A Disturbance In The (Burger) Force - <AUTHOR> http://www.weathersealed.com/2010/02/23/a-disturbance-in-the-force/

<comment><USER2> hum not sure about this.. It shows my area is dominated by dairy queen yet we have maybe 3 within 50 miles.. There are far more sonics, mcdonalds, ect.

<comment><USER3> a disturbance in the (data) force?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, I didn't understand that.</comment>


Twitter buys Summize -- or not? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/twitter-buys-twitter-search-engine-summize-or-not-

<comment><USER2> I guess making their own search system would be too hard, so they acquired another company's.

Logic FTW!</comment>


Show HN: Procedural Voxel Rendering in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://guillaumechereau.github.io/goxel/ <comment><USER2> Lovely! Reminds me of L-Systems such as the 2D Context-Free Art [http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/](http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/) and the 3D Structure Synth [https://www.flickr.com/groups/structuresynth/](https://www.flickr.com/groups/structuresynth/)

I had planned to use such a system one day for a Ludum Dare entry :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the syntax is directly inspired by ContextFreeArt. I didn't know about Structure Synth, it looks very cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't work here:

        Blocked loading mixed active content "http://bootswatch.com/slate/bootstrap.min.css"
        Blocked loading mixed active content ...

You may want to include your JavaScript via "//bootswatch.com/..." instead of hard-coding unencrypted HTTP via "[http://bootswatch.com/..."](http://bootswatch.com/...")

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I just put the js in the webpage directly. That should fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Needs more Comanche ;-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this actually voxel rendering, or is it voxels rendered with polygon rendering techniques?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel#Rendering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel#Rendering)

<comment><USER6> Huh? What is "actual voxel rendering"?

I mean, short of using special hardware and raycasting methods, everything is going to be reduced to triangles of some form. Even the more specialized stuff that NVIDIA has been working on.

<comment><USER7> Not everything has to be drawn as a triangle. You can apply a fragment shader symmetrically to every pixel in a framebuffer, instead of using geometry to apply different fragment shaders within each triangle.

This technique is commonly used to post-process already-rendered scenes, like with a tone mapping shader or depth of field effects. But for simple scenes you can also put an entire rendering engine in the fragment shader, typically using ray marching.

Here are some examples of this technique being used to draw voxels:

[https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=voxel](https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=voxel)

<comment><USER6> That is a very good point, I forgot about that option.

Do you think this will be a realistic option at some point for wide-spread use? The stuff I saw from NVIDIA looked like they think a hybrid approach (voxels are shoveled to the GPU in a octree arrangement to handle ray marching, but the output is traditional triangles) would work best for efficiency reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice! What shader (I guess?) is used to make the cube borders looking a bit rounded?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here: this is simply using a bump texture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool and powered by emscripten!

</comment><comment><USER10> Works on my phone!</comment>


Ask HN: What is the legality of hacking systems in lawless jurisdictions? - <AUTHOR> I'm not experience in this topic so this may be a naive question, but are you breaking US law if you attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in servers in places like, for example, ISIS controlled regions or North Korea? <comment><USER2> IIRC U.S. citizens are always subject to U.S. law. There's no such thing as a lawless jurisdiction.

Vigilantes trying to hack ISIS probably just end up getting on NSA controlled honeypots.

</comment><comment><USER3> [IANAL]

North Korea has laws. It is also a sovereign state under international law.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use a language not normally associated with web development? - open-source-ux When I say web development, I mean specifically server-side programming rather than client-side programming.
Examples of languages that are associated with server-side programming (some more strongly than others): PHP, Python, Perl, Javascript, Java, Go, Ruby, Haskell, Erlang, Scala, C#, ASP.NET, Lua (and no doubt others I may have missed).
But is anyone using a language that isn't normally associated with server-side programming? For example: Ada, C, D, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Oberon, Pascal, Basic, Prolog...or some other language?
If you are using a language not normally associated with web development, what are your reasons for using that language? Is it familiarity or fluency? It for speed or performance reasons? Is it because of unique features you miss in other languages? (Or the way a feature is implemented?)
Is there a lack of web-related libraries for your language, and if so has it ever been a problem? <comment><AUTHOR> I used to work for a company which heavily used TCL[0].

When I started working there, I really questioned his decisions about the stack and the language in general ( everything is a string )

After a few weeks I realized that, this stack was blazing fast in combination with the NAVI[1] server which is written for high performance web sites.

This guy wrote everything you could possibly think of in TCL.

That company is powering a ton of enterprise grade e-commerce web sites.

I still see it as a secret weapon and I'd probably use it as well if there wasn't my fetish for statically typed languages.

edit:

As a side note, I'd like to mention that this guy taught me that I shouldn't go with the hype but just choose a language/framework that helps me finishing my projects.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviServer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviServer)

<comment><USER2> I'm interested in hearing more. Are you allowed to tell us more about the company? Number of employees? It sounded like you got hired to do TCL without knowing TCL. Why was it a secret weapon? Was it productivity?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Are you allowed to tell us more about the company? Number of employees?

We were around 15 people ( sales, design not included )

> It sounded like you got hired to do TCL without knowing TCL.

Indeed, in their job description, they just wrote that I had to be curious and willing to learn something unusual. They didn't mention TCL.

> Why was it a secret weapon?

I would say flexibilty, it was quite impressive to watch how his very own web framework evolved. He would check out new frameworks over night, if he liked some patterns/features etc. from other frameworks, he would just put it into his own framework over night.

The most impressive part, was probably the loose coupling of all the software components.

There wasn't some kind of an ORM, just pure handcrafted optimized SQL.

The secret weapon was, how he ignored other opinions.

Just a few examples, for some people OOP is the way to go, anything else is just unacceptable. They are forcing themself into a corner with limited options. I agree, OOP is awesome but it's not the solution for all our problems, in TCL we just could switch from OOP to imperative or to functional without breaking anything.

As already described above, plain SQL is already the best DSL for databases, we didn't have any abstraction layer on top of that, which we had to learn.

I don't agree with all his opinions but I do agree on the fact, that we software engineers tend to over engineer things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Crazy world where JS is considered server-side but C isn't.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is C associated with if it isn't "server side". It must be be server side, you can't exactly compile and run C code "client side".

<comment> open-source-ux Sorry, my fault for being unclear. When I said server-side, I meant languages used for creating dynamic web sites rather than for writing web server software.

Obviously, C is used for writing server software like Apache and Nginx. And also used for implementing interpreters for dynamic languages like PHP.

However, my impression(which may be incorrect) is that C isn't normally used for creating dynamic web sites in the same way as PHP or Python. Hence, why I put it in the category of languages not typically associated with web development.

<comment><USER5> >However, my impression(which may be incorrect) is that C isn't normally used for creating dynamic web sites in the same way as PHP or Python.

Likely true. FWIW, there is a web framework for C++.

[https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt](https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt)

Also just googled for "C++ web framework", there are others like TreeFrog, which seems to be updated this year.

Don't know more as of now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm using PureScript because it is purely functional and has a powerful type system like Haskell, but compiles to JS with easy FFI and I can use it with webpack. I'm writing both a backend API server and frontend app with it. It's been amazingly productive and a godsend for writing type-safe JS.

On the front-end, it has purescript-pux, which is pretty much a port of the Elm architecture. The language/community is really shaping up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Smalltalk: Pharo for personal projects, VA Smalltalk for work. Scheme: I am rewriting all my automation scripts in GNU Guile. Erlang: When my Smalltalk Seaside prototype sites cannot handle the load, I will rewrite in Erlang Cowboy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've worked with C, C++ and VHDL. Now a days mostly Python. It's much more productive.

EDIT@ Oh, you mean to actually do web dev with one of those languages, no, never did web dev with C or C++ sorry

</comment><comment><USER2> I really, really, want to use Racket and have been looking into it some more. But the problems are lack of web libraries and a slow http server (which can be fixed).</comment>


Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs - <AUTHOR> http://www.myce.com/news/microsoft-onedrive-for-business-modifies-files-as-it-syncs-71168/ <comment><USER2> SharePoint has always been a piece of garbage. Unfortunately it's a _money making_ piece of garbage, so there you go.

Inside MS, SharePoint is often used to "track" project documents. Start a project and -poof- your most unfavorite PM has creates a procrustean bed of document folders, all set for you to lose your documents in because none of the categories match anything in the actual product. Like, having whole separate doc folders for Beta 1 and Beta 2 (there's going to be a second beta, and the docs are going to be cloned into those? Really?)

PMs: "Please add your documentation to these folders."

Devs: "When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even _find_ stuff in there, and SharePoint is slow and the permissions are always wrong, and a year after the project ships the SharePoint will be destroyed and we will lose all of the documentation." [All of this is true, especially the bit about not very old project documentation completely going away, OMFG].

PMs: "We don't care."

Devs: [check documents into the source tree anyway, and write a mirroring script to copy the things to SharePoint]

PMs: "Stop that."

Devs: "We don't care."

The right answer is, of course, to fire the damned PMs who serially insist on a crappy excuse for a version control system despite everyone else pushing back and saying that it sucked hard. Only saw that happen a couple of times.

<comment><USER3> _When we do that, we lose control of the documents, we can 't get at the history, we can't search them, we can't even find stuff in there,_

Except SharePoint does store history and you can search it. And no need to create a second Beta1 and Beta2 folder when you can just mark documents as release = Beta1 or release = Beta2.

<comment><USER2> Except that search was always borked, for various reasons (one really special reason was that search was utterly global, and didn't obey the access rules that were so vigorously enforced elsewhere, exposing details of your Super Secret Project to the rest of the company). So search was turned off, and good luck finding anything. Sheesh.

And getting history out was, to put it mildly, a pain in the rear. Something I could do in five seconds became a nightmare of bad web UI.

Anyway, the devs in my group had a rule of keeping docs in the source depots, and we never lost _anything_. Poor other groups, we saw them lose important design documents when IT decided that the two year old SP wasn't being used anymore and got recycled. Wow.

Maybe SP does all that whizzy stuff. I just saw it being unutterably stupid, slow and unreliable in practice.

<comment><USER4> I can relate to your experience.

I have seen SharePoint installations at big corporations and they are horrible.

In one case there was a central SharePoint group that has commissioned the sites. So we had a highly restricted, utterly gutted and badly corporate styled thing that was practically useless.

Add to that that there was a weird mix of public and enterprise editions (which cost a bunch of money and were frowned upon by the org unit).

In this environment you can sit back and watch productivity and common sense being choked to death. Enterprise is a weird place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IIRC OneDrive for Business is not your average cloud storage but build on top of SharePoint (unlike the normal OneDrive). Therefore this might be some kind of side effect due to way SharePoint handles documents and document versioning. It is definitely unexpected behavior but this might be a reason explaining it without bad intent on Microsoft's side.

<comment><USER6> "OneDrive for Business" is a branding disaster, as it creates a completely rational link in people's minds that it's the same as OneDrive. In reality, it's a completely different product that acts in different ways.

Sigh.

<comment><USER7> It's amazing how wrong companies can get marketing. Take Apple's AirDrop, for example. I spent 20 minutes one day wondering why my iPhone wasn't connecting to my Mac Mini. Turns out, "AirDrop" is two different things by the same company that are similar but completely incompatible.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I hope they improve and fill the gaps in current AirDrop and AirPlay. It has come a long way, but there's still room for improvement.

Namely, AirPlay between OS X devices and iOS devices (including just audio and both audio+video), in either direction. Here's hoping for OS X 10.10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), tosses it in a validator or something similar that "corrects" the file, and saves that file internally. That's not too unusual in the CMS world. The bad part is that the internal version has found its way back out; hopefully in turning SharePoint into "cloud storage" they screwed up and sent the wrong thing. Otherwise, that's rather a mis-feature of SharePoint. If there's anyone here who actually knows it (I only generally do, being on the OSS side of the CMS world) I'd be interested to know.

So I'm ascribing this to incompetence and/or bad judgement rather than malice. But either way, still unacceptable.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but as a cloud sync product it's a _" you had one job"_ situation. Not so much incompetence as a fundamental failure to achieve that basic requirement.

<comment><USER11> The problem seems to be that this is not primarily a cloud sync product, despite what the name might suggest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not that OneDrive is modifying files "as it syncs"; it's that it involves Sharepoint, which adds certain metadata to documents that it handles, and has probably always done so; here's a stackoverflow question about it from 2010:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop- sh...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop-sharepoint- from-appending-msocustomdocumentproperties-to-my-ou)

EDIT: I see that 'ppog has already mentioned this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624293)

</comment><comment><USER13> Microsoft is not the only one. I had saved a special PDF with settings to full screen the PDF on open. I uploaded this to my Google Drive to transfer it to another machine and it completely reconverted the file into another type of PDF which not only corrupted the document but also broke the full screen open setting. This is a really random circumstance, but I was surprised to see GD reconvert the PDF, not store what I wanted "byte-for-byte"

<comment><USER14> The full screen bit might has been seen as malware and was "sanitized" by their anti-virus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've just spent a couple of weeks "unclouding" everything due to a number of problems like this. I was using OneDrive (the consumer one) with an Office 365 Home sub for doing basic personal finance spreadsheets and it decided to literally destroy the contents as it was uploaded and downloaded from one computer to another. I can't really trust it.

I tried Google Drive before and found it unacceptable that it just leaves links to documents on your local disk. I could imagine that in a network down situation I'd be in the shit.

So I'm here with LibreOffice and local file storage only now and all is good.

I don't buy the supposed advantage of these services any more. I'm just going to lump my ThinkPad around and not worry about where my shit is now (it's with me). I'll keep an offline backup at home and one off site (encrypted).

<comment><USER16> Try BTSync

<comment><USER17> Closed source with that sort of application is uncomfortable.

<comment><USER18> If you want open source, and you're okay with manual sync and conflict resolution, I've had good results in the past using Unison[1] to sync multiple systems.

At this point, though, I've personally settled on a system similar to the GP's — a backed-up laptop. In the rare event I need to access a document on the laptop when I've left it at home, there's always ssh, and, in the even more rare case where I need a document and I've left the laptop elsewhere, there's always ssh + rooting around Time Machine folders on my backup server. Finally, for times when I don't want to carry the laptop and know I'll need access to files, GoodReader[2] on iOS syncs over a variety of file server and cloud storage protocols.

[1] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/)

[2] [http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html](http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If this is true then Microsoft will have a hard time convincing the majority of potential users to switch to OneDrive. Although I can imagine possible use cases altering data without user interaction is unacceptable. What if you had a git repository stored there? (Yes I know this belongs somewhere else but some people might want to do it regardless) Although Dropbox apparently looks at the data to create previews for the Website etc. I have never experienced altered data.

<comment><USER20> This article is about OneDrive for Business, not OneDrive. OneDrive for Business is for business, as the name suggests. SharePoint maybe slow, but it does have features that users in business like, so having OneDrive for Business behave like SharePoint is fine.

<comment><USER21> So must mean it's just like the difference between Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows 8 Home, yeah? It's exactly the same thing under the hood, but the business edition just has a few extra businessy bits bolted on top, or possibly some restrictive anti-features removed? Because that's how Microsoft branding works, right? Right?

<comment><USER22> No, they're almost completely different under the hood.

[edit] On second reading, I see perhaps you were sarcastic. If so, well trolled good Sir! :-) I had it coming.

<comment><USER21> No, thank you for being so gracious and understanding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why risk so much user trust in order to tag some files?

<comment><USER24> Same question for me. I think it's all about tracking if someone steal files from your onedrive and then they can track who stole it... maybe? But as a user of onedrive and google drive i can say that their license agreement on onedrive (normal customer) doesn't assume owning your files, while google drives i think is written that they own your files and can modify it without your permission. At least google say it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Disappointing, but a good reminder to not trust 3rd party services with sensitive data regardless.

<comment><USER26>
      ssh firstname.lastname@example.com md5 your/file

... let's not paint us all with the same broad brush ...

<comment><USER27> You may be great today, but nobody knows what tomorrow holds. Therefore, I would prefer:

        ssh email@example.com md5 your/already/encrypted/file

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Shocking that so many bytes would be added to HTML files. If you were backing up website views, this could add a lot of bytes per page request if you published them without realising. Totally unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER29> Seriously raises some questions around the whole product, and makes me wonder if we can ever trust any other third-party with any sort of "sensitive" data.

Luckily there exists plenty of FOSS options that provide a close approximation of this functionality for me, though I know they will likely never be an option for the type of companies that rely heavily on things like OneDrive.

</comment><comment><USER30> They'll probably blame this one on an "error" again, like how they did when it was found out that Skype was MITM-ing https links, or when Bing was censoring stuff from China _globally_ , and even in English, and in a couple of other cases I don't remember well right now. That seems to be their boilerplate PR response whenever some big privacy infringement happens and many are outraged about it.

<comment><USER22> I'm interested if you have a cite for MITMing hyperlinks. The only thing I see sounds attributable to old fashioned cookies and ad networks.

<comment><USER31> I'm pretty sure this user is referencing the link checking bot news that came out mid last year. Basically, a Skype bot HEADs links placed in messages. It's hard to say why, maybe it checks for 404ed links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As much as the "new Microsoft" impresses me some parts of the company still seems to believe they can get away with anything. :-/

<comment><USER33> There is no "new Microsoft". The huge ship has shifted course, visibly, and announced the shift, but that doesn't mean it's completed it's shift, nor does it mean that everyone in the company is completely aligned yet.

While I'm happy that Microsoft is re-aligning with reality, I still don't quite trust them yet. They have a lot of credibility to rebuild.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of a few years ago when I said that I thought it was likely the NSA and GCHQ were able to monitor and then inspect without warrants pretty much anything they wanted on the internet, password or not, and I was ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist. After Snowden's revelations I see absolutely zero reason to trust anything any of these companies say or do. And I would use them all with caution - especially if it's your startup's patent application stored in onedrive.</comment>


Glot.io – An open source multi-lang pastebin with runnable snippets and API - <AUTHOR> https://glot.io/ <comment><USER2> This seems not cheap to operate. What is the business model?

<comment><USER3> I have an ad-blocker (and a network ad-blocker via the corporate network I'm connected to right now) but when I click on any one of the languages I can see a box labeled "ads via Carbon" to the right of the stdin box. So my guess would be that it's ad-supported for now.

<comment><USER4> You'd think that all people interested in something like this have an ad- blocker. I wonder what the revenue is like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 52-6F-62 Cool. This is quite usable and seems really handy—it's really fast compared to some heavier online repls. (definitely a use case for me)

How is it set up? I was definitely able to crash an instance I was in as well as read from root, but seemed all it took was a reload of the page and it snapped right back in without any real startup wait.

*edit: I just saw that you posted the source code as well. I'll definitely be exploring!

<comment><USER5> Seems like he spins up a container on each run, so 'root' is not really 'root'. I'd be worried though, containers are not secure enough to run untrusted code.

<comment><USER6> yeah this setup seems to indicate it's just running regular docker: [https://github.com/prasmussen/glot- run/blob/master/docker_se...](https://github.com/prasmussen/glot- run/blob/master/docker_server_config.md)</comment></comment></comment>


Solving the H-1B Visa Problem - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/20/solving-the-h-1b-visa-problem/ <comment><USER3> I think this is a great idea, let the H1B prices be freely controlled by market, and let companies buy/sell H1Bs among themselves.

People have mentioned that this makes things more expensive for companies. This is true, but i wish someone would take the side of the immigrants (there are only a few of us, and we can't vote!). Companies oppose this because its more expensive, and politicians oppose it because its "taking jobs away from Americans" and anyways immigrants on H1B can't vote. Of course, if we don't like it we should just "go back home", even if we have been here for years, have houses, spouses, jobs and friends here and don't have roots back home anymore. Immigrants have to put up with a lot of crap:

\- a very short deadline to find a job if you are unemployed on H1B. Technically 0 days! - its only an unofficial grace period at the mercy of the whims of an immigration officer. meaning constant uncertainty and scrambling to find a job ASAP lest the immigration gods smite you down.

\- ridiculously long wait times for green cards. in some cases 10+ years.

\- unable to move companies while in the green card process. if you do, you go right back to the end of the line. many companies know and abuse this. during this time, you are pretty much a slave to the company - think about it, if you don't ultimately have a choice to switch companies without throwing away years of waiting, you have no means of recourse when they treat you poorly.

</comment><comment><USER4> This proposal (run an auction for the H1-B slots) would likely make it even harder for startups to offer H1-B visas compared to say Microsoft.

For arguments sake, lets consider an average potential hire. Lots of startups are willing to pay ballpark $130k in San Francisco right now (low end $70k, upper end $180k). Since the company most likely don't have funding lasting more than 18 months, this means they're budgeting just about $200k plus taxes and benefits for this person over that duration.

You might be willing to pay 10, 20 or even 30% as a fee for the right candidate (just like headhunter fees) but that translates into either that many fewer employees or that much less runway. Taking 18 months of capital and turning it into 12 is a quick way to end up dead. By contrast, large companies are paying much more in total compensation and can easily afford to spread this cost over multiple years (assuming the candidate doesn't nearly immediately utilize his ability to transfer his visa).

If anything this proposal seems like it would lend itself towards ensuring only large companies apply for H1-Bs and that smaller ones just have to hope people will transfer, despite not being able to promise that they'll be in business long enough to sponsor a green card.

<comment><USER5> It's a false premise that startups are currently competing against large companies like Microsoft for H-1B visas.

The biggest H-1B users are offshoring/outsourcing companies (source: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing- companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html))

Moving to an auction system will in fact _improve_ a startup's chances - <USER2> VC funded startups can comfortably outbid an outsourcing company. The outsourcers' business models are dependent on visa costs being on the low side.

<comment><USER4> Wow! Thanks for this link. For those that didn't click through: all the big tech firms combined only took about 5000 of the 85000 H1-B applications in 2014. Tata/Wipro/Infosys etc. each took more than 3000 a piece (Tata alone did more than all the big tech firms combined).

Still it seems like an auction isn't necessary, just a higher fixed fee upon selection. If it was say $10k, that's a pretty big chunk of the $45k to $90k that PayScale reports for software engineers at Tata Consultancy Services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been on H1B for years in various companies and I totally support this proposal. I personally have not seen any case where H1Bs were underpaid in salary terms but I definitely saw people being threatened and worked to death because their green card application was dependent on the company (this made, hourly wise, a minimum wage job for them).

<comment><USER7> They aren't underpaid wrt their nominal career level. Many of them definitely are underpaid if you consider their actual experience and what they'd get if they were in the market. That price point can only be established if you can safely change jobs, which on an H1-B you can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have an easier solution. Companies routinely use supply and demand to whine their way politically. It's simple: any H1-B who comes into the US should be paid at least 30% more than the prevailing market average because it's clear that there's more demand than supply for their talents. The truly talented still get to come to the US, and they get paid handsomely for it. The rest won't, and more employers will be willing to train young developers, engineers, nurses, and scientists rather than pay the difference. Having a talented and educated native populace is far more important than propping up companies that abuse the system.

<comment><USER7> There's no such thing as "prevailing market wage", at least not in software engineering. Your comp can vary by a factor of 3 or more, depending on where you work, for the exact same skill set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the opposite corner: Immigration skeptics…

Ouch. I disagree with this, so much. The US takes over a million new legal immigrants into the country every year. These immigrants are free to choose their career path in response to market signals and their own personal interests. This sort of immigration has nothing to do with the H1B visa.

A lot of people are certainly skeptical of claims that there is a severe shortage of tech workers. Many of us simply believe that when people are free to choose their own path in life, those with the skills necessary to become excellent programmers are able to apply those skills more profitably and find greater personal fulfillment in other areas. We believe that the government should not coercively force people to work for a period of time in certain fields and for certain employers as a condition of gaining the right to become a free participant in the US labor market, and that this sort of corporate power invites mischief.

In fact, I'd say that a program that provides a captive workforce whose ability to enter new fields and jobs is limited will create bad market distortions. It will prevent or at least suppress the kind of changes that would make programming and other tech fields attractive enough to start drawing that top talent out of other fields and into programming.

Employers, even "good" ones, should not control their employee's right to live in the US. People should be free to choose their path in life, and should not be coerced into studying or working in a particular field as a condition of living in the US. Those beliefs do not make an immigration sceptic. I'd say they are consistent with a very pro-immigration mindset.

</comment><comment><USER10> The top tech industry seems to be totally unaware of underground H1Bs. Some companies "charge" people to file their H1B, run fake payrolls and pay below legal salary. Government probably does not have much resources to catch all of them and hence catches only fraction of tip of iceberg.

F1 is another route through which lot of Indians enter the country and then struggle bribe their way to OPT/H1B.

It is really sad that the dishonest people get rewarded more.

</comment><comment><USER11> This "solution" seems a bit naive. If H1B's were actually auctioned off at market rates, the companies involved would lobby even harder to increase the number allowed, in order to drive the prices down.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is my own opinion here. I think if you increase the price of H1B significantly then jobs would just move to Bangalore, Dublin or Vancouver. There is a higher limit to how much you can jack up the prices of a H1 visa and that higher limit should be set taking into account what the companies are willing to pay and still keep employing people in the US, assuming they have an option to hire people elsewhere in the world. If its too high, you might just have incentivized a behavior that stops companies from hiring people in US and instead hires them in other countries, these are the reasons why this will happen

\- Companies increasingly have a global presence, almost all Tier 1 (AMZN, MSFT, GOOG) and Tier 2 (CSCO, JNPR, HP) firms have an office in Bangalore, Dublin and Vancouver these days. \- Work can be done from anywhere really. At least the kind of work that H1B's are hired to do. A majority of these roles are not client facing. And you can always fly in and back on business visas when you need some face time with the team in US. \- And you don't have the hassle of dealing with a non working immigration system. I can hire a guy from anywhere in the world and have him working at my Dublin office in a month. It takes a year of planning to get the same person in the US if I am lucky. I won't even consider it if the prices are too high. \- As a precedent, Almost all of the Tier 1 companies and most Tier 2 companies, move workers from US to India, Ireland and Canada routinely if they cannot secure a H1B visa in the US. If the prices are dramatically increased this will just become the default behavior.

<comment><USER13> That does not compute. The US is already the most expensive place to move employees even with H1B scams factored in, so if employers were price sensitive they would just hire those people in Bangalore, Dublin, and Vancouver right now. What motivates employers is the use of presence in the US as a perk as people badly want to get out of those other places. Individual managers also like H1B because it gives them a high level of power and control over those individuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not a lot of people talk about this but the non profit organizations and schools don't have a cap for H1-Bs.

<comment><USER15> Note that cap-exempt H1-Bs are not transferable to cap-subject commercial employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The H1B process already has a mechanism built in to prevent this 'abuse' \- employers have to pay the prevailing market wage for the position. Perhaps the existing rules just need to be enforced better?

</comment><comment><USER17> This article's idea will immediately makes everything worse. The only good outcome from this program is higher revenue for the government. Good companies will suffer. Foreign workers will suffer. American economy will suffer. All this revenue you collect from higher H-1B fees, you lose out in tax revenues because many companies will fail. The best way for government to enjoy healthy revenue is to have a super healthy economy! There is no other way around it.

The spirit of H-1B program is such that foreign workers get equal pay for equal work compared to their American counterpart. Assuming that is true, employers are already paying a premium for foreign workers because they have to pay thousands more dollars for the visa. The only reason they would do this is that they cannot find enough American workers. If they have to pay the same salary, why would any company in the right mind hire foreigners instead of Americans? If this very fact is not enough for you to show there is shortage of qualified American workers, read on.

Foreign workers will only hurt American workers if they cost less to companies and out-prices American workers. This could be the case for companies that do not follow wage requirement established by the H-1B program. However, if this is the case, then enforcement of H-1B wage requirement should be the thing that needs to be addressed. A new program based on H-1B auction is really addressing the wrong problem, in the wrong way.

Making H-1B fee auction-based will simply drive up the cost of hiring on H-1B. Yes it will become a disincentive to hire foreign workers, however given the same H-1B quota, companies that is able to get away with lower wage for foreign workers are more likely to be willing to pay more for the right to hire H-1B. Companies that are paying foreign workers competitively has no incentive to bid up and will just give up and suffer from under-staffed engineering team. So this program will reward employers who are fraudulent and who depress wages for H-1B worker and punish good companies who provide equal pay for equal work. And guess what, those employers who uncut pay for foreign workers will now undercut their pay even more because the foreign workers have fewer choices of good employers and all the potential employers remaining are the ones who want to pay foreign workers less to justify the higher cost of hiring them. Alas, you have the exact opposite outcome one would expect.

The shortage of highly skilled tech workers in this country needs no further proof. Do you really believe if you kick out all the foreign workers or making them really expensive to hire, then all the Americans who can't find job because their skills are irrelevant can suddenly find a job? They still won't find a job until they learned the things necessary to make them relevant again! Do you know why coding bootcamps are so popular? It is because the Americans who attend these programs know that they need to learn the new skills that will make them relevant in the tech sector.

If anyone works at one of those bootcamps, let's do a survey among your students and publish the results on the Internet. Do your students feel they are disadvantaged from foreign engineers/workers when it comes to finding a job? Which is going to help them more in finding a job they want and like? Attending a coding bootcamp, or sending all foreign engineers home.

The notion that foreign workers are taking jobs away from Americans is an ill- informed one. Illegal Mexicans are doing dirty work that many Americans don't want to do. Foreign tech workers are doing work that many Americans don't have the capacity to do. The pampered Americans(just some of Americans, not all) need to stop whining about their job being taken away and start to up their game and think about how they can contribute to this economy. To quote JFK, My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Ask not what easy job your country can hand out to you, ask what you can do to stay relevant and useful for this country's economy. Take a coding class, become a uber driver. If you really want to work, you will find a job. If you just wanna find scapegoats, you will find many but it won't help you become a better and more useful person.

I welcome comments at bostoncutem at gmail dot com</comment>


Facebook is down - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying to log on but... <comment><USER2> One of the things I remember from an internship there a few years ago, Facebook does its main "push" of new code to its server farms on Tuesdays around 5pm (i.e. around this time). It would be interesting to read a postmortem on what brought down the most visited site on the world—was it an image staging issue? A latent bug in the product? A badly configured setting? A malicious attack? A network problem? Hopefully Facebook Eng will do a write- up on the root cause!

<comment><USER3> I thought Facebook did daily/continuous pushes? Or did that end?

<comment><USER4> Stuff is pushed every day, but the biggest chunks are pushed on Tuesdays.

Source: Friend who interned at FB.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. You can find more information here: [https://developers.facebook.com/support/beta- tier/](https://developers.facebook.com/support/beta-tier/)

"Every week, usually on Sunday evenings, we stage our weekly push, which happens on Tuesday evenings, on the beta tier. This provides ourselves and developers 48 hours to test and find bugs before the build hits production. After Tuesday, while the beta tier is continuously updated with hotfix patches which are queued up for the daily hotfix release, the production tier is updated with the hotfix push in the evenings, Pacific Standard Time"

<comment><USER4> Ah, makes sense. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Down for me in Australia. Twitter confirms.

[https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook%20down](https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook%20down)

Their "Sorry, something went wrong." page is copyright 2012.

01:18GMT - Seems to be loading every now and then.

01:25GMT - Loading consistently.

\--

[http://developers.facebook.com/live_status](http://developers.facebook.com/live_status)

Says facebook is healthy. You can see a spike in response time and drop in error rates(hehe) in the graphs at the bottom of the page.

</comment><comment><USER6> Facebook seems to have major reliability issues in general for me. At least once a day the site will not load for several minutes, despite my connection being fine. I also seem to be the very last person to get every new feature, e.g. graph search, hashtags, feelings on statuses, etc. (I don't yet have any of those...)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this is anyhow related to the malicious activity from Tor nodes they reported today.

</comment><comment><USER8> Use [http://beta.facebook.com](http://beta.facebook.com)

</comment><comment><USER9> Would be quite interested to hear any sort of postmortem on this in light of recent news around FB...

</comment><comment><USER10> Down on Ellesmere Island, Canada (not Jurassic Park).

</comment><comment><USER11> You are correct, congrats on posting this to a HN.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's back but it is extremely slow...

</comment><comment><USER13> Same here in mexico it seems down

</comment><comment> mkr-hn It was very slow a moment ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> Same in Taiwan.

</comment><comment><USER15> it's back fyi, at least for me

</comment><comment><USER16> Same for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Down in Prince Edward Island, Canada

</comment><comment><USER18> Down in Argentina</comment>


Sources: We were pressured to weaken mobile security in the 80's - <AUTHOR> http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/Sources-We-were-pressured-to-weaken-the-mobile-security-in-the-80s-7413285.html#.Us8n75CJDAQ <comment><USER2> This sounds suspiciously like modern context being retrofitted to an ancient story.. there were (and still are) much bigger problems in GSM than just the cipher in use, say for example, that phones do not authenticate the network, and the network dictates the handset's encryption mode.

It seems curious that the intelligence community would be so vocal in such a directly attributable manner when simpler means of interception exist, and when many other reasons could be given for reducing the key size (e.g. cost seems an obvious one, given we're talking about the 80s here), not to mention that A5/1 itself had major flaws that puts it on the level of WEP in terms of the ease with which it could (and still can) be cracked.

<comment><USER3> From what I understood, it wasn't the intelligence community that directly requested the changes, but rather the British part of the GSM working group (whatever that was called at the time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant report by Srlabs.de: [http://gsmmap.org/assets/pdfs/gsmmap.org- country_report-Unit...](http://gsmmap.org/assets/pdfs/gsmmap.org- country_report-United_States_of_America-2013-08.pdf)

 _Conclusion: The GSM networks in USA implement only few of the protection measures observed in other GSM networks._

Encryption algorithms:

             AT&T  T-Mobile
        A5/0  45%    17%    (ie: unencrypted)
        A5/1  55%    83%

</comment><comment><USER5> Snowden docs make it official: The NSA can crack 30-year-old A5/1 crypto

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/archaic-but- widel...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/archaic-but-widely-used- crypto-cipher-allows-nsa-to-decode-most-cell-calls/)

Does anyone know if LTE security is that much better? I imagine that even if the ciphers are good, there are probably a ton of ways for agencies like NSA or even FBI to intercept the calls before being encrypted, even without warrants.

<comment><USER6> Didn't Karsten Nohl give a presentation about cracking A5/1? Of course NSA can crack A5/1.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I seem to recall A5/1 was cracked quite a while a ago (by an Israeli team?)?

Hm, 1999? [http://cryptome.org/a51-crack.htm](http://cryptome.org/a51-crack.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ross Anderson, writing in 1994:

"Indeed, my spies inform me that there was a terrific row between the NATO signals agencies in the mid 1980's over whether GSM encryption should be strong or not. The Germans said it should be, as they shared a long border with the Evil Empire; but the other countries didn't feel this way. and the algorithm as now fielded is a French design."

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.telecom/TkdCaytoeU4...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.telecom/TkdCaytoeU4/Mroy719hdroJ)</comment>


Advice on Making and Funding Hardware Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://noahbuscher.com/hardware/

<comment><USER2> I tried Quirky but they always reject my ideas.

OpenPower based Super Amiga ATX motherboard with PowerPC and Intel socket to use both processors in a modified Linux to run Intel operating systems in a virtual machine like the old Bridgecard did on the Amiga 2000. New Linux OS named Amigix and a GUI like AmigaOS.

Raspberry PI motherboard in ATX size, can use PCI and PCI-E cards like a serial port card to control industrial devices.

iAuto Android based car radio replacement. Has built in GPS, Wifi, LTE, can use AM, FM, Satellite, and Internet radio stations. Replaced old radio to a better one controlled by Android.

They all got rejected.

I tried doing an Android alarm clock and watch on Kickstarter when it first came up, nobody funded it, and then others stole the idea and got it funded.

Like high school it is a popularity contest, if you aren't popular, it will never get funded. Business, politics, showbus and other stuff are also popularity contests.

If you are a smart introvert, and have few friends like me, and have good ideas and inventions, they will never see the light of day until you find a way to become an extravert and learn people and social skills required to become popular.

I still sit at the weird kids table apparently at lunchtime.</comment>


Drowning in grain: historically high supplies and low prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-grains-supply-special-report/special-report-drowning-in-grain-how-big-ag-sowed-seeds-of-a-profit-slashing-glut-idUSKCN1C21AR?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social <comment><USER2> Very interesting. Modern technology lets you grow corn that would previously take 120 days in 80, and everything is getting cheaper and more efficient. At the same time prices for corn are falling, but nobody wants to stop growing it because they're locked in with expensive equipment.

<comment><USER3> A similar oversupply happened right before the Great Depression.

Wheat prices were dropping from too much supply partially attributed to newly expanded prairie farming in the US. But these farmers owed fixed costs on their mortgaged land. So to pay their expenses, they plowed up more prairie and grew more wheat. This compounded the supply problem. Eventually, as wheat piled up at railroad depots unable to be sold, farmers left the plowed prairie fallow and the topsoil blew away.

Source: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

<comment><USER4> Thing is, prices for food never really shot back up massively, instead our govt ended up creating price floors for many commodities, insofar as they would give farmers money if what they produced was sold for less than a certain amount[1].

This led to consolidation, whereby family farmers became much fewer in number, and those that owned and operated larger farms ended up working a 2nd job to cover their living expenses. What used to take a whole family to farm is now nearly entirely automated, causing food prices to continue to decline.

1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States)

<comment><USER5> > _What used to take a whole family to farm is now nearly entirely automated, > causing food prices to continue to decline_

I don't see the immediate causal relationship between these: cars are semi- automatically manufactured, but the price of cars hasn't declined anywhere near as much as grain/commodities.

<comment><USER6> The quality of vehicles has increased dramatically over that time. There isn't a similar increase in the quality of grain.

A vehicle that I purchased roughly ten years ago has operated perfectly fine with half of its scheduled oil changes and very little other maintenance. From an engineering perspective I find that mind-blowing: you buy these machines and they operate flawlessly for years, running for thousands of miles, while performing a complex, mechanical task with many moving parts. It's easy to take for granted how marvelous modern automobiles have become.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for explaining how car quality has improved, but I still don't follow your link between automation and price decreases. I feel like your explanation doesn't address the market side of farming, and disregards the huge advances in crop & agricultural science.

<comment><USER7> Not the OP, but the point is that the car you buy today has much more value than a car that was sold 20 years ago at a similar price. So, even if the average price paid for a new car didn't go down, the price _for the same car_ has effectively decreased, thanks to automation.

<comment><USER5> I still don't see how this relates to farm automation: automation didn't significantly change the price point, it increased production, decreased labor costs and increased equipment/maintenance costs.

<comment><USER8> I can't help but get the sense that you want to see "factor X made Y cheaper" come out in Y getting absolutely cheaper. But it's just a single factor in a complex world. Consider the alternative; do you really think that removing the automation today would have no impact on the price? Even after the economy had a chance to adjust? Personally I find the idea incredible, in the older sense of "not credible".

<comment><USER5> > _do you really think that removing the automation today would have no impact > on the price?_

I haven't considered that! I know it would affect production speed, which could be addressed by increasing capex to build more factories, and which could be funded by increased revenue or investment.

But here's the thing: this car talk doesn't help me understand how agricultural automation caused grain prices to drop. That's my question & what I continually seek clarification on.

BTW you can just ask me what I think instead of offering me some strawman claim to take under my wing. Argue in good faith! If a point of view sounds incredible to you, just go right ahead and assume I must have a more credible point of view that I haven't communicated effectively yet.

<comment><USER8> "Argue in good faith!"

The reason I posted is that you did not seem to be. People kept giving you reasons, and you basically discarded them with "But that's not the reason I'm looking for"... or something like that. I'm not even sure how to accurately characterize it. But you definitely seemed to be just unilaterally dismissing the people trying to help you understand and putting no effort into understanding what they were saying. Your second paragraph of this very post reads like that once again.

If that is not the case, well, consider this useful feedback then.

<comment><USER5> I don't need help understanding how the analogy to car automation is wrong, I get that. I gave it as an example of how automation did not reduce prices.

The 'good faith' part which the responders are failing at is badgering me to accept their explanations of car manufacturing in place of farm automation. I accept their explanations but it does not help me understand this:

Why does the GP think that agricultural automation caused the decline in prices?

If I again get a response talking about cars: I don't get it. I don't understand. I can't work it out. I need help to see the connection. It doesn't make sense to me.

Please, help me understand instead of deriding me for not accepting an explanation about car manufacturing as an substitute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Around here people tend to look at unused land and lament that it was all farmed 30 years ago.

But the reality is that grain growing operates on ever-thinner margins. It now makes sense to skim grain from the best lands, insolation and precipitation- wise, and leave the rest to grasses, shrubs and marshes. What do people do in depressed regions in the absense of productivity, especially in the country, is another story.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the reduction of Fed stimulus - reduction of quantitative easing as well as low inflation rate. It's not just grains that have slumped -- almost every major commodity is down from its 5 year high.

</comment><comment><USER11> "For every dollar a shopper spent on breakfast cereal in 1980, today you'd have to spend $2.93"

Source from 2015: [https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/28/puffs-flakes-and-dollars- why...](https://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/28/puffs-flakes-and-dollars-why-your- breakfast-cereal-costs-so-much.html)

Which means that the marketing/advertising spends have increased in a disproportional manner. What a world we are living in.

<comment><USER12> Is that inflation adjusted? Because 1 1980's dollar would be about $2.99 nowadays according to Wolfram Alpha.

<comment><USER11> Since the source is CNBC, I presume the $ is inflation adjusted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a kid, I was taught in school that the world population was growing so fast that soon we wouldn't be able to grow enough food to feed everyone.

But, here this article says we're growing an endless bounty of corn.

<comment><USER14> Did you grow up in 18th century England and Mr.Malthus was your teacher?

<comment><USER15> "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...."

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968

His first sentence appears to be correct - just not in the direction he meant.

He's still making similar doom-laden predictions, and still getting paid lots of money for them.

<comment><USER16> The battle is very much not over. Famine remains a major issue in many places all over the world.

[http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty- fac...](http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and- statistics/)

<comment><USER15> Famine is caused by poor distribution, not poor production.

From your link: "The world produces enough food to feed everyone."

Further: "For the world as a whole, per capita food availability has risen from about 2220 kcal/person/day in the early 1960s to 2790 kcal/person/day in 2006-08, while developing countries even recorded a leap from 1850 kcal/person/day to over 2640 kcal/person/day."

<comment><USER16> The quote from the post I replied to mentions "the battle to feed humanity". Distribution is very much part of that battle; otherwise it could only be considered solved in the purest theoretical sense.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, and you can also talk about specific nutrient needs, and really the obesity epidemic is also a part of the battle to feed humanity.

But Ehrlich wasn't talking about any of that. He was specifically saying there was no way we could produce enough food to feed the population of the world in the 1970s, and we'd have to drastically curtail population to survive.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about growing corn without pesticides and herbicides? They'll get lower yields but can charge more for it if it gets organic certified.

<comment><USER18> Organic certified foods are allowed to use pesticides and herbicides, just that those substances come must from organic sources, like rotenone.

<comment><USER19> rotenone is no longer certified in america as a pesticide [other than to kill fish]. May seem like nit, but it was a very dangerous pesticide and citing it as an organic pesticide might incorrectly lead to the conclusion that organic pesticides are not safer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's eat pork then! They love corn, even though it makes them fat (white meat)

For those complaining about subsisides: any country worth its salt needs to make sure farmers and heavy industry don't go caput. People need to eat and someone needs to make tanks and bullets during tough times.

</comment><comment><USER21> Any legs left in the ethanol initiative? Could be a decent place to direct a glut of supply.

<comment><USER22> It seems to me that it serves no environmental or pragmatic purpose, and may increase the corrosiveness (and decrease the stability) of fuel.

<comment><USER23> Growing one acre of corn takes approximately 8 gallons of diesel fuel (directly) and produces enough corn for 485 gallons of ethanol.

<comment><USER22> The direct combustion emissions can be about half in the right powertrain, but ethanol fermentation produces CO₂ on its own, as does the distillation process, as does the machinery involved in cycling and drying (possibly actively, consuming more energy to heat them, or passively, consuming more energy to transport them) the molecular sieves used to separate the azeotrope of H₂0 and ethanol. Furthermore, Ethanol is, gallon for gallon, about half as energy dense as gasoline.

<comment><USER15> Not a fan of ethanol production, but CO2 released fermenting and burning bio fuels is carbon neutral - the CO2 was bound in the plant by photosynthesis, then released by these processes.

<comment><USER24> Some of it is, yes. But some of it depends on nitrogen fertilizer, which is made using energy from petroleum.

CH4 + H2O → CO + 3H2

CO + H2O → CO2 + H2

3H2 + N2 → 2NH3

<comment><USER25> As your homework shows, nitrogen fertilizer comes from hydrogen which comes from natural gas, not petroleum.

Maybe if we were all aware of this, we'd be setting up clean hydrogen to be converted into ammonia instead of just burning it in hydrogen cars.

<comment><USER24> > hydrogen which comes from natural gas, not petroleum

That's a rather subtle distinction ;)

I mean, natural gas is just a natural cracking product of petroleum, which gets captured under impermeable geological formations.

<comment><USER25> Not a subtle distinction as in the US, natural gas is essentially all domestic (and is starting to be exported as well). The decision to grow ethanol is geopolitical at least as much as it has anything to do about the environment (remember, serious ethanol mandates started under Bush II) as part of the effort for energy independence, so trading natural gas for gasoline through ethanol (even if we wrongly assume it's as bad as 1:1) is still desirable.

Also, gasoline (C8H18) has a carbon to hydrogen ratio of approximately 0.44, compared to 0.25 for natural gas (CH4) (and natural gas has a higher specific energy), so from a carbon emissions perspective is still superior.

Additionally, natural gas in not "just a natural cracking product of petroleum." There are other significant geological sources of natural gas, and it is produced through decay of just about any organic matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With global warming, Saskatchewan and Manitoba production could really take off.

<comment><USER27> I think you're kidding, but this has already happened in North Dakota: [http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/13/340116405/shi...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/13/340116405/shifting- climate-has-north-dakota-farmers-swapping-wheat-for-corn)

The story leads with climate changes, but other reasons include corn varieties that have shorter growing seasons. According to the query tool ([https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov](https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov)), corn acreage in ND has gone from 1.0M acres in 2000 to 3.7M this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss: domestic demand is dropping for cereal grains.

If you follow dietary trends you would know why.

</comment><comment><USER29> I note that oil prices crashed 2.5 years ago and oil is needed for the Haber process to make fertilizer. Could that be a cause?

I also note that high grain prices led to the Arab Spring which led Arab monarchies to need money to pay to keep their supporters happy...

<comment><USER25> No, not oil. The Haber process uses hydrogen. Which almost all comes from natural gas right now.

(A note to clean hydrogen advocates: this is a much better market for hydrogen than burning it or converting to synthetic methane as it costs money to convert natural gas to hydrogen. Displace all that natural gas used for ammonia and nitrate fertilizer production before moving to burning it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Its almost as if the grain and corn could be fed to starving peoples around the world for a lower price.

Sarcasm aside, a lot of starvation could be counteracted with better distribution of excess corn at a lower price so I don't see a real problem. North American farms might be hit but the actual amount of labour needed at a massive corn-producing farm is shrinking every year due to technology (although there is also a agricultural labour shortage).

<comment><USER31> Most of the corn grown around here in Kansas is not the variety that you eat off the cob, it's the kind you feed to livestock. Shipping this corn off to starving people doesn't do much for them unless they want to raise cows and pigs on it.

<comment><USER30> Its still quite edible, I've seen people eat pig corn as corn flour, its not great but it does make an alright stew

But then again, we shouldnt steal food from livestock to just feed humans.

I apologize for my sarcasm, I couldnt help it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Naturally, the american tax payer still foots the bill via subsidies.

</comment><comment><USER33> And yet, bread prices have jumped recently.

<comment><USER34> Makes some sense. As a result of fast-growing corn, areas previously planted to wheat are switching to corn instead. This has increased the supply, and thus decreased the price, of corn -- but wheat, on the other hand, would see a corresponding decrease in supply, and increase in price.

This is also why cash crops can cause food shortages.

<comment><USER35> You can make bread from corn, though. I don't mean that sugary cake called "cornbread" in the US, I mean actual bread, but made from corn flours. It's one of our national delicacies: [https://easyportugueserecipes.com/broa-de- avintes/](https://easyportugueserecipes.com/broa-de-avintes/)

<comment><USER36> The US has nonsugary cornbreads, too.

<comment><USER35> No doubt, I just wanted to be clear what I was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What about making bio fuel

</comment><comment><USER38> I have an idea. Corn farmers aren't making money, so let's subsidize corn farming to help them make money. Of course, that will lead to a worse oversupply, but hey, it's been working so far, right?

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there enough food for everyone? [http://isthereenoughfoodforeveryone.com](http://isthereenoughfoodforeveryone.com)

<comment><USER40> Annoying that the domain is "is there enough food for everyone" but the site asks the opposite question "do people still die of starvation" so the site has a big YES despite the answer to the question in the domain being NO.

<comment><USER41> I think the point is that the answer is YES to both questions.

There's enough food to be able to feed everyone, but people still die of starvation, because it's not well distributed.

The other question links to [http://dopeoplestilldieofstarvation.com/](http://dopeoplestilldieofstarvation.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Senator Al Franken Asks Carrier IQ to Explain Itself - <AUTHOR> http://franken.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1868

<comment><USER2> I have to admit that when I first heard Al Franken was running for Senate, I didn't like him, I didn't like the fact he was an actor, and I felt he was too smug whenever I heard him talk. I basically thought it was ridiculous that another actor made his way into politics.

But he seems to be the only politician that is actively involved in the issues that I care about, so I admit I was completely wrong about him, and I've done an about face and actually do support his work.

The fact that he is questioning Carrier IQ about what they're doing is just another data point to prove that I was wrong to dismiss him.

<comment><USER3> He says it "underscores the need for congress to act."

No, this incident underscores the need for independent security professionals to keep an eye on what our devices are really doing so we can make informed choices.

<comment><USER4> One kind of government regulation would be to prohibit building tools that would, for instance, track your location. I can see how that would harmful government intrusion.

Another kind of government regulation would be, for instance, to prohibit companies from intentionally lying when describing to the public what kind of personal information their devices record with the intent to conceal it. That kind of regulation would then allow customers to make the informed choices you speak of.

<comment><USER5> Companies can already get in trouble for "intentionally lying" it's called fraud. Of course, that's assuming a user reads the TOS and actually knows what they've agreed to accept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is Senator Franken still using snail mail? He could've just emailed Carrier IQ from his phone. He wouldn't even have to hit send.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why would he ask Carrier IQ to explain itself? Why not the wireless carriers and phone companies that installed this on the phones?

Carrier IQ makes a product. Companies are choosing to use it in a scummy way. I don't think that Carrier IQ is the bad guy here.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. It's like asking Smith & Wesson to explain itself after an armed robbery.

<comment><USER9> No, not exactly.

"Exactly" would be if CarrierIQ sold a boxed piece of software that was fire & forget.

As it stands, CarrierIQ was a business partner with each of these companies in the implementation of the software, and so they are the initial point of leverage in figuring out what actually happened.

If CarrierIQ decides to roll over on the carriers and say "well, $carrier asked me to log all the SMS messages", well, then I'll take up a side business selling popcorn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's an interesting comment on governmental policy to see how quickly recent events have gone from Internet meme to Congressional attention.

<comment><USER11> It's only really started being this way since Franken was elected in. He seems to be one of the few people who really care about all this shit.

<comment><USER12> Ron Wyden's been pretty good, too. He was recently declared a winner of the EFF's Pioneer Awards.

[https://www.eff.org/press/releases/us-senator-encryption- inn...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/us-senator-encryption-innovator- and-tunisian-blogging-group-win-eff-pioneer-awards)

Excerpt: _Few legislators have done more to promote and protect online speech, privacy rights and innovation than U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Most notably, he authored Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that helps make user-generated content and online services possible by protecting hosts from liability. Senator Wyden is currently the lone senator blocking passage of the PROTECT IP Act, legislation that attempts to safeguard intellectual property at the expense of free speech, technological innovation and the very foundation of the Internet. Most recently, Senator Wyden introduced legislation to create a legal framework for when and how location information derived from cell phones and other electronic devices can be accessed and used by both government agents and private entities._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish we could clone Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren a few dozen times.

Just think of how the DMCA tries to block this kind of discovery though.

</comment><comment><USER14> Remember the emails that AT&T sent out to people it suspected of tethering their phones without paying the exorbitant monthly fee ([http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/18/atandt-tells-customers- us...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/18/atandt-tells-customers-using- unauthorized-tethering-methods-to-pay/))? Something tells me that this wonderful "diagnostic" information had something to do with it.

Why packet-sniff and risk legal issues when you can just look at your CarrierIQ analytics for people who opened a tethering app regularly?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll be impressed when he asks the NSA, FBI and NYPD to explain themselves.

<comment><USER5> They already do explain themselves just at classified hearings to the Senate and House Intelligence committees. Although I don't know about NYPD although they do have an intelligence community liasion that coordinates with FBI and DHS.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to help someone learn to code? - <AUTHOR> My girlfriend is currently struggling with some courses that require a basic understanding of how to write code. It's not so much that she can't learn the syntax of whatever language is used, her difficulties start at a lower level, i.e. at what one might call algorithmic thinking.
I'm having a hard time helping and explaining these things to her, so I was wondering whether someone here knows some literature or MOOCs or tricks or whatever that focuses on teaching total beginners, ideally in a language-agnostic way.
Thanks for any help! <comment><USER2> I've been helping some friends learn programming, and they probably wouldn't describe themselves as algorithmic thinkers. What I found was a good starting point was talking about basic boolean logic and truth tables. The topic was really straightforward, felt foundational and there are tons of examples in all kinds of topics.

From there, we started talking about simple circuits/gates like AND, OR, etc. Then we started talking binary (and other bases), then binary arithmetic. At the end, I went over how integers are stored from a high level (and integer overflow for fun :) ).

There really wasn't a super high-level plan, but exposure to these topics I felt was a great intro to the mindset and we had good fun/progression during the session. From here, with booleans & integers as the foundation, I might feel comfortable writing pseudo-code and such with them, slowly bringing the abstraction higher.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey, I recommend her to try interactive coding course at BitDegree. It is suitable for absolute beginners. This was my first completed coding course. It is very engaging and easy to learn. Hope she will love it too. Here is a link: [https://www.bitdegree.org/course/coding-for-beginners- space-...](https://www.bitdegree.org/course/coding-for-beginners-space-doggos)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is she looking for a full course? If so, I highly, highly recommend Harvard's online CS50. Tremendous course, and I think it gives a really great foundation for algorithmic thinking.

If she's looking for something a little less intense, MIT's Intro to Programming w/ EdX is also a great way to learn more about problem solving, and since it's in python it's a little more approachable.

Both are free and online, and I highly recommend either of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've taught a few friends the basics by using codecademy's free javascript course while also tutoring. Unless they've changed it, it has you build a simple console cash register. It introduces each of it's concepts very organically, & if they get stuck on any of javascript's idiosyncrasies I'm there.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want them to learn to think about how to develop code, but not a particular language I recommend: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming- fundamentals](https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-fundamentals)</comment>