Facebook's Lookback - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/lookback <comment><USER2> This is a lot like Google's auto-awesome videos they came out with last year. On New Year's Eve I got a push notification from Google+ on my Android phone that said something like "Happy New Year!" and when I touched it I got a video that showed an auto-curated video of stuff that happened in 2013 based on my videos and pictures that auto-upload to G+. Pretty well done -- I showed it to my family and they were impressed.

After I saw the version they made for me, it let me pick the background music and re-rendered it to match the music I picked.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. I found this rather poignant. I've been on Facebook for 6 years, and it struck me that most of the events it picked out were closer to the start of those 6 years than the present.

<comment><USER4> I found it funny, because of the mismatch between the "this is supposed to feel poignant" style of background music and the completely-lacking-in- poignancy material I tend to post on Facebook.

<comment><USER5> I was laughing almost all throughout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Nicely done - kind of made me realise how unimportant a lot of the stuff I post on Facebook is though! The photos were nice to see but all but one of the status updates were dumb things that only had relevance the day they were posted and had no lasting nostalgic value.

I'm guessing this was quite a technical challenge to produce a 1 minute HD video for every user on Facebook and have them all available today.

<comment><USER6> If you have important, meaningful things to say, a Facebook status update is probably the wrong platform. :)

<comment><USER7> I don't see why that has to be the case. My posts it showed were about a new job I got in town, when my girlfriend got her first full-time teaching job, the completion of a really difficult junior year. I was impressed with how many interesting things it pulled out while avoiding drunk posts and party pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something? It's just 6 photos that I've uploaded, 4 of which are from the past month. It looks like people here are talking about music, but the page is not playing music in Chrome.

<comment><USER9> Yes, mine is just a few photographs on a page. No video. I guess you need to have a certain number of photos uploaded/tagged on Facebook to create a video, whereas I make an effort to not upload any such content.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it makes a difference. I've been on Facebook since 2004 and have about 950 photos and videos.

<comment><USER10> what are your privacy settings? I think that is the big differentiator.

<comment><USER11> You may be on to something. I have turned off Platform (and so no applications work for me), and have set almost all other things to Friends only. All I get is six recent photos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could someone please describe this for those of us that don't have a Facebook account?

<comment><USER13> Unless you are like me and self-delete posts after a day or two. Then you get a picture of your cover photo and profile pic plus the message

"Thank you, [name]

10 years ago people started using Facebook to connect with each other in a new way. Thanks for being a part of it.

Mark and the Facebook team"

<comment><USER14> That's exactly what you want, right?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, basically. I mean, I'd prefer nothing but...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who doesn't participate in memes, uploads a fair number of photos, and has been consistently on Facebook since 2006, my Lookback video was actually pretty awesome. The music matched the flow of the content, and even the mood of the content.

I like this. Good job, Facebook team.

<comment><USER16> I agree and had the same experience. Was very impressed, this is one of the more personalized and emotional experiences a company has created for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been on Facebook for 9 years (apparently) and this actually did a pretty amazing job picking out the most important moments from my life over that period of time. It actually managed to jerk a tear from my eye as well but it cheated by showing a picture of my mom who passed away last year. YMMV, obviously, but for people who have been diligent about providing Facebook with curated content from their lives this will most likely hit home for them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have any information regarding the logistics of rendering 800+ million videos like this for each user on Facebook? I'm pretty sure it's not rendered on the fly.

<comment><USER18> I'm part of the team that built this which came from different parts of FB. I think we'll be getting some much needed rest after today, then I hope we can start telling the story of how we built it.

<comment><USER19> Will we be able to create a new video again? I deleted pics out of my album because I forgot they were even there and then the video disappeared and all I get is the thank you one...GREAT JOB though, what a wonderful idea. I have enjoyed so many people's videos

<comment><USER20> Ok that's probably what happened to me. After I viewed the video, I deleted some pics in my albums and I'm afraid it affected the video... and I would actually like to request for a new video.... please? Thank you!

<comment><USER21> The same as me :( theres no way to recover it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As much as it was oddly enjoyable to see my life as a 1990's British chick- flick movie trailer, I did not relish all of the details. Like my most liked post in 7 years having 18 likes. Or digging up photographic memories of things long repressed.

How are they rendering these so quickly? There was no noticeable delay in the page load. The HD version is a 4.15MB mp4, with 1.19billion active monthly users that's 4.939PB of video to prerender. I thought perhaps they were rendering it either in the browser and passing a bytestream to the SWF (they're not), or starting the render on the server and streaming it down before it completed (unlikely as the video is coming from akamai). Anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's the solution to get your Facebook "Lookback" Video back.

To those who have deleted a picture or post from their Timeline, in hopes of "Editing" their "Look Back Video" you have to go into your cache and get the original link. Here are two possible Chrome Fixes:

Type "about:cache" without " signs on your chrome search bar (provided that you don't clear history/cache after you close your browser) You will see a list of links on your window, just click Ctrl F or ⌘ F to and search "lookback" in the Find searchbar Look for the link that will have something like [https://lookbackvideo7-a.akamaihd.net/hv..](https://lookbackvideo7-a.akamaihd.net/hv..). and so on. Click that link. After you clicked the link, you will see on your window a bunch of text with white background. Ignore that. LOOK AT YOUR URL BAR. You should be able to see something like chrome://view-http- cache/[https://lookbackvideo7-a.akamaihd.net/hv..](https://lookbackvideo7-a.akamaihd.net/hv..). etc etc. In the long string of url, DELETE THIS PART: chrome://view-http- cache/ then press enter. You should be able to see your video again...

You know what? I found it! I played it and I downloaded it to my computer. To share on facebook I simply copied the url and posted it as my status. Although it doesn't play through on facebook, it opens as a new window and plays. :)

<comment><USER24> Sounds great, but I saw the video on my iphone, and shared it before accidentally deleting it. Is there a way to get it back, even though it was on my iphone? I am so sad to have lost that touching video! Also, why has facebook not allowed people to regenerate it if deleted? thanks :)

<comment><USER25> Same here, help pls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I find it a bit funny that you can't share your video on Facebook.

<comment><USER27> Careful, the video has photos that might be restricted.

<comment><USER28> But the sharing is per the user's privacy policy so what restriction can there be?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a very beautiful idea and it's brilliantly executed.

Kudos to people who helped making this page, it put me in a somewhat emotional state.

Also, this reminded me another page called "Museum of Me"[1], that was nice too.

[1] [http://www.intel.com/museumofme/r/index.htm](http://www.intel.com/museumofme/r/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER30> Great, photos of all my ex-boyfriends, in sequence, set to sentimental music. Just what I've always wanted.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Depending on how much content you have shared and how long you have been on Facebook, you will either see the personalized video, a collection of photos or a simple thank-you card, the spokesperson said.

Facebook said users will be able to share the video on their pages after 12 noon ET on Tuesday. The videos will only be available for about a month unless you share them on your Timeline. Only you will be able to view your video if you don't share it."

So I guess if you don't share it the first time you watch it, you won't ever be able to. I really enjoy the videos and it sounds like they built each one so I appreciate that but it also sounds like a lot of people got skipped over and they kind of dropped the ball on not being able to share past the first view. Hopefully after they have a rest they will change that.

<comment><USER32> I've been on fb for 9 years, with 900+ photos and easily 500+ posts, but all I got was 6 photos, 4 from the past month... I guess other people are a LOT more social networky than I am.

</comment></comment><comment> bharathi-priya Awesome..I was smiling when i am seeing my lookback video, remembering the moments.

Still i need to agree that some of my best pictures are missing in the video.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Sorry, this page isn't available

Do you need to be logged in?

<comment><USER34> Yes, it's a personalized video for your profile.

<comment><USER35> I'm logged in but still get the error, although my account has very little activity (i only use it for dev purposes).

<comment><USER13> See my previous comment (made a minute or two ago) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7177239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7177239)

I got the error, too, until I didn't and this (see link) popped up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is actually pretty awesome. Good work Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER37> Ok, yes, I post way too many cats. Way too many.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd like to know how to make my own. Facebook should make thus a new feature. I like it, but would have picked other Most Liked photos for example. All the wonderful photos of my son and my family, and the Most Liked photo they fb team picked, to stay up the longest I might add, was a picture of my cousins, that didnt even include me

</comment><comment><USER39> *

1 point by ratna 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

Plzzzzz accidently :'( I delet my vedio,it was accident.my lil baby was playing with computer. I viewed the fb lookback video it wasss asesome.that was made for me but pictures... I was wondering how I could retrieve the video as I would like to share it? Thank you in advancc.plzzzzz help Me out :'(

<comment><USER40> you just make it again. :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I found the handwritten Mark Zuckerberg signature a little pretentious. Maybe that's because of The Social Network, but I don't feel like other CEO's are using their own brand like that. It's like a fashion designer or even an artist signing their work... My video was not THAT good.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't see anything but a message thanking me. Even on mobile, no video whatsoever. Why's that?

<comment><USER43> I didn't see anything, either. There is my cover photo and a placeholder for profile picture. At first, I thought it was an adblocking extension in Chrome, so I tried it in vanilla firefox and saw the same thing.

Unlike others in the thread who delete everything they put on facebook, I do not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I haven't been over-posty on facebook for a while, but my most liked posts are the birth of my two daughters, and a picture of my older one that climbed up on the window sill. anyone find a way to save the flash video? usually you can view source and find it pretty easily...

<comment><USER45> Using Google Chrome, you can open developer tools, click in network, then, click in the "HD" button in player and find for mp4 file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Awesome! I wonder how much computer power FB used to generate the videos for all of their users.

</comment><comment><USER47> THIS IS AWESOME!!!! I HAVE WATCHED 7 SO FAR TODAY AND I HAVE CRIED DURING 4 OF THEM!!!! THIS IS THE EXACTLY THE REASON MY MAJOR IS IN PHOTOGRAPHY TO BRING HAPPINESS TO PEOPLE BY SHARING THEIR HAPPIEST TIMES!!! GREAT JOB MARK AND FB TEAM!!!!

</comment><comment><USER48> They say in the news articles that you can tap some "edit my movie" button, but I am unable to find any such button. Also, I don't see an option to share the video on facebook. Can anyone give me some directions? Thanks!

<comment><USER21> But where did you find your own video? I just see a couple o pictures :(

<comment><USER48> do a Google search for "a look back facebook" and there will be a link in about any article. Here's one: [http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/04/facebook- unveils-l...](http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/04/facebook-unveils-look- back-new-video-product-shows-20-biggest-moments/#!uqD7b)

just click on the link and your video should pop up. I did see something in one article that based on the content of your facebook (the quantity of your pictures and posts) you may either see a video, a collection of photos, or just a "thank you" note.

<comment><USER21> By the way, I htink I remember theres a green button up at the right that says share with friends, but im not sure, :(

<comment><USER48> there isn't a green button on my screen. I found a link to a similar compilation called "Year in review" and there is a green "share" button on that, but "A look back" doesn't have it. Does anyone else have any advice?

<comment><USER49> View ur movie over and over it will eventually produce a share your movie button

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I didn't have a share button either. I typed in this link and it worked. Hope that helps some of you. [https://m.facebook.com/lookback/share](https://m.facebook.com/lookback/share)

</comment><comment><USER51> Interestingly enough, I was in a relationship with my ex for pretty much all of the last 9 years... and yet they didn't highlight a single post or picture of her in the lookback. Can't be coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER52> Anybody knows how to restore my lookback video once it was deleted from the wall where I shere it? Now when I click on the Facebook/lookback link it show me only a few photos!

<comment><USER53> i'm having the same problem!! someone please tell me how to get the video back!

<comment><USER54> You have to hit the share button in upper right hand corner the first time you visit the page ...no going back or it won't be there

<comment><USER55> I can't seem to make the new video that has just been offered on FB... I made one earlier and posted and then deleted it from the wall because photos wouldn't show. Now when I go to [https://www.facebook.com/lookback/](https://www.facebook.com/lookback/) all I see is some static pictures and a greeting that says what's on the file attachment.. I really want to make a lookback video... can anyone help???? I did hit the share button and then deleted from the wall.. I don't see any video in my photo album..

<comment><USER19> The same has happened to me and I really want a video lol any suggestions on how to get a video again??

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Wow. I found this rather poignant. I've been on Facebook for 6 years, and it struck me that most of the events it picked out were closer to the start of those 6

</comment><comment><USER57> Is this generated real time? I had some very recent posts appear and it's impressive if they pre-generate 1.25billion .mp4 files in such a short time!

<comment><USER58> I was wondering the same. Because there is no "building" or "loading". It just plays.

<comment><USER59> Ya, i am on my phone using sprint's crappy 3g data that cuts out every 2 mins and it played without buffering one bit, i get that its a 30 sec video, but when vines or gifs dont play...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Thanks, but I already frequently revisit my most popular posts to bask in the glory days of old. Is Facebook not keeping track when I creep myself?

</comment><comment><USER61> I laughed. At one of the song's dramatic points, it showed a picture of a fork that you can split in half to become chop sticks.

</comment><comment><USER62> I loved it, made me laugh, I need to share it!

</comment><comment><USER63> Man, now I wish I hadn't deleted 2 years worth of posts/images/etc back when I first got on.

</comment><comment><USER64> Hi all .. i want to exchange specific pic , how can i do this ?? thanks for your replying .

</comment><comment><USER65> Can you do a lookback page for a company page that you are an administrator on?

</comment><comment><USER66> I've been much more impressed with Google Plus's Auto-Awesome videos.

</comment><comment><USER67> I deleted mines by accident. How can i restore it back on my fb page?

</comment><comment><USER68> Where can I find the song that was used in this?? I love it!!

</comment><comment><USER69> It's pretty lame when you only have 5 pictures on FB.

</comment><comment><USER70> I deleted my video by accident, how do I get it back .?

<comment><USER39> Same here, :'( I delet my vedio ,i was accident.my lil baby was playing with computer.

I viewed the fb lookback video it wasss asesome.that was made for me but pictures... I was wondering how I could retrieve the video as I would like to share it? Thank you in advancc.plzzzzz help Me out :'(

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> is anyone having trouble getting the video? mine simply's not generated at all. i just find a bunch of pics, no movie, no share button.

anyone?

<comment><USER72> I tried to watch my facebook LOOKBACK video, first of all it didn't show up when I wanted to watch it and it threw an error message, but it was able to be shared. That's what I did and when it appeared on my timeline it wasn't able to be watched again, so I erased to tried it again, but when i clicked the link it showed up 6 pics and an explanation that I am kinda inactive on facebook, what I am not, and I used constantly since 2006. I want to watch this beautiful gift and retrieve my video. Can you help me? I've heard people who did it and it worked, but I did it from my windows phone internet explorer and I don't want to make a mistake.

Thank you,

Caroquito,

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> That is so corny.

</comment><comment><USER74> My did not play...how come? Patsyhaggerty

</comment><comment><USER75> my friend deleated the tha flash back now he is not able to do again what to do?????? plz reply

</comment><comment><USER76> i did what you said with cache but i can only found my friend's videos that i have seen!!

</comment><comment><USER40> it's awesome. But what is the background song ? i really want to know it.

</comment><comment><USER77> i canceled my account today.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it wrong to write another Syslogd? - <AUTHOR>

HN Hivemind:
Ive ended up writing a (rather simple) distributed syslogd (I'll be posting the code on GitHub in a week or two, once I've gotten the code REALLY matured) using C# and basic threading. So far, I've outclassed syslog-ng (I can handle 12k/msgs a minute on a 900Mhz P3 and have the load <2, while syslog-ng can only handle 4k/msgs a minute with a load of >6)
So, is it wrong to write /another/ syslogd implementation? <comment><USER2> Absolutely not wrong: this is the kind of thing that drives progress. You may not get all that many takers, though</comment>


Ask HN: Why are there no Slideshare competitors - <AUTHOR>

Slideshare is great, and from the start provided clear value (youtube for powerpoints). So why are there no Slideshare competitors (where there were heaps of Youtube competitors)? <comment><USER2> Slideshare is ok but I love using Prezi(<http://www.prezi.com>) for my presentations now. It allows me to make presentations that are really interesting and that keep people engaged. Since my audience tends to be developers/testers this can be difficult but having things move around without be "Death-by-powerpoint" movement its a winner!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always thought of scribd as something similar to slideshare There are various publishing platforms like scribd, eg Issuu. Also, [http://superuser.com/questions/81741/alternative-to- slidesha...](http://superuser.com/questions/81741/alternative-to-slideshare- net)</comment>


Amazon Studios - <AUTHOR> http://studios.amazon.com/ <comment><USER3> This is great! I for one have always been writing scripts as a hobby. Film- making business has always been a closed circle, even in foreign and indie markets. An additional channel into the circle for people outside of Hollywood couldn't hurt.

<comment><USER4> That's what I thought too. I stumbled across this yesterday, while searching for a market for my script.

The deal sounds great, I'm too busy to market my script properly, but I can just upload it to them, get feedback, exposure, possibly win some money, and maybe make $200,000 if they buy it.

Worst case scenario is I leave in 18 months with just my script again -- but I figure that's the expected case for self promotion anyway.

<comment><USER3> Agree. Even though I haven't tried to publish anything in print media format, but I suspect that, at worst case scenario, this is no different from a writer submitting his work and getting turned down with some comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am constantly amazed at just how many things Amazon is involved in. Though I do not work for them, I am pretty intimately involved with them, and have some insider knowledge, and it blows my mind how many different, random, and seemingly pointless things they work with.

I kinda have hard feeling against them because I feel like they go out of their way to stifle (external) innovation. However they certainly do their best to innovate within their own company. I literally can't think of any other company that throws their money around on experiments to such a degree as Amazon.

As for this project, It is an unique idea, and all it really takes is on home run for the world to take notice, and for them to disrupt the current system. Unfortunately I believe it is the writers' that are the most taken advantage of in Hollywood, and it doesn't seem like this does anything to remedy that. I think it would be better if they gave them $100k on the front end, and 10% on the back end. That way they still get the guaranteed money for their work, but they are compensated if it is a home run hit. That is a better deal than a lot of studios give writers, and so it would actually attract high quality scripts.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could this be considered a "seed-stage film fund?"

<comment><USER7> My answer would be "no," since rather than buying just a small piece of your movie idea, Amazon studios options the entire thing immediately. Their arrangement is "if we decide we want to make your movie, we will pay you $200k and that's all."

In some sense $200k is actually quite a lot for a no-name script, but since Amazon gets all the equity I don't think we can call it a seed fund. This may be how the movie industry works (all the upside for a new writer is in reputation), but since you don't get to make the movie and earn the profit it doesn't seem comparable.

<comment><USER8> But do you get to keep your name on the script? There was that other project for writers where apparently they could (and did) remove your name from the list of authors. So you didn't even build a reputation.

As you say, $200k for a no-name script is actually not bad. And if it has some decent success (gets made into a movie at all), that byline probably has some value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone explain why amazon is doing this? Of all the industries they could move into, why financing indie scripts?

<comment><USER10> Possibly as an avenue to creating original content for Amazon Instant Video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Will today's cheaper, more accessible technology for making movies end up disrupting the big studios?

It does bring movie-creation within reach of a great many more people; and disruptive distribution channels are also growing (amazon; netflix; even appleTV/iTunes; plus the growing "home theater"), as alternatives to movie theaters.

The question is consumers: they have access to movies made with the highest level of technical expertise, screenplays, character actors, stars, franchises, marketing - and movies are _cheap_ to rent already (plus, piracy drops their price to zero). Why would consumers select one of these indie movies over the major studio movies? In a head-on comparison for the mainstream, these indie movies would seem to have everything stacked against them.

But indie movies aren't new, and there has always been a niche for them - <USER2> not the mainstream. What is changing is their quality is increasing. What they really need is slightly bigger niches, where their non-big-studio qualities offset their not having all those other advantages. Do these bigger-niches exist?

I'm not sure that they do. Even foreign language fims - made to very high standards, with huge niches - are regularly remade by hollywood, and with much greater commercial success in the mainstream. When people pirate movies, they seem to pirate mainstream movies, not indie ones...

Here's what I think will happen: as soon as any film-maker gets a foothold of some success, he will be co-opted by the big studios - as they have done with the idea of an indie film (notice how "indie" films often have big name actors in them these days?) They are still masters of the value networks for making mainstream movies: theaters, stars, marketing.

Technology isn't the main commercial barrier to making movies, so reducing it doesn't undermine their business.

What could change it is:

(1) if there were customers who prefer the indie films, because they are more accessible or cheaper. But everyone can access films, and privacy makes them free - denying indie entry.

(2) or if, even without a nurturing niche, indie films could become of such high quality (according to the mainstream) that they could take business away from the big studios. This would provoke a fierce competitive response from the studios, and they have so much non-technical power that it seems unlikely.

What can happen is disruption of the traditional distribution channels of video rentals (there's bankruptcies there already I think).

But probably not theaters (people like the theater partly because it is _not_ home - they are going out - there's the energy of a mass of people; a different environment/atmosphere etc). Maybe cheaper projection equipment will change the way it's done (e.g. there are now complexes that show many more films, in smaller theaters), and that may disrupt traditional chains to some extent, as discount stores disrupted department store. But I don't think so: theaters have always been priced so that everyone can afford them; I guess what might change is accessibility, with small theaters opening up locally. But this niche is already filled; those small theaters can just upgrade their equipment and keep making money in the same way - the cheaper technology is a sustaining innovation for them. Unless someone works out a way to use it disruptively... (maybe showing more films, more recently, at cheaper prices, by using smaller theaters).

<comment><USER12> I think what we'll continue to see, is the physical-distribution-based middle- men fall away. They'll be awfully nice to have for quite a while. But the production companies won't _need_ them for very long.

I expect an increase in digital middle-men in dealmaking (ala Netflix/HOUSE OF CARDS). Followed by the digital middle-men striking exhibition deals with the theatre chains. Then it's pretty much free-fall for traditional studios unless they adjust their model.

The theatre chains actually stand to get a shot in the arm with digital and physical middle-men competing on deals in the near-term. And with digital distribution/projection bringing overhead down, they'll pick up an incredible amount of flexibility in theatre-sizing/scheduling/etc. Exhibition is poised to get pretty interesting.

And if the big chains won't do it, I'm sure the digital distributors would be keen to prop up a smaller-theatre model in the interim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _cough_ <http://massify.com/> _cough_

<comment><USER9> Massify is a "connect, collaborate, create" place, and amazon is running contests for funding. It seems completely different to me.

<comment><USER13> Massify is mostly competitions.</comment></comment></comment>


The Atlantic Was Wrong. Software Engineers Do Exist - PVS-Studio https://medium.com/@nayafia/the-atlantic-was-wrong-software-engineers-do-exist-24b2ed024861 <comment><AUTHOR> It's still not engineering. I mean, I can't stop you from defining engineering to include software, but there is a critical difference in the actual _activity_ performed by engineers vs programmers.

Programming is cheap enough that (even for these hardcore "infrastructure" tasks) the cost of planning something is roughly equal to the cost of simply building it. In fact, to a large degree, the activity of planning is identical with the activity of building. So the optimal approach is always going to be to plan/build, then test.

Programmers spend their day alternately planning and building, in an interleaved way.

Engineering is characterized by problems for which the planning is many orders of magnitude cheaper than the implementation. So "getting it right" and doing all the math in a very rigorous way up front is much much more important.

Engineers spend their time exclusively planning and double-checking their work. Somebody else does the building.

<comment><USER2> So I've spent the last few months trawling through camera datasheets, evaluating OCR solutions, and building and comparing custom image transformations so that we can have a good idea of the quality and limitations of the ANPR solution we intend to deploy.

As of today only the framework of the final solution has been written, and we are finally interviewing for developers to write up the system for production (I will manage them, but am moving on to our radio code now).

Is what I've been doing engineering? If I was doing the final writing myself is it ?

<comment><USER3> To me, what you have been doing is engineering, regardless of who writes the code. If a group of people were to start writing the code without doing the preparatory analysis that you describe, and instead tried to get to a solution by test-and-fix / trial-and-error, that would not be engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Compared to other technical and scientific efforts, programming is still in its infancy. It has a long way to go before it is as refined and disciplined as other occupations.

We are getting there slowly, but it's still the wild west. Where else could you find a college dropout working alongside somebody with a PhD? I've never seen a hospital where somebody with only a highschool education and good scalpel skills was allowed to perform life-or-death surgery. But in the world of software, we routinely employ trial-and-error in trying to put the right person into the right job. And it's tough when the nature of those people and the nature of those jobs changes so rapidly.

It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. When I tell my grandchildren about how we did software 'engineering' nowadays, I expect them to laugh like we do when we hear about doctors who used leeches and magnets to cure diseases.

<comment><USER5> you know they still use leeches for some conditions :-) and NMR uses magnets

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _> Perhaps, if these software engineers make a mistake, people will not die, as with the civil engineers building bridges._

(these == infrastructure engineers)

When you have software that decides upon real life's objects, a small bug could end up in a disaster, even death.

<comment><USER5> Normally you blame the contractors - Back when I worked for one of the really big consulting engineers. I did reverse engineering on one project where the subcontractor had messed up some soil analysis,

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> By definition, an engineer is someone who works on an engine. Unless we go back to steam powered computers, we're going to need a new name.

</comment><comment><USER8> The title of "Engineer" doesn't matter. The work and pay do.

<comment><USER6> The degree of "Engineer" does matter. Like the work and pay do ;)</comment></comment>


First Wave at Omaha Beach - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/11/first-wave-at-omaha-beach/303365/ <comment><USER2> "An account of the "epic human tragedy" that unfolded when Allied troops landed on the shores of Normandy on D-Day"

Stopped reading there. Google: "By the end of the first day, none of the assault forces had secured their first-day objectives. Allied casualties on June 6 have been estimated at 10,000 killed, wounded, and missing in action: 6,603 Americans, 2,700 British, and 946 Canadians."

10k killed on your worst day? "an epic loss"?

The Soviet Union lost like 15k people. Per day. Over a week, a month, a year, in the end, over 5 years. It was a German-Russian war in Europe and the "Omaha Beach" looks more like a birthday party for children.

<comment><USER3> Tragedy is not a function of scale.

<comment><USER4> GP may have been doing some strange one-upsmanship, but Russia sure did have a worse time than the U.S. in WWII. I also think that extant Russian culture still suffers from PTSD over the trauma of the entire 20th century.

Suicide rates and alcoholism are high over there. If you act cheerful, many Russians think you must be stupid. Not a happy place to be.

<comment><USER2> [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/13518049608430230](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1080/13518049608430230)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Square talking to banks about possible 2014 IPO (no paywall) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Square-talking-to-banks-about-possible-2014-IPO-4962089.php

<comment><AUTHOR> I resubmitted from here [1] since the link was paywalled, but freely accessible from sfgate instead of sfchronicle.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691034)

</comment><comment><USER2> > "Square, which makes credit card readers that plug into mobile devices."

Perhaps the worst explanation of Square's business model I have ever seen.</comment>


The Things We Carry - <AUTHOR> http://www.hillarypredko.com/kipple/1-the-things-we-carry/ <comment><USER2> I share the author's concern about kipple, although I came to the same conclusion from a different starting point.

It's very difficult to jump off the train of kipple. On one hand, it's hard to make unwanted items useful again. Barely anyone will accept old electronics for free, tiny items like gifts and poscards are destined to be burned like the flowers in the article.

On the other hand, there's an expectation that everyone will keep getting new things. Family will notice the same sweater as last Christmas. Coworkers will organize Secret Santa where 90% of gifts serve to satisfy curiosity and nothing more, doomed to be thrown into a bottom of a drawer. Sellers will try to push for replacements instead of fixes once items start showing signs of wear.

For me, the journey didn't start from flowers, but from living in many places for a short time. Every kilogram off the back makes moving (and, conincidentally, life) easier. This minimalism blends well with the idea of overproducing, and now I know the word - kipple - that describes what I'm trying to fend off.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, I find that it is difficult to escape the expectation of getting new things unless you're already wealthy. Poorer people can't afford a high quality new thing, so they buy a cheaper one to replace its utility. However, that object breaks, so they have to buy it again.

Is there a way to create the conditions of minimalism for everyone?

<comment><USER4> I agree that this is true but so many of the things we buy have no utility. It is the chase that kills us (me included) not that we need some things.

There are groups that have that mindset to _want_ less, to avoid the chase, like the Amish. (Not that they don't have other problems).

I think even simple rules can help though: * If haven't used something in the last year, sell it or get rid of it. * If you want to buy something that costs more than $X, wait a two weeks. If you still want it, wait two more weeks. If you still want it, then buy it. (So much of our spending is impulse). * Don't have cash/cards easily accessible or always on you or "saved" in sites you use. Having hurdles to spend money prevents it for things you don't need. This also means making a grocery list and only taking along enough money to buy what's on your list. * Buy used or thrift. I buy almost all of my clothes on eBay. High quality, name brand stuff that retails for $75-$150 for $15 shipped. This is even more true if you are a less popular size. * etc.....

<comment><USER5> > There are groups that have that mindset to want less, to avoid the chase, > like the Amish. (Not that they don't have other problems).

I do, and I educated myself to it. Interestingly, buying something (intended as adding) for me, is as painful as it is to lose something for other general people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The link is broken. I keep getting redirected to [http://www.hillarypredko.com/kipple/1-the-things-we- carry/wp...](http://www.hillarypredko.com/kipple/1-the-things-we-carry/wp- admin/install.php).

<comment><USER7> Here's a boingboing post that contains some of the text of the article: [https://boingboing.net/2017/12/10/shanzhai- futurism.html](https://boingboing.net/2017/12/10/shanzhai-futurism.html)

<comment><USER2> This post contains some text from a different article, there's no mention of Shenzen or Toronto in the original link (I still have it open in a tab).

<comment><USER8> Both are mentioned in the last paragraph.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, that's right. Still, that's not the quoted article.

<comment><USER9> It's a five-part essay -- you have to click on the links to the left to get to the other parts. It may be from there (I can't get the site to load right now either).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do note that there are 5 parts to the story. (I almost closed the tab after finishing part 1)

</comment><comment><USER11> I just went through a break up of my own and I'm having a tremendously hard time in every sense of the phrase. Part of me wants to hang onto some of the photos and momento's to help me learn and remember the good times, but it feels so painful as well. But getting rid of it all feels dishonest that implies a revisionist history about how I felt about my s/o.

<comment><USER12> keep them. trust me you'll be happy you did in a few years. if it really hurts put them on an HD or SD and give to a friend to give back to you in a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Such beautiful, thoughtful writing. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Site seems down (HN effect, I guess), but this article is related: [https://boingboing.net/2017/12/10/shanzhai- futurism.html](https://boingboing.net/2017/12/10/shanzhai-futurism.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Kipple is Sturgeon's Law applied to household objects.

</comment><comment><USER16> redirecting to install.php

either malicious, infected or just broken.

<comment><USER17> Its a mis-configured WordPress multi-site installation. If the domain is not recognized it redirects to the install page to create a new site on the domain, but they probably have site creation disabled, since they aren't an open community like wordpress.com is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything."

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

<comment><USER19> "If you are not very careful, your possessions will possess you." \- Marina Lambrini Diamandis, Oh No!

<comment><USER20> "I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust."

HD Thoreau, _Walden_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kipple, climate change, humans irreversibly changing the planet - it all sounds bad, until you realize that the earth has undergone numerous major shifts in the history of life, each of which created new conditions that ultimately led to humanity.

The Great Oxygenation Event is the story of bacteria that mindlessly converted resources into waste until they were drowning in it, killing off the vast majority of life - except the tiny portion that was adapted to thrive on that waste. And from then on the oxygen-breathers flourished.

This and other events make me pretty confident that some life form will find a way to make use of whatever garbage-laden hellscape we produce. In fact I'm pretty sure even humans will be able to adapt, and who knows, maybe the new conditions will usher in new wonders!

<comment><USER22> I never quite understand this argument. I don't think people who are worried about climate change are worried that it will be the end of all life, but that it will be the end of a good life for humans.

Knowing some bacteria will love the apocalypse doesn't really matter; I want humans, and my children and their children and their children's children, to be able to enjoy this planet. I care about humans because I am a human. I mean, if you trully believe that all life is interchangable, it doesn't really matter if humans exist as long as some life exists, then why do anything at all? Nothing would matter.

<comment><USER21> It is somewhat of a nihilistic or fatalistic argument. But to me it serves as a counterpoint to the fear and depression that can take hold when considering the future of humanity and one's lack of control over it. It's meant to be comforting in a "don't sweat it too much, life will go on" kind of way.

I do sometimes feel like it's not worth worrying too much about what kind of earth your children's children's children's children will inherit. Just as all humans, they will enter the world as it is and make do. Their perspective and basis for what a "good life" is will be relative to their environment and experience.

I'm not saying we should burn it all down for the hell of it, but that I feel like there is a lot of hand wringing and pessimism about "the future" that is perhaps unnecessary and contributes to increased fear and anxiety (i.e. not the good life) among people that are actually alive right now.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacking my way through off-the-grid survival - <AUTHOR> https://nunodonato.github.io/solar/2019/11/09/hacking-my-way-through-offgrid-survival.html <comment><USER2> Having a propane powered generator seems like the cheapest easy-button. You are already producing tons of co2 with unregulated burning of wood, it would actully benefit your environmental profile. While propane cannot be gathered in the woods, neither can dishwashers, water heaters, batterys or controllers.

I'm honestly suprised when I hear an off-gridder is even considering a dishwasher, which is replaced easily by another 10 minutes at the sink, uses no wattage, less water. Seems it would be a smaller sacrifice in the big picture than the other issues.

Also consider passive heat options. Painting one side of your home a dark color is shockingly effective, even moreso passive heat exchangers.

Find old car batteries, and learn to recondition them. They are a bit bulky, but can provide cheap amperage if you understand the concepts involved. Most just need a bit more water and acid, and a desulfation to hold a majority of their original capacity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Burning wood can actually be very eco-friendly if you know how to do it right :) With proper wood and proper burning, of course!

Dishwasher, no way to go without it with 2 kids! Unless you enjoy doing lots of chores :) And actually, a dishwasher is more efficient (water-wise) than washing manually. I dont buy the "romantic" idea that offgrid = cave-age living. My whole point is to be off-grid, in nature, but with some useful modern technologies :)

I've been looking into many passive heat/cooling solutions. We just moved in, so lots of experiments going on :) We do have extreme winters and summers, so a dark color would grill us during summer ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe there is a typo in the power of the water heater, 15000wh (15 Kwh) seems way too much, a typical water heater (at least here in Italy) is 1.6 or 2 Kw (not Kwh btw).

In off grid situations are common "hybrid" water heaters, with either a plain enough solar serpentine or with a heat exchanger connected to the wooden stove.

<comment><AUTHOR> Typo indeed. Thanks.

Serpentine is definitely in the plans for next year!</comment></comment>


Linode is having a major outage in Atlanta - <AUTHOR> http://status.linode.com/incidents/ddmgjjndmmfc <comment><USER2> This is so obnoxious.</comment>


I need to consult with a startup guru on where to take my finished startup - <AUTHOR>

Is there a list of people you would recommend I talk to regarding a startup I've finally completed?<p>For great advice I would pay a consult fee not matter what the price. I'm needing to team my project with a production house and would love someone to chat with that's in the know regarding startups and how they recommend I go about launching and teaming with other people I need for my startup to work <comment><USER2> I hate to be pedantic and off-topic, and I realize English is probably not your first language...but, one cannot, have a "finished startup." The term refers to a startup company, as in, you are starting a company. Companies are never "finished," so it seems the better term to use here would be project or MVP.

I hope this doesn't sound rude.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to chat I have 3 exits under my belt two of them where to large organizations. I am always up for a conversation with people that are pursuing ideas, even if it does not lead anywhere at least you have another person in your network. My contact info is in my bio, as well as my LinkedIn profile where you can get a deeper understanding of what I have been doing.

<comment><USER4> That's probably one of the best HN bios out there, kls. Very beleivable ;-)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, my step-brother actually was almost taking by one of those scams on Skype, I was like how could you fall for that fortunately he came to talk to me before he sent her/them any money but the fact that he thought she was real up until that point is incredible, not to mention he was still trying to half convince me that it was legit. I guess most people by nature are not skeptics. I am not a hardcore skeptic, but I am at least skeptical enough to know when someone starts asking for money it's time to stop taking them at face value and investigate their claim. The part I find most amusing about the whole situation is that I am 38, fat and bald, my bio pic on Skype is me the wife and kids standing in a Japanese garden, there is nothing on my profile that would make a 20 something, beautiful model looking woman want to contact me to see "whats up" because she is board. Trying to explain that to my wife at first was comical to say the least. She knows now that it is a scam.</comment></comment></comment>


Nvidia Tesla Supercomputer (960 cores) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/personal_computing.html

<comment><USER3> (I can't see any of the 11 comments so forgive me if post is redundant in some way)

Visual Effects production often needs lots of computing resources for rendering. This is a task that can be heavily parallelized. Usually this is done on a frame/per core basis, with memory being the limiting factor. Now I've started using EC2 recently which made me realize a different approach to rendering tasks.

Normally a facility has a fixed number of CPUs available to run jobs. So for example 100 cpus. Let's say the average number of frames to render is usually around 200. So if each frame takes an hour to render and your's is the only job on the queue then it will take 2 hours to see the complete shot. And it's much worse in the real world with many artists working on many shots. Whereas using a resource like EC2 you can always render your entire shot in 1 hour regardless of the number of frames. You're only limited by the time it takes 1 frame to render, and the cost is the same if you use 1 cpu or 200.

In other words one can trade depth for breadth. Now this may seem obvious to anyone familiar with EC2, but for me it means that tools like Tesla which where once in high demand for this type of work are now much less valuable. I would expect that it's price/performance is much better then EC2, but where is the cutoff? How many hours do you have to run that Tesla to come out ahead? And if you're running 1 Tesla for that many hours, might it not be worth a premium to get your answer sooner by running more massively parallel (but for less wall clock time) on an EC2 like service?

I suspect these types of tools becoming only relevant to real time applications (due to reduced latency vs. EC2), and or nonstop computing (assuming there's a big price/performance win).

<comment><USER4> Pretty soon someone will rent you GPUs by the hour, at which point you'd have the advantages of elasticity and price/performance.

<comment><USER5> That actually sounds like a neat business.

<comment><USER6> It's easy to imagine EC2 expanding beyond 1U servers and databases to GPGPUs, FGPAs or quantum cores. There's a lot of potential for a gpu cloud - <USER2> quick rendering (xtraNormal/nVidia Gelato) to scientific computing (Larrabee?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not quite 960 cores. There are 960 main ALUs across the system, but they're 8-way per item you'd maybe call a core (the stream multiprocessor) and run the same program instruction per clock. There are multiple partitions to execution on top of that, too: 3 cores share a memory space, 10 to a chip, each chip with access to board memory, three chips in the complete Tesla system.

Those 960 ALUs are just the main FP32 and INT32 hardware, too. There are others (FP32 MUL and special function units, and an FP64 ALU too, per core).

</comment><comment><USER8> This is probably very cool for people doing CG work. It's still too limited for most scientific work though because only single precision floating point is supported. If they'd make a version of this that supports double precision arithmetic and support it in the BLAS library so that parallelization of matrix operations occurs automatically without having to change existing MATLAB code, these things will sell like crazy in the scientific community.

<comment><USER4> CUDA now supports double precision and BLAS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love me 2 of those. Has anyone had experience with CUDA?

<comment><USER9> Yes.

It's pretty nice. As nice as C can get, that is... The biggest hurdle for me was thinking data-parallel as opposed to sequentially or even task-parallel.

<comment><USER10> I use CUDA for finance based Monte-Carlo simulations. Unless you are at a place with a huge cluster that you have access to, some problems cannot be solved without CUDA.

<comment><USER11> One downside to CUDA is its massively powerful for single FP precision, but double FP precision performance is less than 1/10 of single FP performance.

When precision is needed CUDA is much less useful, say you're running 10^10 simulations then with single FP precision you will only have a result accurate to 5 significant figures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the title, I was expecting something about the onboard computer of the acclaimed nerdmobile.

</comment><comment><USER13> From what little I know of the subject, I can see this becoming the dominant platform for game servers, especially MMO games within a few years.

</comment><comment><USER14> So what would be primary use of something like this?

<comment><USER15> Either a map-reduce type operation, or a job which can be split into multiple processes, and cobbling together all their data into a result at the end (or periodically).

Optical Character Recognition could be done, by for instance, recognising each letter on a different core.

<comment><USER16> Assuming you know where each letter starts and ends. So each word maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> New Folding@home super-cruncher?

</comment><comment><USER18> How many FPS in Quake?

(just kidding)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, a link I posted 2 days ago (also .co.uk) got frontpage'd. :-D

I'm gonna love one of these babies for my AI work!</comment>


Show HN: Nocode Hub, Discover What People Are Building Without Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.nocodehub.com/ <comment><USER2> [https://foodstillgood.webflow.io/](https://foodstillgood.webflow.io/) is _exactly_ the kind of preview I wish every app had.

This is a nice site I can get lost in. Thanks OP!

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing, thank you. I love that design too! I hope you signed up, would love to keep you posted on the new submissions.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nocode Hub helps you discover the newest no code projects shipped by makers from all over the world and to keep up with the news. Would love your feedback and questions! (if any)

<comment><USER3> Good site!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)</comment></comment></comment>


White House encryption Confide app - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/white-house-encryption-confide-app/ <comment><USER2> This is what happens when you let the Bush/RNC private server mass email use and _cough_ loss _cough_ go unprosecuted. Clinton's "off the reservation" server and disregard for State's own IT services. (Hey, Secretary of State, if they're broken, how about fixing them? Especially after all the carping the Obama Administration made about Mannings' leaks -- enabled by, you guessed it, inadequate systems at State.)

People in government who are inclined to hide things, get a pretty good signal that they are going to get away with it.

Oops. Did I just inadvertently make a pun, there?

The problem is, we have all this _concern_ that mere career bureaucrats, scientists, and the like are going to "go dark" communicating with some neo- commie press. About what swim floats to buy for your kids when the oceans wash over mid-town, I suppose.

When really, it's the guys at the top, hiding their own communications -- most likely to certainly in contravention of law -- that should be the real concern.</comment>


How do you manage a team of geeks? - <AUTHOR> https://thelab.o2.com/2013/01/how-do-you-manage/ <comment><USER2> Replace "geek" with "highly sought after, intelligent and talented employees" and you'll be closer to the truth.

The reason developers are "hard" to manage is that they're in demand, so they don't have to put up with bad or abusive management.

That said.. I'd recommend reading Team Geek (<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018025.do>) if you have any ambition to move into a management or leadership role.

<comment><USER3> IMO the reason developers are "hard" to manage has nothing to do with the fact that they're in demand - fortunately most developers aren't that fickle.

There are numerous reasons why developers are difficult to manage. One of the main reasons is because by and large they are introverts. They therefore don't communicate well with other people at all times.

Also - let's face it - the work developers do isn't always easy to understand and quantify; as opposed to say building a house where the inputs/outputs are clearly visible. I can't imagine being a non-techie and trying to manage a team of developers would be at all fun.

Source: I own and run a software development company and have employed and contracted with dozens of developers.

<comment><USER4> Have you thought that maybe you pay so bad, that those are the kind of developers you get to be around, and therefore build judgement and assume they are introverts, or don't properly communicate?

Social HR huh? Yeah.

<comment><USER3> Interesting point but unfortunately you're off the mark - we use pay ladders for our team, very similar to those Joel Spolsky applies at FogCreek. We keep one eye on the .Net market to ensure our pay scales are aligned with market rates, so pay isn't the issue.

<comment><USER4> Hah .NET coders. Yeah I got ya.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article, (and many others), has a tone that some people ("geeks" in this case) are like another species of human origin that only the most skilled manager has learned to tame.

According to this article, they hate bureaucracy, filling out time-sheets and want flexible working hours. I guess I'm a geek in need of special management.

Who really believes this crap?

<comment><USER6> Show me someone who likes filling out time sheets, wants inflexible working hours, loves bureaucracy, and respects authority more than ideas. I don't know anyone like that, so I must only know geeks.

<comment><USER7> I know some three of four people like that.

<comment><USER6> Who?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> UK-AL I hate this tone. Geeks want what everybody wants, respect, recognition, autonomy, progression, money.

Its just that geeks are more likely to stand up to a manager (They respect ideas, and knowledge, not authority)if they don't like the way something is done, rather than be meek. Thus have a reputation for being difficult to control.

<comment><USER8> > Its just that geeks are more likely to stand up to a manager (They respect > ideas, not authority)

How much of this is inherit in "geeks" and how much is just because we're lucky enough to be in one of the strongest job markets around? Many people would be ecstatic to have the problem of recruiter spam.

<comment><USER9> I guess its not about the job market. Geeks are more of creators and artists. They dont bother much of the hierarchies and luckily the hierarchies too dont have an issue because they deliver.

Its just that whose in more power. In the factory age it was the sales man. In the tech age its the geek

<comment><USER10> I think we all are wired to bother about hierarchies, it's just that among "geeks" the perceived rank has to be more about actual substance and real acomplishment, compared with "normal" hierarchies where the differentiator is about who is the more social, political person even when often the person has no substance nor real acomplishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have to say I'm not normally one to post here, and I dislike posting negatively, but this isn't a submission I've enjoyed.

We're all a bunch of human beings. People are complex and have varied fears, motivations, and delusions - and they act accordingly. Whatever role they play in a company.

Someone who has the role called 'manager' in an organisation who interacts with other people who have a role called 'developer' has the task of interacting with a bunch of human beings, and that is often difficult. It is made more difficult when they all decide it is in their interests to devote their time to creating something complex. That's a fine area about which we can talk about ways to improve.

However this 'geek' moniker, while all lighthearted, puts distance between people. It makes the article, to me, seem partly about the author (telegraphing the distance he puts between him and others in a relationship he possibly sees as being based around 'power') and partly about his message. I'll be happy if I've gone overboard in my interpretation though!

</comment><comment><USER12> I think giving geeks a quiet space to work in with little distractions is the most important aspect.

Most companies fail at doing this though, usually offices are geared towards the extrovert, so huge sprawling open plan desks with people coming/going all the time.

An ideal solution would be everyone gets their own office, a practical solution would be to provide laptops and allow remote working or the option to work anywhere in the building with carefully designed areas to that are quiet and comfortable.

Most corporates don't understand this though and just put everyone on a desk/cubicle in a huge room with 80 others and blindly hope some productivity will happen

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, maybe the way Danny Ocean (George Cloony) manages his team in Ocean's Twelve (the movie) - tight team, clear plan, known desirable end-result, exact subtasks and timing, confidence in the experts' abilities (proven before).. A sense of common purpose, unity, and perhaps friendship helps also.

<comment><USER14> And having a scriptwriter who can ensure a great outcome for you, that's a definite plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 2009: [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_u...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks)

1999: <http://blog.calevans.com/nerd-herding/>

1980: [http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Mp8rAAAAIBAJ&sjid=S...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Mp8rAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SvwFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5054,4061727&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is probably a tangent, but can we use a better word than "manage"? I honestly think the vocabulary continues to inform our expectations of the job that needs doing here, and I'd suggest that in cases like groups of talented engineers the needs isn't one of authority or "management". Something closer to "facilitator" is a more appropriate description of the real need.

<comment><USER17> Communicator

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think many professions have to put up with the condescending and patronizing bullshit that this article reveals. This is exactly why tech corps are ruined. A few business grads get into the top and convince the company that anyone who has to think to do their jobs is infantile. It's quite sickening but is a natural part of the death of a corporation.

</comment><comment><USER19> Weekly Skype team calls against the current milestone & scheduled 1:1s.

Mockingbird for web wireframes, fluidui for mobile.

FlowDock for devops and support: tickets (jira), commits (git), builds (jenkins) and releases. FD is way better than HipChat/Campfire due to threads and tags. (Try looking in HipChat for a real 24x7 multiperson support incident with some admin password for some random box 80 hours ago. GFL!) It also rocks for support because of the group inbox. And, it can be used by PR people (in a different flow) since it does RSS and twitter.

JIRA + Greenhopper for features/milestones, Redmine/Chili works too. (Gitlab looks neat.)

IRC for informal chats.

</comment><comment><USER20> "[...]especially if they have been told that other people have looked at the problem and couldn't find a solution!"

There's too much ego in our profession, we have to get rid of it. I hate when a client says: "You have to implement a real time video compression algorithm of 100K LOC in brainfuck. This shouldn't take a lot of time for a talented developer like you"

In my head it sounds like: "I think you are stupid and I'm using your ego to get a better/cheaper/faster result"

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been on the wrong end of #4 a couple of times. My boss' opinion of what is "interesting and really challenging" rarely coincides with my own opinion. By this criteria, "make me a Facebook" or "solve the bin packing problem in linear time" would be perfect tasks! And yet I can't imagine many developers jumping for joy when assigned to them.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Remove as much bureaucracy from their working day as possible, they hate doing it, are not very good at it and will spend more time trying to figure out ways of either getting around the tasks or automating them than it would take to actually do it in the first place."

In most other professions there are secretaries to do this kind of thing.

<comment><USER23> I agree with this but it shows an even bigger problem in my mind. It seems to me that the author has decided that employees attempting to automate bureaucratic tasks is worse than just doing it himself. This seems like a wildly inefficient way to manage. Maybe I'm missing something though.

For example, regarding the time sheets, if I could write a quick script that automates the process of filling it out (correctly) in three hours and it would have taken me twenty minutes to fill it out by hand, what's the problem? after only nine weeks I have earned back that three hours in productive time. If I were to distribute it to the entire team of fifteen people and they each take a similar amount of time to fill out the sheets then we are already ahead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > the golden rule of "manage how you'd like to [be] managed" still applies

I tried that. It lasted about ten minutes. I then changed to managing people how they would like to be managed. That was much more successful.

</comment><comment><USER25> If it's O2/Telefonica (which it is), then they manage them fucking terribly and deliver shitty products that fall over and leave people in dire shit regularly.

Not only that, they stereotype and patronise them terribly.

<comment><USER22> I think I've spotted why.

"We're an innovation team, powered by O2. We were set up in January 2011 to test new ideas & concepts fast, in an open environment...We create prototypes, iterate and pivot where necessary, building alpha and beta products to test with user groups with the goal of adding value for our customers."

They've got the PHB working for them.

<https://thelab.o2.com/who-we-are/>

<http://www.dilbert.com/2013-01-09/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Honestly, I think these rules apply to most employees, not just geeks. But there are some great tips here!

</comment><comment><USER27> Two words: continuous integration.

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/120792448/Continuous-Integration>

(I drew these notes up the other day)

PS. Since you appear to be the UK O2, I would add: pay people the same or less but let them work remotely from a more comfortable and healthy environment. Maximum reduction of bureaucracy? Removal of physical environment.

<comment><USER27> Why did this get downvoted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Give 'em beer or pot, and a spec. :)

PS: I'll be hiring this year; if you don't have anything against what's written here send me your resume (email on profile).

<comment><USER18> Wait, don't you need some dummies to manage those people? Better offer some hookers and blow as well. If you need warm bodies that like beer and pot, college hiring season is starting.

<comment><USER28> I figure won't be sending your resume. Your loss ;)</comment></comment></comment>


12-Yr-Old Expands Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/26/12-year-old-genius-expands-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/ <comment><USER2> "The 12-year-old taught himself calculus, algebra and geometry in two weeks, and can solve up to 200 numbers of Pi." and "Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity."

Ignoring the bizarreness of some of those claims ("solving numbers" for "memorizing digits") and the irrelevance of others (IQ?) what's hellish is that there is no mention of what he actually _thinks_. The world is astonished that he has an opinion; no one cares what it is. Reporters make a big deal of having no idea what he's saying; that speaks poorly both of the reporter and the theoretician.

It'll be news when he polishes his thoughts and explains them to someone who is willing to try to understand. For now its a circus, and that's no good for anyone.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you for the most part, but consider for a moment that few people will never understand the type of math he explains. For most people, what he says sounds like gibberish. I know my math pretty well, and while my interest was piqued by the outlandish title, I was even more impressed by the boy's ability to explain these concepts so clearly while writing the proofs at the same time. That shows deep understanding.

You may think that this "circus" doesn't do anyone any good, but I disagree. He will get far more attention than he otherwise would have. And I bet there will be someone who will hear about his story in the press with the right patience to develop his mind to the genius it has the potential to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Misleading headline. The professors at Princeton only acknowledged he's bright and charitably encouraged him to keep studying in the nicest terms possible. Already he's scored 15 points on the Crackpot Index which is not bad for 12 years old.

<comment><USER5> Posting a link since I hadn't heard of it before, assuming we're talking about the same one:

<http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh the poor kid. No one measured Einstein's IQ. He looks to be up to about grade 12 maths -- still an accomplishment for someone so young. He claims to "debunk" the Big Bang theory, and now to be developing a new "relativity". I wish the media wouldn't do this to kids. Every single time I had an article written about me as a kid it contained gross inaccuracies. Half the time they couldn't even get the country I was in correct!

</comment><comment><USER7> "The 12-year-old taught himself calculus, algebra and geometry in two weeks..."

That is real smart.

How come I have never heard about this 12 year old before? The world needs more stories like this.

<comment><USER8> Because he's only been 12 for less than a year (last year you would've heard about an 11 year old and next year about a 13 year old) and hasn't really had a few decades to make a name for himself yet. He and Google would be in the same grade together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was also posted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2379419>

</comment><comment><USER10> Every generation seems to create a genius. The media, the ensuing circus and hero worship usually end up killing the spark.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm starting to think the time-of-day you post on HN is critical

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378099>

Though admittedly this title is better.

</comment><comment><USER12> This kid lives only a few minutes from me. I'm surprised I hadn't heard about him earlier.</comment>


Dear IKEA: Verdana is not a font. It's a mistake. - <AUTHOR> http://shortformblog.com/biz/verdana-is-not-a-font-we-repeat-ikea-verdana-is-not-a-font

<comment><USER2> Some of you are speculating about the reason for the change. Here it is from the source:

 _In an interview with the Swedish design magazine Cap & Design, IKEA's Ivana Hrdlickova says the main reason for the switch was to allow the company to use the same typeface in all countries (current IKEA typefaces do not contain Asian characters, for example). Being that Verdana was designed for the web, it also allows the company's image to remain consistent online and in print._

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually posted a follow-up article based on this information, based on something hilarious I found when researching.

My bit: [http://shortformblog.com/world/ikea-changed-their-fonts- to-r...](http://shortformblog.com/world/ikea-changed-their-fonts-to-reach- chinese-yawn-customers)

The original article (skip the middleman): [http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china- ikea25-2009aug25...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china- ikea25-2009aug25,0,7736661.story)

Considering that was the reason, it's kind of hilarious that people in China go to IKEA to essentially loiter.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, plus <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=785609>. What a deal! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a stab in the dark, but there could be several reasons to try a font like Verdana:

1) Cheap licensing fees. The best typefaces cost plenty of money to use. There is a recession going on but.. c'mon.. you know?

2) It is a challenge to set and make professional use of a shitty typeface. Perhaps this was a ballsy exercise in flaunting an anti-elitist sort of position by using a "proletarian" font. Who knows?

I used to get into friendly, though heated, debates with a friend who would accuse me of being an academic typographer. As a defense, I challenged him to make good use of a junky font like Times New Roman to determine who actually had skill and who was a stylistic fashion whore.

Maybe this is some such attempt by the designers, I don't know? I kinda have a hard time believing that the print designer(s) for Ikea of all places simply made a bonehead error by using a screen font for print.

Just my 3 million bajillion cents. Side note: if anyone has a magical potion that helps to make a succinct point, I'd like to have a teaspoon or so :D

</comment><comment><USER4> How odd - his font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,Nimbus Sans,Verdana,sans-serif"

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a font of last resort, just in case the user has one font on their system.

<comment><USER4> I think that having Verdana was not the odd bit; it was assuming that anyone would have "Nimbus Sans" installed ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> :D

Due to the site's design, which leans heavily on its font, I mainly picked that based on numbers suggesting a lot of Linux users didn't have Helvetica installed. So I tried to pick the most popular Helvetica-like font that usage numbers suggested they would actually have.

And I still put it in front of Verdana. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's a strategic change, meant to make itself more _affordable_ ; its previous font, Futura, is a bit fancy. If IKEA wants to go to the masses, it has already, it might help to dumb down its image and appeal to the coupon- magazine crowd.</comment>


Real-time stream of COVID19 data to build event-driven applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SolaceLabs/jhu-covid19-stream-processors <comment><AUTHOR> Curious to know what others are doing to build COVID related application</comment>


Ask HN: What is your goal for 2019? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I plan to release a distributed knowledge base that supports real/ideal states of the past/present/future states of the world, intended to replace most internet services (e.g., Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Reddit, Wikipedia, BitTorrent, Bitcoin).

</comment><comment><USER3> My goal is to slow down to a more manageable pace and allow for more reflection and dreaming. 2018 was a hectic and eventful year and I am absolutely amazed by how much happened, but I can also feel that I completely neglected the importance of winding down.

I recently completed a biography[0] and the subject in question lost all his responsibility, in turn it let him suddenly have the time to pay attention to the small details relating to his former work. Now, I'm not interested in loosing my responsibilities, but I do want to give them the attention they deserve.

[0]: The Power Broker, Robert Caro

</comment><comment><USER4> Get back to nature. I just moved out to Western Montana (now working fully remote). Looking to do more (or start) hiking, backpacking, cycling, fishing, boating, sitting, relaxing, archery, shooting, maybe hunting, wood woork, and learn to take care of these 10 acres I now have.

</comment><comment><USER5> After working in the east coast for 7 years, working on big company software, i'm going full time remote and moving to the valley. I want to see if it really is the mecca for people passionate about software development and ideas in general. It is going to be hard, my big co stack isn't used much in the valley, and because of that i'm not sure how much my experience will count, so i'm going to essentially start from the ground up. I hope to find a "home" that i've never been able to find on the east coast.

</comment><comment><USER6> Learn how to play the piano.

Continue the deep dive into electronics and hopefully assemble an analog audio synthesizer while completely understanding what I'm doing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Find some truly meaningful work, and get deeper into music.

Hobbywise, maybe build a eurorack and some planar speakers.

</comment><comment><USER8> I plan to proofread my posts before clicking submit ;)

<comment><USER9> We've changed the title from "Ask HN: What you is your goal for 2019?".</comment></comment>


Innovation Requires Resource Starvation, Time Pressure, Shift in Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2006/10/culture_and_innovation.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Core points

       There are 3 necessary, but not sufficient conditions for innovation to take place:

       1. Starvation of familiar resource, forcing you to find
          new approaches, doing things in a different way;
       2. Pressure that forces you to engage in the problem;
       3. Perspective Shift to allow different patterns and ideas to be brought into play.

       Creativity is just one way, and not necessarily the most effective to achieve
       perspective shift.  In fact I am increasingly of the opinion that creativity
       is not a cause of innovation, but a property of innovation processes, its
       something that you can use as evidence of innovation, but not to create it.

There are related videos at <http://www.youtube.com/user/CognitiveEdge></comment>


Show HN: Redux-undo – Simple undo/redo functionality for Redux state containers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/omnidan/redux-undo <comment><USER2> What about undoing on the server though? Doing that on the client only isn't very good useful in most situations I can think of.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting question. The simplest way would be listening to state changes in the store and then syncing the state with the server. Since undos/redos are normal redux actions, you can just handle them like any other action in redux.

For example, in an application I wrote, I do `store.subscribe(autoSaveFunction)` which will automatically save all changes to the state. Of course, you can also only store parts of the state, etc, but this is more redux related than redux-undo related.

</comment></comment><comment> nik-graf Does it also work with immutable data-structures?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tested it yet, but it should. The magic behind redux-undo is a reducer enhancer (higher order reducer) - it returns a function that processes undo/redo and then (if appropriate) calls your reducer. If your reducer uses immutable data-structures, redux-undo will simply store your data (immutable or not) in the history.

redux-undo itself doesn't use immutable data structures, though (for dependency reasons). However, I do make sure not to change any data directly. (you know, the usual redux reducer guidelines)</comment></comment>


What's the most epic photo ever taken? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-epic-photo-ever-taken/answer/Julio-Rodriguez?srid=Q

<comment><USER2> I strongly recommend looking at the other answers to the question: <http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-epic-photo-ever-taken>

</comment><comment><USER3> There are really great pictures in this thread. I'd like to add this one: [http://www.probell.com/photo_exhibit/Muhammad%20Ali%20vs%20S...](http://www.probell.com/photo_exhibit/Muhammad%20Ali%20vs%20Sonny%20Liston%20\(1964\).jpg)</comment>


The Kessler Syndrome Explained (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-debris/kessler-syndrome/ <comment><USER2> >prepare to spend a few years without cell phone reception, Internet, and a five-day weather forecast.

Aside from the weather forecast the rest doesn't need any sort of satellite.

It's incredible how many people still think mobile phones are using satellites! It's a ground antenna, connected via copper or fiber to a wider network of... antennas. If you call abroad, 99% chances your call goes through a submarine cable which is again copper or fiber.

Same with Internet, unless you really are in the middle of the Amazon forest, or (live in country side in the states)

<comment><USER3> I still think there's lots of benefits to be had (and lots of money to be made) from replacing many of current satellites with high-altitude solar- powered UAVs. They'll be much cheaper to design and manufacture (no need for satellite-grade sterility, or engineering for microgravity environment), much easier to service and replace, and they'd offer some capabilities impossible for satellites (like _not_ flying around the globe).

I've said that before, and got plenty of skeptical looks. I recently learned, however, that I'm not the only one thinking this - in fact the concept has been dubbed "atmosats", "pseudosats", or "HAPS". ESA seems to be into it now:

[http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/Crossing_drones...](http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/Crossing_drones_with_satellites_ESA_eyes_high- altitude_aerial_platforms)

<comment><USER4> Have you heard of Facebook's Aquila drone? Sounds like something you are describing. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila) Also, Google's project loon comes to mind.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, they would both be good examples qualify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So a tragedy of the commons, like any other.

The best way to solve it would probably be to have all actors agree on some rules (no rocket bodies left in orbit etc) and some economic incentives such as "for every kg put in orbit you have to pay $X to a fund for the cleanup".

And just like with CO2, the countries responsible for the last 50 years of launches should prime this fund with money for past launches, because the countries that just started launching won't agree to the scheme otherwise.

So basically: US, EU and Russia pay billions to a fund in exchange for India and China agreeing to _start_ paying for future launches.

<comment><USER6> There are rules for satellite designs in place and evolving to address this. You can't just leave things in GEO they must have been launched with a lifecycle plan and suitable fuel/propulsion to move to a dead parking orbit.

<comment><USER7> Enforced by what bodies?

(Not trying to be cheeky, I really want to know. The primary problem here isn't specifying rules but enforcing them among superpowers.)

<comment><USER8> At the moment, common consensus is strong enough. There isn't anyone who has the precise combination of the discipline and foresight necessary to have a functioning space program at all, and the lack of discipline and foresight to not care at all about Kessler syndrome, and/or not be directly impacted by it. It would seem to me to require a contradictory level of long-term thinking and lack of long-term thinking.

If a rogue actor (in the parlance of the age) managed to put together enough of a space program that they could make a few launches, but felt they personally had no stake beyond that, they could try to deliberately trigger the Kessler catastrophe, but at the moment I'm not aware of anyone who is there. (Even the gulf between suborbital missiles and true orbit is fairly large.) And it would have to be a _truly_ rogue actor, not merely one sponsored by a superpower who does have an interest in the orbital space staying useful, e.g., North Korea and their complicated relationship with China, so not a puppet of the US, China, Russia, the EU, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if there's a bit of a land grab going on right now to claim as much LEO and geosync spots as possible before they dry up and become too crowded to operate in safely. Maybe a secondary market of orbital slots will open up where current operators sell their huge chunks to new entrants. Just like good old ipv4.

<comment><USER10> There's not really a land grab, and you better be sure to have propulsion on board in the coming years, as youll most likely have to evade other defunct satellites.

The ISS is actually in a bad position, as satellites tend to go to earth, and the ISS is between earth and most LEO sats (400km vs 600-800km).

<comment><USER11> The ISS is in a great position, because it's in an altitude with such high drag that small objects and uncontrolled fragments deorbit very quickly. Even the ISS loses 50 - 90 m of altitude a day.

Satellites passing through the ISS's orbit do not tend to spend that many orbits there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is something I've wondered about when people start talking about capturing asteroids in Earth orbit and mining them. Mining is typically a dirty activity and most asteroids are more like a loose collection of gravel to begin with, and have such pitiful escape velocity that keeping them together is going to be a significant challenge. One high energy impact from an errant asteroid could make a tremendous mess in whatever orbit they are using, and to the extent that orbital mining makes sense at all it almost has to happen in LEO if you want to use the products on Earth or benefit from labor/equipment being launched from Earth.

<comment><USER13> You could plausibly get a nearby asteroid into a wide orbit of the Earth for 500 m/s of delta v. But getting it from there all the way down to LEO would take 3 km/s. So I expect most asteroid mining would take place fairly far out as a practical matter since the products of mining would be lighter and easier to move. The main downside would be days of travel time to and from the mining site. And there is a market for the products of asteroid mining in GEO in the form of commsats who might want to be refueled or someday maybe even have some parts make from asteroid stuff.

<comment><USER12> Refueling GEOs will probably never be profitable. They already last for 15+ years and are replaced by much improved satellites when they are retired. Keeping an old one running isn't worth it because the orbital slots they are in are too expensive.

IMHO, asteroid mining only makes sense if you are also manufacturing things in orbit (like spaceships and orbital colonies). All of these plans to deorbit the mined materials are crazy talk IMHO. Even if you find some amazing near solid platinum asteroid nearly in orbit already the costs of mining it and bringing the material back to Earth make it extremely difficult to compete against terrestrial mining.

If you are actually manufacturing stuff, then you are much more free to choose your orbit. You can even choose to orbit the moon instead to reduce the possibility of disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So if North Korea launches one of their ICBMs into LEO with a billion metal pellets, would it be the end of the space age?

<comment><USER15> It takes more rocket to launch into LEO than it does to get a ballistic trajectory to your nearest enemy. Your average ICBM doesn't have the oomph to do it. If it did, then it could target any point on the planet, and we are fairly sure the North Korea ICBMs can't do that. Yet.

Also, once you have got your pellets into LEO, you need a way to spread them with a variety of relative velocity. A satellite-satellite collision or a rocket explosion does this very well - the models give the individual fragments 1km/s relative outward velocity from the incident, so you basically need to make a nail bomb. Some of the fragments will be blown in the backwards direction, and may re-enter the atmosphere on the first orbit. Interestingly, because reasons, fragments that are blown upwards and downwards may also re- enter on the first orbit too.

<comment><USER3> Launch retrograde (in the direction opposite to the spin of the Earth) with low inclination, and spread the pellets around just a little; should be enough to deny everyone their typical launch trajectories and would also remove the need to shoot those pellets very hard - everything else will be running into them at 2x the orbital speed.

<comment><USER15> Launching retrograde means you have to make your rocket bigger. And once you are travelling at orbital velocities, a glancing blow is quite enough to cause catastrophic damage anyway.

<comment><USER3> A bigger rocket or a smaller payload, yes. Higher-energy collisions should produce more and higher-energy shrapnel, through, leading to even less predictable mess. Also, Inescapable Hypervelocity Shredder™ has a nice ring to it, and it would be giant "fuck you" to the rest of the world; precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West.

<comment><USER16> > precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West.

That assume the leadership is actually crazy and hating the west, though, rather than a mix of in a bind because their own propaganda has made a lot of their population expect a hard line against the west, and genuinely believing they are facing a threat.

To dig into history, Reagan by most reports reacted to the indications of the Soviet fear over Able Archer 83 [1] (where the Soviets may have come dangerously close to thinking the NATO exercise was a smoke screen for an intended first strike) with shock that they might have actually seen America that way. He later wrote in his autobiography (copied from Wikipedia):

> "Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many > people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America > and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During > my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took > it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable > that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the > more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew > them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not > only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear > weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even > more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince > him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear > from us."

In other words: if your opponents seems to act irrational, it's worth considering that maybe it is because you don't understand their world view. If someone is threatening to nuke you left right and center, is it more likely they are crazy, or that their starting worldview has led them to a conclusion that they are under such dire threat that they have no other choice than to play up their capabilities as deterrence?

It is worth considering because the avenues to defend against a madman vs. a scared but mostly rational person are potentially very different. E.g. the latter is more likely to respond well to attempts at giving them reasons to feel safer.

(and as much as I dislike a lot of Reagans legacy, the above realisation was a large part of him changing tack on foreign policy towards actually talking to the Soviet leadership, and it made a huge difference, and he deserved praise for doing so instead of just blindly continuing to push the same aggressive line he started out with)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How long would it take for orbit decay to bring these objects back into the atmosphere?

<comment><USER18> That's one of the key factors. It depends on the how high the orbit of the satellite is. For ones in LEO

\- below 350 km, months

\- 400km a year

\- 500km five years

\- 600km ten years

\- 700km twenty five years

Etc.

However, when a satellite breaks up, the small pieces are much more affected by drag. Another is effect is that an explosion results in approximately 50% of the pieces having a lower orbit. So even though the Cosmos-Irdium collision happened at 700km, which would take about twenty five years to deorbit, in just five years, more than a quarter of the debris had deorbited.

<comment><USER19> When you put it like that, it doesn't sound as bad as, say, nuclear winter. 25-50 years of high debris, then slowly reducing remains. It's weird to imagine that if humanity would die out suddenly, our satellites and orbital space waste would only stay up there for what, 100 - 200 years more?

<comment><USER18> You are right - it's not apocalyptic.

Particularly, since satellites in general are getting much lighter than they used to be (faster decay times, less mass in case of a collision, smaller target), as well as targeting lower orbits than we used to (most go to 400km-500km now).

Also, even in the event of everything in LEO blowing up, we can still launch to farther orbits / other planets.

<comment><USER3> > _Also, even in the event of everything in LEO blowing up, we can still > launch to farther orbits / other planets._

It'd be risky though, since you have to cross LEO to get there (unless you're willing to pay the extra cost of launching to absurd inclinations and correcting in space).

<comment><USER12> It would take an unbelievably catastrophic Kessler syndrome to make it too dangerous to boost through LEO. It's not a game of Asteroids, we're talking about collisions on a yearly or possibly monthly timeframe. Bad enough to ruin LEO for satellites, but not so bad that it blocks you from space entirely.

<comment><USER3> I still think a _believably_ catastrophic Kessler syndrome would be risky enough that NASA and others would refrain from sending _manned_ missions through LEO at low inclinations.

It's not a game of Asteroids, but it's also not as thin as the asteroid belt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How long can something stay in low earth orbit without propulsion?

</comment><comment><USER21> Needs a (2014) tag.</comment>


Could we have an option to have a link to our prototype alongside our names? This would encourage continued contributions to YC Startup News. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> You can just put a url in the about field. Many do this already.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not as direct. Also, visitors of the site may not know that clicking on a name might lead to a prototype link.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would also be good to include name and prototype links in the rss feed. Some angels/VCs may not even visit the site at all but simply use the rss feed as a source of startup news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure this is up to YC. I doubt they want to go to everyone they're trying to fund and ask permission for this nor do they want to deal with potential investees feeling like their trust has been breached.

Furthermore it's probably in YC and their founder's interest that people not know what they are working on until they feel ready to disclose it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's completely optional. You would have to explicitly ask for it. This is intended for founders who are not getting any funding from YC.

<comment><USER3> I read it more as a request to YC instead of the founders themselves. I guess the later's not a problem if people feel like disclosing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've changed the title to make this more clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey a good way to promote your startup is post it on <http://demomyapp.com>

Thats why we built it!

<comment><AUTHOR> One problem with demomyapp is that it uses youtube, which does not allow high resolution videos.

It would be better to use flash for demos.

<comment><USER4> cool - we'll add higher resolution demo support later down the line. I don't know if google video might be more appropriate, be interested in your thoughts...

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you looked at this tool?

<http://www.debugmode.com/wink/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Vote: -1. It would just clutter the normal display. I'm not interested in your web site unless I'm interested in you based on your comments in which case I'm more than happy to click on your username to find out more about you. Next it'll be avatars. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if this is a great idea. I'd rather spend time working on my code than scouring the web looking for stuff to post.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a way to promote your startup so that you can get users and/or find cofounders.

And perhaps more angels/VCs would check out your startup as well.

<comment><USER6> That part is good, yes. What I'm worried about is the time and effort it would take to get onto the leader board. There is already a profile linked to every username where people can list their startup urls, blogs, or contact info.

An adjustment to your idea that I'd feel more comfortable about would be having an url field next to your name in comments/submissions. So your comment would look like: 1 point by amichail (mystartup) 3 minutes ago

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not do both?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way the Netflix Prize does <http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard>

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be clear that there's a direct link to the startup prototype.

For example:

username, prototype link, brief prototype description

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good idea. A definite benefit for the guys taking time to add value to the site.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like that. It will also build that all important pagerank

</comment><comment><USER10> Just use the about field.

</comment><comment><USER11> seconded</comment>