Your cyberpunk games are dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/05/08/your-cyberpunk-games-are-dange.html <comment><USER3> It's at the bottom of the article, but I think it's worth noting that Jon Peterson does some impressive work for role playing game historical documentation. His book Playing at the World is a labor of love, giving not only a detailed history of the early days of wargames and tabletop rpgs, but a history of the science fiction and fantasy genres, a history of games in general, and how those lead to the creation of modern rpgs. He then wraps things up with a chapter on how tabletop gaming influenced the star of the video game industry.

The scope is huge, the book is giant, and he published it under his own imprint so that no one could tell him to cut things. I found the section on Kriegsspiel particularly interesting. Highly recommended if you're an enthusiast for the subject, otherwise you'd probably get very frustrated.

</comment><comment><USER4> > The raid couldn't have come at a worse time for Steve Jackson Games. Already > in debt, the company depended heavily on new releases for cash flow, and the > confiscation of the GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript would significantly delay the > book's release. On March 9, the company let go eight people from its staff > of seventeen. Since the Secret Service did not immediately return the > manuscript, the team frantically reconstructed it from earlier draft > materials and hurried it into print.

The other moral the story: _always_ keep an off-site backup.

<comment><USER5> As the guy they're talking about, I _did_ keep an offsite backup. The GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript existed in three places -- my computer at home, my computer at work, and the Illuminati BBS.

They took all three. They also got my wife's in-progress Master's Thesis, and she had to restart from scratch because they refused to return even a copy.

I'm curious where the quote attributed to me was sourced from, as I don't remember saying that. However, since I regularly come across things in old backups that I had totally forgotten, both code and written text, it may be completely legit.

I'm kind of surprised the author didn't bother to contact me at all (I'm hardly difficult to find). We weren't awakened at gunpoint, for instance. That was Goggans. We were awakened by pounding on our apartment door at 6 AM.

<comment><USER6> Hi, I wrote the article. The long quote from you is sourced from a (pre-raid) article you wrote for Steve Jackson's house organ of the time "Roleplayer" #15; be happy to send you a scan if you're don't have one.

As for being woken up at gunpoint, that's sourced from a number of contemporary accounts, including a Mar 5 1990 comp.dcom.telecom post (reposted in Phrack #31) reading "The Mentor was awakened at 6:30am on Thursday (3/1/90) with the gun of a Secret Service agent pointed at his head."

I do apologize if it seems standoffish not to have dropped you a line while I was working on it - it's kind of my shtick that I work exclusively from documentary evidence of the era I'm writing about rather than from interviews today. No method is perfect, but the results tend to be pretty decent.

<comment><USER5> Like I said, it doesn't surprise me that I said that, I just didn't remember it.

But a random Usenet post from someone who undoubtedly wasn't there isn't a source, it is hearsay....

And how hard would it have been to look at the cover of Cyberpunk and spell my name right?

<comment><USER6> I hadn't noticed that your name is misspelled in the published version - <USER2> about that, I'll see if that can get fixed. It must have been spellchecked somewhere late in the editorial process.

And as for the gun in your face, obviously you know best what happened to you, I was just explaining why the article says what it says. I will not repeat the hearsay.

<comment><USER5> They had guns when they came in the door, but Goggans had said something to the effect of 'you'll never take me alive' on a BBS post, so they were a little more proactive in his case... :)

<comment><USER6> They did manage to correct your name in the story, fyi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _J. Eric Townsend reviewed a copy [of GURPS] for the early computer security > zine RISKS_

This looks like the review in question: [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10.03.html#subj10.1](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10.03.html#subj10.1)

</comment><comment><USER8> " he notes that "now it seems that anybody with any computer knowledge at all is suspect,"

seems like knowledge is what's being hammered on these days by propaganda. IIRC a kid was arrested for using DOS / a shell on his school computer (can't find the link, sorry)

<comment><USER9> I got yelled at by a teacher for this in the '90s. I used the command line to access things that weren't presented in the login shell's menu. Since the system had permissions which explicitly granted me the right to access other programs I didn't think anything of it... but he thought differently and accused me of hacking.

<comment><USER10> We had a similar outbreak of NETSEND at my high school. A couple of kids were suspended (for sending bad things) but the chorus of kids explaining how easy it was to send anonymous messages to the entire school caused them to actually secure the computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Our cyberspace today has its share of problems, but it is no dystopia"

Really? What changed? The government at least got more proficient at using the Internet, I guess.

<comment><USER12> I had just copied this to paste here.

That someone is able to write such an article and at the very end wrap it up like this, today, after everything that the whole world knows for a fact, this scares me more than anything in the article.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, ultimately I think the Internet today is a lot more open and a lot more beneficial to liberal society than any network was in 1990. I understand why you gag at that, but, I can imagine much, much worse outcomes than we got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Role-playing games were dangerous: they warped fragile young minds, breaking down the barriers between the real and the imaginary. The irony is that it was the authorities, not the players, who couldn't tell a game from reality."

... well said.

<comment><USER14> What is the quote again? "Do not expect a man to grasp it, when his continued employment depends on him not doing so".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've read a couple of previous write-ups regarding the raid on Steve Jackson Games, but this one provided a number of details I don't remember the others having (though I could have just failed to remember them).

<comment><USER16> Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling's non-fiction book _The Hacker Crackdown_ covers the era pretty well, and is freely available. Sterling, after all, coined the very phrase "Information wants to be free."

[http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html](http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html)

<comment><USER17> per [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free) the phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

<comment><USER16> Huh. Looks like I've wrongly attributed that phrase for pretty much its entire lifetime!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember this from when it happened. The SJG raid and sun devil made me join the eff. At the time it looked like we needed help defending against the war on information.

</comment><comment><USER19> Had no idea Legion of Doom were connected to GURPS. Good read.

<comment><USER5> LOD is even thanked in the book credits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are degrees of Black hat hacking. Let's not make the laws so serve most Americans don't even think about ways to penetrate a system?

While other countries, like Russia, and China--seem to encourage their citizens to become better black hat Hackers? Russian Hackers seem pretty efficient, and we can't touch them.

prosecutorial laws should be not so heavy handed. A Prosecuter should not be able to stack charge after charge against a black hat Hacker(like Arron Schwartz)--to the point where he commits suicide. Or, make Black Hat Hackers so angry with their government they turn their backs if asked to help? Crimes --even computer crimes are not black and white; neither should the punishment be one big blow in order to send a message.

When other countries become better Hackers than Americans and take over critical infrastructure; I picture some Gsometing government employee scouring Google trying to figure out exactly what the Russians and Chinese have done to our servers? Or worse, hiring some slick security outfit who claims they know how to fix the intrusion?

(No wonder Hackers keep Obama up at night? I don't think he was referring to American Hackers either?)

</comment><comment><USER21> I am not sure which is more dangerous, the era in which the government did not understand the Internet, and accidentally lashed out in hysterical fear against non-threats, or the era in which the government does understand the Internet, and deliberately lashes out in hysterical fear against non-threats.

<comment><USER22> Or the era in which the government does understand the Internet, and deliberately attacks actual threats…getting caught in the crossfire is never fun, no matter how legitimate the battle. How many people died in the Battle of Britain from shells, shrapnel and planes falling on them? But of course, many more would have died had the RAF not fought the Luftwaffe.

Likewise, how many will suffer today in the crossfire between criminal gangs, extremist organisations and legitimate governments? How many would suffer if legitimate governments didn't fight?

<comment><USER23> >Likewise, how many will suffer today in the crossfire between criminal gangs, extremist organisations and legitimate governments? How many would suffer if legitimate governments didn't fight?

About as many, or even less.

Governments not using mass surveillance, and other forms of spying on their own citizens, implies the following benefits:

The money spent on mass surveillance is either spent elsewhere (so you merely need to find a more productive use of those untold billions to decide that the surveillance is not worth it) or not collected as taxes or tariffs to begin with.

The man hours spent constructing, maintaining and operating the apparatus of surveillance is spent elsewhere (this coincides with the benefit above, where the government takes engineering talent and uses it for more productive projects or increases the supply of engineering talent in the private market alongside a tax rebate).

The money & man hours spent by innocent people (read: people caught in 'crossfire') defending themselves from mass surveillance is free to be spent on more productive projects (whereas now it merely serves to lower the impact of the 'crossfire').

The chilling effect caused by mass surveillance ceases to exist (or is at least less in the world where people are unsure whether mass surveillance occurs vs. the world where they know it occurs for sure).

As for the detriments, I'm not sure how effective mass surveillance has been at achieving its stated goal - while I cant reliably reason about a world where mass surveillance never existed, I can say that the impact of domestic and international terrorism on the quality of life in US and Europe was not high prior to mass surveillance and that I see no good reason to believe it should have increased dramatically enough to justify both the resources spent and the loss of privacy (or even either of those separately) - but this is an argument that you need to make, I can't provide it for you.

I'm also not aware of any notable achievements of the mass surveillance programs, and although these may be classified, I doubt they exist since the US gov't still refuses fair trials to the alleged terrorists it imprisons, and if the surveillance projects had generated a significant amount of useful, incriminating evidence this would not be necessary (under the, imo, fair assumption that the reason they avoid trial is that the govt is incapable of proving guilt in many relevant).

<comment><USER24> Intelligence collection is not about security but about * control*, though security is a small subset of control.

The problem is that, as Gall's Law states, systems and organization eventually become counter productive: the NSA and the security industry generally are threats to individual and national security.

<comment><USER25>
         <comment class="devils_advocate">

This seems like a mighty conspiracist view on the topic. There haven't been any inklings, covert or overt, that the recent actions taken by governments are for anything other than their stated goals.

How can you confidently say that this is about control and not security?

<comment><USER24> Have you ever managed an organization? Then you would understand why it is a fundamental need for those in control to have the maximum amount of information possible. It's impossible to govern an organization of you know nothing about it.

That you call it a conspiracy betrays your ignorance of this matter.

<comment><USER25> You just did an excellent job of not answering the literally one question I asked you. Could you do that, please?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The AP Is Using Twitter To Send People To Facebook. Wait. What? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/20/the-ap-twitter-facebook/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> They probably just have one publishing to the other automatically. Where tweet links are hosted is hardly something that most big companies care about.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly what's happening. When you create a Facebook page, it gives you the option to hook it up to Twitter.

The only interesting part of this story is what uninformed jackasses tech journalists can be. I mean come on... a tiny bit of investigation and this "story" never happens.</comment></comment>


Theoretical Computer Science Cheat Sheet [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/cheat.pdf <comment><USER2> This seems more like a cheat sheet of applied mathematics with CS flavoring than a theoretical CS cheat sheet...

<comment><USER3> Seriously. Five pages of calculus? Come on. A real cheat sheet might have:

* Optimal asymptotic time/space efficiencies for the most important problems

* The best known exponent for matrix multiplication

* Names and definitions of some popular complexity classes

* Some common but not obvious big/little O comparisons

* Dual conversions from optimization

* Probabilistic bounds used all over CS (Chernoff, Chebyshev)

* Basic facts about spectral graph theory

* The most often used inequalities like (1-x) < e^{-x} that follow from Taylor expansions

* Best known approximation ratios for various problems

* Central open conjectures like P vs NP and the unique games conjecture

* VC/margin bounds from learning theory

I could go on...

<comment><USER4> this has lots of useful formulas that are useful when you are stuck but no THEOREMS to really guide your work.

jkun, you have the honors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but woefully incomplete since it doesn't include a single turnstile-based statement. I'm still looking for the cheat sheet that includes an explanation for how to read and comprehend anything written by Simon Peyton-Jones.

<comment><USER6> [http://siek.blogspot.com/2012/07/crash-course-on-notation- in...](http://siek.blogspot.com/2012/07/crash-course-on-notation-in- programming.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recall for out PhD written exams we were allowed on leter-size cheat sheet.

The irony is the act of compiling such a sheet meant you temporarily memorized the information on the sheet and didnt really need the sheet.

<comment><USER8> Do PhD students have written exams? I thought they did research and wrote papers? How can you write an exam to test a PhD student when they are the ones coming up with the knowledge in the area?

<comment><USER9> PhD students take classes, and some of them do have written exam (in CS theory more than other parts of CS). In the US, where the PhD is 5 years, you spent a good portion of the first 2 years taking classes.

Before coming up with new knowledge you need to know what's already out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jaehyun Park's Stanford ACM-ICPC resources:

[http://web.stanford.edu/~liszt90/acm/](http://web.stanford.edu/~liszt90/acm/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Sheesh, I'm glad I didn't go to whatever school you guys went to.

</comment><comment><USER12> After a single page, it usually becomes quicker to just google it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sheets. 10 of them.

</comment><comment><USER14> what is the grid of numbers on the last page in the bottom right? (above Fib numbers)

<comment><USER15> 10x10 magic square, I guess (tested that by summing a few rows and columns modulo 10; got 5 everywhere. Rows and columns should add up to 4950/10, so that doesn't disprove the hunch)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Oldest browser extension still maintained? - <AUTHOR> I'm doing some research on browser extensions and I wonder, what's the oldest browser extension still maintained today? (Also, the first extension ever created?)
I found that The Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick was first released on June 3, 2003[0] (when Mozilla FireFox was still known as Firebird) and it is still alive today as a web extension.
There are other ones?
[0]: https://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/history/firefox/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't the first browser extension be something like some obscure 90s IE or Netscape toolbar? They was not only search bars but also email checkers, media controllers, notepads etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the infamous "browser toolbars"[0] came first. Luckily they are long gone. I meant the first "modern", single purpose, browser extension.

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

<comment><USER2> Well that's still will be something using NPAPI [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI) which means old. Back in the days browsers didn't have build in flash, java, divx player etc. so they was done by extensions aka plugins back in the days, so no, toolbars was not the only extensions in 90s. I guess there have to be some kind of extension that went from Netscape to Firefox etc. In there late 90s there was extension pack giving a lot of functionality to IE called MyIE (today known as Maxthon). You have to define what "modern extension" means to you because I have a feeling that you are looking just for oldest Firefox/Chrome extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your feelings are right. By "modern" I mean single purpose extensions as we use them today, a concept basically introduced by Firefox and later adopted by Chrome. Not ways to extend the HTML functionality itself (NPAPI) nor general purpose grayware (browser toolbars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Probably something awful like the Alexa toolbar.</comment>


Flash exports to HTML Canvas and JavaScript via Dreamweaver - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v69S22ZBBqA

<comment><AUTHOR> Really interesting presentation on exporting vector graphics from Illustrator and Flash to HTML5 Canvas. The Flash part is near the end.

This certainly addresses the iPhone/iPad Flash issue.

</comment><comment><USER2> No one's pointed out yet that this video was uploaded in October of last year, long before the iPad launch. This is something Adobe's had in the pipe for quite a while.

I hate Flash as much as the next guy (more!), but Adobe's smart enough to know when to hedge their bets. This could be pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Adobe actually taking the high/intelligent road? This is cool.</comment>


People work longer and different hours under lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://workplaceinsight.net/people-work-longer-and-different-hours-under-lockdown/ <comment><USER3> I'm technically working longer because I'm not spending 70-120 additional minutes of each day commuting 14 miles to/from the office. Despite working longer, I still end up having more free time.

It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.

<comment><USER4> I'm hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves.

The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension.

Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital.

I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.

<comment><USER5> I feel the same. The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me. As someone who grew up pretty poor it always fascinated me that my family and neighbors would buy cars worth 20k - <USER2> which would be enough to provide a very basic/safe way of living for the foreseeable future. I would take the peace of mind I would of had over having a status symbol that random people on the highway could look at for a few seconds on a trip.

Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.

<comment><USER6> > The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really > depresses me

I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!

<comment><USER5> I think that's fair but I think the amount of people that think they're into cars is far more than the amount of people that are actually into cars.

Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold.

Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means.

Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy.

I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get.

I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.

<comment><USER7> I agree. It's not just cars, it's also smart phones, expensive watches, clothes, and so on. At the same time, it is what provides a fake boost of the ponzi-scheme economy. Without all of this wasteful consumption there would be no SP500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe I'm working on average longer hours, but I'm able to more flexibly use my own time whilst doing so. I'll work as I'm watching a Twitch stream, for example, and I feel far more relaxed doing this than trying to focus 100% on work and only work. I can pick when I work, so when I'm feeling completely mindless and distracted at 2pm I can just zone out and do my own thing, but then make it up later.

For me, the hours might be longer (even not counting the breaks in the day), but the time when working is more relaxed. I prefer this balance.

<comment><USER9> This is a slippery slope towards overworking, where work blends into life. This isn't how things should be. Unless you're a PhD student like me :)

<comment><USER10> It's how "work" always was for thousands of years, before the office culture meme changed it during the 20th century

<comment><USER11> Oh so the internet and the endless distractions it brings with it existed in the 19th century as well? /s

You couldn't be more wrong. There is mountains of evidence that attention spans have shorted, and parent comment was a perfect example of that. Can't be arsed to deal with whatever you should be doing? Ctrl + pgdown to the twitch tab.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about you, but no matter how much I try I can't just spontaneously summon up focus if my mind's not commmited to it. I was that way in school, in uni and now in work.

Working in an office pretending that I can focus on the task at hand whenever required by the roster of office life is one of the biggest charades I've ever performed. It's not possible for me and I piss around on the internet on their time when I am unable to focus. I don't feel that's an abnormal situation for people, either, as it seems many of my colleagues also do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think I need to go back to the office just to get a better separation between work and home. Working during the week I'm helping with kids and house stuff, and if I have nothing to do for a few hours on the weekend I'm dialling in to work to finish stuff off I should have done during the week. Its all becoming a blur and I'm not doing either role well.

<comment><USER13> As much as I oppose forcing people into the office, there is nothing intrinsically bad about being in the office.

Two guys from our team are in a similar situation as you are and we've agreed on them taking up our office spots permanently. It's still simple to control and track contact in that situation in case an infection occurs. But all in all, it's been a great boost for their mental well being.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like those guys are either fortunate to be able to live on one persons's salary or they feel comfortable returning the kids to daycare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've definitely noticed shorter meetings and it is now more common to end the meetings when the topics are covered. However, there are a few people that I work with that simply must blather on until the schedule time is used up. Making up additional topics, begging people on the call to raise additional items which are always completely off topic and unimportant. Perhaps they are lonely, but it is especially annoying with video calls. I am going to get rude about it one of these days.

<comment><USER16> Rather than getting rude, get passive aggressive. Just drop off the calls and blame Comcast -- something that's more difficult to do in an in-person meeting.

<comment><USER17> Someone created a video background for Zoom that says "reconnecting..." in the same font Zoom uses for other stuff. They just put that up and step out of frame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a matter of time discipline. Start your workday at 9AM. Someone sending you a Slack message at 7AM - too bad - you are in the middle of your morning routine.

At end of day, log out of your work account or shut down the work laptop, whichever case may be.

You are not using your personal user account and a work account during the day still, ARE YOU?

<comment><USER19> It's partially discipline but culture plays a role as well. If everyone at your company is sending slack messages at 7 and you aren't it becomes easy to be branded not a team player.

<comment><USER20> > it becomes easy to be branded not a team player.

Which is not a bad thing in my opinion. :-)

As they say in Germany: "Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich ganz ungeniert." (When the reputation is only ruined, one lives pretty unbothered).

<comment><USER21> That is a pretty fantastic expression. I'm in IT, but I dabble in photoshop and was having fun making some silly photoshops for my coworkers. Word got out and suddenly I had a queue. They even asked me to do things that we were paying outside vendors to do (make logos). It got pretty aggravating until I finally put my foot down and closed the "Graphic Design Shop."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was let go but I found that I worked a lot longer as it was harder to get things done with two kids in the background. Even as my wife struggled to keep them away and let me work, inevitably I felt the need to help her or help the older one with online school. As far as telling people that I wasn't available at certain times, that just didn't seem to be an option.

<comment><USER23> What didn't work about telling people that you weren't available at certain times? I've had this feeling as well, but in practice I find that people either respect my boundary or try to get a reason and then argue with the reason—the latter type now just send me the signal that I don't want to depend on people like this anymore and that I should make space for new people. Asking more to trigger reflection than for an answer, rhetorically I think that'd be called. Best wishes. (Ps. It's true that I'm homeless, if you check my history, and I don't feel that's an indication of having boundaries not being sustainable, I think I just had a lot of old garbage from being weak that lead me here but I'm more likely to overcome it with this approach, even if it's slower).

<comment><USER22> I was in finance. Telling a senior level person about needing my own time jeopardizes my bonus. Which was 50% of my total comp

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love WFH but I found myself having serious productivity issues because I'm an ADHD guy and I'm having procrastination issues, and WFH makes it even more serious.

At first, I was struggling because I always wanted to open YouTube or just stay there and thinking about random things and basically doing nothing for hours. Eventually I have to secretly compensate with my own time regretfully.

Then I found when every time I compensate the work at night I'm pretty productive because I'm under enough pressure to keep me focus and not overthinking things. At that moment, I realized I can swap the time slots to maximize everything.

Now I usually try to start working in the morning, as long as I'm productive, and setup a timer to keep tracking on how long did I work. When I found myself stop being productive and my mind is wandering, I would pause the timer and just relax - do what ever I want, just not struggling anymore. When I feel I'm ready to work, I would go back to work, and repeat. The most important part is, if according to the timer I only worked 5 hours today and I ought to work 8 hours, I would start working no later than 9pm (given I usually slept at 12pm). It gives me enough time to finish my stuff, while I would unconsciously understand it's the deadline thus it gives me the pressure to focus and being productive.

It's pretty effective for me, and it helped me being able to keep being productive without struggling. Some people may argue it's not good working ethic, but as Martin Fowler suggested "Don't tell your manager (you're refactoring)" (because refactoring would be a part of developing). Usually in the office, there were times I have to force myself working in low productivity mode. I'm refactoring my time to keep both my productivity sanity.

<comment><USER25> IMO "good working ethic" is only about doing your work and doing it well. It doesn't mean anything about working continuously for 8 hours.

<comment><USER26> 100%. Don't let internalized capitalist guilt make you give your employer free labor. Working more for no tangible benefit is just deadweight loss on your end.

EDIT: Thanks for the downvote, anonymous capitalist HN stooge. pg, is that you??

<comment><USER27> Being very capitalist, I don't give my employer free labor. I make my employer pay. Capitalism is great for me.

<comment><USER28> If you're employed by someone else, you're probably not a capitalist, as in, employer of variable capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This says that people work 48 more minutes per day on average. I looked up the mean commute time in the US, and it's 26.6 minutes each way. So this would still be a small net win for people who are working from home. The win is bigger if you factor in being home for lunch and other breaks.

<comment><USER30> Sure, on the surface, that's ~6 minutes "won back" during lockdown... but time commuting and time working are not equatable. Speaking for myself, my commute is a time to focus on something simple, reflect, and listen to the radio or podcasts. Work, while more interesting, is infinitely more mentally and emotionally taxing.

Also, lunch at the office can be a nice time to take a break and socialiaze, whereas lunch at home can turn into eating in front of one's laptop.

<comment><USER31> There are winners and losers here for sure. Long commutes are gone but many people relied on their commute keeping their work hours more strictly bounded. You're right that the the office camaraderie is mostly gone—-assuming your office ever had any! I do miss lunchtime chats with coworkers—-and morning chit chat as we settle into the day. Unfortunately as more people shift their hours to better fit their different lives the possibility of a lunchtime connect goes away entirely.

But, this has given me an idea to try and start a lunchtime video chat at work. It might be harder with teammates in different timezones, and God forbid should it ever become mandatory. But it sounds nice in theory...

<comment><USER32> We've done the social lunch thing on video chat and while it has been nice it can also add to overall fatigue of being in camera and in front of a computer all day. It also doesn't scale that well in terms of number of people. Still though, having it there as an optional way to socialize has been a net positive

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The key thing here, as most people have noted, is that although it's a bit more time, the flexibility and lack of commute makes it an overall net positive.

I think this is actually already what most people doing WFH have already experienced. Whether you're WFH forever or just during this lockdown, the key thing is to be aware of your time and create some routines that break up your day in ways that bring you joy and peak productivity.

(stop reading if you dislike a little self promotion)

For anyone interested, I cofounded a startup ([https://reclaim.ai](https://reclaim.ai)) hat helps here. It lets you establish personal and professional habits and block out time for tasks, while preserving max availability for genuinely necessary meetings. If you're struggling with this stuff and on Google Calendar, give it a shot :)

</comment><comment><USER34> The obvious reason why we work longer: we have no social lives anymore ...

<comment><USER35> Yeah. I am extremely confused that you seem to be the only comment on this entire thread who isn't focused on commuting tradeoffs or work/life balance due to commingled environments, as if this is "life a small usual, except working from home"... I have _always_ worked from home (and think people who go to an office are crazy), and my job is thereby identical to what it was before COVID-19... and yet, I am working _much_ longer hours because I have absolutely nothing else to do :/. I used to go out to eat a lot, hang out with friends, go to movies and concerts and events, I live next to a university where I could drop in on classes and talk to professors, I used to go to a lot of conferences (which you could argue was "for work", but frankly we all know a lot of the time spent at them isn't just a vacation you can justify as being sort of related to your job; do I really need to go to CES every year? no)... hell: I used to spend a weirdly large amount of time just grocery shopping, as I enjoyed finding new foods and it was an activity around people I didn't _have to_ interact with (as we are all doing stuff), but since I live in a small-ish town (where I am even in local politics, which helps make it smaller for me) I would often run into people I know and exchange at least a few pleasantries; but now we all treat grocery shopping as something to do seldom, in bulk: it is all very transactional and you can't wander the isles for an hour, or get into conversations with people. So like, now, I am spending more time on random hobbies, but those are still a bit lonely :/. I have gained a bunch of weight, in no small part because I have gotten better at cooking... just for me :(. I swear I am mostly an introvert, but I know I have an extroverted streak (it is why I am able to be a politician and a public speaker despite kind of hating other people ;P) and I normally have ways to burn that off but I just don't have that at all anymore. I have watched an infinite number of movies and TV shows (I now have a "quota" to get through three movies a day ;P...), as my brain considers the people on the screen vaguely similar to being around other humans (this has even caused me to start following people I don't know on social media--like Instagram and TikTok--as it causes the same trick), but that only uses part of my brain most of the time (most movies aren't _good_ ) and so I still want to do something while watching them (which also helps my brain not realize they aren't made from real people). You know what working has? Coordination with other people on what feels like a shared sense of purpose. I need that right now :(.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder how much is people anticipating that a hammer is probably coming. In nearly all areas of North America and Europe, even the best managed countries are expecting some sort of economic downturn - and it's likely to spread and impact every industry eventually to some degree.

I know that I'm thinking that a bit. No one wants to be the easy pickings when the layoffs come rolling around.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If interested, this is the study they reference: [https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612](https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612)

<comment><USER37> What I'd like to know is how they collected that data from 3.1M people.

> To study this question, we acquired de-identified, aggregated meta-data from > an information technology services provider that licenses digital > communications solutions to organizations around the world.

I'm guessing Slack, Teams or some other company provided them with this data. If they have access to this data, then what kind of data do employers have access to?

> Using the span of time defined by the first and last email sent or meeting > attended in a 24-hour period, we also find the average workday span > increased by +48.5 minutes

So that's how they define a workday. When you're in an office, you have lunch with colleagues and there might be pressure to end it quickly, especially if your boss is joining. At home, you can easily take a few more minutes, which might actually be the 8% increase they are seeing here. To add to this, just because the workday seems longer, it doesn't mean that the entire time was spent working. It's possible to take more breaks when you need it.

<comment><USER38> > Using the span of time defined by the first and last email sent or meeting > attended in a 24-hour period

What a worthless definition. I often start my day with hours of development or debugging work that doesn't involve sending any emails or attending any meetings, so that would be completely missed. I can't be the only such person, surely.

On the other hand, timezone issues mean that I sometimes have late-night meetings, so I'd look really dedicated on those days. Of course, that'd miss the fact that I took time out to go shopping, make dinner, do some gardening, watch a movie, or whatever... all that now counts as part of my "work day" because of a late-night meeting.

Seems like they've come up with something essentially meaningless here. This "workday span" is (a) wildly inaccurate for anyone whose role is more than sending emails and sitting in meetings, and (b) totally ignores the fact that many people when working from home have huge flexibility to take breaks when it suits them.

Ah well... I suppose a publication "dedicated to the design and management of workplaces" has to try and justify its existence somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> From personal experience I can confirm: I worked longer and more efficiently during working from home (WFH). There were a few more meetings as well. Sometimes a few developers and I simply stayed in a conference call for almost the whole working day. I had to start maintaining a log o working hours to stop doing more than 8 hours. There was always that last thing I wanted to get done that day, often costing 1 or 2 more hours.

And that was still better than having to waste 1h+ on the way to the office and 1h+ on the way back. I am not sure I would decline, if I was offered to work 9h a day but was allowed to WFH. I would still start earlier and be done earlier than when not WFH.

<comment><USER40> My comuite was 2 hours two work and 2 back, getting up at half 5 every day.

Since the office is now WFH I get more sleep and am far more productive.

I two find myself doing 1-2 hours extra a day though I am trying to reign that back in.

I had always said at work I am just as productive at home as I am in the office and this lock down gave me the chance to prove it

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I really don't get why anyone who can choose when to stop working and whose compensation is not hourly would ever work longer hours. Your time doesn't belong to your employer.

<comment><USER42> Some people enjoy their work. It's not always 100% about the money.

<comment><USER41> There's a difference between "I enjoy programming in my free time" and "I will program my employer's stuff on my free time." The first one is enjoying what you do, the second one is a sucker creating value for their employer without being compensated for it.

<comment><USER43> That's an over simplification. My job is owning part of an open source stack. There's countless fun projects in that which aren't a necessary part of my job but are fun to do out of hours and and still happen to contribute to my employer's larger goals. Eg, refactor some subsystem to make it faster. Everyone wins, and because the source is open any future employers can see it also. Plus I enjoy working with my coworkers and learn a great deal from doing so: it'sa good environment for such projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am getting very tired of living at work. I miss going in to the office.

<comment><USER45> Agreed. Between work and non-work, I'm literally spending over 12 hours per day in my living room. No matter what some people would have us believe, this can't be healthy.

<comment><USER46> As a single person I've found it difficult.

I've made efforts to go out after work, spend time with friends, and get back into my hobbies.

But none of these are enough to make up for the 8 hours of social interaction I was getting each weekday by being in the office.

Also as a single person, working in an office environment downtown felt like I had way more opportunity. Opportunity to move up in the company, opportunity to meet a girlfriend, etc.

Oh well I guess there's Tinder.

<comment><USER43> I have a couple single friends in your position who were getting dangerously lonely. They got a cat in one case dog in the other and it hasn't fixed anything but it's given them a reason to get outside and a bit more of something alive in their life

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I in fact realized how much time I spent locked down in an office everyday. And it seems too much. And now with home office, I'm locked down most of the day again, at home. With this corona situation I was unemployed for 4 months. I finally had time for my own projects. And I was able to actually finish them. I'm now working home-office for a company. But the idea of earning money with my own projects remains.

</comment><comment><USER48> Not that the article claims this, but this doesn't mean lockdown is leading to _more_ or _better_ work getting done, of course. It may just mean work-life balance is harder now that the lines have been further blurred. Or maybe work without commutes is relatively more relaxing to the point where start and stop times don't seem to matter as much.

</comment><comment><USER49> I feel that I work more, but I spend less time at work. I may work 30 minutes more a day, on average, but save 2 hours commuting, $130 in mass transit and a bunch in lunch money. As others said, I can also modify my hours a bit as needed. I also have vastly more and longer meetings, unlike the article.

<comment><USER50> You spend 130 a day on mass transit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Personally, I've been working harder because I lost my sense of job security. My company wasn't hit hard, but there are so many people looking for jobs right now that I could easily be replaced. I feel I have to constantly impress my bosses to keep my job.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've reverted to my natural sleep cycle of 3:00am-11am or so. It has been great for my health.

</comment><comment><USER53> Someone should map the sentiment in HN comments on working from home during Coronavirus articles, I bet it would look interesting. I feel like they're getting gradually more negative. (I personally can't wait to go back to the office.)

<comment><USER43> What if your employer did the same as Twitter etc and declared working from home was allowed forever. Could you imagine moving somewhere you'd love to be - with excellent internet - finding new friends there and being happier than other situation?

<comment><USER54> If the new normal world is too dangerous to sit in an office together, how on earth would you find new friends if you moved?

It doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER43> Doing stuff outdoors or by other means staying apart

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's all about finding the perfect work/life harmony, though. Everyone's lives have slowed down considerably, and in many ways work is a necessary and welcomed use of time. As long as you have enough time to spend with your loved ones and pursue your hobbies, working more may not be a bad thing.

My thoughts on work/life balance: [https://gridology.substack.com/p/gridology-8-how-can-i- strik...](https://gridology.substack.com/p/gridology-8-how-can-i-strike-a- better)

</comment><comment><USER56> Oh. I'm definitely working more hours total.

But I might go to the shop or take a 20 minute nap if I'm feeling frazzled.

Overall I prefer this interleaving of my work and my life, but I appreciate that it shouldn't be expected.

</comment><comment><USER57> What will happen when people get burned out and they can't escape work to recover because they live at work now?

<comment><USER54> Feeling in the middle of this now. It's honestly starting to feel like hell.

<comment><USER57> Sorry to hear friend. If you have family and friends that can hang out with you, try making regular outside time with them. Heck, or just take a daily walk at the park (with masks,etc...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm working longer because now everyone expects my availability 24/7, rather than just during office hours.

<comment><USER59> Just turn the notifications off.

I turn slack off (currently in office until notice period is up then remote) even when I'm at the office and I don't have a phone on my desk, if someone wants something so urgent it's worth distracting me they can physically come find me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Anecdotal: I work less hours and different hours under lockdown. Burnout means I barely do shit and no one can tell the difference because I was just doing the same thing (YouTube and Twitter) at work anyways.

</comment><comment><USER61> My company has a strict no overtime policy for remote employees. I can't work longer even if I wanted to unless I do the work in secret.

</comment><comment><USER62> my wife and I both work full-time (SWE). Have been fun WFH with 2 and 5 year olds. And, I know, we are among the lucky ones who got to keep their jobs.

</comment><comment><USER63> Personally I see an increase in hours worked per week, but I feel like my meetings are more frequent and longer than average.

</comment><comment><USER64> I've been adapting my schedule partly to the weather. When it is hot during the day, I try to shift some of my work to cooler hours.

<comment><USER21> Ditto- except when it's lovely and sunny out, I'll make sure I block out 45 minutes to go do some yoga on the deck or garden in the yard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> People have to, at least parents do. Its pretty hard to get things done with the kids in the house.

</comment><comment><USER66> Is probably more spread out instead of longer they need to know the difference

</comment><comment><USER67> Horrible website, post the study instead.

</comment><comment><USER68> We should all be working only 3\4 days of the week.

When you think of it, it's crazy how we just succumb to the notion that we have to work at least 5 days a week (yay magic numbers) just so we can please our corporate overlords.</comment>


Ask HN: What resources are there for Search/Information retrieval? - <AUTHOR>

Other than going through the source code for Lucene/Solr, what books, articles or any other resources would you recommend that go over the theory/math/design of a Search system? <comment><USER2> Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning, Raghavan, & Schutze is my favorite. Available here: <http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! This looks really useful.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Interview Insider – Filter companies by interview type - <AUTHOR> https://interviewinsider.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

Today I'm launching Interview Insider, a site that shows the coding interview process at various companies.

I think that coding interviews are unnecessarily stressful and difficult, and people end up doing badly even though they're good engineers. And I think that more transparency will help improve the process.

Here's the main functionality at the moment:

* Filter companies by interview type * Find out what to expect at your interview * Read interview guides published by transparent companies

It's a super MVP so I know there's a bunch of issues, I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback as I work to improve it.</comment>


A popular self-driving car dataset is missing labels for hundreds of pedestrians - <AUTHOR> https://blog.roboflow.ai/self-driving-car-dataset-missing-pedestrians/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is really scary. I discovered this because we're working on converting and re-hosting popular datasets in many popular formats for easy use across models... I first noticed that there were a bunch of completely unlabeled images.

Upon digging in, I was appalled that fully 1/3 of the images contained errors or omissions! Some are small (eg a part of a car on the edge of the frame or a ways in the distance not being labeled) but some are egregious (like the woman in the crosswalk with a baby stroller).

I think this really calls out the importance of rigorously inspecting any data you plan to use with your models. Garbage in, garbage out... and self-driving cars should be treated seriously.

I went ahead and corrected by hand the missing bounding boxes and fixed a bunch of other errors like phantom annotations and duplicated boxes. There are still quite a few duplicate boxes (especially around traffic lights) that would have been tedious to fix manually, but if there's enough demand I'll go back and clean those as well.

<comment><USER2> > This is really scary.

No, it's not even remotely "really scary". No one is putting an actual self- driving car on the market using this specific data set. Disingenuous to pretend this is any indication of the data using by serious companies in the space or is represented of the impact a few mislabelled samples have on the ability of these systems & algorithms to generalize.

<comment><USER3> It's scary when you consider two other factors:

First, the AI hype train. People think that calling something "Artificial Intelligence" implies that it is artificial, yes, but also, critically, that it is intelligent. Many enthusiastic people, and also many policymakers, don't fully realize the extent to which machine learning is constrained by both the quality and nature of its training data, and the capabilities of the larger, non-intelligent, software framework that it's being plugged into.

Second, that we have one case study - the post-mortem analysis of the fatal pedestrian collision in Arizona - that strongly indicates that commercial products are not free of the sorts problems being highlighted here, and that, unlike what others have suggested, misclassification problems aren't necessarily an issue that's isolated to individual frames and that will come out in the wash when the software is dealing with a stream of frames.

Me, I think that self-driving cars are probably a lot like nuclear power. In theory, yes, it is a great idea. In practice, there are a lot of little details that one _must_ get right, and there seem to be a whole lot of opportunities for flaky engineering decisions and incompetent public policy, both enabled by insufficiently-tempered optimism, to scuttle the whole thing.

<comment><USER4> Given that nuclear power is significantly safer than other forms of power, are you asserting that the risks of self-driving cars are more about PR and perception than actual risk?

<comment><USER3> I'm saying that nuclear power _could_ have been a safer energy option, but, in practice, the whole enterprise has been scuttled by a bunch of regrettably bad decisions that have pretty much destroyed everyone's trust. So now it doesn't really matter if it's safer, because it can no longer realistically be considered an option.

<comment><USER5> If everyone believes that everyone else will be irrational, then they themselves will not throw their support behind nuclear power, rendering their stance on nuclear de facto irrational. As Baby Boomers age, and Millennials/GenZ form a greater percentage of the voting population, we have an opportunity to press the reset button on nuclear. The younger generations don't really have a solid opinion on the matter, and probably don't think about it much.

Scientists are in the best position to influence the public and push for change. It is astonishing that scientific organizations have been timid about nuclear energy, or outright against it, because of a few people with the most extreme, empirically unjustified stance.

<comment><USER6> Is it a tautology or just an unfortunate nash equilibrium?

<comment><USER5> As you know, a nash equilibrium is the point at which no player can benefit from a move away from the equilibrium. However, that's a concept from game theory. What is the game here? Who are the players?

Part of my point is that you might think that the game is "scientists vs. politicians, ignoramuses, and fear-mongers," but that's not the case. Sometimes they're all on the same side. Imagine a 4 player split-screen Star Fox, where the scientist leaves their controller and helps the others shoot down their plane because they don't think they can win. If that sounds baffling, it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is a self-correcting problem: these pedestrains won't be present in the next dataset.

<comment><USER8> People should learn not to go outside if they're not labelled.

<comment><USER9> What a funny future it'd be, if we have to wear something distinctive (giant QR codes?) so we don't get killed outside. As a side effect it would make tracking us much easier...

<comment><USER3> It would be less inconvenient than what I already have to do to avoid being killed by human drivers. Getting to the other side of a street according to regulation procedure can easily require taking a 10 minute detour. It can be worse than that in the suburbs.

<comment><USER10> I suppose this differs depending on location and what your perspective is. Here, it can be quite a chore for human drivers to avoid killing pedestrians. They'll just wander out across the crosswalk, nevermind that their walk-light is red, and proceed leisurely across without a care for the speeding traffic (that has the right-of-way to begin with).

To say nothing of drunks.

\--- Anecdotally, I do also remember, as a pedestrian, waiting for 10 minutes or more in subzero temperatures at an un-managed T crossing (crosswalk but no lights), waiting for an opportunity to cross. Traffic just kept coming and coming from all directions; this was a frequent problem at the time of day I needed to cross. I suppose there's opportunity for improvement on both sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I acknowledge the issues in the dataset and that it has a lot of stars on github because it's from Udacity; but calling it 'a popular self-driving car dataset' is misleading as it implies this dataset is popularly used for self- driving cars when it is in fact only a small dataset Udacity uses to teach the basics of training neural networks for self-driving cars.

I've been involved in the autonomous vehicle industry for a while and have been focused on perception for most of it. Most research papers will test their models on popular datasets for self-driving cars and show the results as a sort of benchmark. I've _never_ seen this dataset mentioned anywhere. Heck the size of the dataset is an order of magnitude smaller than most of the popular ones as well.

This is just a github repo. That's it.

<comment><USER12> Are these larger datasets routinely subject to the same kind of inspection this titanic.csv of self-driving car datasets?

<comment><AUTHOR> I _hope_ so. I've personally tested Scale's labeling service and it was much higher quality than this dataset. But it's a pretty secretive industry so I'd bet some companies' data is better than others.

It'd be interesting if the NHTSB had a held-back "test set" they used to evaluate self driving cars before letting them on the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These are manually tagged stills, right? Not video? That's a data set for training CAPCHA breakers, not self-driving. You need to use video, where you get to see the same objects at different ranges. Recognition gets better as you get closer. Then track the recognized objects backwards to when they first appear, and try to recognize them at smaller sizes.

<comment><USER14> I'm tangential to the field, but not directly in it myself, and I tend to agree. The goal of these systems should be to "perceive" their environment, not just to "recognize" it.

Perception means understanding that just because a truck (that we recognized 3 frames ago) went behind a tree, doesn't mean it ceased being a truck. Furthermore, this knowledge should be used to refine the model, to say "hey I can still see the wheels, I know those wheels were attached to that truck a moment ago, therefore I still know where the truck is, even if I can't recognize it plainly as such right now".

Furthermore, even if it's completely out of view, it's still there, probably moving close to the same speed and track it was. And if its path intersects ours, we need to assume that it'll reappear at some point. And the longer it's out of view, the bigger are the errors on its estimated position, according to our knowledge of the acceleration and braking limits of trucks of that type.

I've never heard of anyone even working towards this sort of perception, much less having achieved it. And until we get there, these things are all toys. Dangerous, legally nebulous toys.

<comment><USER15> you're correct that this sort of persistent world modeling is needed for self driving cars, but from what I've heard from friends who work in the industry, both cruise and waymo have it. they're very far from using a plain CNN on their video cameras, they've got depth mapping and such and carefully constructed software making use of the perception data to model how the world will change and react to that. idk if it works well, but they definitely know they need it and are trying.

that said, I've driven a tesla on autopilot, and holy crap is was so incredibly bad. I'm optimistic about self driving cars in general, but not about tesla's. it will frequently lose track of the road lines at night and fail to make turns, suddenly beeping at you that you're in control now, with no warning! I only ever used it like cruise control, but I can't understand how anyone driving a tesla would dare use the tricks that allow bypassing the restrictions that prevent taking your hands off the wheel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, if an autonomous vehicle outfit were running unmonitored Level 4 vehicles on public roads using only an open source data set I'd be worried. Even if it was labelled thoroughly and correctly, there isn't nearly enough data in any open source dataset to train an autonomous vehicle perception system that can operate safely without human supervision. This is not a safety critical issue.

<comment><USER17> The Uber vehicle that ended up killing the pedestrian in Arizona was running under conditions similar to the ones that you outline here. The only notable difference was that a person was monitoring the vehicle.

<comment><USER18> The only notable difference was that a person was _present and supposed to be_ monitoring the vehicle.

Fixed that for you

<comment><USER19> And it will happen again. There were cases of people forgetting Nuclear Weapons on a runway for a whole day by accident. People, eventually, will fuck up. Mislabelled datasets will be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work in the AV space. There's a lot of ambiguity in labeling.

How should a crowd of people be annotated? A line of parked cars? A photograph of a car?

Examine the training set!

<comment><USER21> A big thing is not that the example is missing, but that it counts as a negative example.

I.e. if during training a ML system notices the ambiguous combination (i.e. a woman pushing a baby stroller or a crowd) and marks it as a pedestrian, then it gets penalized in a manner that teaches it to ignore these ambigious combinations and treat it as nothing; while in practice it should probably treat such ambiguous combinations as _even more_ "avoid-worthy" as an ordinary pedestrian.

The problem is that the default assumption is "clear road, you can drive there" \- so what we need isn't "pedestrian detection" that finds pedestrians and only pedestrians, we need detection of random stuff that you shouldn't drive over. If a kid is wearing a weird Halloween costume, that doesn't look like a pedestrian, but it is one; If somebody has set up a tent in the middle of a supermarket parking lot, that's not a pedestrian but it should be avoided just like one.

<comment><USER14> Likewise, I have yet to see one of these things that can recognize potholes and swerve to avoid them lest a wheel be ripped off.

Sooner or later it'd be nice to be able to drive one of these things in a place that isn't southern California.

<comment><USER22> That's a feature, not a bug. Swerving for potholes can be very dangerous, more dangerous than having undercarriage damage. If a pothole surprises you enough that you have to swerve you were either not paying attention to the road or you are following too close.

<comment><USER21> Regardless of what's the appropriate action to take given the context (ignoring, swerving, slowing down, a timely proper change of lane) it's probably not controversial that potholes should be identified by a car vision system and taken into account. And from a computer vision perspective there's no qualitative difference between "just" a deep pothole and a lane-wide ten foot deep sinkhole or a construction pit that's unmarked for some reason, it's just a matter of size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My knee-jerk is to be upset because the risk factor of a poorly functioning pedestrian classifier is obviously higher than something like a sentiment analyzer, but at the same time, this dataset is just for educational purposes, right? Is Udacity actively recommending people use this in production settings?

<comment><AUTHOR> They claim[1] they're working on building an "open source self driving car" but it looks like the project hasn't had much activity recently.

[1] [https://github.com/udacity/self-driving- car](https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hold on a second here - are unlabeled pixels used in training a NN to do detection? Will a typical NN get trained to label those pixels as "not a human"? I agree that they should be labeled, but it's the difference between needing to throw more data at the problem (because you aren't getting as much learning per image as you could) and actively training the car to do something bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, if you don't "punish" incorrect predictions in your loss function your neural net could just get "perfect" accuracy by putting a giant bounding box around the entire image.

Technically that's "right"; it did put a box around all the obstacles just like you asked it to. But that "solution" is not useful. You want it to find what it's looking for and _only_ what it's looking for.

In this case, if it detects an unlabeled pedestrian the loss function will penalize it a bit for that "wrong" answer and it will slightly deviate to try to not find _that_ pedestrian but still find the correctly labeled examples. It's trying to fit the examples you give it best as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Until self driving is possible with purely unsupervised data, self driving cars and other algorithms relying on massive datasets are unlikely to get really strong because label inaccuracies like this are inevitable

Also, far worse has been found in large scale datasets. Pretty sure there was CP found somewhere in imagenet

</comment><comment><USER26> Isn't training against subset of data and then validating against rest a common practice? It wouldn't detect all the mislabeling but should detect some indicating that manual inspection is required, assuming error isn't very systematic.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is, and there are some interesting techniques published recently to help mitigate things like this. But if you don't have a good ground truth you're at the very least flying blind and at worst feeding garbage in and getting garbage out; your models will learn what you tell them to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> While I am happy about their efforts, it's interesting that in the bottom left image of their example I can clearly see another unlabeled car in the lower left half (standing at the sidewalk of the street). Also, I am not sure, but it seems like there's a cyclist on the sidewalk, visible between the stroller and the car (the wheel and hands are more clearly visible). The google image marks a car and a few pedestrians, but completely misses the traffic lights at the junction.

So I guess even their fixed dataset still misses many labels, if already their showcases miss some.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, OP here, yeah you're correct. The dataset doesn't label any obstacles that small/far in the distance. I zoomed in on the region with errors for the sake of the screenshot.

Here's the original run through Google Vision AI. They actually don't get the pedestrian either: [https://imgur.com/a/84IVTV6](https://imgur.com/a/84IVTV6)

(I fired up the labeling tool I use and grabbed a recording of the few seconds of video around that frame to give an idea of what's labeled in the dataset and what's not at that imgur link as well)

<comment><USER27> Nice, thank you for the upload and thank you for clarifying that small objects are not labeled, that explains it. I was suprised because other images do contain rather small labels for traffic lights or even cars, but I guess it's always in the eyes of the person who labels the data.

I think you did an amazing amount of work and huge improvements over the original, have you considered contributing the changes back upstream?

<comment><AUTHOR> I plan to. They use a custom CSV format that my labeling tool can't work with so I converted everything to VOC XML. I need to write a script to convert back to their format to submit a PR.

Not sure if they'll accept the PR though; the original data had a "visualization link" back to the labeling company on each line which I can't reproduce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, do they claim to be human managed datasets where people drew all the object bounds?

I wonder if they used their own classification AI on sample sets and just called it a day. AI blind leading the AI blind?

<comment><AUTHOR> They claim it was ("The dataset was annotated entirely by humans using Autti" via [https://github.com/udacity/self-driving- car/tree/master/anno...](https://github.com/udacity/self-driving- car/tree/master/annotations)).

But after looking at the data I'm almost certain there was some "tool assist" going on. There were dozens of frames in a row with phantom bounding boxes in the exact same location which made it look in some way automated (maybe user error combined with a "copy bounding boxes from the previous frame" feature?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's a bit like saying "We found this store and it doesn't label kitchen knifes as potentially dangerous"... Nobody in their right mind would use this data set for developing a self-driving car and if one does, then they will not get a license to operate... And if by any chance they do it's still like stabbing other people with a knife snatched from the shelf a supermarket. You just don't do it.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is the same for MS COCO: [https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/issues/4085](https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet/issues/4085)

Lots of datasets are semi-automatically generated, with human oversight. Sometimes annotators miss things or are just plain lazy.

</comment><comment><USER31> What's the dataset size? If there's billions of pedestrians tagged and a couple hundreds are missing, would it actually have a big impact on the training? Also looks like a lot of the people in those images are off the road. What's the current standard in AV? Is everything tagged on the sidewalk? (Genuine questions)

<comment><USER32> If they are reporting a 33% image error rate, I would expect a large effect on accuracy no matter what the individual annotation error rates were.

I am unfamiliar with the detailed tagging standards but that also seems irrelevant until the more egregious problems are resolved. Get everything untagged first, then look for smaller scoped issues. And thanks Roboflow for doing whatever amount of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _REDACTED accelerates your computer vision workflow through automated > annotation quality assurance, universal annotation format conversion (like > PASCAL VOC XML to COCO JSON), team sharing and versioning, and exports > directly to file format, like TFRecords._

This is an ad, posing as a sensationalistic blog post.

</comment><comment><USER34> This just shows how clueless AI is still. Imagine your driving instructor insisted there was no person with a stroller on that corner. You'd dump them on the spot!

Only when the machines start to complain when they are fed shitty data, we can talk about them being fit to drive.

</comment><comment><USER35> Do they really think people are using these datasets for commercial applications?

<comment><USER19> Do you really think there is any possible fuckup that won't happen sooner or later?

Will staff of a nuclear silo forget to lock the door, and then fall asleep? Because that happened in US

Do you really think someone will put a plane in production with a single safety critical sensor with no backup or fall back?

Do you really think someone will pour dissolved uranium down the drain, starting a nuclear reaction and dying horribly?

Do you really think someone will crash a spacecraft into mars, by mixing up imperial and metric units?

<comment><USER35> None of these is similar! The off the shelf dataset won't help you achieve nothing commercially, maybe learning or tinkering at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> amplification of the old complex/neurosis - not only people don't notice me, now robots too!

      Cellophane
      Mister Cellophane
      Shoulda Been My Name
      Mister Cellophane
      'Cause You Can Look Right Through Me
      Walk Right By Me
      And Never Know I'm There...

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

</comment><comment><USER37> This seems like the kind of problem that is suitable for and important enough to throw hundreds or thousands of (volunteer?) people at. Imagine assembling a massive public corpus of human verified training data - we'd collectively be that much closer to a technology which will change society! This problem is screaming for a consortium effort on behalf of major corporate entities in the space, who could each benefit without revealing internal secrets.

<comment><USER38> If you've ever had recaptcha ask you to identify stop signs, traffic lights, buses etc you're helping improve Waymo's data set for free :) Maybe it'll be shared with the public instead of used for profit in a decade or two.</comment></comment>


How to get featured by Apple - <AUTHOR> http://denzhadanov.com/2014/03/26/how-to-get-featured-on-the-app-store/ <comment><AUTHOR> I would add, I think there are two steps to getting featured:

1) Make your app featurable: solves a problem in a well designed, polished way. Bonus points for showcasing one of Apple's new technologies (right now things like 3D Touch or iPad Pro optimization).

2) Get noticed by Apple: if you can make a small splash, Apple may make you a bigger one. Apple are kind of like app journalists: they are scouring the web to find out about upcoming gems or breakaway successes. I'm sure they also look at what new apps are making a splash in the charts. I think they found my first app, Grades, because I wrote a blog exploring how to build successful apps and some folks at Apple read it. You can also meet Apple folks on Twitter, conferences, and especially WWDC.

After consistently releasing apps that Apple is impressed with, they may start to build a more personal relationship with you and that's the goal.

Some people think this is all about luck but, as someone who started as a poor college student no one knew about, I found there is a method to the madness.</comment>


CyanogenMod surpasses 1 million installations - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/CyanogenMod-surpasses-1-million-installations-1409652.html <comment><USER2> I installed CyanogenMod after the CarrierIQ story broke. It wasn't trivial but there were good instructions for my exact model of phone. CyanogenMod is an improvement over the stock HTC Sense-based firmware: more customizable, better battery life, no crapware that you can't remove. Not a life-changer, but probably worth doing if you're curious.

<comment><USER3> The one exception is the keyboard. The previous keyboards I had used were the iOS keyboards when I had an iPod Touch, and the Sense keyboard from when I bought my phone to when I installed Cyanogenmod. The stock Android keyboard was shockingly bad. I installed SwiftKey, but it's still not quite as good as the Sense keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I know this is only vaguely related, but another "Android Installations" figure that surprised me the other day was when I saw that Orbot has over 100,000 installations:

<https://market.android.com/details?id=org.torproject.android>

Who'd have thought that over 100,000 people would even have Tor installed, let alone on their phones!

<comment><USER4> I suspect a good portion of those installs are for doing things like getting amazons free app of the day outside the US.

<comment> mike-cardwell I've seen no evidence to suggest that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations- it's well deserved. My first Android phone was a Nexus One, and I loved the CyanogenMod improvements that came with every release.

I made the mistake of upgrading to a Galaxy S2 _Skyrocket_ (I mean, really?) and quickly found out that the non-Nexus world of Android is very depressing. I hated TouchWiz, and I couldn't put CyanogenMod on my new phone. I returned it.

<comment><USER6> It seems like only in 7.1 have they added features that were on SGS2 since the beginning.

And actually, were it not for these stupid blue gradients on scrolling (that appeared in recent update), I find TouchWiz perfect.

<comment><USER3> Cyanogenmod Settings > Interface > Overscoll effect.

Edge Glow is the gradients, Bounce is an iOS like behaviour, or you can just turn it all off like stock Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does the CM stats page only record those who allow anonymous statistics to be collected? If so surely the actual number of installations is much higher

<comment><USER8> Your question is answered in the second paragraph of the article... The answer is yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I installed CM 7.1 for my Vibrant phone quite easily following the instructions, but it lacked two features which were very important to me. One was taking calls through wired headphone. My stock vibrant software worked quite well for taking calls through headphone but CM didn't work at all. There were bug reports raised for this issue but it was not fixed. Another small feature I missed badly was the lack of recently added playlist which I use to listen to songs which are new without searching or making a playlist of them. This playlist was available on stock player but was not working correctly. I hoped to wait for these issues to be fixed, but I came to know that Samsung Vibrant will not be supported by CM because of a 911 issue. So I had to go back to stock Samsung version with less battery life and crapware.

</comment><comment><USER10> As an aside the guy who founded and still leads the CyanogenMod project now works for Samsung on their Android distribution(/flavor).

I'm not sure whether they hired him to try to let the steam out of Cyanogen but if so it certainly hasn't achieved that.

</comment><comment><USER11> An interesting side-effect is that they have enough users to make it worthwhile to start their own app store, as explained by Koushik Dutta, the guy behind Clockwork Recovery (a custom ROM used as a trampoline to installing and upgrading Cyanogen) and active contributor to Cyanogen: [https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/ViJ665K3...](https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/ViJ665K38Xa)

</comment><comment><USER12> I use CM variations on 2 of my Android phones (in the family) and I'm considering putting it on a 3rd one we just bought.</comment>


Fastmail Calendar Enters Public Beta Testing Phase - <AUTHOR> http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68137

<comment><USER2> huzzah!</comment>


Making GitLab faster - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/25/making-gitlab-faster/? <comment><USER2> I was running GitLab on a VPS with specs close to the lower end of the recommended requirements and its performance would gradually slow down over the course of the day until pages seemed to never finish loading. Restarting gitlab got it responding properly again, but the whole process would repeat over and over again, so that it had to be restarted every couple of hours just to be able to use it.

I then switched providers, which also came with more system resources, and GitLab was working without any issues right away. It could have been caused by an oversold node at the previous host, or the slightly higher system specs at the new host made the difference, but I've been running GitLab on that new server for a couple of months now without experiencing those slowdowns again.

If you've noticed a gradual slowdown to the point of pages getting stuck on loading indefinitely, then try to up the system specs a bit, as it could make quite the difference.

<comment><AUTHOR> What can also help is running the Omnibus package that restarts processes that start using too much memory automatically.

<comment><USER3> The Ruby on rails solution to memory leaks probably shouldn't be the goto remedy.

<comment><USER4> gitlab IS a ruby on rails app

Why wouldn't a ruby on rails solution be right for a ruby on rails app?

<comment><USER5> If the ruby on rails solution to memory leaks is to restart, then it's far better to actually get it fixed to not leak memory in the first place.

Restarting is just ignoring the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome - really happy to see improvements here.

It looks like the front-end can use some attention too: PageSpeed Score is only C (79%):

[https://gtmetrix.com/reports/gitlab.com/57l7nHlc](https://gtmetrix.com/reports/gitlab.com/57l7nHlc)

This is the most valuable measurement, IMO. Server response time is just a proxy for end-user experience.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for taking a look at our frontend speed. I've created a few issues so we can take a look at this.

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13820](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13820)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kudos to the GitLab team. I've been running it for 12 months now on premises. The Omnibus package makes the instance unbelievable easy to install and upgrade, so there's no excuse not to run the latest versions. I've just been watching my instance get better and better over those 12 months, better UI, more features and better performance. I really love the software and can't talk it up enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks shaunol, glad to hear that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using gitlab for the past few weeks to host a couple of repositories, it's awesome so far since it's the only solution that allowed me to mirror a repo AND create my own branch on the mirrored repository.

The only complaint I really have is the fact that I have to append a ".git" to the http url to clone the repository. Alternatively, it'd be nice to have a git:// read only url too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to open an issue both for the http clone without .git, it seems interesting but I'm not sure how complicated it is.

Not sure about the git:// read only url, I don't oversee the consequences.

<comment><USER10> The git:// protocol requires its own daemon (which is bundled with Git) running on port 9418 [https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The- Protoco...](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The- Protocols#The-Git-Protocol) . The standard Git daemon is unsuitable for GitLab I think because of the way it manages access control.

[https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Git-Daemon](https://git- scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Git-Daemon)

For this to work in GitLab we would need to find or write an alternative implementation of the protocol.

Sounds like a lot of work to me when we already have decent HTTP clone access.

<comment><USER10> Hmm I was wrong, the current version of the built-in Git daemon has an --access-hook option so no problem there.

[https://github.com/git/git/blob/56f37fda511e1615dc6df86c68f3...](https://github.com/git/git/blob/56f37fda511e1615dc6df86c68f3b841711a7828/daemon.c#L291)

The question is then: how badly do people want this and how many admins out there are willing to poke an extra hole in their firewall just for this protocol.

<comment><USER10> [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/13838](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13838)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I finally decided to give GitLab a shot, and so far things are going pretty well. You can make an account with your GitHub login, and you can migrate projects with just one click. From there I just had to set a password for my account, and now I'm pushing commits with no trouble at all. The whole process took just a few minutes, pretty cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is the GitLab CEO here?

<comment><USER13> CEO is the poster, 'sytse'.

<comment><AUTHOR> lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion earlier today in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11173254)

</comment><comment><USER14> I literally just spun up an instance of gitlab today. I'm regretting using bitnami's version though... all their documentation is out of date, and they change a lot of defaults and break things. It's been an unpleasant experience.

That said. A fresh instance of bitbucket hosted close to our office vs bitbucket? No contest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying GitLab! We're not happy with the Bitnami version, from [https://about.gitlab.com/installation/](https://about.gitlab.com/installation/) "One-click installers are frequently out of date and might not contain our Omnibus packages. An example of this are the Bitnami packages in the past couldn't be updated and are now much harder to update than the Omnibus packages. We advise to not use one-click installers but instead start an vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 instance and use the recommended Omnibus package installation. This is almost as quick as a one-click install and you're sure of the latest version and easy upgrades."

<comment><USER15> While the Omnibus packages are nice, focusing on them and neglect the gitlab- only packages makes life harder for other group of people.

Some of us want to reuse the pgsql/redis instances we are already running. For example, we already have pgsql for redmine and other uses, we don't want another, separate instance. Too bad that standalone packages working with system supplied (debian, centos) packages are non-existent.

<comment><AUTHOR> We understand the appeal of native packages. There have never been any gitlab- only packages, so I don't think we're able to neglect them. In fact, we've been sponsoring Pirate Praveen to bring native packages to Debian and this is really close at the moment, see [http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-deprecated- feedback...](http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-deprecated-feedback- forum/suggestions/6151718-native-debian-deb-and-fedora-rpm-packages)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where can I find this tool Sherlock you guys mention? It sounds interesting.

<comment><USER17> It's built into GitLab itself, it's not an external tool you can install without using GitLab. Some information about it can be found at [http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/development/profiling.html#sherlock](http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/development/profiling.html#sherlock).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is great! I moved my team's repos to GitLab last year and I love it. Pricing is better, there's more granularity in assigning team member roles, and the mobile app is good too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear that Matt!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unrelated but I signed up on the hosted gitlab and I imported some repos from github (worked flawlessly and was very easy) but I got stuck at the .travis.yml -> .gitlab-ci.yml since the documentation on the CI is not too great (or I didn't it).

Is there a plan to convert or support travis ci config? If not, would it be possible to get a repo example for each language. I think i've seen something similar but there was only 1-2 examples

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad to hear the import went smooth and I'm sorry to hear you got stuck on the CI yml format.

We're working on more examples there and are planning two blogposts about this next week. For our blogpost planning see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog- posts/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Been using gitlab for a while and its mostly good. The only thing that is letting it down for us is the code review tools which are not as good as some of the other dedicated tools on the market. The big gripes are:

* the ability to assign a review to multiple users * set a number of reviewers * Multiline comments * review publishing * Review versions

Not really noticed any problems with speed but its good to see that they are working on it anyway :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. Have you seen the merge request approvers feature in GitLab EE/.com [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/06/16/feature-highlight- approv...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/06/16/feature-highlight-approve- merge-request/) ?

I would love to see multiline comments too! See [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab-ce/issues/4143](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/4143)

Review publishing, do you mean [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/3364](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3364) ?

Review version, what do you mean with this?

<comment><USER21> "Thanks for your feedback. Have you seen the merge request approvers feature in GitLab EE/.com [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/06/16/feature-highlight- approv...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/06/16/feature-highlight-approv..). ?"

Yes saw that. Currently evaluating various git servers as its something we use a lot. But would really want to assign the review to particular (or a group of) people i.e. the more experienced people in a team.

"I would love to see multiline comments too! See [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab-ce/issues/4143"](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/4143")

Cool. Didn't see that - will add my vote if I can.

"Review publishing, do you mean [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/3364](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3364) ?"

Basically yes.

"Review version, what do you mean with this?"

Thinking about it not sure that this is really necessary in the git world. Back in svn days seeing the diffs versioned was handy but with merge request you can see the commit history so its not necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

"But would really want to assign the review to particular (or a group of) people i.e. the more experienced people in a team." => doesn't [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/06/16/feature-highlight- approv...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/06/16/feature-highlight-approve- merge-request/) allow that?

We seem to be in sync on all other feature requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We've been using Gitlab with my team for the past year or so. Moved from corporate Github to it. It's really nice and almost flawless so far. When i tried to install it, at some point, to a VPS of mine i had several issues with ruby packages etc. I might give it another go, it seems like the latest versions have been improved significantly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad yo hear the experience of your team has been good. Please consider using our default Omnibus packages to prevent problems with installing ruby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thank you for the post, it is always great reading performance reports they make you think twice next time you develop software and question if you got any "code smells" to work on in your own code as well.</comment>


Alarm raised on teenage hackers - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7690126.stm

<comment><USER2> Any company that disqualifies you from a job for something you did when you were 13 years old needs to seriously examine its HR processes.

<comment><USER3> OK, I'll be the jerk with the extreme example here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger>

Happy to hire those guys?

<comment><USER4> The problem isn't that it's an extreme example, it's that it's an irrelevant example.

<comment><USER3> It's irrelevant to the real question here, but it's relevant to the assertion that what you did at thirteen (or in this case, eleven) shouldn't be held against you by employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is the typical scare-mongering from fascist mindset.

This article lacks a social expert and gets just a shallow analysis by an unqualified person who (to me) clearly has no clue for the reasons why a kid would turn into vandalism or scamming (not necessarily hacking.)

Those kids probably feel excluded and most likely have parents who don't dedicate any time to them. Be it by indifference or because of modern times work schedules. TV is the worst possible option for a tutor/nanny.

<comment><USER4> And I think yours is a knee-jerk immature response to an issue you haven't thought carefully about, all the more irritating because you're closer to the issue than the reporter who wrote this article.

Whether or not the reporter is making a value judgement on "hacking" --- and I didn't read one --- it's bringing up a real issue. Idiot teenagers _are_ in fact a few clicks away from a felony conviction, and the Internet _does_ in fact facilitate, encourage, and amplify behavior that is far more likely to get you in legal trouble online than offline.

Believing that doesn't mean one needs to support substantive policy changes for how we "regulate the Internet"; it just means we're attentive to a new risk faced by modern stupid teenagers.

Exemplars/evidence:

* The stupid kid who hacked Palin's Yahoo mail account

* The stupid kids who are getting themselves sued by the RIAA

* The stupid kids who break into DoD computers for IRC bragging rights

I was 17-18 not long ago, and it was nowhere nearly as easy for an 17 year old then to commit theft and fraud as it is today. It does bug me that the Internet is so "unreal" that a careless person could easily fuck things up in the real world by accident on it.

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised you say that. More significant crime than hacking an email account or "pwning" a government computer is committed everyday by teenagers in at least an order of magnitude more. From drug dealing to happy slapping. And the later even though is related to Internet (filming and uploading the video), it is just an amplification of a very old tradition, bullying. Nothing new.

Instead of increasing the sentences and applying broken-window policies (a new form of fascism), the social problem needs first _understanding_ and then defining good policies (from family level to national level.)

<comment><USER4> This is the same incredibly myopic belief I held until I was 19, when I got my first full-time sysadmin job. You have no idea how expensive it is for a company to lose a server root user to a teenager; it is, in the best case, several days of lost time. At a conservative FTE of $85k, a couple days of sysadmin time is over $1000. Do $1000 of damage to someone's house and see how the legal system treats you.

That's the _best_ case.

I think it's you who doesn't understand the problem here. I stand by my assertion: it is worth considering that we have created a system that encourages dumb kids to incur thousands of dollars of civil liability and serious criminal liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ... and that's why I'm a t. _entrepreneur_ instead.</comment>


Ask HN: Gear for Remote Programming - <AUTHOR> I'm going to start coding from the road more, and while I can live without a big secondary monitor and mechanical keyboard, I'm looking for ways to improve efficiency when not coding from my desk.
I've been looking at things like 15-inch, USB-C external monitors, keyboards that don't take up too much space without compromising typing comfort, and noise canceling wireless headphones.
So I thought I'd ask here: What gear has made your "work from the road" lives better, and do you have your eye on any specific items (links appreciated) to solve pain points? <comment><USER2> To be honest, a change of habits tends to work best. I used to think I needed a mouse to be productive, until I made the effort to learn more keyboard shortcuts for my editor. I used to think that I needed a couple of large monitors to get everything up, but realistically I was only looking at one window at a time so I went to full-screening applications into their own workspace. Basically, the less stuff you can get away with carting around, the happier you will be.

The other thing: get hardware warrenties that will overnight you new parts, or get hardware that can be trivially rebought and restored to from your backups. Things go wrong, and you can't stockpile spares, so common hardware is good hardware.</comment>