google has said it plans to honor the existing ITA contracts. But who knows how long or how pervasive that will be in the future. I personally know of one startup that came _very_ close to signing a contract to get service from ITA and we actually backed down ultimately, in part, because of the fear of lock-in to their service. Plus they were expensive. ITA is/was a bit like the Oracle of fare search products. Good shit, but really expensive shit. At least for a wee little startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dan Weinreb has made some comments on the acquisition, the future of Lisp at ITA/Google, etc.: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1481299>

</comment><comment><USER36> Antitrust?

</comment><comment><USER9> _gigantic_ move in the travel industry

ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement.

(I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

<comment><USER37> I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already?

My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that Google can do to really change things beyond how ITA already has?

<comment><USER9> A Google buyout of ITA could improve things in one simple area: resources. As in, way way more. Hardware and cash.

Even if Google made no significant changes to the behavior of ITA's existing code, if they instead just tweaked it to run on say millions of cores, highly distributed and parallelized in Google data centers, with gajillions of cached results -- endusers would probably be able to see better, fresher, more "long tail-y & last mile-y" and faster results. I'm just making an educated guess here, I could be wrong if there's some fundamental bottleneck in the ITA architecture I haven't considered (and someone chime in if you know that to be the case) but I don't think this will be an issue.

<comment><USER6> As far as I know ITA's QPX system has no inherent insurmountable bottlenecks, but I'm not sure Google's scale will make much difference anyway:

There's a C++ backend that collects and massages the various data streams and then loads the data into an in memory database. Much of that is quite parallelizable, e.g there are various data sources, the massaging probably needs only so much global state, etc.

The computational front end is an SBCL process that does its magic based on a copy of the in memory database. One process, one query at a time, that scales out very nicely.

I suspect the biggest tricks besides groking the data (hard since it's so messy and special cased) and their secret sauce that does the routing is maintaining the required availability. There I suspect ITA's service/operations culture has things it can teach the corresponding Google culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)

<comment><USER38> I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be successful there.

<comment><USER39> Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google.

And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.

<comment><USER6> How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.

<comment><USER9> Some hits, some misses. It's hard for anybody to say with authority just how many should have been hits but were not. I think it's unrealistic to expect ALL of them to be a net win. Nobody can predict the future, not even Google.

NOTE TO SELF: start a web-based service that successfully predicts the future. Sell out to Google.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Before the Flood — Sea level rise map - <AUTHOR> https://www.beforetheflood.com/explore/the-crisis/sea-level-rise/ <comment><USER2> That's a website promoting a new NatGeo/DiCaprio film.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like this[1] is the original data source, if the mods want to change the URL.

[1] [http://ss2.climatecentral.org](http://ss2.climatecentral.org)</comment></comment>


Highly Available WordPress on AWS: Don't Learn the Hard Way - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rtizzy/highly-available-wordpress-on-aws-dont-learn-the-hard-way-5c9ca308bdc6 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone. This is a follow up on my past article where I outline why doing this is often a bad idea™.

[https://roberttisdale.com/you-shouldnt-host-wordpress-on- aws...](https://roberttisdale.com/you-shouldnt-host-wordpress-on-aws-except- when-you-should/)

I wrote this article for the cases where it's been decided that AWS is actually the best option.

Would love to hear from anyone who has been working with Wordpress on AWS (Or other cloud providers) and the challenges you've faced.</comment>


Why did HN's traffic tank so hard recently? - <AUTHOR> https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com <comment><USER2> HN has the distinct privilege of not giving a single iota about traffic. That's one of the things I like most about the site, a complete lack of monetization. It's pure in this sense.

<comment><USER3> > HN has the distinct privilege of not giving a single iota about traffic.

If that was true, HN wouldn't exist.

> That's one of the things I like most about the site, a complete lack of > monetization.

But jobs are advertised here.

> It's pure in this sense.

It's better than most, but it certainly isn't pure.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe anyone pays to advertise jobs here (correct me if I am wrong) but it is available for YC companies to post jobs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm wondering, is that a bad thing? I would think that the less traffic that HN gets via Google and the more it gets as a percentage from the prototypical tech crowd, the less comments/posts it would get that aren't really conducive to intellectual discussions.

<comment><USER6> Alexa says that percentage of visits from a search engine has not dipped significantly. Maybe 15% to 13%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do people rely on Alexa's traffic numbers?

Serious question - have they ever proven to be reliable?

<comment><USER8> They're excellent indicators yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it's all the posts about Erlang ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145)).

</comment><comment><USER10> Similarweb doesn't show any significant change: [https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#over...](https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#overview)

Seems to be Alexa's bug, not HN's.

<comment><USER6> The Alexa chart is rank among other web sites. The Similarweb chart shows number of visits. Apples and oranges. It's possible that they are both correct. Similarweb shows a small decrease in number of visits.

It could be that there are thousands of sites with a similar number of visits. A small drop in number of visits might cause a huge drop in rank.

<comment><USER11> Also that other sites in the same 'bracket' increase number of visits. Even if HN's visits were increasing, they could still be rising faster.

Also when a site has been around for long you have to start taking into account the 'population growth'; how many new people gained access to the web this month? How many among those are tech-savy people? Does this proportion increase or decrease over time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure this is important at all for hackernews (benefit of people visiting it directly).

But there definitely has been a significant drop in keywords where HN is displayed on Google (probably because of the major algorithm "Medic" update on August 1st): [https://i.imgur.com/qCTC0xd.png](https://i.imgur.com/qCTC0xd.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> What does the chart show?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Same trend for producthunt.com. Probably an issue of measurement, not actual traffic. Most likely due to ad blockers and the like.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there an estimate anywhere of how many people have browser extensions installed that report back to Alexa?

I note that for ycombinator it makes it clear figures are an estimate. To get proper stats you need to embed some JS, right?

</comment><comment><USER15> I've had work to do.

</comment><comment><USER16> I only just saw this, but HN's traffic hasn't tanked recently. Not sure what's going on with that Alexa chart.

</comment><comment><USER17> Using it less to get more perspective outside of the startup bubble

</comment><comment><USER18> google algo changes have been happening as well

<comment><USER6> Alexa says the number of visits from web searches hasn't changes that much.</comment></comment>


Bioengineering 101 for wanna be Biohackers - <AUTHOR> https://mailchi.mp/539e5a2de22c/enrollment-open-for-pre-recorded-bioengineering-101-class?e=36c588555f <comment><AUTHOR> Low cost ($399.95) batteries-included Bioengineering Web Course by Josiah Zayner.</comment>


Y Combinator announces two new partners, Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/y-combinator-announces-two-new-partners-paul <comment><USER2> Congratulations to Paul, Harj, and YC. Really glad to see important things like Y Combinator grow, since even a small change at YC results in a huge effect on the industry given the influence that YC has.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

I believe YC is one of the most innovative places in silicon valley and has the potential to truly change the world by helping to create hundreds of new tech companies. It's exciting to be a part of that.

<comment><USER4> To expand on harscoat's comment, it's exciting to me (and I imagine to many others) that you'll be part of it, and I expect YC to be even more world- changing now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does it mean to be a 'partner'? Do they then get some percentage share of the company?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company>

<comment><USER6> Is YC structured as an LLC? I thought funds are generally LPs.

<comment><USER7> Usually in a VC firm each "raise" from limited partners is structured as a separate LLC. One VC might have a dozen different LLC's, each one associated with a different fundraising period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it speaks to the character of YC to promote Harj based on the job he has done; when I think a lot of others companies would have kept him where they hired him in at.

<comment><USER9> You don't have to promote people to show them they are doing a great job. Now, I'm sure Harj wanted the promotion, it's a big win for him, but promotions aren't the answer all the time.

There are lots of people who do NOT want a promotion, and you shouldn't feel you have to give them one. Often you can give them something more meaningful to them in the form of more compensation, bonuses, internal/external recognition, equity, etc.

When it comes to engineers, many prefer to keep writing code, not managing people, and simply want more recognition, equity or comp.

<comment><USER10> Receiving a promotion does not always require a significant shift in roles. Good tech companies allow engineers to climb the ladder while maintaining their propensity for writing code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will Paul take part in the interview/selection process? Will he participate more than the mentors dinner? & Congrats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, he's going to do everything we do. Kate Courteau is arranging for us to get a new, longer table for interviews right now.

<comment><USER11> Because he is leaving Facebook at the same time! [http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/12/y-combinator-paul- graham-h...](http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/12/y-combinator-paul-graham-harj- taggar/) Talent leave Google to FB. Now "one of the world's best hackers" leaves FB for YC.

<comment><USER12> Y Combinator is the next Facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's nice of you to say that, but it's impossible. The portfolio effect means that no investment firm ever ends up as big as the most successful individual startups. Nothing beats putting all your eggs in one basket, and having that basket turn out to be an outlier.

<comment><USER13> What about Berkshire Hathaway? Though, it's a pretty focused portfolio.

Perhaps YC will acquire companies in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> BH is more like a conglomerate than an investment firm. They're just a super- disciplined conglomerate, unlike the random ones that gave the term such a bad name in the 1970s.

<comment><USER14> More to the point, Berkshire Hathaway itself had only 19 employees as of the 2006 letter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean YC will be able to fund more startups in the future as you add more partners?

<comment><AUTHOR> We should be able to, yes.

<comment><USER16> At this point, you guys have seen a significant slice of the startup world. Has YC ever thought about how large your batches could become? You've said several times that the only real limit is the number of quality teams... but have you ever thought about how big that number really is?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've always approached that question the way hackers approach scaling software: we don't know where the limits will be; they'll probably turn out to be higher than we'd expect; the only way to find them will be to repeatedly expand, and hit and remove bottlenecks.

So while we often hypothesize about what YC would look like if we funded e.g. 10x more startups, we know better than to plan to. It's a question to be decided empirically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cool-RR I've been wondering for a long time, and this might be a good opportunity to ask: How do you pronounce "Buchheit"?

<comment><USER17> Looks German.

Buch = 'b _ookh_ ', similar to 'ach' or 'Bach'. Some Germans will pronounce this closer to ' _boosh_ '

Heit = 'height', as in 'Gesundheit'

<comment><USER18> Boosh-ite, I'd guess. You'd need two aitches for bookh-hite.

<comment><USER19> There are 2. It's Buchheit.

<comment><USER18> Ah, flip my comment around, then. Thanks for the correction, I didn't notice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just can't believe it took so long. PB has always seemed (from the outside) like a de facto partner. This can only make YC better. Congrats PB, Harj, and YC.

</comment><comment><USER21> I do not know who HT is but it is nice to see 'promotion' from within (being that he previously co-founded a YC company and exited).

<comment><USER22> <http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-harj>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congrats to YC, Paul and Harj!

I'd love to sit down with Harj one day and see how much he's changed since our school days. I'm really inspired by how much he's accomplished. Although, he's obviously worked very hard for it and it's well deserved!

<comment><USER24> ha i'd seen you on HN and dismissed the possibility you were the same Paul Joslin from school, that's funny you actually are. hope you've been well!

<comment><USER23> It definitely is a small world! I work as a software developer for a UK software consultancy, but dabble in my spare time on personal projects.

Techcrunch / HN / Reddit has been on my daily reading list for years. It's definitely been interesting seeing your story unfold.

If I'm ever over in Silicon Valley, I'll have to drop you a message as it'd be great to have a catch up and laugh about the old BGS times.

Congratulations again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Congrats all around!

</comment><comment><USER26> Incredible announcement, 3 days before (rumors say) Facebook opening their "gmail killer". I am reading this like a fat slap on zuckenberg's face(book hehe) Big thumbs up for PG for messing in facebook vs google brains war.

(edit: seems I wasnt able to explain I was trying to congratulate YC for being able to play in the big league where such companies are punching each other. I think this speaks a lot about how YC name is growing.)

<comment><USER27> > _..."gmail killer". I am reading this like a fat slap on zuckenberg's > face(book hehe)_

Maybe Paul just didn't want to participate in killing his own brainchild.

<comment><USER26> Didn't meant (I realise how unfortunate writing the comment I was) it was PG objective crushing anyone. Its only I can not imagine a worst moment for an engineer with so huge webmail background like this one, moving out of fb only 3 days from launch (the rest was buggy literature)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks like <http://ycombinator.com/people.html> doesn't list Paul Buchheit yet.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does this mean that PB is leaving Facebook?

<comment><USER21> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898669>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harjeet_Taggar>

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats - That's great news for everyone

</comment><comment><USER32> I thought it was "do no evil", not "don't be evil". Subtle difference, but not the same thing.

<comment><USER33> No, the submission has it right (AFAIK). My guess as to why so many people use the former instead of the latter is because they get their wires crossed with the whole "see no evil, hear no evil, do no evil" saying, which has a different source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Congrates Paul and Harj.

</comment><comment><USER35> Congratz to YC and Harj another step forward

</comment><comment><USER36> Ok great, but why?

Is there more to hacker news than the frontpage? How many people are needed to maintain it?

<comment><USER37> In case you're not trolling...

There is more to YCombinator than Hacker News. HN is just the social news website intended to serve the YCombinator crowd. Your best bet to learn more is to go to the YCombinator website; you know, the one without the "news" in the url: <http://ycombinator.com/>

Reactions like this (when genuine) bring more attention to the fact that HN has grown waaay beyond the YC participants.

<comment><USER36> Thanks, tried actually that but no page loaded, therefore the comment. Page loaded fine now though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This, along with other things, feels like we're headed into a new renaissance period in silicon valley. There's talk everywhere about fundamental changes to how venture capital is done. There's ycombinator, 500startups, founder institute, etc.

Paul Graham's goal is obviously to be the valley's biggest patron for starving artists, err, hackers.

All of this is very fresh and exciting.

</comment><comment><USER39> congrats to Y Combinator, Paul, and Harj.

it's an interesting choice to reinforce the demographic biases rather than trying to counter them. when you decided to add two partners, did you consider any women?

<comment><USER40> I don't think that's how it works. YC didn't decide that 'its time to add two partners' and then start looking for candidates. What actually happened is that there were people who were already acting like partners in everything but title, and this is just a formalization of that.

<comment><USER39> according to the interview with Paul B in the LA Times, "Paul Graham had mentioned it several years back but I was looking to start FriendFeed at the time. It's hard to do anything else when you are trying to start a start-up. He mentioned it again this summer and it got me thinking again." So it sounds like they actually _did_ seek out at least one candidate.

<comment><USER39> i was surprised to see this downvoted. it seemed to me that i had introduced a fact that directly contradicted YuriNiyazov's point above. people on HN pride themselves on being evidence based. what am i missing?

<comment><USER40> Actually, what you are missing is the subtext of my original message. I have to go now and tend to my startup, but if you want to email me directly I'll respond when I can

<comment><USER39> i don't really like email ... how about Facebook?

here's some subtext for my question: <http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2091>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Now these are all fine people.Maybe it's time to add some color and character to YC.How about a James Bondish cat stroking villain type as partner,who sits in a dark corner of the room during the interview.Meow - Make stuff people want.

<comment><USER42> That's either Elon Musk or Peter Thiel for bond-villainy.</comment></comment>


Diamonds Are Bullshit (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit <comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9251952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9251952)

Previous previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331565)

Previous previous previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988)

Or consider this followup: "Everything is Bullshit": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945256)

So this has me wondering, I've heard about people having their cremated remains condensed into a diamond. How much carbon can be extracted from a pile of cow dung? It might be possible to form an artificial diamond from actual bullshit.

<comment><USER4> There are even more previous discussions than that. The Priceonomics article is just a rehash of an Atlantic article from 1982, with a modern spin on it. Over a third of the Priceonomics article is just quotes from 1982 original. The original is a far better article overall, but no one has time to read longform these days hence why the rehash is popular.

Earlier discussions for the 1982 article:

279 points, 1237 days ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611)

140 points, 2073 days ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698)

96 points 2189 days ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Diamonds%20Are%20Bullshit%20po...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Diamonds%20Are%20Bullshit%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER6> Buying the engagement ring can be just the tip of the iceberg - <USER2> disappointing monetary ROIs when you start a family. You get different kinds of payoffs however.</comment>


The Commingled Division of Visual Attention - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130611 <comment><USER2> Very interesting, if unsurprising that increasing demand on attention reduces efficiency. I suppose that's what I dislike about the busy visual displays installed in new cars, and why I turn it off in rental cars. Hard enough to drive in an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar city without the additional distraction.

I'll read the article in detail, but seems logical that other sensory input would have similar attention-splitting results. I was thinking about the apparently preoccupied drivers using their mobile phones and trying to negotiate downtown traffic at the same time.

Lessons may be in it re: design/engineering of instrumentation for automobile operation and other critical attention tasks. Basically, would seem fall under the heading of constructing UI that minimizes risks to attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> So let see if I understand this--if as a test subject your task is to perceive two different criteria in the same scene concurrently, performance drops off dramatically?

Sounds about right. Take video games. Whenever I've tried one of those indie/experimental games where you need to deal with multiple problems simultaneously, my brain enters this anxious mode where I keep flip-flopping between paying attention to qualia A or qualia B. It's such a stressful mode. God, Towerfall is hard.</comment>


"REBOL is pretty weird"  - <AUTHOR> http://torquingwetstrainers.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/rebol-without-a-cause/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the REBOL user. I find this interesting as a unburdened review from someone who is not a REBOL user/fan.

<comment><USER2> I remember REBOL from year ago. I evaled it for a project, but never did anything with it. Nice to see it's still around.</comment></comment>


InKin Social Fitness Is Now In You Pocket - <AUTHOR> https://www.inkin.com/blog/en/inKin-Has-Gone-Mobile--Download-Our-iOS-And-Android-Apps-Today <comment><USER2> Curious if this is something you made.</comment>


Future Leipzig: Incredible Shrinking City (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.com/article/5287-future-leipzig-the-incredible-shrinking-city <comment><USER2> i find this arcticle almost completely misleading. just a couple of thoughts:

the city "once boasting a population of over 700,000" never saw more than 600,000 people after 1957. it's correct that it lost about 100,000 between 1990 and 2000, but as it is gaining more than 10,000 per annum for a couple of years now, it is approaching 600,000 in 2017 or 2018. in fact, it is the fastest growing city in germany[1]. i don't see how this correponds to "Since 2007, the city is regaining some population at a very slow level." Concerning vacant houses: "large parts of the city still remain quite empty" is definitly untrue. There's almost nothing left of the huge vacancy of the 90s and property prices skyrocketed.

long story short: think this article is a fairly accurate description of the situation of the Leipzig -- fifteen years ago.

[1] [http://leipglo.com/2015/12/09/germanys-fastest-growing- city/](http://leipglo.com/2015/12/09/germanys-fastest-growing-city/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like Leipzig would be an excellent place to work remotely. Cheap lifestyle, good proximity to interesting places like Berlin and maybe some cool stuff of its own going on.

<comment><USER4> I visited Leipzig and quite liked it. It has a lot of Bach-related things as he worked most of his life and died there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny that this article does not even mention once that East Germany is pretty well known for right-party extremists - and this might be one of the reasons of its shrinkage, instead of further development.

As a non German native, I find this one of the main reasons not to live in such a city. As far as I know ( but please don't take my words for granted ) Germany is investing pretty much to develop and to grow in this region (lower tax rates/fares for mortgages, lower house prices, and so forth), due to the fact it was deeply underdeveloped compared to the rest of Germany before/after 1990. However, my understanding is that this region is destined to be the "cheap" region with low paid salaries (companies like Zalando hire there). It would be a cool idea to attract cheaper workers, but first they need to solve these "right-party" problems - but this won't change any time soon, considering the political situation in Germany.

This is the region you hear about in the news when they mention people with "molotov against refugees camp" or similar episodes; this is the region Pegida comes from: exactly the cultural hub of Germany. Seriously? Germans are not like that (and if you talk with many of them, you'll realize it).

<comment><USER6> While it´s true that lots of the right extremist stuff started in East Germany, you have to see that there is a nationwide rise in right party activities and election shares. I think it´s also a European problem caused by the "refugee crisis" at all.

National "sponsorship" was a big deal in East Germany to develop that part of the country after the fall of the DDR and the Berlin wall. It didn´t work out so well, I think. Lots of companies moved over there, took the money they could get and moved on, once funding was over and you could produce (cheaper) somewhere else. Some companies obviously stayed, yes, but they do not necessarily provide well paid jobs, so the overall living standard won´t increase for most of the people, although rent, taxes and more are lower in some areas, yes.

This is what frustates people and makes them throw molotov cocktails against refugee camps, because they think the refugees are the problem. This damages the areas' reputation and keeps companies from starting there. I think the situation "over there" is quite complex and will keep Germany troubled for quite some time.

What I like about East Germany is the nature. There are really some quite untouched places which are great for holidays. I´d love to have a house or an old farm over there, somewhere in the nowhere for the times you want to get down.

<comment><USER5> It's pretty well known everywhere in Germany that East Germany is more right wing than other regions - at least all people I spoke with, who live in the West/South-West and North of Germany - and it was already like this before the "refugees" crisis (as we Europeans call it).

I am sorry, but you can't minimize the issue to "they think the refugees are the problem because of +30 years old problems". I don't know the history of Germany in the last 30 years, but I find it more correct to say that these people are just extremists because of other issues (the frustration was already there before refugees came).

I just found the article pretty biased. This is more marketing than journalism: hiding important negative aspects of your product while highlighting what you want to sell. But after all, Germany is getting better and better at it, unfortunately ... :(

<comment><USER6> Oh yeah, East Germany always had a, "well-earned", bad reputation concerning racists or right wing extremists. I don´t want to question that and I don´t want to minimize the issue, I just wanted to point out that right-wing positions are on a rise all over Germany, so it´s nothing "exclusive" to the East anymore.

And the frustration surely arises from lots of reasons, the refugees are just an easy outlet for those people there now. Like the somewhat-undefined unhappiness of the last 30 years can now be pointed to the refugess. That obviously is not true, but some people benefit from the fact that other people think that way.

I am totally with you that the article is not very well written regarding that. Perhaps the whole situation is not very known to the author and he most probably had some official documents and marketing brochures as sources and you will most probably not find "East Germany is nice, except that we like to hit immigrants and burn their houses down." in there.

<comment><USER5> > ... and he most probably had some official documents and marketing brochures > as sources and you will most probably not find "East Germany is nice, except > that we like to hit immigrants and burn their houses down." in there.

LOL!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Badly needed Buzz improvement #1: individually hide followees - <AUTHOR> http://anwag.posterous.com/badly-needed-buzz-improvement-1-individually

<comment><USER2> "My son's real first and last name, with a number of additional, probably location based infos just one click away." Facebook is exactly the same, and yet nobody is complaining that they've forced real names public.

As for his problem here, he can just hide his following list, which is now a one-click option when he first joins Buzz. That's if his son even has a profile, which until he joins Buzz, he won't have.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I don't understand why people are being hard on Google but give Facebook a free pass for doing pretty much the same thing. Granted, you have to put in your email credentials (something which scares me, but most Facebook users won't think twice) which gives Facebook permission scan your address book for 'friends'. They even retain email addresses that aren't tied to accounts so that if they are ever registered Facebook can tie them back to your account.

<comment><USER4> I don't give Facebook a free pass. I don't trust Facebook or have any interest in their services, so I don't have an account. I've had a Gmail account for years, and I'm being hard on Google precisely because it's "doing pretty much the same thing" as Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there some reason that 'blocking' a person wouldn't accomplish this? I keep seeing people request this, but within Google Profiles, there is a 'block' feature that you can apply to a given person. I admittedly haven't tested it, but I honestly can't imagine what else it might do.

<comment><USER6> OP is actually saying that he wants to be able to follow someone, but have them hidden from his list. His example is his son; he doesn't want to block his son, he wants to have their Google connection but not create a public list of all his nearest and dearest, with all the included information that Google provides.

<comment><USER7> But isn't it his son who decides what to share and with whom? (Or him through his son's account settings.) His son can block location information, or limit it to groups he controls, for example.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pay for a skill-testing based recruitment service?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm talking about a service kind of like interviewstreet.com, that helps weed-out bad hires by testing them for their sills and help you find people whose skills match those that you are looking for.<p>Would you actually pay for something like that? <comment><USER2> one part of what a recruitment agency does, but as a web-based service?

as an employer: no, either the application, the CV and a quick google search convinces me and the person gets an interview, or not.

as an employee (which i had been in the past): a company which sends me to a stupid online test is probably not the company which i want to work with anyway.

but:

do it anyway, and solve the issues mentioned above.

</comment><comment><USER3> Plenty of companies do, but it's a trade-off on the false negative front.</comment>


Note To Criminals -- Don't Call Tech Support  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071023-would-be-identity-thief-finds-himself-stumped-without-printer-drivers.html There are a few things in this world that thieves need to keep in mind in order to run a successful criminal operation. For example, don't take the cash you just stole from one bank to another bank down the street to have it deposited into your account. Don't steal someone's MacBook and take it to the Apple Store Genius Bar the next day to get help with OS X. And finally, don't steal a drivers' license printer from the DMV, only to call up the manufacturer the next day looking for drivers. <comment><USER2> People who steal computer equipment, and probably just thieves in general, tend to be pretty dumb.

A friend of mine had his laptop stolen. A few days later, the thief fired up AOL Instant Messenger on the stolen laptop using my friend's screenname and started chatting, taunting him and so forth.

Well, my friend called AOL and the police. AOL cooperated, his IP address and other info was given to the police, the police found out where he was connecting from, and he was arrested. It turns out he was living in a house with 4 other people with arrest warrants.

</comment><comment><USER3> Natural selection applies to criminals as well. I'd love to see some sort of Darwin Awards for stupid criminals.</comment>


More $99 HP Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2011/12/08/here-we-go-again-99-hp-touchpads-hit-ebay-sunday/

<comment><USER2> Will HP continue WebOs or will they switch to Android? If they're going with WebOS, i'll buy one.

<comment><USER3> I believe HP already announced they remain committed to webOS and that it was still in development.

<comment><USER4> There is, of course, the elephant in the room: nobody currently builds WebOS devices.

Which is too bad - I love my Palm Pre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >and with HP still undecided on the fate of WebOS I'm not going to spend my money on a potential brick

This sounds like a misnomer. Can a device that is primary focused around web- browsers be considered a brick?

<comment><USER6> And a device that can have Android and Ubuntu/Debian installed on it. The CyanogenMod team is working on porting Ice Cream Sandwich. An openly hackable device lasts much longer than a planned-obsolescence, closed-platform model.

<comment><USER7> I know the current way to get Ubuntu on it is the chroot method, but why hasn't anyone hacked the WebOS Doctor to have a boot loader to dual boot Ubuntu? Or even have a system like a GDM login that gives the option to start X/Gnome instead of the native environment so you wouldn't need Ubuntu at all?

<comment><USER6> The reason they use a chroot instead of a native boot is because WebOS has the drivers for the system already loaded. By booting Ubuntu inside of WebOS, they avoid not having compatible drivers for the system inside of Ubuntu. I don't know if all the drivers are open source or if today's announcement will change that.

<comment><USER7> Ah yeah, I guessed that's why they only had a chroot until now, but what if you modified the system to load X11/Gnome at the end of boot instead of going into their own proprietary desktop environment?

<comment><USER6> With the announcement of WebOS open source, it should theoretically become possible. Luna is just a desktop environment overtop a fairly normal Linux system. There might need to be a few extra packages installed to get Gnome 3 or Unity running, but as long as they can grab access to the video processor, it should be do-able. One more thing to look forward to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I gave a TouchPad to my mother-in-law for her birthday and she loved it. I think the TP is a great transition device because the interface is quite easy to use. Plus she was able to print to her HP printer, so she was happy. The TP didn't get a lot of love from reviewers, but it is a solid tablet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Curious about the ability to put Android on one of these (in case WebOS ends up a dead end) - has anyone here tried it? How'd it go?

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone managed to get the 32GB/$150 version from that Developer Device Program announced in November?

<comment><USER11> I didn't get one and I had to dig around to see that they have all gone. They didn't even have the courtesy to email everyone to say they had sold out.

If you go digging around the forums there is a short paragraph on it somewhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know if this will be available in Europe??

<comment><USER12> Ditto. Does eBay USA provide international shipping?

<comment><USER13> ebay doesn't provide any shipping. either use a dropshipper or ask the seller to ship to you.</comment></comment></comment>


Derek Smith on the Myth of the Magical Teacher - <AUTHOR> http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/03/myth-of-magical-teacher.html

<comment><USER2> It's not just teachers, but any popular media portrayal of someone being successful: the magical teacher, the genius investor, the miracle comeback kid, etc. You have Billy Madison, The Rookie, Kill Bill, The Karate Kid, all of these films showing someone going from zero to AWESOME in less than two hours. I think it's really just the nature of the media and how we respond to it that we want to believe that these kinds of people exist and surround us -- we want to believe that WE can be that kind of person, too.</comment>


It's just am iPhone, not a person. - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2010/06/i-guess-hacker-news-doesnt-like.html I think he brings up a very interesting point about how fast the police complied with Apple's request. Like he said, it's a f<i></i>king phone. People have to wait 24hours before police will start to looking for missing people. <comment><USER2> Not quite sure why this has been re-posted, this time with a fake title...?

<comment><AUTHOR> I never saw it, just saw the article he was referencing. My bad if it's a dupe.

<comment><USER2> Ah OK - what's with the title?</comment></comment></comment>


Proposal for namespacing in OCaml - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lpw25/namespaces <comment><USER2> This sounds invasive. Will it be possible to mix old/new compilers? (Because we support a large variety of platforms, some quite old, we cannot just upgrade everyone's OCaml compiler to the latest version all at once).

Plus I've never found systems like Java where module names follow directory structures to be very pleasant.

<comment><USER3> I don't know the answer to the mix old/new compilers question but it looks like it's only the directory structure of the compiled artefacts that's important rather than the directory structure of the source code. It looks like you could keep all your source in one directory (unlike Java IIRC) and then compile it with `-I` and `-P` options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we stop posting proposals or RFC's people have submitted as "X coming to Y" \- namespaces would be handy in ocaml, but until I see a patch with serious consideration from the developers on a mailing list/github/issue tracker/whatever it's nothing more than a POC.

<comment><USER5> You might want to take a closer look who proposed this before being so dismissive.</comment></comment>


Songkick Detour: Prepay bands to come to your city - <AUTHOR> http://detour.songkick.com/faq?locale=en-gb <comment><USER2> I see no US locations, are you actively operating in the states?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should clarify that I have no involvement with the company whatsoever, I just came across the feature yesterday and thought that it was a form of crowdfunding that actually made a ton of sense.</comment></comment>


Essential Cheat Sheets for Machine Learning and Deep Learning Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://startupsventurecapital.com/essential-cheat-sheets-for-machine-learning-and-deep-learning-researchers-efb6a8ebd2e5 <comment><USER2> Essential to create website traffic, maybe, but not for the engineers. These things have next to no additional value over official documentation, and are of lower quality than the official docs - like the "numpy cheat sheet" telling people that "np.float32" is a standard _double-precision_ floating point dtype ... really?

<comment><USER3> Generally cheat sheets are something you print out and put on your desk as opposed to having to search for official documentation. Because of the maximum size requirement, short and snappy references to functions / arguments for commonly used parts of the libraries are essential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know a good place to get started with Machine Learning?

<comment><USER5> Depends on what your goals are. I do very small projects on the side just for my benefit and I've found Siraj Raval's YouTube channel to be good for digging in without much of a knowledge barrier, as well as r/learnmachinelearning. This isn't sufficient to break into a ML job obviously, but it's helped me understand some of the basic contexts of the ML world

<comment><USER6> +1 for Siraj Raval's YouTube channel. Videos are quick, entertaining and give a good overview of a lot of ai/ml concepts. Some of the content is a little over the top (i.e. memes & breaking out into song), but overall really well put together.

<comment><USER5> I agree that it's sometimes over the top, but I do prefer that over a presenter who's clearly qualified to speak on the topic but lacks the communication skills. The dude clearly cares about his productions, and I really appreciate that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Syntax Matters? (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/04/15/syntax-matters-dot-dot-dot/ <comment><USER2> Yes, syntax matters. What is in question is why syntax has to be so tightly bound to intrinsics of a language? I think it is possible to have a meta layer above any programming language that can bridge particular flavor of the syntax of your choice to the underlying language. In fact, I have been practicing that for the last 10 years (MyDef).

To illustrate what I mean by meta layer, the preprocessor (macros) is a (crude) example of meta layer that is (in fact) independent from the C language. In fact, M4 can and has been used on top of many independent languages. But to have a fuller syntax layer, we'll need a more sophisticated (not necessarily more complex) system than M4.

<comment><USER3> While technically independent of the C language, the C pre-processor has the idea of C tokens baked into its core (such as refusing to ## together two things that would result in invalid C), which has caused some people (such as Haskell) who relied on the ability of some C pre-processors to sort of handle things that are not C, they have been burned as of late when dealing with ones that have refused to implement extra modes that allow it to process arbitrary text (such as clang).

The preprocessor is essentially specified so as to be able to be efficiently implemented inside the tokenizer of a unified C compiler stack (hence why token pasting isn't textual): it isn't really "independent from the C language". In contrast, m4 is fundamentally more "independent" than the C preprocessor, in that (as far as I know... my experience with m4 is much less, and mostly with respect to amateur-level autoconf work) it doesn't assume anything about the underlying text.

<comment><USER4> One of the curious things about clean layers of abstraction is how often they're counterproductive in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been in love with Lisp since the 1980's. But recently I came to the realization that Lisp syntax creates drag on embedded Domain Specific Languages because they wind up with the aesthetics of Lisp syntax, and sometimes that's not really the right design...e.g. implementing RSpec in Clojure loses any potential readability advantages that come with somewhat natural language like phrasing: surrounded by parenthesis and with terms reordered, the important point of human readability with little friction is lost.

That's not to say that there are not advantages to Lisp syntax. There are and they may outweigh other costs, but I can understand why people object to Lisp aesthetics.

<comment><USER6> RSpec remains one of the more controversial testing approaches in the Ruby community. DHH, for example, consistently knocks it. In this I think Hickey's comment remains gold: "there is no syntax you can create that will improve upon pure data".

But then I used midje (a Clojure analog to RSpec) with glee, so, by gum, my position is even incoherent.

<comment><USER5> My impression is that Mr. Hanson knocks a lot of things in hopes of finding someone to argue with...and here I am knocking. On the other hand, I think Mr. Hickey is insightful about many things, yet perhaps inconsistently, I still believe that code is potentially the most precise way of describing information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, syntax matters but I suspect that how we react to a language depends on which languages we come from. Familiar syntaxes usually make learning a new language easier.

Go through the code at [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Letter_frequency](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Letter_frequency) and whatever your background is you'll see some programs that will look almost incomprehensible and others that you can understand even if you don't know the language they are written into.

And then there is the aesthetic: some of those programs look beatiful, some look ugly. That matters too.

<comment><USER8> Completely unrelated to the topic but I'm struck by the Ada solution. So many other languages either make a map or make an array and then back out characters from numeric indexes.

Ada just lets you use characters as indexes. Ada will actually let you use damn near anything as an index. I use enumerated types to build lookup tables for stuff a lot when playing around with it.

<comment><USER7> Many languages have associative arrays that can take any data type as index. A Ruby example, intentionally written to make it easy to read (and maintain):

        array_of_characters = ["a", "b", "a", "c"]
        count = {}
        array_of_characters.each do |character|
          if count.has_key?(character)
            count[character] += 1
          else
            count[character] = 1
          end
        end
        count
         => {"a"=>2, "b"=>1, "c"=>1}

The one on rosettacode is smarter but it takes some time to be understood.

<comment><USER8> Ada has associative arrays as well. But it will also let you have normal old boring arrays with enums, chars and modular types as indexes.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Maybe naively, I always assumed that the difference between those two data structures is that an array has integer indices to be mapped trivially to RAM and CPU index registers, and associative arrays are hash tables. I googled this [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/array](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/array) and it seems that arrays in Ada can have only discrete indices. Example from there

        type Character_Counter is array (Character) of Natural;

I guess that the compiler maps Character to integers and uses index registers to access RAM. That would be character.ord in Ruby and in many other languages but it's a lower level construct.

<comment><USER8> I can for instance do

      type throw is (ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS);
      type result is (ME, YOU, DRAW);

      winner : array (throw, throw) of result := (
        (DRAW, YOU, ME),
        (YOU, DRAW, ME),
        (ME, YOU, DRAW));

      YOU = winner(ROCK, PAPER); --would evaluate to true

because types are cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847605)

</comment><comment><USER9> When I was a young child I'd type random things into the Apple IIs at school and they'd say, "? SYNTAX ERROR" "What is syntax?" I wondered. Decades later, I still make syntax errors.

</comment><comment><USER10> wether names are part of signatures is not merely syntax, as the article argues, but very much a semantic issue. It intrudces a translation step from one environment to another by translating selected parts of it to and from a list. Which forces us into odd semantics of order in places where order usually does not matter. While at the same time throwing away any semantics of naming, usually much more important.

Besides the usability issue of introducing the wrong order as noted by the article, it also makes a mess of things like partial application and composition. Consider a language like Haskell where this is a fundamental part how you design function signatures. There is a function for swapping argument order just to make this work. [1]

Had the semantics of the language instead considers binding names more important than ordering there would be no need for that. A -> B -> C would already equal B -> A -> C. In fact you could throw away things like curry and uncurry too if you treated tuples as records, {A,B} -> C would also equal A -> B -> C

Of course now binding names would be much more important than ordering, so something like a rename function would probably still be needed. But it couldn't be much worse than all the workarounds for ordering currently introduced.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12129029/how-to-change- th...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12129029/how-to-change-the-order-of- arguments)

</comment><comment><USER11> Syntax matters, but I think it is subjective. I know a lot of engineers who like the syntax in Java, for instance, but I hate it. To me, it is needlessly cumbersome and wordy, and I derive no joy from programming in it. I know a lot of engineers who hate Python's syntax, but I like it because it encourages consistency. My favorite languages at the moment are Ruby, Elixir, Python, Elm, and Haskell, and syntax plays a large role in that opinion.

</comment><comment><USER12> Syntax matters for ease of writing code transformation and analysis tools (e.g. syntax checking, refactoring, formatting, generation) that consistently and efficiently work. IIRC, it was a design goal of the Go syntax to make such tools simpler. C++, on the other hand, has a reputation of being impossible to parse with anything except a C++ compiler.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting that designers universally agree that fonts matter, but programmers can't agree on whether syntax matters.

<comment><USER14> Some dev does.

E.G: it's very important for the Python community and it one of the selling point of the language.

I tend to think that syntax IS very important for the very same reasons Guido does:

We are basically typers. Making a language with many special charaters hard to type on your keyboard is going to make you work more, no matter how you slice it.

Yet we read code 100x more times than we read it. Hence reading must be efficient.

But there is a soft spot between a code being too long or too concise, either abuse making it harder to scan. And we scan a lot.

Take the colon in Python blocks for example, it is syntaxically useless:

         if stuff: # <- the compiler could do without this
             foo()

It's main appeal is to improve your hability to scan the code:

\- your brain can quickly catch all starting block in all nested these indents. \- it's way easier to type than "{" \- you use it the same way you would do it while writting english (see this very post). It's familiar, and you are already trained by grade school to scan it.

So yes, since you will spend 8h a day reading source code, syntax is of the most importance, so you can express enough, and yet read it without too much though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree that semantics are usually more important than syntax in a programming language, but surely syntax can still make a huge difference to both productivity and reliability. Let's consider a simple example: taking a sequence of integers, and printing out those which are less than 5.

Here is how we might do that in Python, a language well known for its clean and simple syntax:

        xs = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
        ys = filter(lambda x: x < 5, xs)
        for y in ys:
            print y

That seems pretty straightforward to me, though the lambda expression is a little clumsy compared to a language like Haskell that specialises in combining functions neatly:

        main :: IO ()
        main = do
            let xs = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
            let ys = filter (<5) xs
            sequence_ $ map (putStrLn . show) ys

The output step in Haskell is a little awkward, as we have to be explicit about sequencing the effects, but this is more of a semantic issue than a syntactic one.

Now, let's look at a C++ version. The C++ standard library has provided built- in filtering algorithms ever since its first standard back in the '90s, but the syntax if you tried to actually use them was so bad that it took me about 15 minutes to even get this example to work:

        #include <algorithm>
        #include <functional>
        #include <iterator>
        #include <vector>
        #include <iostream>

        #define ARRAY_LENGTH(x) (sizeof(x) / sizeof(*x))

        int main()
        {
            const int xs[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7};
            std::vector<int> ys;
            std::remove_copy_if(xs, xs + ARRAY_LENGTH(xs),
                std::back_inserter(ys),
                std::not1(std::bind2nd(std::less<int>(), 5)));
            std::copy(ys.begin(), ys.end(), std::ostream_iterator<int>(std::cout, "\n"));
        }

This was an attempt to show a like-for-like comparison, though it's a little unfair because it also shows the semantic problem of distinguishing between built-in arrays and the vector container, and it needs a lot of explicit headers where Python and Haskell both happen to make their filter algorithms available as standard. Still, just look at that remove_copy_if mess. Unsurprisingly, approximately no-one ever actually wrote C++ like this for real.

We could tidy that up with a few of the more recent improvements, but C++ is still hopelessly clumsy when it comes to employing standard library algorithms:

        #include <algorithm>
        #include <iterator>
        #include <vector>
        #include <iostream>

        int main()
        {
            const std::vector<int> xs = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7};
            std::vector<int> ys;
            std::copy_if(xs.begin(), xs.end(),
                std::back_inserter(ys),
                [](int x){ return x < 5; });
            std::copy(ys.begin(), ys.end(), std::ostream_iterator<int>(std::cout, "\n"));
        }

In reality, I suspect many C++ programmers are still just going to write C-style for loops instead for simple tasks like these, and who could blame them? The syntax for the other tools is so bad that programmers will avoid using them, even though the underlying semantics of that copy_if are no different to the clean one-liners in Python and Haskell.

<comment><USER16> The "awkward" Haskell line could be rewritten:

        mapM_ print ys

<comment><USER15> Yes, that would have been a better choice. Thanks.

<comment><USER16> Using sequence_ and map can be argued on the grounds that mapM_ is only recently visible in Prelude in GHC (and not so in the Haskell standard), but using it is probably more idiomatic and certainly clearer.

<comment><USER15> I think both changes (mapM_ and print) are certainly clearer and probably more idiomatic today. Coincidentally, I wrote almost exactly your suggested line of code only yesterday for another project, but those simplifications didn't occur to me as I was writing my earlier post, perhaps because I reached the original form via some edits to make all the examples produce equivalent output. I'd love to say I was just trying to be careful about portability in this case, but I'm afraid it was nothing so clever. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Prolog is homoiconic.

</comment><comment><USER18> Please note that this was written in 2012.

<comment><USER19> I almost pinged Niko to be like "you know Java has closures right?" and then I saw him mention `ret` and was like "oh this is ancient, ok".</comment></comment>


Safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Lab's work on U.S. nuclear warheads - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-federal-nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal <comment><USER2> > the staff had become "de-sensitized" to the risk of a serious accident.

Yet again serious problems happen due to the Normalization Of Deviance. We really need to find a way to create working conditions that encourage correcting problematic situations immediately before the behavior becomes normalized.

Regarding the management/other problems... I encourage everyone in ever industry that is ever involved with _safety_ (i.e. most industries) to see Richard Cook's short talk about "Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems"[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60)

<comment><USER3> I'm picturing workers who have never spent time on wikipedia reading about nuclear accidents, much less in any books.

The list of nuclear accidents is hair-raising. The thought that a co-worker might assemble a near-critical mass nearby is... beyond hair-raising. Where the heck are they getting these guys, and what are they telling them?!

<comment><USER4> They are normal people, who follow normal psychological patterns.

In your root cause analysis, 99% of the time the answer should not be "human error". An error that one human makes will be repeated in the future by another human.

The problem is setting up patterns and processes in the working environment that are aware of these human limitations and that work around them. The air travel industry is a _great_ example of what happens when you don't simply blame the human, but look to fix the true problems that caused the human to make a mistake.

<comment><USER5> > The air travel industry is a _great_ example of what happens when you don't > simply blame the human, but look to fix the true problems that caused the > human to make a mistake.

Contrast to my company:

Our phones require you to dial "9" to get out of the building, and then "1" to dial long distance. A lot of my coworkers are foreign and in the process of trying to dial a cell phone number (international or otherwise) accidentally dial "911". When they realize their mistake, they hang up, not having grown up in America and learning to stay on the line and tell the operator that you made a mistake.

Company response? Threatening emails, verbal and written company-wide wrist slaps, and stickers on every phone that say not to hang up if you dial 911 or you'll get in trouble.

As a result people are now afraid of dialing long-distance numbers and so they simply avoid it.

Imagine if the company had instead tried to correct the true issue causing the errors (poor phone routing numbers)?

<comment><USER6> In many (all?) parts of the US, even if you stay on the line and tell the operator that the call was a mistake, you'll still get a visit from the police. The thinking is that someone who got a chance to dial 911 but then is discovered by a captor might be coerced into saying the call was a mistake. So they send the police to invesitigate ALL 911 calls -- hangups, mistakes, everything.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. I definitely made this mistake as a child. My dad's cell phone number started was 915-XXXX. I misdialed once and dialed "911".

I explained that it was a mistake, and they said not to worry about it and hung up. No officer was dispatched.

I wonder if something has changed since I made that mistake, if it's just inconsistent across the country, or if there is some discretion of the dispatcher to decide that the child probably did make a mistake.

<comment><USER7> I don't think anything has changed; I made test-calls to 911 (to confirm the call was routed properly) when commissioning new phone systems and never had police dispatched. I'd tell the operator that I was testing and wanted to confirm that they were showing the correct phone # and address.

<comment><USER8> It is something that every state and county could decide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The investigation further revealed that the penalties imposed by the government on the private firms that make America's nuclear weapons were typically just pinpricks, and that instead the firms annually were awarded large profits in the same years that major safety lapses occurred. Some were awarded new contracts despite repeated, avoidable accidents, including some that exposed workers to radiation._

The author buried the lede.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the author was trying to create a conversation about the misalignment of the lab's management and safety. The article goes out of its way to sensationalize industrial accidents with "NUCLEAR RADIATION" to construct a narrative of uninformed fear of anything associated with nuclear material.

It reminded me a bit of some of the Discovery Channel's shows where they stress that if this multi-million ton container ship doesn't stay between the two entrance markers to the harbor, it kill everyone on board and probably destroy millions of dollars in goods. The entrance markers are 5 miles apart. The fact is accurate, the narrative is not.

If you want to be really scared go read the OSHA reports on any of DOW's chemical plants. I would be willing to wager that more people have died in the last 5 years of industrial accidents at their plants than all of Los Alamos. The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster killed over 2,000 people, one accident.

The point is the article was not written to compare the risk of accidents at Los Alamos to that of other similarly sized industries, nor was it written to highlight the misalignment of lab management with safety goals. It was written to characterize nuclear materials as scary and dangerous and carefully avoids any way for the reader to compare that risk with other risks they are both familiar with and are not concerned about.

In short, it is anti-nuclear propaganda.

<comment><USER11> On the topic of scary chemical plants: check out the Chemical Safety Board's videos on Youtube. Mostly computer-animated recreations of serious industrial accidents.

<comment><USER12> Wow these are a great way to communicate risks in workplace safety. Here's an example video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QMaJqxqIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QMaJqxqIo)

This is a great idea. I wish more of the more serious post-mortems were this thorough in our industry. But I guess people rarely die, they just have millions of peoples data leaked or result in serious service interruptions, so we don't have much of an incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" they gathered eight rods painstakingly crafted out of plutonium, and positioned them side-by-side on a table"_

The unpleasant death of Louis Slotin [1] is an example of the risks these people were taking.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident)

<comment><USER14> The radiation dosage section of that article is a mess and I think shows a limitation of wikipedia. The writers managed to not use the same unit in any two consecutive sentences and sometimes not even with in the same sentence and don't bother providing any way to relate the different units.

<comment><USER15> So... fix it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" The resulting blue glow — known as Cherenkov radiation — has accidentally and abruptly flashed at least 60 times since the dawn of the nuclear age,"_

I'm not a physicist, but as far as I know the blue flash generated by a criticality is caused by gases in the air fluorescing. Cherenkov radiation is a different phenomena.

Edit: Seems to be confirmed by [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Blue_glow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Blue_glow)

<comment><USER16> "Cherenkov radiation could also be responsible for the "blue flash" experienced in an excursion due to the intersection of particles with the vitreous humour within the eyeballs of those in the presence of the criticality."

That's a pretty alarming idea!!

<comment><USER17> It's actually a well known effect.

Astronauts have reported seeing flashes of light when they close their eyes in space. It's believed to be caused by Cherenkov radiation from cosmic rays traveling through the vitreous humour of their eyes.

Source: [https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v228/n5268/abs/228260a...](https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v228/n5268/abs/228260a0.html) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12678106](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12678106)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another recent incident involving LANL and nuclear waste: [http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear- dump-...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear- dump-20160819-snap-story.html).

Essentially, they used a chemically incompatible kitty litter in bins of nuclear waste (I read another article somewhere that went more in depth about how the decision to switch went down...unfortunately I can't find it quickly, but I recall it had something to do with a lack of clarity in communication). That bad reaction caused the bin to explode underground in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and release radioactivity.

Shortly before this event, there was a truck that caught fire underground at the waste repository, shutting down operations. I think that event happening kept the amount of workers exposed in the bigger incident down.

From my experience, safety in these sorts of situations is more of a burden than a lifestyle from a worker perspective. Holding individuals _and_ their superiors accountable--not only those that do not follow safety practices but also supervisors--I think is the only way safety will actually be fully practiced.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Atomic Accidents" by James Mahaffey is an entire book of essentially criticality accidents. Well worth reading and entertaining in an often sick way.

<comment><USER20> "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser enumerates accidents related to nuclear weapons, many of which do not end in criticality due to sheer luck in most cases. Illusion of safety indeed.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

<comment><USER21> And also "A Review of Criticality Accidents", a short but action packed read referenced in the article. Nuclear materials are deadly in the most unexpected ways.

[https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf](https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf)

<comment><USER19> That's a really good read too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The report didn't tell the background about the private firms managing the lab, this is a much cleaner report: [https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201006/losalamos.cf...](https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201006/losalamos.cfm)

Another related story [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/safet...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/safety-lapses-undermine-nuclear-warhead-work-at-los- alamos/2017/06/17/87f051ee-510d-11e7-b064-828ba60fbb98_story.html)

<comment><USER23> It's been a pretty slow, sad unraveling of LANL (and to some degree the other two DP labs). The latest stories are pretty predictable given the transition from UC to LANS about a decade ago (I left the lab after the transition, since it was a morale mess - I really enjoyed my time there for about a decade before the change though). Things were already bad before that - the whole change of management from UC was in part due to a string of safety and security issues. Interestingly, I believe the issues that are currently being reported about have roots that trace all the way back to the last facility for doing that sort of work that got shut down up near Denver (Rocky Flats). The issues today are hardly new or novel - there has been some serious rotting going on within the NW complex since the Cold War began to wind down almost 30 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if anyone has considered building faux plutonium rods that can simulate criticality events. That is, they're packed with electronics and lights that display to you how much radiation they're giving off, and how close they are to going critical. They'd be electronic devices that measure each other's position. Accelerators could tell if they're dropped or banged on something. You'd also pair them with a faux radioactivity meter (Geiger counter), and perhaps a faux radiation dosage badge.

"Huh, if I bang these rods on each other, I see a flash of lights showing it was 50% to critical, I hear the Geiger counter jack up, and my radiation badge measures that I've just instantly received a year's worth of radiation. Ouch."

Maybe if technicians could experience first-hand how easy it is for these plutonium rods to go critical, they might be more wary of mishandling them. It's understandable how a person could become desensitized to the risk of something that they've never seen happen, where the threshold of that event occurring is not intuitively known.

When I'm driving my car in a high performance way, I can feel when I'm beginning to push the bounds of its traction. I can feel when antilock breaking kicks in. I get to experience the threshold where something bad can begin to happen. With fissile material, perhaps it is a problem that workers never get to experience the threshold boundary at all until it's too late.

</comment><comment><USER25> Getting people to believe in the dangers of things they can not touch, taste, see, or hear is often difficult.

<comment><USER26> according to reports it's tasteable (metallic) and visible (blue light). The problem is just, when that happens it's too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's a few things abut training and so on here - but the problem is that plutonium rods should never be somewhere they are not meant to be imho. So to remove the risk when a rod is put somewhere it must be in a special stand that holds plutonium rods, the stand has little holes spaced the correct distance apart so criticality can't occur. The rule then is easier - plutonium rods will always be somewhere they should be. Also maybe paint them blue or something.

Edit: upon thought if I was anywhere that had a rod laying on a table I'd get the hell out of there as soon as possible, cause it's just a recipe for disaster

</comment><comment><USER28> Also relevant: [https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/light- pe...](https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/light-penalties/)

</comment><comment><USER29> >PF-4 is also the only place where existing cores removed randomly from the arsenal can be painstakingly tested to see if they remain safe and reliable for use in the nuclear stockpile. That work has also been blocked, due to PF-4's extended shutdown, according to internal DOE reports.

I wonder if having another facility that can perform this work wouldn't provide the right incentive for the underperforming unit to improve. Competition is a healthy thing. Knowing that there is another lab that is doing the work to specifications should provide good motivation to improve.

<comment><USER30> Competition in search for excellence is a dangerous tool, management implements a metric and the departments optimize for the metric no matter what the long-term goals are. This is how Sears became run into the ground: [http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys...](http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/)

Armed forces around the world rely on _esprit de corps_. The British SAS don't have to compete against Navy Seals to know they are the best, they know already.

<comment><USER31> Of course if something analagous to the SAS selection course was used for hiring at these labs, methinks you wouldn't see sloppy work either.

<comment><USER30> Also the training. In special forces each serviceman is trained beyond the immediate job duties. If the commander or anyone with special skills dies during a mission someone else must step up immediately to replace them and of course they all had the requisite training.

You'd ask just how a nuke technician could even think of getting close to assembling a critical mass. Are they really that dumb? Have they never been told?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Most of these problems are what I call "paper safety" noncompliance (e.g. somebody not taking a refresher safety class on time). The problem will be solved by employees taking even more mind numbing safety training. You can also apply these principles to security violations.

</comment><comment><USER33> Without genuine selflessness, homeostasis or worse is inevitable. This is why in Japan you traditionally find the most enlightened Zen monks not teaching, but cooking or supervising the kitchen - because that's the prime point of safety vulnerability for a monastery.

</comment><comment><USER34> Seems like the contractors over that facility should be removed? What does it take to lose a government contract?

<comment><USER35> As a former DOE lab employee, I can't even begin to imagine the hassle of changing operating contracts, although LANL has really been putting forth extraordinary effort to get the DOE to try.

What's most irritating is that the DOE use a broad brush and go overboard where it's easy and clearly don't do enough where it's hard. I had to attend ladder training before I was allowed to climb down under the 4' floor in my computer room and the rule was made that we had to use ladders all the time. You can't even fit the ladders in the tile holes, but the rule was on the books because it was "safe!". There were so many of those boneheaded rules, but these boneheads are allowed near plutonium to photograph it for no scientific purpose? Grrrrr

<comment><USER36> You go full union and work to code, refusing to do anything until they provide a suitable ladder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think they misuse the word "critical" in the first paragraph. Surprising for Science.

<comment><USER38> Do you mean in the 2nd paragraph? I think they're using it correctly.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am very offended by the improper use of the term "accidental". Nothing described here was accidental at all. It was intentional. Insisting this is based on accidents, perhaps requiring endless more 'training', is counterproductive when the described acts were done with full awareness by qualified individuals who knew better. More training won't fix that. Therefore the solution of more training is doomed to fail.

What should happen, in my opinion, is the University of California, and all contractors and corporations, and employees and workers, should be fired, banned from industry permanently, and the entire system replaced, because none of this, as the article points out, are isolated incidents, but rather are systematic and endemic problems.</comment>


Ask HN: Do Startup Databases have copyright over the data on their platform? - <AUTHOR>

I have a question regarding Startup Databases that charge money to use their platform such as Mattermark (https://mattermark.com), Datafox (http://www.datafox.co), CBInsights (https://www.cbinsights.com), and Tracxn (http://tracxn.com)
who owns the data? They are sometimes or mostly just scraping publicly available info in potentially illegal ways in the first place so how can they then claim copyright on the data they have that is publicly available anyway?
Example:
CBInsights admits to scraping data of newspapers which I believe is illegal to then use for commercial gain, are they claiming they have legal contracts with every newspaper?
"We crawl over 12,000 information sources daily ranging from local, national, and international news publications to SEC filings to investor and corporate websites to social media sources and parse out structured data elements including company name, investor names, amounts, Board of Director names, etc. programmatically. "
http://www.cbinsights.com/venture-capital-database <comment><USER2> The quoted text indicates only that they parse out "structured data elements." The test for Copyright infringement is a four prong test.

1\. Access to the original work 2\. Copying of the original work 3\. Substantial similarity between the oriinal and the copy 4. Damages

If you were to compare select elements from the database and compare each element to the work from which is was scraped, would you find that there is a substantial similarity between the data elemment and the work in its entirety from which the element was obtained? If the answer is NO, then the tjhird priong of the test fails, and there is no infringement.

<comment><AUTHOR> the scraping they are doing is illegal in the first place, do they have written permission for and cite and source every data point they have?

By their logic, Someone can scrape their site and do enough manipulation on the data to avoid similarity's hence no infringement</comment></comment>