Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/alphabet-s-waymo-sues-uber-for-stealing-self-driving-patents?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social <comment><USER2> From another source to provide some colour:

> According to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in California, Waymo > accuses Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Google to found Otto and > now serves as a top ranking Uber executive, stole 14,000 highly confidential > documents from Google before departing to start his own company. Among the > documents were schematics of a circuit board and details about radar and > LIDAR technology, Waymo says

> The lawsuit claims that a team of ex-Google engineers used critical > technology, including the Lidar laser sensors, in the autonomous trucking > startup they founded, and which Uber later acquired

I was confused as to what stealing a patent actually meant:)

Waymo has also posted this....

[https://medium.com/@waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against- otto...](https://medium.com/@waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-and- uber-86f4f98902a1#.mn83yyh0t)

From this post...

> Recently, we received an unexpected email. One of our suppliers specializing > in LiDAR components sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of > machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber's LiDAR circuit board — > except its design bore a striking resemblance to Waymo's unique LiDAR > design.

> We found that six weeks before his resignation this former employee, Anthony > Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary > design files for Waymo's various hardware systems, including designs of > Waymo's LiDAR and circuit board. To gain access to Waymo's design server, > Mr. Levandowski searched for and installed specialized software onto his > company-issued laptop. Once inside, he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo's highly > confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and > testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the laptop. > Mr. Levandowski then wiped and reformatted the laptop in an attempt to erase > forensic fingerprints.

Ooops, that does sound bad after a first read.

<comment><USER3> How does Google build such forsenics? Do they have spyware monitoring all their company laptops?

<comment><USER4> This was the noteworthy part for me as well.

They had to know that he:

1\. modified the software on his laptop

2\. logged into an area he should not have had access to (this is probably standard)

3\. attached an external drive (possible, but standard?)

4\. and they got all this info _after_ he deleted the drive, which means they either went in and found remaining data on the drive or else they captured the info in real time.

I suppose if the drive is clean now, and they know he downloaded data, they can infer that he wiped it.

I suppose that if they know he accessed it, and there was software on his computer preventing him from doing so, they can infer that he downloaded something to overcome it.

But knowing that he connected to an external drive implies active monitoring. That's the part I am most curious about.

<comment><USER5> This is all information a rudimentary desktop auditing tool can gather and store on a server. Most collect both hardware (which would include connected devices) and software inventory. Anyone SHOULD be auditing company PCs on a relatively regular basis. It wouldn't surprise me if Google was auditing much more frequently than the average and could catch something like this in the act.

<comment><USER6> Yup, lots of firms using HIDS that gather all sorts of system data. OSSEC is what I've seen rather frequently for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had an interview there where the manager asked me to leave my laptop behind and go for a walk. I was hesitant after hearing stories of Uber conducting electronic espionage against its competitors. They could easily bypass Macbook security with a USB device (I had heard of that on HN too) so I was very nervous to leave my laptop behind and noted its exact orientation and position on the table. Sure enough when I returned my laptop had changed both position and orientation, but only enough to tell if you had specifically memorized it. I could be paranoid. They could have simply moved things on the desk. But anyway, people who are paranoid like me are advised not to take their laptops into Uber interviews. They are capable of just about anything, or so thinks my now paranoid self.

<comment><USER8> > They could easily bypass Macbook security with a USB device

Isn't this only possible if the laptop is unlocked?

<comment><USER9> It's not possible unless you have zero-days against the USB drivers or firmware on your laptop, in which case being logged in or not doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER7> Proof I'm paranoid. My greater point, however, is that they have done some really shady stuff, and stealing competitor's IP is part of their culture, so their behavior itself promotes and justifies paranoia on my part and on the part of anyone looking to work for or do business with Uber.

Reputation is everything.

<comment><USER10> It's pretty stupid to get paranoid over this. As GP pointed out if you logged out then it's very unlikely that they will get access.

<comment><USER7> I think it's pretty stupid to consider any consumer device to be secure enough. I did hear on HN some time before that interview that some USB device can be used to bypass the lock screen, which was the basis for my worrying. Now, some are saying in this thread that it is possible (or at least was at the time) while others saying that it is not (and was not) -- Even an educated sample of tech folks cannot make up their mind, so there is (or at least was) room for justified concern... no?

<comment><USER9> I think the consensus is that it's possible, but expensive. So like, nation- state espionage yes, corporate espionage no. But anyone who actually knows anything won't be talking about it on HN ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A really critical thing that hasn't got much attention is that shortly before leaving Waymo, Levandowski had a meeting with senior Uber execs(!). The day after the meeting, he formed 280 Systems which became Otto.

The implication in the filing is that Uber planned this with Levandowski, and he only created Otto as a plausible corporate vehicle for developing the LiDAR technology before Uber acquired them. Given what we know about Uber and the assertions in the complaint, this sounds entirely plausible, maybe even likely.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k/view)

<comment><USER12> Paragraph 48 if anyone is wondering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In related news, Tesla is accusing ex-autopilot director Sterling Anderson of stealing code from Tesla before starting up Aurora with Chris Urmson (the former CTO of Alphabet's self driving car program):

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/tesla-sues-ex-autopilot- di...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/26/tesla-sues-ex-autopilot-director-for- taking-proprietary-info-poaching-employees/)

</comment><comment><USER14> > searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued > laptop

That could mean he downloaded an SFTP client like Cyberduck. He could have searched the internet for a client and then installed it. It doesn't say he did not have auth.

Imagine a Google security engineer being deposed for this lawsuit.

Lawyer: "Show me on the MacBook how he downloaded the files"

Engineer: "Well, he used Cyberduck"

Lawyer: "Is that part of the Mac?"

Engineer: "No, he'd have to download it separately"

Lawyer: "So, he searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop?"

Engineer: "Um, sure"

Lawyer: "Thank you, that's all the questions I had"

<comment><USER15> > That could mean he downloaded an SFTP client like Cyberduck. He could have > searched the internet for a client and then installed it. It doesn't say he > did not have auth.

They weren't trying to claim he hacked in. They're making the case he went out of his way to get his hands on these documents, and building a timeline that suggests _why_ he went to that trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. I vividly remember a commenter here on a thread about Uber's acquisition of Otto. The user said based on the timeline and filings, it seemed like Otto hadn't really accomplished anything yet, and was probably founded purely to be acquired by Uber. I wonder if there's even more here...

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone else remember this New Yorker profile [1] of Anthony Levandowski and self driving cars? Way back from 2013, when this tech was still novel. Google let Levandowski run the show for this piece -- his name is mentioned 57 times in the article. Goes to show how important and trusted he was in Google's universe.

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/25/auto- correct](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/25/auto-correct)

<comment><USER18> Sure. I met him when he was still a student at UC Berkeley. He was the one who built the self-driving, self-balancing motorcycle for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It didn't navigate that well or get all that far, but it was really cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe I have a selective memory as a former Zynga employee, but generally these "stolen documents" lawsuits in high profile tech companies have generally turned out to be pretty factual. Easy to prove, and hard to fake.

<comment><USER20> And lawsuits like this generally don't get filed unless it's near slam-dunk considering the burden of proof is high on stolen electronic documents.

<comment><USER21> Considering even with logging off: journaling file systems, "user assist", device connection logs, pre-fetch (or your OS's equivalent)- these are all huge tranches of data if you are looking at a system shortly after an event. Ask me 6 months later- probably not. Give me a system that hasn't even rebooted, has a heap of ram and hasn't been used much since- 6 weeks is fine, not ideal, but doable.

<comment><USER22> Journaling filesystems don't "journal" all the activity in perpetuity. They typically just journal the changes until they're committed to disk, usually for less than a second.

See [http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system- design.pdf](http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf), section 7.2 "How Does Journaling Work?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I always was incredibly surprised at how quickly Uber had working self-driving cars (with the required, highly specialized hardware). Guess this explains it.

<comment><USER24> Uber acquired Otto around 08/2016\. I don't think this explains it.

<comment><USER25> Who knows maybe they had somebody else from the Google self driving car project to steal self-driving car secrets earlier. Based on what this Levandowski guy did the industrial espionage may go unnoticed. I'm wondering if Waymo will require Uber to reveal schematics of their self-driving car project as part of the law suite.

<comment><USER24> I have doubts what was stolen was actually any of the secret sauce. An interface board for a lidar unit is probably one of the most simple things on the list.

The actual self driving software, and more importantly, all of the collected data from the waymo fleet would have been the key.

<comment><USER26> Not so much an interface board as a whole new tested design for a LIDAR unit, including a unique patented optics setup and laser driver circuit, according to the complaint. Also testing, manufacturing, and characterization procedures and results and information on suppliers for the parts required. The PCB was just the component whose accidental disclosure lead them to conclude that Uber and Otto were using the stolen design. Since the PCB apparently dictates the position and orientation of the laser diodes and sensors, presumably it would only be useful if they copied the whole thing.

<comment><USER24> Interesting. Is the specific Lidar unit really that big a differentiator? I understand they aren't cheap or simple, but it seems odd that each self driving car company would want to design their own. I would guess you would rather have some healthy ecosystem of suppliers...Velodyne, etc.

<comment><USER27> > it seems odd that each self driving car company would want to design their > own

They don't _want_ to do this, so, if they do, it's because they _had_ to do this.

Practically all of the current sensor suites are expensive, bulky, and power hungry. If you want them on lots of cars, you need to reduce all 3 of those characteristics dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What kind of employee would download 14K files to a personal drive right before quitting? It is trivially easy to watch what files get copied over to external drives.

I think you can follow the money trail here and find some answers for sure. Now if Uber/Otto has a clause that prohibits employees from bringing in confidential data from previous companies, how can they be held liable? Does Google have to prove that those stolen documents were actually used in Uber designs?

<comment><USER29> A supplier of Google received the file from Uber and that supplier forwarded it to Google. This means the file was sent out by Uber to a supplier to try to get parts made. I think that's proof enough.

Btw that's 1 very sharp eyed engineer, whoever that is...

<comment><USER30> >Btw that's 1 very sharp eyed engineer, whoever that is...

It sounds like this was entirely accidental on the supplier's part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Lots of Juice here.

Complaint: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k/view)

>Waymo was recently – and apparently inadvertently – copied on an email from one of its LiDAR component vendors.

Is this going to be a legal test of that annoying lawyer email footer language?

>This message contains information from xxxxxx that may be confidential and privileged. If you are not an intended recipient, please refrain from any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of this information and note that such actions are prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately by telephone or by replying to this transmission.

Ha! More legalese BS that never holds up.

> Otto launched publicly in May 2016, and was quickly acquired by Uber in > August 2016 for $680 million.

The fact pattern here is going to be absolutely brutal for Uber. A non- technical judge is going to see the allegation: ex-google employee downloads technical documents in December 2015, launches a company 5 months later in May 2016, and is bought for $680M (later speculated to be $1B+) for all its technical accomplishments. How much fundamental research did they do in the 3 months between May-16 and August-16?!?!? Or was it just to buy the stolen IP that google had developed over 7 years?!? Brutal for Uber!

\--

A public company recently settled a similar lawsuit (competitor hires exec, exec is proven to have downloaded documents) for $130M on much smaller numbers. And the defendant was run through the legal wringer first.

[http://www.geekwire.com/2016/zillow-realtor-com-operator- mov...](http://www.geekwire.com/2016/zillow-realtor-com-operator-move-move- reach/)

Expect Uber spankage, bigly.

> shortly after Mr. Levandowski received his final multi-million dollar > payment from Google

Funny because of all the recent press that Google paid autonomous driving talent too much that they left!

>Infringement of Patent No. 9,368,936 (Against All Defendants)

Real nasty. If a trade secrets lawsuit is an arrow, throwing in a patent infringement claim too, is poison tipped and barbed!

This is some good "old skool Google" where they used to show broad competence across many domains; in this case legal.

</comment><comment><USER13> Presumably you're in Arizona at the moment, Mr. Levandowski, it's close to the border, run for it!

We'll take a moment to remember the salad days, when you were just a crazy college kid who showed up at the Darpa Grand Challenge with a self driving motorcycle:

[https://youtu.be/XOgkNh_IPjU](https://youtu.be/XOgkNh_IPjU)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is going to be interesting to watch. Alphabet just:

\- went nuclear on Uber/Otto

\- revealed what they track internally to all their employees

<comment><USER33> When your company stores very private info on billions of people, and is actively attacked (sometimes successfully) by the top intelligence agencies of the world[1][2], you have to be extremely careful, and monitor everything.

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

[2] [https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech- companies-s...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies- slap-back-at-the-n-s-a-s-smiley-face)

<comment><USER34> Some people might see an irony in your comment.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in 2009 "...banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist..."

My theory is that the too big to exist theory is now true for basically all the tech giants. Generally, everyone who knows the kind of tracking these companies do (internal and external) agree this is true, except those who benefit from the companies' continued existence e.g. employees, investors, shareholders.

<comment><USER35> You conveniently forgot consumers.

<comment><USER34> On the other hand, imagine if the data collection never stops and one of the big companies gets hacked, or faces a serious competitive threat making it more likely to sell its data, starts going out of business, or needs to cooperate by sharing its data in return for government favors, or needs to share data to get access to foreign markets etc. I have a feeling this venerable "consumer" is going to learn a painful lesson one of these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Minor fix: Waymo is suing for stealing secrets, not patents. As far as I know, it's not actually possible to steal a patent.

<comment><USER37> Infringement of patents (the '273 patent, entitled "Microrod Compression of Laser Beam in Combination with Transmit Lens")

<comment><USER38> Infringement, yes, but how can you 'steal' a patent?

<comment><USER36> That was exactly my point. Patents are definitionally impossible to steal (unless, I guess, you somehow are able to get access to the patent database and change the patent holder?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Well, that would help explain how Otto went from nothing to $680 million acquisition in ~7 months.

</comment><comment><USER40> There's something very wrong in the world when the people who invent things aren't the main beneficiary of their own inventions.

Edit: A guy downloads 9.7GB of other people's work, walks off with it, and sells it. Flushing years of work from hundreds of engineers down the toilet. You down voters really support that? Amazing.

<comment><USER41> Otto was a YC company so there's your answer. People condone a lot of awful if they 1) make money off it; 2) Have some emotional connection to it

<comment><USER42> As far as I know Otto wasn't YC - are you sure you're not thinking of Cruise (which was acquired by GM)?

<comment><USER43> He could be thinking of starsky robotics

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google might have been better off with patents than trade secrets. There are financial penalties for theft of trade secrets, but once the secret is out, no injunctions. The one who stole it can use it. With patents, injunctions are available, although hard to get.

Anyway, several companies are developing automotive LIDAR units which are better than Google's rotating things. Quantergy and Velodyne claim to be close to low-cost solid state LIDARs, and ASC has good ones now at a high price point. (An ASC unit just docked the Dragon spacecraft with the ISS.) By the time this gets to court, Google's secret technology will be obsolete.

The question is whether Uber will defend Levandowski or leave him to twist slowly, slowly in the wind and go to jail.

<comment><USER44> I doubt there is any hot technology in some LIDAR interface board in the first place.

<comment><USER18> There's a lot to be done at the semiconductor level for solid state LIDAR. The ASC units work great, but the sensor requires an InGaAs fab, like night vision sensors, to get good light sensitivity and thus range. Others are talking about getting good performance with a sensor that can be made in a CMOS fab, but nobody is shipping yet. This is an area where Waymo has a strong interest, even if they're not making the sensors themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wow this has got to be the worse single month for a company that I've ever seen.

<comment><USER46> Or Microsoft antitrust?

<comment><USER47> Please - Microsoft antitrust was nothing like this.

Microsoft was basically extremely successful - and then became a monopoly provider. In general, I wouldn't call this an 'immoral act' or whatever.

Also - I'd suggest that Google is just as much a Monopoly provider as MS ever was, they could face the same type of case in EU soon.

Stealing IP, lying, corruption - this is in a whole different league from being so successful that you become a monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It looks like bloomberg updated the title to: "Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets", which makes more sense. We should change the title here.

</comment><comment><USER49> Could a mod change the title to "Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self- Driving Secrets", which is what the Bloomberg article says (for now)?

<comment><USER50> To expedite this, you may want to email the mods directly via the Contact link in the footer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Direct link to the complaint: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k/view)

</comment><comment><USER52> And Google Ventures is an Uber investor... so Google is effectively suing one of their own portfolio companies.

<comment><USER53> Companies sue other companies they have relationships with fairly often.

For example, Samsung is still a hardware supplier to Apple, so Apple is suing its own supplier in the Apple v. Samsung case.

<comment><USER29> And not to mention other Samsung subsidiaries (that make display, RAM, CPU) were probably crying bloody murder to Samsung Handphone division...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Despite the damning alleged evidence, I get the feeling that all the offenders knew that they would be found out ahead of time, evaluated the risk reward trade-off and decided that they could somehow get away with it.

Are there any lawyers here who could make an educated guess how they could?

<comment><USER55> Well a good start would be using a different supplier than Waymo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > Recently, we received an unexpected email. One of our suppliers specializing > in LiDAR components sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of > machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber's LiDAR circuit board — > except its design bore a striking resemblance to Waymo's unique LiDAR > design.

Doesn't sound plausible. At a minimum, this would have to be the "dumbed down" version of how they uncovered this.

</comment><comment><USER57> Copy-pasting from my comment on Reddit.

The first thing that caught my attention after reading the whole lawsuit! [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k/view) [Item 42- 49] itself is some of the timings regarding Otto's inception and Uber's acquisition.

Timeline:

* Levandowski first registered the domain for his then(now Otto) company on Nov'15

* The suit says on 3rd of Dec'15 he searched for the LIDAR docs and on 11th of Dec'15, he downloaded 14,000 docs from Google's servers.

* Google alleges that on Jan'16, Levandowski told his colleagues that he plans to replicate the Waymo tech at one of Waymo's competitor.

* One of the damning allegation from Waymo is that he met with top execs at Uber at their HQ in SF on Jan 14th 2016.

* Just a day later on 15th he officially formed one of his company(280 Systems, now part of Otto), later on Feb 1st he also registered his other company(Otto Trucking) Feb 1st.

* Strangely after working at Google for about 7 years, he quit Google without a notice(from suit) on Jan 27th.

This is from the interview Bloomberg's did after Uber acquired Otto: 'Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of an acquisition during a series of 10-mile night walks from the Soma neighborhood where Uber is also headquartered to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two men would leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or competitors. They'd grab takeout food, then rendezvous near the city's Ferry Building. Levandowski says he saw a union as a way to bring the company's trucks to market faster.'

From the above details, it can imply any of these three things might have happened,

* Scenario 1: He or Uber didn't do anything different from the official story so far.

* Scenario 2: Levandowski went to Uber saying he has custom LIDAR tech but ended up starting his own company the next day and 8 months later Uber just bought them for $680M for the team and tech he alleged stole from Waymo.

* Scenario 3: Levandowski went to Uber in Jan'16, said he has the tech for custom LIDAR, Uber wants it, but there is non-suspicious way for taking the tech directly to Uber since Levandowski alone can't build it. Instead Uber suggests to spin off his own company, hire a team (mostly from Waymo), put together a demo in Nevada desert. This brings in all the press and validity that Otto has the self-driving tech and team. So at this point Otto and Levandowski is a Self-driving tech startup not a LIDAR startup. Now Uber can come in, acquire this hot startup and team, in a market that's worth Trillions. Now Uber is suddenly in the trucking business, gets a huge PR and valuation bump. In this process they also get the LIDAR tech that's build in just 9 months.

What it means is that if the 3rd theory is true, Uber was always buying the LIDAR tech from Levandowski even before he left Waymo. Otto and other components are just a proxy so that it gives them a great story without any suspicions.

To put things into perspective, a single Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR that almost all self-driving companies use costs around $75,000. Waymo says their equivalent custom alternative costs less than 10% (<$7000). This is a huge cost saving for a tech that is going to go in 100,000+ cars Uber hopes to have in the market in the future. So yea, this can be a bullshit Lawsuit (based on the evidence, less likely) or a well executed corporate espionage!

<comment><USER58> It could also be that Levandowski met with Uber execs as the lawsuit claims, but didn't tell them he had stolen the documents.

<comment><USER59> That could very well be true. _wink_ _wink_

"I know it's hard to believe, Travis, but while I worked for a company doing the exact the same thing as this company, at nights, I _singlehandedly_ created this trove of patentable technology that will revolutionize the automobile industry, which _coincidently_ , _really_ , my former employer is spending billions to do. You have to trust me."

<comment><USER58> If I had stolen a bunch of trade secrets I wouldn't tell my company's competitor.

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr.drink)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Is the HN headline correct? The bloomberg article says "trade secrets" which are very different from patents, the video also says that this is not primarily a patent case.

edit: 0:48 in the video

</comment><comment><USER61> His favorite quote: "I drink your milkshake."

Wish I were kidding.

</comment><comment><USER62> Seems like Google/Waymo has known about this for a while, funny how they timed this lawsuit announcement during the Fowler blog post uproar

<comment><USER63> Yup, timing is everything. For press.. I doubt tho, this will affect the lawsuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Things couldn't be worse for Uber these days. Sexual harassment scandal, Didi Chuxing plans for global expansion, now this lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER64> Interesting questions for google employees:

Does Google force you to use specific version of OS?

Do they have pre-installed software?

Is it not-okay to format and install any OS you want?

I work in startups, they provide only laptops and doesnt care about OS or software. There is no mandatory software requirement from company side.

<comment><USER65> For eng workstations, virtually all are Goobuntu unless you have a reallllly good reason (e.g. CAD software for mech e's, or work on Windows Chrome).

For laptops, they're essentially just used as a dumb web terminal + ssh. You can get mac, goobuntu, or maybe even Windows. Since you aren't allowed to have source code on laptops (except certain special exceptions), it's not as big of a concern.

<comment><USER22> You aren't allowed to have source on your laptop? How do you edit it? Through some web editor? Serious question!

<comment><USER66> SSH or a web editor.

<comment><USER22> That sounds awful! Is that just a "laptop" rule (i.e. are "desktops" exempt)?

<comment><USER67> Workstations mount what's called citc (clients in the cloud). And you can use whatever ide or editor you like. Code is never downloaded directly to the desktop. You don't really notice any performance issues with this and you get the benefit of being able to build or include any library without having to download it all.

Laptops can't mount citc, and you need to either SSH/rdp into a workstation or use a web based code editor.

Once you've used citc/Piper/blaze you'll find it's a great system and there is no good alternative... Yet

As for OS choice I believe only goobuntu can be used to modify Google's code repo.

<comment><USER43> Wish they used citc/Git/blaze... but oh well. There's a wrapper internally but I heard it was crap, so I never used it.

<comment><USER68> It's heavily used now. Works very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Google was on the other side before:

[https://techcrunch.com/2011/05/26/paypal-lawsuit- google/](https://techcrunch.com/2011/05/26/paypal-lawsuit-google/)

<comment><USER70> What was the outcome of this lawsuit?

<comment><USER69> Was curious too, can't find it anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> uber is a DUMPSTER FIRE right now. feel bad for the engineers there who didn't steal anything.

</comment><comment><USER72> Sounds a bit like the Aleynikov saga.. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-24/aleynikov...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-24/aleynikov- s-conviction-is-reinstated-by-state-appeals-court)

</comment><comment><USER28> The medium article also notes that a couple more employees stole confidential information. Five years later Waymo employees will be bitching and moaning about corporate overreach and will have these fucktards to thank. (If allegations are proved).

</comment><comment><USER73> > Alphabet's venture capital arm, GV -- formerly known as Google Ventures -- > is an early backer of Uber.

Correct me if I am wrong, but does that mean Alphabet is suing itself since Alphabet owns both Google Venture, Waymo and has an investment in Uber...?

<comment><USER74> Yeah, that's wrong, being an investor in a company doesn't make you liable for their actions.

It does mean that Alphabet stands to lose something if they win the lawsuit, though whatever stake they do have in Uber is obviously negligible compared to WayMo itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> The timing here is just way too coincidental. Coming at a fresh nadir in Uber's standing in the tech industry, the week after Fowler's post.

For how long did Google know Levandowski had swiped its secrets?

This is how PR war is waged.

</comment><comment><USER76> Google has shares in uber. If they sue them and win their shares are theoretically worth less. I guess if they win enough money it works out.

</comment><comment><USER77> Patents, or Trade Secrets?

<comment><USER78> Misappropriating trade secrets and infringing on patents, as per the Waymo blogpost:

[https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against- otto-...](https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-and- uber-86f4f98902a1#.c48mb4c3b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> dang: just like we have warnings for [video] and [pdf] could we have warnings for autoplay video? I accidentally had the sound enabled on my computer.

</comment><comment><USER80> I need popcorn and front row seat for this

</comment><comment><USER81> This will put a permanent blow to Uber, it's in a tight spot already and self driving cars are it's only chance of survival.

If there's anyway to short Uber or any of the other unicorns kept afloat by low interest venture capital, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER82> Anyone here would do the same thing.

<comment><USER55> Maybe you might, but if you give me the choice of being in jail or not, I think I'd rather keep my windows unbarred.

<comment><USER82> He's not going to jail, he's white.

<comment><USER83> We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring repeated requests to stop.

If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email firstname.lastname@example.com and promise to follow the rules in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So a junior engineer took the files, left Waymo to join Uber and tried to pass off the files?

Correction. So he's not really a junior engineer. But how can he not think that everything he access on the Google's network is monitored?

<comment><USER84> Not quite...

First, Levandowski is far from a junior engineer. He's been described as the tech lead at Waymo and worked on Google Maps and Streetview.

Second, he left Waymo to co-found Otto, a startup which existed for six months before Uber acquired it for several hundred million dollars.

Third, he's now described as a senior executive at Uber.

I'm not sure where Facebook comes from here. Did I miss something??

<comment><USER29> Yes, yes. One must not comment on HN while coding (simple stuff) and eating snack, and telling kids to do their homework. I work from home today.

My apologies...

<comment><USER84> Don't worry bud and thanks for your reply!! I knew there was a 50% chance that I was severely confused and I appreciate you taking the time to clarify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> How can you steal patents? Those are public info.

Infringing on patents?

<comment><USER49> The title is "Alphabet's Waymo Alleges Uber Stole Self-Driving Secrets". I hope the mods can change the HN article's to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> It's sad how G lost its top engineers and is now trying to get back at them in the courts.

</comment><comment><USER87> This is a little idiotic. Alphabet let all their talent walk out the door. I'm assuming mostly because of idiotic management and now they're suing. They're basically losing on all sides.</comment>


Make sure you are actually using your EC2 reserved instances - <AUTHOR> http://gist.github.com/612288

<comment><USER2> An example of the output it produces:

      Comparing reserved instances to running instances...

      m1.large:
         us-east-1b 1/1
         us-east-1c 1/1
         us-east-1d 1/1

      c1.medium:
         us-east-1a 4/4

      m1.small:
         us-east-1a 1/0

      --
      0 unused reserved (good)
      1 unreserved running (bad)</comment>


StumbleUpon lays off dozens after failing to raise new round - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/10/stumbleupon-lays-off-dozens-after-failing-to-raise-new-round-source-says/

<comment><USER2> This sort of reflects hard times for the open web and desktop.

</comment><comment><USER3> StumbleUpon committed corporate suicide years ago. Surprised they are still around.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a disaster!</comment>


First they came for the file-sharing domains…  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.easydns.org/2010/11/27/first-they-came-for-the-file-sharing-domains/

<comment><USER2> Very nice parallel to the time before the second world war. But the post should also have given a credit link to Martin Niemöller: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came></comment>


Safe and Affordable Jetpack: Just $90,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/safe-and-affordable-jetpack-just-90000/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))

<comment><USER2> Be the first person outside of the development team to go through the 'test pilot' training program: [http://www.totalexperience.co.nz/browse.asp?CategoryID=245&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830868></comment>


Nasa bulds software game that allows children to map Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/nasa_microsoft_beamartian/

<comment><USER2> Link to the NASA page: <http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/welcome></comment>


The importance of DNS to startup – get emails delivered - <AUTHOR> https://www.dancvrcek.com/the-importance-o…ns-to-a-start-up/ <comment><USER2> I seem to be getting a 404 error

<comment><AUTHOR> Bugger. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Overlooked No More: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obituaries/alan-turing-overlooked.html <comment><USER2> In case you were wondering _by whom_ and _when_ someone as known as Turing was overlooked:

>Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.</comment>


Gadsby: 50,000 Word Novel Without The Letter "E" - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

<comment><USER2> Some years after I read about Gadsby I heard people talking about "The Great Gatsby." I was very confused about why there was an "e" in the title of the book which was supposed to contain no "e"s.</comment>


Feed-Forward helps artists communicate better. - <AUTHOR> http://www.feed-forward.net

<comment><AUTHOR> My friend, and business partner William Klieber have developed a unique to too help artist communicate better. We host artists of several disciplines including visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers. Artists can also sell their work commission free.

Our unique karma system encourages artists to give feedback for each others' work. The more high-quality feedback an artist gives for others' works on our homepage, the more often his/her work appears on our homepage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Congratulations!</comment></comment>


Amish Hackers (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/ <comment><USER2> My dad spends his summers near an Amish settlement. By settlement, I mean vast tracts of land with several farms. He buys most of his eggs, fruits, vegetables, etc. from them. They sell goods at a local farmers market, and when "organic" and "free range" became a fad, these guys put a giant photo in front of their stall of their chickens frolicking in huge paddocks with the words "FREE RANGE" below it - doesn't get more authentic than that.

He's gotten pretty friendly with them over the years. When we bring friends along to their farms to pick up goods, they're always shocked how contemporary these guys are.

One of them has a pretty sophisticated machine shop, with tools like drill presses, saws, sanding belts, etc. all driven by a series of axles forming a mechanical drivetrain that snakes throughout the barn (eventually to a very old diesel motor).

A couple of the young men came out to frame a house he's building. Once on a day off, they arrived by carriage and brought a pair of young Amish ladies with them to hang out at the beach. The next day, my dad found one of the girl's leggings left behind. He was discreet enough to return it to the girl's younger brother, instead of her dad.

All the kids know how to use iPhones - they sometimes ask to borrow his so they can make a call.

One of the more technically inclined gentleman even showed up one day with a cutting-edge drone, and had a blast flying it around with my dad. He made it very clear his wife isn't allowed to know he owns it! Last I heard that same guy is helping plan a solar array my dad wants to install to go off-grid.

<comment><USER3> Maybe the wife isn't allowed to know about the drone because she's currently cleaning his dirty underwear by hand?

<comment><USER4> Good point, I wonder if they are also slow to adopt social trends. If they're 50 years behind in technology, does that mean they're also just starting to consider women's liberation? The author seemed to interact only with men. Are the bishops who decide what technology to adopt also all men?

<comment><USER5> Great points, it's virtually guaranteed that as in many other religious groups there is a notion of "protecting" women by taking such decisions away from them or restricting them from various roles. The southern baptist church in the us remains inordinately focused on limiting women's roles. Women shouldn't be priests, in some places they allow them, other places look askance at that.

<comment><USER6> That is just a matter of basic theological fidelity; the matter is spelled out very clearly in the Bible[0]. You can't just pick and mix which parts of it you'd like to selectively ignore and claim it's 'up to interpretation'.

[0] Timothy 2:11-12

<comment><USER7> And yet I dont know of a single Christian that follows the rules against wearing blended material garments laid out in Leviticus 19:19.

My parents are Deacons in their local church, and believe you me, they pick and choose which parts to interpret as allegory and which parts to interpret literally all the time.

<comment><USER8> That is part of the ritual law, something a follower/disciple of Jesus is not required to do. In fact as a follower of Jesus there are no rules other than 2. Love God and love others. Everything else flows from that as far as the instruction gave like Jesus did in his Sermon on the Mount.

Someone who has said, hey I declare that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, and truly believes it will of course do things. Not because they have to, but because they want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am reminded of how much more difficult it would be to drive a car, if you had no Reverse gear. Our society, generally, has only every once in a great while successfully reversed on a technology. This means that we have to either ban it proactively, which requires us to be able to predict its consequences, or else adopt it and hope for the best.

The Amish subculture seems to have a functional reverse gear, allowing them to try out a technology and then decide not to allow it after all. It would be a good feature to have, for our society more generally.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you look around there are hacks and DIY solutions to problems everywhere!

No matter the hobby or location you can be sure that space had hackers and tinkers. Some really cool hacks come out of restrictions and lack of money for what we would consider 'proper' solutions, and each technology however analogue will be a space with its own hackers.

I really enjoy writeups like this of ingenious solutions to problems I will never face. Growing up having friends living on old farms far away from villages or towns I got to see some crazy contraptions, my favorites of which were probably various uses of streams (of water) for mechanical work.

<comment><USER11> I traveled to Cuba in 2012 as part of a research trip and seeing all the ways people have managed to hack together fixes for everything was perhaps the most incredible part of the experience. The embargo makes it difficult for Cubans to get a lot of things we take for granted but the Cuban people are perhaps the most inventive I've ever met. Living under the sanctions for decades has made creative problem solving a part of their culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amish are certainly an interesting group and I have a lot of respect for their work ethic! I recently had an Amish crew reside my house and they showed up every day with their driver at 6am! I am not sure how long the commute was but we live about an hour from Amish country.

They also had a young boy, maybe 12-14 years old, apprenticing with them. I believe Amish only need to do K-8 school and then they start their careers.

<comment><USER13> The Amish are extremely honest people in my experience. The ones I have met selling homemade goods and foods are fastidious about not charging for old food (e.g. 2 day old bread is free) regardless of whether it is still good and could be sold. I think the work ethic ties in with this, they see hard work as the only honest path in some way I think. In either case, it makes them some of the best handymen and construction workers:)

<comment><USER14> Except for stuff like this [https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish- sexua...](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish-sexual-abuse- incest-me-too/)

<comment><USER5> Oh my god, that's so horrifying. If you are in an insular community the idea that you want to hide abuse because it makes the group look bad, that's the same thinking that lead to decades of widespread abuse by priests in the catholic church. In america especially we have a blind eye toward the behavior of religious groups. There are other religious groups in america that have these self-reinforcing "the only way to be in the world is with us" behaviors. I'm sure there are also lots of decent people who are Amish too (probably doesn't need to be stated, there are decent people everywhere and in every group).

Blind allegiance to a group leads to endemic corruption, always has, always will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "They often don't have logical reasons for their policies" ...goes on to explain the logical reasons for why certain Amish communities refuse to use automobiles, closed carriages, etc.

<comment><USER16> I have read that the Amish make explicit decisions about whether to accept a certain technology into their communities.

A specific example was about technology that saved many hours of simple/light mechanical work for women: as a result, it eliminated the communal practice for women to be together in a large room talking while doing it. The technology was tried but then removed, as the result was less communal engagement.

To oversimplify: we default to using whatever comes up (Facebook, etc), whereas their approach is to evaluate the new thing as a community and decide.

<comment><USER17> That is really interesting and echoes some of what Camille Paglia has to say about washing in Italian immigrant communities. Do you have the source handy? I'd love to check it out.

<comment><USER16> It was _The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being_ by Daniel M. Haybron

[https://books.google.com/books?id=jAEBzgqniMAC&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=jAEBzgqniMAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=philosophy+of+unhappiness&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbpZLvudHnAhVRvFkKHXETDlAQ6AEwAHoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=amish&f=false)

I read numerous books on topic of Positive Psychology ... a really good academic one, tying together the field into a unifying framework is: _The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being_ by Michael A. Bishop

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's unfortunate that somehow, I just read an awesome article on (amish) hackers and technology, but leave the page only remembering the spambot comments at the bottom. Kevin (and other bloggers who have the same problem), if you read this, please disable comments in your posts. They provide hardly any value and just ruin the experience.

<comment><USER19> You should have kept reading. Right after the initial spambot comments, there were some really deep and useful comments from members/neighbors of Amish and Mennonite communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would be cool to see a whole free open source digital computing/communication platform of selfmade hardware and software built be the amish.

</comment><comment><USER21> Every time I think about Amish & technology I'm reminded of the Capability Maturity Model:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Leve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Levels)

1) Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) - the starting point for use of a new or undocumented repeat process.

2) Repeatable - the process is at least documented sufficiently such that repeating the same steps may be attempted.

3) Defined - the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process

4) Capable - the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed- upon metrics.

5) Efficient - process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

Amish tech processes seem to me higher up the chain than most people, so from this point of view, they are actually more advanced..

<comment> blaser-waffle I think it's more like they're willing to outsource / be late adopters, so that when they're seriously thinking about a technology it's already on Stage 4 or 5

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To some extent, I have a similar attitude about technology, though I draw the lines far differently than the Amish. I was a latecomer to smartphones, and even though I use one for a variety of purposes, I don't spend all day with my face buried in it - and I'm very picky about what apps I'll install. Facebook? Instagram? Hell no.

Back in my twenties, I started noticing that there really wasn't much on TV that I wanted to watch, and so never got around to subscribing to cable. To me, in the intervening years, TV has only become worse. My TV set spends most of its time as a large monitor.

<comment><USER23> > Back in my twenties, I started noticing that there really wasn't much on TV > that I wanted to watch, and so never got around to subscribing to cable. To > me, in the intervening years, TV has only become worse. My TV set spends > most of its time as a large monitor.

Same here. I grew up with television, but once I got my first own apartment I never bothered to get a cable subscription. I have a TV in my living room, but I consider it as a monitor for my game console and chromecast.

The first thing people ask me when they hear I don't have a cable subscription is usually: how do you watch the news then? The answer is simple: Except for stuff that interests me (tech mostly) I do not read, watch or listen the generic news. Most news is depressing anyways, and you really don't miss out on anything imo.

<comment><USER24> What I miss the most is local news. If something happens in Italy (pick a random country that is far away from my US home) that matters to me I will hear about it. However if something happens on my block I am unlikely to hear about it because things that close to home matter even when they are well below insignificant on the scale of national (or even state level) news.

Note that news shows cover a much larger area than my neighborhood and wouldn't give me that anyway. What I need most is a local newspaper with a small circulation.

<comment><USER25> This is why I pay for a couple of my local "papers". Thankfully I live in a section of New York (Halfway between Poughkeepsie and Peekskill) with loads of them. I'm sure a lot of mediumly populated places have at least one. Even my town of 600 has it's own paper - that I don't subscribe to because they distribute them to most of the shops in town.

Even if they have a political slant (which (a lot|most|all) of them do), it's easy to ignore that coverage and focus on the truly local news. Also, tons of local gossip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A thread from 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6317761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6317761)

2010: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378)

Discussed (barely) at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476454)

</comment><comment><USER6> > My impression is that the Amish are living about 50 years behind us. They > don't adopt everything new but what new technology they do embrace, they > take up about half a century after everyone else does. By that time, the > benefits and costs are clear, the technology stable, and it is cheap.

Yeah, this is definitely a sensible approach to doing things. They get most of the benefits of modernity, but few of the downsides. I wish our regulators would do the same.

quasi-relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/606/](https://xkcd.com/606/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice - learned something today. Before reading this article everything I knew about the Amish was from the movie Witness.

<comment><USER28> Not Kingpin?

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The comment section of the article is filled with funny bot spam, worth a glance for a chuckle. Guys advertising "whatsapp hacking" services with a "customer" replying to the ad vouching for them.

<comment><USER30> those people are abusing disqus across practically every site that uses it which ive visited in recent memory. wish they could get a handle on it, its a pretty useful plugin except for the apparent shitpot security. maybe its up to site moderators and they don't do the work, maybe the disqus audience is particularly vulnerable to soc.eng .. w/e, bummer.

<comment><USER31> Seems as if unapproved comments got auto hidden after a few days or a week, all that spam would disappear?

There are _real_ comments too, though, starting from 8 years ago: _" I can't say that I would ever manage to live like this, but I applaud their motivations behind it. // ... Why they don't use automobiles ... // Actually, some do. ... Local church elders basically determine what is acceptable ..."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Title should note that the article is from 2009.

<comment><USER26> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


EC2: Simpler Access to Spot Capacity, Smooth Price Changes, Instance Hibernation - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-update-streamlined-access-to-spot-capacity-smooth-price-changes-instance-hibernation/ <comment><USER2> Hibernation when a spot instance is reclaimed is an excellent addition. Like TFA says, it's like closing the lid on your laptop, and re-opening it later. This definitely makes spot instances more attractive to developers who don't have the, ahem, bandwidth to write the additional fault tolerance code typically seen in spot instance-optimized workloads.</comment>


Ask HN:How did you monetized your website? - <AUTHOR>

For me,I can develop,deploy and market website but when i think about monetization i sweat out,it is very hard . It will be great for me(and others too) if you please share your experience how did you monetize your website. Thank you. <comment><USER2> It very much depends on the website.

Some websites will be best running Adsense. Seriously. I know a guy who, at its peak, was running a website making 5 figures a month off Adsense.

Many websites will work well with affiliate marketing - find a product that your audience wants that has an affiliate program (where you're paid commission for either selling it or generating leads) and recommend that to your audience.

Others are obvious fits for a designed product, or an email list, or upsell to consultancy, or - the list goes on.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution, I'm afraid.

It also depends on the person running the website. Do you like doing A/B tests and have a gift for selling? Affiliate marketing may be the way forward. Are you a fantastic writer? Ebooks, my friend, ebooks. Do you love interacting with your community, have a skill for building huge traffic, but hate selling? Adsense.

<comment><AUTHOR> No,I'm afraid but am not great writer but what I am creating will bring huge traffic on my website(or say blog).

After hearing lot of suggestions and googling, i found that i will use Adsense as default way for generating revenue with upgrade plan which can filter ads and provide other fancy extra things.

Thanks for your help

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If it's just as website without selling services then your probably going to be looking at advertising.

<comment><AUTHOR> seriously saying,I don't think ads are the true solution for a monetization. Users are visiting on our website to read content(or to use our service) and if we show them ad they will leave our website.We don't want them to leave, i invested $1oooo+ to bring users to my website and now i showing the route abandon my website...

In the fastmoving world where everything is going better, it is hard to believe that ads are still surviving and sitting comfortably; where all entrepreneurs cleverness goes , why don't they solve this problem.

<comment><USER4> Most people won't simply leave if the ads are not intrusive; many of the people who are annoyed by ads will already have Adblock installed, anyway.

Did you consider having a paywall for a portion of your content?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think and believe that Adblock is mostly used by technical person ; non- technical person may not know or use such services.

Payway is good but it will limit the audience which I really don't want.

Something i think i should run donation campaign then deep inside i accept that i am not Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I monetized it with good content. I got hired along the years because my writings.

</comment><comment><USER6> I choose to not monetize my website ([http://www.stratigery.com](http://www.stratigery.com)). I saw advertising very obviously corrupting newspapers in the 80s and 90s, and I view that corruption as part of why newspapers didn't adapt to The Internet. I decided to avoid all that potential bad influence by not monetizing.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you can assume everyone is in the same boat as you. Using something like AdSense isn't going to "corrupt" this guy's website. It's not like Google is making him do ads for Viagra. The key, like with most things, is moderation.</comment></comment>


Microsoft and NIST partner to create enterprise patching guide - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-and-nist-partner-to-create-enterprise-patching-guide/ <comment><USER2> >The OS maker said that many of the organizations that got hit had failed to install patches, even if security updates were available. This led Microsoft to investigate why companies didn't patch their systems.

Because MS keeps releasing patches that break their systems. Just look at the history of Win10 patches...</comment>


Most Dangerous Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://drbenkim.com/ten-most-dangerous-drugs.html?awesm=fbshare.me_APNu2

<comment><USER2> There is some seriously fallacious thinking going on here:

"It is estimated that tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is involved in more than 50 percent of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. In light of these statistics, the authors of this study question why alcohol and tobacco are legal to use within current drug policies for Britain and the United States, while less harmful drugs like ecstasy and LSD are deemed illegal to use."

Ok, so if you start with a statistic representing the frequency of an event in the general population caused by a drug that is legal and in widespread use, you cannot simply compare that directly to a lack of the same event attributed to another drug whose usage population is far lower. Far fewer people use ecstasy (just an example) than use alcohol or tobacco. That, in itself, doesn't make it less dangerous. You'd have to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the population that uses the drug, then apply a per capita calculation.

I'm not necessarily arguing that any of the drugs on the list shouldn't be there, but as soon as I saw bullet #3 (The drug's overall impact on society) I knew things were going to get fuzzy.

</comment><comment><USER3> so on the second list - marijuana is more harmful than paint thinner and LSD?</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't I raise funding? - <AUTHOR> I'm developing a Venmo-like solution in Europe. With disrupting regulation coming in 2018 (PSD2), fintech is quite a hot space in Europe at the moment. However, I can't seem to be able to raise funding for my project. We've raised 250k so far to develop the product and harvest the first user data. Investors tell us that the market is too competitive and too capital intensive to get involved in. They tell us explicitly that they like the team. I don't believe a capital intensive market is a reason not to invest.
We're in a market with strong network effects, so naturally being a first mover is one of the biggest advantages right now.
Some key metrics: 28d Retention: 25-30% Doubling userbase every quarter. No marketing, have an inherent viral product. Current userbase: 3.6k
What would be the reason people don't want to invest? Is my retention too low, userbase too low or am I naive or ignorant about something obvious about consumer fintech?
Curious as to what the HN community thinks. <comment><USER2> What gets measured becomes the goal. I think about payments and the numbers I'm likely to care about are number of transactions and revenue per transaction. I would not really focus on users because it is vague...could be a harvested email or someone who downloaded an app etc.

Or rather I would not focus on number of except as it relates to transactions. Having just ten users who do a million transactions a month suggests a strong network effect and the potential for profits from volume on fractional fees. A million users who do a million transactions a month might also be good, but 4k users at $60 acquisition per user does not suggest it will be easy to get to the hundreds of millions of users that would are probably required to make a consumer facing Unicorn.

Fintech may be a hot space. By the time I hear about hot spaces I figure the smart money that earns 40% a year is already there and big dumb money that is happy with 6% a year is on its way. Not that I have money to invest either way.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> In Feb we did 1k+ transactions, done by 615 users. 4 months before that we did half. We're seeing a little bit more growth in usage in the last months than we see in user growth, mainly because of the network effect.

A transaction costs a few cents per transaction, and the prices will drop a lot in two years from now.

<comment><USER2> For a back of envelope calculation, call that ~0.3 transactions per user per month and round the few cents up to a dollar and the revenue is $0.30 per user per month. That's $3.60 per year and the current acquisition cost is ~$60.00 per user without accounting for churn. Over twenty years that's $72.00 of lifetime value and $12.00 over acquisition costs. I'm not saying those are the numbers but they are a starting point for a _pro forma_.

A low rate of engagement and a high cost of acquisition and a low margin per transaction are all considerations in terms of viability of the business. A changing regulatory landscape is a huge risk that probably does not favor small companies with constrained resources. The probability of lower prices in two years is an insight into the market, but not one that encourages investment.

As an exercise, it might be useful to think about what should be done if the company does not obtain outside investment. How would bootstrapping work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _I don 't believe a capital intensive market is a reason not to invest._

It's what investors believe that matters though. And if they tell you that "the market is too competitive and too capital intensive to get involved in", then what more do you need?

The investors you've managed to attract are not for big risks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does this mean there aren't any investors that would be willing to do such a thing? Do I simply need to look elsewhere for funding?

<comment><USER3> Possibly, unless you have reason to believe that they just don't like your implementation, and are lying it to you about their true concerns.

In general European investors are more conservative that SV ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Which investors are you pitching to? If "capital intensive" is the main complaint, perhaps you are trying to raise the wrong kind of funding. Is the "capital intensive" due to the need to float money between payment cycles? If so, perhaps you would fare better trying to raise a line of credit from a bank. Or, specifically target fintech funds.

Also, where did you get the first 250k from? Are those investors not interested in further investment? If so, that's a very negative signal and you need to figure out how to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've pitched to VC's. They tell it's too early stage for them, because we're 4-7 years away from profitability.

I've pitched to angels, they want to invest, but I'm reluctant to take their money as I am not seeing how their money is going to help me get the next round of funding, with the comments from VC's I'm getting right now. Also, the angel network in my country is not big (5-10 people I can raise from).

First 250k we got from a big bank. We since then pivoted the company to a more mainstream product and they just killed a proposition like this one of their own (because the product sucked), and are afraid to invest more in the same space.

<comment><USER4> Still wondering what's so capital intensive about the business. Is it the need to float money? Could you restructure your business to avoid this? i.e. by partnering with an existing merchant account provider and signing your customers up as "sub merchants"? (isn't this what stripe does? or at least used to do?)

Why not reach out to other big banks for investment? Perhaps you can frame the pitch so that they feel like they're capitalizing on a missed investment opportunity by their competitor (your original investor).

<comment><AUTHOR> One big bank ripped our idea off after having pitched the idea at the same time we did at Bank A (our investor). If we don't close something this month, we'll sell to them (they're rather eager). Making it an acquihire, because they don't know how to take the product to the next level. This outcome would certainly feel like a big failure to me.

They are not extremely hard to beat, their product lacks a lot of strategic implementations, making the barrier to exit extremely low. Our product also tends to be better.

The reason it's capital intensive is because you'll need to pay for transactions up until about 2020, and also need to acquire users very rapidly before 2018. Only to find out between 2018-2020 how much you can monetize the product. (big risk, fairly unkown reward).

There are ways to get the transaction costs down, but they will always be there long before we become profitable.

<comment><USER4> Why aren't you passing transaction costs onto the customer? So all these customers you have are paying you _zero_ dollars?? Is that really necessary?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, consumers are never paying premiums for transaction costs in Europe. Debit cards are the norm here. We don't pay extra when using our regular bank app to transact nor ecommerce transactions. Consumers are not going to pay for transactions :-)

<comment><USER4> Ah I see. I missed the part that you were more Venmo than stripe. I guess this is the same strategy Venmo took (and they started charging fees as soon as possible, especially given all the people using it for credit card churning).

Sounds like you have a solid business. Good luck getting more funding. I hope it works out for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kilt for Hire - <AUTHOR> https://literaryreview.co.uk/kilt-for-hire <comment><USER2> This was an interesting period of history, and I'm really looking forward to reading _Kilt For Hire_! I can't believe there's a book about Gardener now.

I always try to make a pair of books for a period I'm interested in: one comprehensive history of the major events and people of the period, and one personal story. (For instance, the late 1800s/early 1900s incl WW1, I have "Dreadnought" by RKM and "Storm of Steel" by Junger).

For the time before and during the first Afghan War, I can highly recommend:

1) Maybe the best-researched, most vivid, and most comprehensive overall telling of the before, during and after of the First Afghan War: the book _Return of a King,_ by Dalrymple. It incorporates a lot of surprisingly- recently-translated documents from libraries in modern-day Pakistan, which became more interesting to historians post-2001.

2) A personal story, that of the American Josiah Harlan, the book _Josiah The Great_. Like Gardener was a wanderer and soldier of fortune, but who unlike Gardener was the inspiration for Kipling's short story written after the publication of the first part of his memoirs (and later movie with M. Caine and S. Connery). His story has a lot of detail, because he was a weird duck who kept to himself, brought a personal library with him, and took extensive notes for his memoirs. In fact he's a high-quality primary source in book (1). As a result, there's a lot of detail. You can really feel the personal danger Harlan was in, and just how often he bluffed his way through situations that could easily have killed him.

</comment><comment><USER3> The photo of Gardner mentioned at the start:

[https://atechnologyjobisnoexcuse.com/files/2012/10/tumblr_m9...](https://atechnologyjobisnoexcuse.com/files/2012/10/tumblr_m9u3epSS1L1qa2j8co1_1280.jpg)

<comment><USER4> I will never look this badass

<comment><USER5> At least not in a pair of Tom's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who is behind Kashi House the publishers of this book? Their stuff seems like hard-core Orientalism?

<comment><USER7> From googling around: looks to be based in England, and focused on books about the Sikhs, or Punjab generally.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but suppose it's run by Lord Shufflepuff ex. Major 34th Lance Hussars.</comment></comment></comment>


Fix Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

<comment><USER2> The page title is "How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections". The shorter "Fix Firefox" sounds more like a command than description.</comment>


Look This Up on Wikipedia: How Big Is Too Big? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/look-this-up-on-wikipedia-how-big-is-too-big/ <comment><USER2> Wikipedia is not continuing to grow because its policy is to delete articles whose subjects aren't covered in the mainstream press.

The mainstream press, on the other hand, is shrinking every month.

The current definition of notability is like Newtonian physics. It's useful, but must eventually be replaced by a more nuanced model.

<comment><USER3> At the moment, Wikipedia relies on the press to verify the truth. How do you suggest Wikipedia verifies the truth without relying on the press and other scholarly sources?

<comment><USER4> A good question -- and there are at least two dimensions: (1) using traditional publication coverage to evaluate 'notability'; and (2) using traditional publications as sources of information.

I personally would jettison 'notability' for 'usefulness', and improve the procedures for allowing 'self-published' material -- even up to original research and the testimony of primary sources -- to provide Wikipedia content, as long as it's true.

Yes, that's harder than just deferring to traditional high-reputation news and academic publishers. But those publishers are retreating, while the need for reference information is growing, and this problem needs the boldness of the wiki-model, even as Wikipedia has become squeamish about such experimentalism.

<comment><USER5> So let's say I build some kind of application. And I create a website for it and a Twitter account and whatever else. Should there be a Wikipedia article for that? By having lower notability standards, there would be, as the article could use the sources I created. Seems to me that there shouldn't be an article for that, though, as that's really just a case of self-promotion and advertising. Besides, there really isn't anything particularly notable about the product itself, is there? It's just something I made on my own in a few days.

<comment><USER4> By the 'true and useful' standard, yes. If someone wants to write it, why stop them?

Whether your app dies in obscurity or explodes in popularity, if Wikipedia could collect true and useful info about it, why exert extra effort to exclude or erase that info?

If there's a topic that only a dozen people in the world (currently) care about, but one or two of them are willing and able to write neutral, reference-style articles about that topic that will be of interest to the next dozen people, why exile that work elsehwere because of traditional standards of 'notability' based on the idea of limited staff time and print-page column- inches?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the obsession with constant growth? Why does wikipedia need to keep growing? It's not going to disappear if its user base stops growing. People will still edit. People will still read it. It'll probably get better if it slows down a bit and starts to get real.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. And, even if Wikipedia can't sustain infinite exponential growth, that hardly means that it's failed.

<comment><USER8> Certainly, information isn't necessarily governed by Moore's law, it's information processing that is! Exponential information creation would require an exponential rise in population, and that's just not the case - thankfully.

<comment><USER7> That, and Wikipedia has been growing far more quickly than the world's population, or even Moore's Law, can account for. At a certain point, a carrying capacity is bound to be reached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the reasons for the decay were already widely discussed everywhere: 1\. there is a great amount of rules and guidelines which worsen the learning curve 2\. quite often, articles are owned by "shepherds", who tend to rollback outsider contributions (because they have their own perfect vision in their heads); this contributes to despair of occasional contributors 3\. because the topmost reasons to be a winner in a editor dispute are (a) persistence and (b) bone-headness

<comment><USER10> These problems get a lot of attention because people tend to whine loudly about them. But the vast majority of articles are not affected by them.

Except possibly the learning curve. I think the fact that Wikipedia is just a little bit difficult to edit has helped it enormously. That filtered out the people who post the sort of junk you see on YouTube, digg, reddit, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> WP's a lot more daunting than it used to be for a newcomer. Every now and then I see an article where someone came along, dumped in a bunch of text (unique if not original), and ran away from merging it.

They could _really_ use a hand-holding (offline?) editing environment. Stylistic expectations now are daunting for a noob - and their online help is, well, badly organized might be kind.</comment>


Explore the Ocean in new Google Earth - <AUTHOR> http://earth.google.com/ocean/

<comment><USER2> I'm wondering if the ocean version of Google Earth will include a submarine simulator in the way that regular Google Earth had an airplane simulator.</comment>


Neat trick for getting private info for Facebook, GMail, Twitter and Digg users - <AUTHOR> https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Private_Information

<comment><USER2> _Side note._

      https://twitter.com/account/use_phx?setting=false&format=text

Recognised that URL immediately, and (after first changing to newtwitter which I hate), reloading the page did indeed switch me back to oldtwitter.

Edit: Because of the change in URLs between the old and new versions of Twitter, I can only find one alternative to the us_phx option (a fairly obvious one):

      http://twitter.com/settings/account

Returns 302 if not logged in, and if logged in then 200 regardless of if your account is set to use new or old twitter.

<comment> mike-cardwell 302 wont work. It simply redirects to the destination page, and then the onload would be triggered. What you need to find is something which generates an error code, ie 4xx/500. When logged in, this generates a 406, because I set "format" to something invalid:

[https://twitter.com/account/use_phx?setting=false&format...](https://twitter.com/account/use_phx?setting=false&format=text)

But when logged out, it redirects to the login form which ultimately provides a 200 status code.

There are probably several other ways of making twitter generate a HTTP error code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is why I use "Request Policy" on Firefox. It prevents by default all kinds of cross-domain requests like these.

It's a bit painful to set up at first for all sites that you visit frequently (similar to setting up NoScript), but then you can enjoy a much more lightweight browsing experience - and a more secure one as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I almost wish attacks like this could be used to trim down all the options provided by uber-social sites that offer me the option to twitter/like/stumbleupon/reddit/digg/etc... every single page.

<comment><USER5> by using browser history leaking...you can! <http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/>

This will be plugged in future browsers though...its already blocked in chrome

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could actually be useful to a UI designer in a non-evil way. Normally we have a list of services that you could authenticate with. If we knew that someone was logged into a less-common social network we could show that button instead of a more-common one they weren't logged into.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perfect. I needed a replacement for the visited link technique that's being squashed by Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER8> Twitter provides an undocumented endpoint that returns true/false depending on your session state.

      <script>
        function twitterSessionsPresent(state) {
          console.log(state);
        }
      </script>
      <script src='https://api.twitter.com/sessions/present.js?callback=twitterSessionsPresent'></script>

</comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't expose any "real" private info( eg: passwords ). If the intent of the piece was to get users to turn off Javascript and secure themselves, the possibilities laid out are not forceful enough to achieve that objective, imo.

<comment> mike-cardwell The intent of the piece was to tell people about a neat trick I'd discovered. Nothing more.

Which sites you log into, _is_ private information.

The Firefox addon "Request Policy" does protect from this attack, but it's not the most user friendly way to browse the web. I've been trying it out myself the past couple of days. Fine for geeks, but not fine for the average user.

<comment><USER10> You said "Which sites you log into" but mean "Which sites you maintain a persistent log in on" which are two very different things.

The post you responded to is correct in that the title is somewhat incendiary compared to the reality, unless there is some possible hijacking or scraping vector from this, but that seems massively unrealistic.

<comment> mike-cardwell For the average user "Which sites you log into" and "Which sites you maintain a persistent log in on" are equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder why doesn't it work in Opera?

<comment> mike-cardwell Iit's only the Facebook, Twitter and Digg attacks that don't work in MSIE and Opera. The GMail attacks works in all of them. The reason the "script" based attacks don't work in Opera and IE is because they don't fire the onload/onerror events if the returned content isn't valid JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Checking the color of <a> gives similar information. It's all client-side so you can do 40k+ URIs per second.

Here's code I wrote to display the "digg this" button only to digg users: <http://int2e.com/blog/improved-digg-integration-script/>

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, the next version Firefox will block this hole, and I imagine other browsers will follow suit.

[http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes- com...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-coming-to- css-vistited/)

<comment><USER13> Why is that unfortunate?

<comment><USER7> I use visited links to personalize my site.

There are definitely privacy implications when doing it on a large scale, but I wish there was a middle ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hm. It reported I'm on Twitter although I wasn't. Both on Chrome and FF. JavaScript was enabled. A bug perhaps?

<comment> mike-cardwell Strange. It's still working fine for me. Said I wasn't logged in, so I logged in and checked and work, and I logged out again and checked and it worked. I wonder if you're using a proxy that is interfering somehow? I'm assuming it's not an addon as you said it's the same in both Chrome and Firefox?

I'm sure this isn't what you're thinking, but just to double check... You don't think that you're logged out of twitter just because it's not open anymore do you? If you log in, and then close the tab without logging out, then you're still logged in...

<comment><USER14> I know I wasn't logged in because I don't even have a twitter account :). But, your assumption that this may be a proxy issue is almost certainly right, since I accessed the page from my work computer. I tried it now from my home computer and everything checks out - it doesn't show that I'm logged in anywhere except where I actually am.

<comment> mike-cardwell For the Twitter test, the HTTP response code is an error code if you're logged in. So if your work place blocks Twitter and returns an error code like 403 or something, then you will appear to be logged in.

The test could easily be modified so it checks some other url first to make sure twitter isn't generally blocked.

The intention of the article was to describe a general technique, rather than to provide some complete fully functional tests. Although they do work for the vast majority of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can you get usernames this way?

<comment> mike-cardwell Not in any of the examples provided. The article describes a general technique for attacking sites. There are lots of variations of the attacks that work against lots of different sites. Two variations are provided as examples which cover 4 particularly well known sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> iOS 4.2, mobile safari: Facebook mobile failed, but switching to full site works.</comment>


This is the best "we're hiring" image ever drawn - <AUTHOR> http://www.dropbox.com/jobs

<comment><USER2> Most relevant bit for geeks: "Build/buy your dream computer."

Another good way to measure the quality of a job posting would be "root on your box", I don't understand why so many companies are reluctant to do this.

<comment><USER3> This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill.

I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer.

Sadly this is rather common.

My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.

<comment><USER4> It's not just developers or geeks. I actually quit a job in the financial industry a while ago as soon as I got other money coming in because I was too pissed with their drone environment: outdated HP boxes, Win XP, Matlab, Excel/Office etc. I'm not saying these are generally bad tools. They just didn't fit my brain and, frankly, hurt my eyes and ears. It was not the only thing -- the machines fit the firm's intellectual and political standards -- but it was a big part of making my life miserable every day. I'm still taking some time off and thinking about my options but one of the main motivations for doing my own thing would be to never ever have to work again with stuff I hate.

<comment><USER5> Did a stint as a freelancer at a major marketing firm about a year ago. Was running a pentium 4 with half a gig of ram and windows 2000. Not that bad, I suppose - it could have been worse.

Except there was photoshop involved.

And a solitary 15" monitor.

And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).

After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love the musical culture: Every night around 7, I turn up the music in the office. Then I have to explain to the beijing office why ICP, G&R, 2-Pac or any other thing I put on is a good choice. The Killer or Fleetwood Mac seems goes over better.

I find that music at night and on the weekends makes all the work even more fun.

<comment><USER7> I find that not working on nights and weekends makes life more fun.

<comment><USER8> Some people enjoy working like that, and enjoy their jobs enough that they don't care that they're actually working.

The extreme example is John Carmack, who according to the book "The Masters of Doom", would crank music all night, and drink diet pepsi (early days of id, grant you, I don't know how he works now) while programming. He rolled in the office at 4pm and stayed until early morning.

There's nothing wrong with working crazy late hours if you enjoy it.

<comment><USER9> Rolled in at 4pm - when he wanted.

The problem is when you start at 8am, work all day, waste time in meetings - then have to stay til 10pm every night to meet some deadline so that a sales guy gets a bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related to logo? [http://www.wow.com/2010/07/30/the-maelstrom-is-probably- epic...](http://www.wow.com/2010/07/30/the-maelstrom-is-probably-epic-enough- for-you-now/)

<comment><USER11> i'm jon, the guy who made the drawing. though i did play wow once upon a time, the drawing actually wasn't inspired by this despite the crazy coincidence that both have a dino riding a shark.

...but i'm not gonna lie; i will say that wow's version really makes me heartbroken that i left out a laser beam D:

<comment><USER12> It would seem that it was subconscious inspiration. Things you see around you can easily get into your creative work without you realizing it (I know, [citation needed]). I did see a show where someone anticipated the nature a creative drawing, just by showing them similar imagery a while before. But that doesn't count as a citation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I loved it too.

Then I clicked on the "try our challenges" link and found another awesome image: <http://www.dropbox.com/jobs/challenges>.

All things considered, I'm falling in love with Dropbox more each day! :)

<comment><USER14> Similar to this one is also used on their 404 page: <http://dropbox.com/404> — freaking awesome

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I understand it's pretty normal for America, but 15 days paid holiday seems so small to me. 22.5 here in the UK + bank holidays, and I don't feel it's particularly generous. Hmm...

<comment><USER16> What's even more concerning for me is that it is "15 Days of Paid Time Off." Not sure about Dropbox, but at a previous employer of mine that meant "15 Days of Vacation/Sick Time."

<comment><USER17> I don't know the details, but when I worked for a company based in SF (like Dropbox), they claimed there was a law that compelled them to count sick time and vacation in one bucket.

<comment><USER18> CA has some really weird rules. In addition to that, there's also a cash-out rule that vacation can't be expired without compensation.

So, managers have to be persnickety about having you track the time you spend out of the office going to the dentist, etc. because otherwise the company can get shafted with a bill for the "untaken" paid time off at the end of the year / when the employee leaves.

<comment><USER3> Cash-out can be abused, but on the other hand, if you don't exert pressure on your employees to continually work overtime, or take as little sequential leave as possible, that's less of a problem.

Though I know it's somewhat common practice here in New Zealand to start not taking leave if you're about to quit, so you can get one or two extra paychecks when you quit, and time it so you have two weeks to a month before your new job starts.

Same benefit, plus a nice cash bonus.

Not saying it's the best thing to do for employers that treat you right, but if you're not being paid overtime, and being asked to work it and weekends a lot, it's not like you don't deserve getting that back if you leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would only be cooler if the shark had a laser beam on it's head.

<comment><USER20> Or if the shark were using Lisp in Emacs

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great way to let company culture shine. The site seriously stands out from typical, generic job postings. Dropbox looks like a fun place to work :).

</comment><comment><USER22> Heh - love it. But playing devil's advocate here: won't this discourage applicants who aren't up on their latest internet memes? Is stuff like this on the recruiting page just a fast route to a homogenous company with a reduced ability to design for users not like them?

<comment><USER23> All corporate cultures select for "More people like us, please." ( _Especially_ the ones who mention how important a diverse workforce is to them. That line _is not neutral_ with respect to the kind of people you want to hire.)

The least they can do is be honest about it.

<comment><USER22> This might be true. I've done this myself. But is it ideal? I don't particularly care for 'people of all colors holding hands under a rainbow' as an ideology, but I do think it's easier for a homogenous team to make bad product mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clever - quirky enough to get to the top of HN, informing (arguably) the best pool of potential employees that they're hiring.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice img. I do remember another version in a ruby-oriented blog with a bear in place of the rex. Can't remember where.

<comment><USER26> Are you thinking of this thoughtbot post?

[http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/159805334/make-your- test-s...](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/159805334/make-your-test-suite- uncomfortably-fast)

I just put this into a unit testing presentation we did at my dayjob.

<comment><USER25> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love the Gaming Benefits, Starcraft 2. Only 2 of us playing at my office:/

<comment><USER28> Maybe we should start a HN group on Battle.net (This is where we rant about no chat channels yet on Bnet2.0)

<comment><USER29> I'd join that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been partial to our jobs page art since it went up a few years ago <http://www.telltalegames.com/company/jobs/>

</comment><comment><USER31> There should be a bear holding the shark: <http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Bear_holding_a_Shark>

</comment><comment><USER32> That is an _amazing_ "we're hiring" image! I didn't even need the rest of the page; why would I, with a graphic like that? Truly remarkable work, dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wanted to apply, except they used the term baller in the job description.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like "Whiskey Fridays." :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Dude. Laser tag in the office? That's awesome.

<comment><USER35> I also love the subtle "Test your might" MK ref.

<comment><USER11> glad you spotted that ;) internal mockups actually had the giant dragon mk logo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> +1</comment>


$4.30 microcontroller dev board - <AUTHOR> http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/MSP430_LaunchPad_%28MSP-EXP430G2%29

<comment><USER2> While the LaunchPad itself is old news, I hadn't noticed that TI was offering a $10 capacitive touch pad/scroll wheel module.</comment>


Chrome Extension Manifest V3 (draft) may end uBlock Origin - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghacks.net/2019/01/22/chrome-extension-manifest-v3-could-end-ublock-origin-for-chrome/ <comment><USER2> He actually brings up a good point later in the article, that this sounds like Microsoft's old mantra:

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

</comment><comment><USER3> Google is the biggest advertising company, is it so strange that they want you to see their non-disturbing ads. ABP want's this as well and now Chrome wants to enforce their syntax.

</comment><comment><USER3> discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973477)</comment>


iRotary - Part Three - <AUTHOR> http://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-part-three/

<comment><USER2> this is super cool, i have an old rotary phone in my basement that i was looking to update</comment>


Samsung swiped my so-so Galaxy Tab review for its faked Galaxy Tab video. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2011/03/26/samsungs-fake-galaxy-tab-interviews-hey-those-words-sound-familiar/

<comment><USER2> Samsung needs to realize that in order to compete with Apple on its home turf, it's not enough to copy Apple's products. Samsung also needs to copy Apple's marketing savvy.

Right now, they're going about it the wrong way. First they announce the Galaxy Player, a supposed competitor to the iPod touch, which has yet to materialize. Then they brag about having sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs. Soon after, they have to retract that statement; it was the number of Tabs shipped to retailers, at that point they weren't sold to consumers. Next, they had a Korean exec with poor English language skills making statements about the Galaxy Tab's sales [0], explaining that "sales are quite smooth" while also stating "sell-out wasn't as fast as we expected". This week, we find out that Samsung cancelled the previously announced Galaxy Tab 10.1, replacing it with a non-working prototype of a new 10.1 tablet, not mentioning a shipping date for the actual product. And then this, a commercial with bad actors being presented as customers who've seen and used the product (which doesn't exist).

      - Only announce products that you're ready to ship.
      - Don't let just anyone at your company comment on those products.
      - Hire only the best firms to create your ads.
      - Communicate emotion, not features.

[0] [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/31/samsung-galaxy-tab- sa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/31/samsung-galaxy-tab-sales- actually-quite-small/?mod=rss_WSJBlog)

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that you say "Only announce products that you're ready to ship." I think doing the opposite (announcing a product that's not ready or not even in development) is a strategic decision used by many firms (Microsoft, for example) to discourage competition.

It doesn't work well here because Samsung is not the dominant player in the market, as Microsoft is in its own market. Ironically, Apple could do this, and it would work. But it'd be against Apple's secretive nature.

<comment><USER4> True, but this is also one of the most annoying tactics that fanboys use to dismiss the value of other products. They quote these statements of future intent as if they are currently available products or features, and often confuse those who don't know any better. I just think it would be nice if companies competed head on, instead of putting an existing product against the possibility that they might make a competitive product in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At vmworld 2010 Samsung had a big TV playing a Steve Jobs-esque keynote presentation introducing some new product. The really odd thing was that it was entirely faked. The speaker, the audience, the applause, everything. Somebody there has a crazy obsession with Apple and has led their company into the uncanny valley of imitation.

<comment><USER6> Cargo cult PR? ("Apple has presentations by Steve Jobs; Apple is successful; therefore, Jobs-esque presentations cause success.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get it. Why should I care about a faux reality commercial?</comment>


Design pattern in simple examples - <AUTHOR> http://www.go4expert.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5127 <comment><USER2> I strongly, strongly dislike this type of article.

With the effort that you need to expend to understand this guff, you could be up and writing concurrent functional programs in Scheme, or Clojure, or Scala. There are plenty of great tutorials out there.

Agreed, if you are stuck in some dreary code-mine (bad lighting, cubes, people with MBAs), these design patterns are a balanced part of the means of communication with architecture astronauts, but if you have access to more expressive languages, then most of these things are just 'how you do it'.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some fun interactive resources for learning HTML / CSS? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://www.codecademy.com/](https://www.codecademy.com/) (free) Is probably what you're looking for, also If you don't mind paying I highly recommend [https://www.teamtreehouse.com](https://www.teamtreehouse.com).

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually want this as my partner wants to start learning HTML/CSS.</comment>