Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90219582/this-company-hired-anyone-who-applied-now-its-starting-a-movement <comment><USER2> The key is the onboarding program. Bakeries are nice, they have a range of jobs that go from very simple (sweeping up and cleaning) to very complex (scheduling different products for baking). If you have that range you can absorb a lot of different people.

That said, if you recall the story we had here a while back [1] about how janitors used to work for the company and now they work for a contracting firm, this is very relevant. There _are_ a lot of jobs at even a high tech company like Google or Apple that could be filled by someone with a high school degree and nominal fine motor skills, but those jobs are currently firewalled behind a general contracting company. That perversely misaligns the end employees motivations and the company motivations.

It was interesting to me to see the remnants of a system like this at IBM which had 10 "bands" of employment level, where band 1 was janitor level, and band 10 was principle engineer/senior manager type level. But it seemed like these days they only used bands 6 - 10 because that was where 'entry level engineer' started (band 6). Many if not all of the jobs in the lower bands were outsourced as far as I could tell. And a lot eliminated when they sold off factories or other parts of the business that had a lot of technician level labor.

I will be interesting to see if we could get back to a more reasonable way of managing these things.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand- risi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising- inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html)

<comment><USER3> A significant potion of this is an end run around immigration law. Cleaning companies need to compete with companies willing to employ illegal immigrants for very low wages which drives down the costs below what companies like IBM would pay people.

Change some of these loopholes and the outsourcing overhead becomes far more significant. Though employing large numbers of part time workers works better at scale so the practice has some advantages.

<comment><USER2> I have heard variants on this as well but haven't seen any actual data or research that supports this notion. If you come across any I'd be interested in reading that.

There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. Having worked with IBM's legal department I'm pretty sure they run audits on any company they employ to insure they comply will all laws (they are _really_ fussy about that stuff). In the New York Times article the Apple contract janitors weren't illegals either just under paid.

Now the 'gig' economy? Sure. People who hire day laborers from the parking lot of the home improvement store? No question. But running a contracting business? I've not seen anything that backs up that assertion, and certainly nothing that is 'significant.'

<comment><USER4> Well, in some states it is illegal to ask a potential employee about their citizenship status.

There are definitely industries in which hiring (suspected, but very likely) illegal immigrants is standard practice.

<comment><USER2> In _all US states_ you are required to fill out an I-9 form if you are hired. That form requires that you "prove" to your employer that you have a legal right to work in the United States and you are required to provide a valid Social Security number or Tax ID number.

If you fail to do that, you violate the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which was passed in 1986 and subjects the business to fines, penalties, potentially the loss of business licenses and prosecution under the RICO act.

<comment><USER4> And it's not uncommon (in certain states, in certain industries) for forged identities to be used. As I understand it, so long as the SSN is "valid" and goes with the name provided, employers don't (and possibly can't, legally speaking) go beyond that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it work you'd need:

1\. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2\. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out.

I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.

<comment><USER6> You forgot #3: A company with a lot of cash, and a lot of time to waste.

I really don't think this can work. Whenever we post for a position, I get flooded with a bunch of garbage resumes from people who barely have an idea what programming is. We have work to do, and deadlines. We literally can't afford to turn ourselves into a technical training school.

<comment><USER7> The idea here seems like it would be best suited to a working environment that has a deep pipeline, from unskilled to semi-skilled to skilled or specialized workers. People can be hired unconditionally to the unskilled pool, from which they can move up to the higher tiers either through training (either internally or externally) or through natural ability.

A bakery, like in this example, seems like it could pull this off, since janitorial work at a bakery is straightforward but unlikely something you'd want to subcontract, and presents a natural place to interact with other workers in more specialized positions, through management or through learning more.

In software this is more difficult, because there's no longer a pipeline for things like data entry, assembly, or basic IT support (traditional inroads), especially at a smaller company, much less janitorial or food prep work that presents an opportunity to advance.

I think the hidden cost here, though, is that progression from one stage to another starts to resemble interviewing at a new company, with all the same biases and problems that result from hiring processes in general, with the possible exception that there's more direct information on personality and work ethic that can feed into the pipeline (for better or worse).

<comment> le-mark A lot of companies used to actually do this. Let the mail room or call center people apply for the cobol training program and become developers. It's unheard of today for obvious reasons (a lot more demand for high skilled jobs makes it easy to get training and leave).

<comment><USER8> > Let the mail room or call center people apply for the cobol training program > and become developers.

That is _exactly_ my story ('85 or thereabouts), with the added caveat that I didn't learn anything from the Cobol training program. The bank where I worked did not even have a way for mailroom people to get into IT, it was mostly because they got sick of my continued applications to IT jobs for which they though I wasn't qualified that I got the chance to do the course (with the qualifier that if I didn't succeed they never wanted to see me again).

So, I passed (and was the quickest person to complete the course) and ended up making a very rapid career in the IT department and after that started my own company.

Some observations:

\- the entry level IT job paid four times as much as what the mail room job did

\- work went from 5:30 am to 2 pm to 9'ish to 4'ish (ish because nobody ever checked who appeared when and when they left again whereas in the mailroom attendance was very strictly policed)

\- in the mailroom you felt part of critical infrastructure, in IT there was zero pressure to perform

\- bringing the mailroom attitude ('let's get some work done') to the IT department was not appreciated by the rest of the department

\- the mailroom had zero office politics, if you stepped out of line you would get chewed out and that would be that, by comparison the IT department was a huge web of intrigue, and quite a few of the people there were downright mean and backstabbing each other all the time

\- the mailroom was all guys, the IT department had exactly two women programmers on a total crew of about 120, the only other woman was a secretary to the head of IT

\- There were a few talented people there but on the whole the talent level was rather low, but they were big on process and that really helped to get stuff out the door

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter > People who are given a job start off as apprentices, during which they go > through a 10-month job training and life-skills course. Around half the > people who begin an apprenticeship choose to complete it and stay at > Greyston, and when they do, they're then assigned an entry-level job–working > the mixing machines or overseeing the slicing and packaging of different- > sized brownies for distribution.

They pay minimum wage to the apprentices. I can see how a system like that would work. Just being able to show up and do the bare minimum to pass the apprenticeship period is more than an awful lot of low skill workers are capable of, whether due to life circumstances, low conscientiousness or other characteristics that make keeping a job difficult. The population of job seekers for badly paid, low skill jobs is full of the unemployable.

[https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/who-wants-the- job/](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/who-wants-the-job/)

<comment><USER9> Who is TheZvi and why should we care about what he's talking about? Especially when the about page is still the default WP about page...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a felon myself working in tech, I find this attitude refreshing. It could work in IT...but would require significant changes to how things currently work. I can't say for sure whether it would be worth it to restructure entire organizations to benefit the disenfranchised, but my instincts are telling me that it would add a reddish hue to the bottom line and thus is unlikely to be adopted.

I do think that this sort of attitude could add value and blacken the bottom line if applied to many other types of industries (eg. construction, manufacturing, machining, food service and much more).

<comment><USER11> I suspect with IT you run into a general trust issue, since IT often operates in an information-privileged environment.

I would love to see better tools and technical infrastructure for requiring authorization to touch sensitive data, so that people in companies can operate with access to "the information you need but no more." Something like that would both protect customer privacy and de-risk hiring at the entry levels.

It would most definitely make getting access to data tougher for lots of people, but as engineers who are often handling customer data, I think it's a generally more responsible (ethics-wise) approach.

<comment><USER10> > so that people in companies can operate with access to "the information you > need but no more."

I think SELinux addresses this problem pretty well, but there is no real requirement to give access to developers for a production database when a development database could be setup with test data. I'm not arguing that this is a great idea for IT, but trust has been an issue from the beginning and there are more than a couple of solutions with varying degrees of quality.

<comment><USER11> > there are more than a couple of solutions with varying degrees of quality

I think you raise a good point. If I were to phrase my wish better, I think it comes down to your implication that "varying degrees of quality" means some solutions do the job better (like SELinux) and some that do it worse. The more work it takes, the more you end up with startups where everyone has the passwords to the production database because it's just easier operationally. But when you do that, then you start to get into institutionalized risks like Uber employees stalking exes. I'm well aware that this is a case of engineering a solution to cover the 0.01% case, but when it comes to sensitive data, you're usually guarding against a tiny number of bad actors who could do a lot of damage.

As an example, let's say you want certain developers to have access to non- sensitive parts of a Postgres database, and you want to be able to temporarily authorize developers with worthy exceptions to touch sensitive data, and you want to leave an audit trail. Let's say you're doing it this way because of HIPAA. It's currently a pain to do, and you'll have to write a bunch of automation to make it work. Now let's say you also have some S3 stores or ETL pipelines using Kinesis, and you have potentially sensitive data in there too. In the ideal case, you could manage the roles and groups and elevations in a more central place, federate those identities over to the Postgres cluster, SSH permissions, etc. That way data and privacy controls could actually be lightweight, which I think would be an overall win for the industry.

<comment><USER10> I understand your argument and have heard it first-hand, but from my standpoint (a felon working in IT) I usually push for a workable and sensible security posture because I do not want any more access than I need.

A non-felon might not share my (perhaps) paranoid view, but I have a family now and need to pointedly avoid any possible controversy or scandal especially related to security and access. To that end, I feel the need to push for sensible and workable solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If pay started at $10 per hour and you had an incredible amount of staff to find actually talented people, this is maybe a bad idea. If you thought you'd "disrupt" hiring at your small company this could be a solid company-ending idea...

</comment><comment><USER13> A choice quote from the article:

> People who are given a job start off as apprentices, during which they go > through a 10-month job training and life-skills course.

I found the part about life-skills pretty interesting. I have long thought that occupations keep specializing and populations keep growing the way the have, that some people will no doubt miss out learning about things that others may take for granted / learn from their own life experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> The companies who hire illegal immigrants do essentially the same thing. No background check (how could they) or drug test. They just shuffle people in, pay them minimum wage, and they if they mess up or quit showing up they just find some more people off the street. Just bodies to do low-skill, low-paying work.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can we not replicate click-bait headlines on HN?

<comment> pure-awesome Is it really click-bait, though? The title seems to pretty accurately describe the contents of the article.

<comment><USER16> The title should tell us which company did what in order to know if we are interested or not.

<comment><USER17> If they don't mention a name in the title it's probably not someone big.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stitch Fix has grown at a steady but not outrageous rate - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-20/stitch-fix-ipo-the-anti-uber-silicon-valley-startup <comment><USER2> I used to use Trunk Club, which was founded two years before Stitch Fix.

I had a really, really good experience with it. When I first signed up, one of their stylists called me for a "style interview" in which she asked follow-up questions to my answers on the sign up form. She also had me send her pictures of major pieces of clothing (shoes, jackets, etc.) that I already owned so that she would know to send matching stuff. It was great - I did two "trunks" with them, and kept everything (probably $1000 worth of clothing and accessories), and still wear each piece five years later.

In comparison, Stitch Fix never called me before sending me stuff. As a result, I kept only one item out of five they sent in the initial shipment, and it has been two weeks and I still haven't really worn it. Overall it feels like a shitty version of TC, and I can't say I'm impressed. I'm going to wait for the next "fix" or whatever they call them and probably cancel afterward if it is similarly bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife used it for a year and absolutely loved it, but after a year, she had enough clothes to the point where she didn't need to buy any more. That's when she stopped using it, pretty similar to what they discovered themselves.

<comment><USER4> This happened with my wife as well. She plans to start it back up again in the future, but exactly when is hard to predict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had no idea stitch fix was doing so well financially, but I guess I'm not too surprised. I love their service (tho be ready to drop some $$).

<comment><USER5> Does having to send items back bother you? I'm surprised by the popularity of these services. I always assumed people wouldn't want to go through the hassles of going to the post offices to return stuffs every time they order.

<comment><USER6> I've only sent items back a couple of times (been using it over a year now).

They seem to be really, really smart (devious?!) with the pricing for the individual pieces. If you don't keep all 5 items, they charge you a $25 "stylist fee". The price difference is then not all that large in many cases to keep all 5 items, vs sending a couple back.

I'm sure they tune their algorithms so that items more likely to be kept are the pricier items, and items that you are most likely to send back are the cheaper ones. Or maybe they even vary the prices per customer, based on feedback and prior history, to increase the odds of a "full purchase". If they don't, they should.

Either way though, it saves me hours of shopping at malls or other stores, and usually does reasonably well with the styles and pricing. I like the service overall.</comment></comment></comment>


Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER3> Fairly simple, assuming that a person does not already have specific health problems:

Don't eat processed foods. Eat (very) slowly and enjoy your food.

Get fresh air and exercise. For most people, walking for 20 to 30 minutes a day is probably enough.

Set aside a few times during the day to relax. Possible activities: hike, meditation, hammock time, etc.

<comment><USER4> about processed foods: what is that? does processing begin with soil treatment? with how we cultivate plants? treat animals? isnt that also part of the process? i think we could design great processes for even greater processed foods, but our current food processing processes suck, since they are optimised for fast profit and nothing else. so i agree to better avoid it. even genetic technology could be used for great benefit, but its currently used mostly for short term cash and farmer enslavement. in general food production and processing need to be a lot more localised and be freed of any market pressure, like tap water is.

<comment><USER5> The problem with processed foods is allegedly high energy density combined with low satiety. So generally anything that involves a refining process. In other words it isn't about processed foods but refined foods.

Sugar, extracts, refined flour, that sort of thing.

<comment><USER6> Also a lot of bad stuff can be put in when food is refined.

Just take Mashed Potatoes. Should be simple - just potatoes. Ingredients of Betty Crocker Potato Buds "Potatoes _, Mono And Diglycerides (To Improve Texture), Freshness Protected By Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Sodium Bisulfite And Citric Acid._ Dried."

Another example, Edy's Slow Churned Light French Silk Ice cream has "Non-Fat Milk, Sugar, Cream, Chocolaty Chips (Sugar, Coconut Oil, Cocoa Processed With Alkali [Dutched Cocoa], Fractionated Palm Kernel Oil, Cocoa, Soy Lecithin, Salt, Natural Flavor), Corn Syrup, Cocoa Processed With Alkali (Dutched Cocoa), Whey Protein, Molasses, Buttermilk Powder, Soy Protein, Acacia Gum, Nonfat Dry Milk, Guar Gum, Carrageenan, Carob Bean Gum, Natural Flavor, Salt, Natural Flavors (Including Malt Extract), Xantham Gum, Caramel Color." Who knows what all those are?

Where possible I make my own food from scratch. (Within reason - I don't milk my own cows, or spend hours making custom bread or pasta)

<comment><USER5> "I can't pronounce these ingredients" doesn't mean they are bad for you. "Cocoa Processed With Alkali" is, as the list notes, a technical name for "Dutched Chocolate". Carrageenan is from seaweed. Guar gum is a ground bean. And so forth.

<comment><USER6> Sure. In any given case, they may or may not be bad for you. But in accepting processed foods over home grown, you are taking on faith that the provider shares your values. (Would they add more sugar and salt than you would to improve taste? Would they put in additives you wouldn't, and hide them under funny names?)

I'm not an off-the-reservation eat everything raw person, but I am skeptical that most managers would make food less addictive to make it healthier. There are exceptions, but this is one of the negative aspects of a market economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This quote is the part you should take away with you, I think. It's great advice. The rest of the article consists of largely the standard anecdotes on how long it takes the scientific community to really do a decent job of evaluating complex proposals in complex systems, and how that timing interacts poorly with the entirely admirable urge to get something done by deploying applications of scientific findings that might do some good in the world:

"So how should we respond the next time we're asked to believe that an association implies a cause and effect, that some medication or some facet of our diet or lifestyle is either killing us or making us healthier? We can fall back on several guiding principles, these skeptical epidemiologists say. One is to assume that the first report of an association is incorrect or meaningless, no matter how big that association might be. After all, it's the first claim in any scientific endeavor that is most likely to be wrong. Only after that report is made public will the authors have the opportunity to be informed by their peers of all the many ways that they might have simply misinterpreted what they saw. The regrettable reality, of course, is that it's this first report that is most newsworthy. So be skeptical.

"If the association appears consistently in study after study, population after population, but is small — in the range of tens of percent — then doubt it. For the individual, such small associations, even if real, will have only minor effects or no effect on overall health or risk of disease. They can have enormous public-health implications, but they're also small enough to be treated with suspicion until a clinical trial demonstrates their validity."

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

From something I wrote a while back:

"The scientific method is the greatest of inventions: when used to organize and analyze the flawed output of we flawed humans, it leads to truth and discovery. It is how we sift the gems of progress from the rubble of short- sighted human nature, magical thinking, willful ignorance, and other self- sabotaging but entirely natural behaviors.

"The scientific community doesn't produce an output of nice, neat tablets of truth, pronouncements come down from the mountain, however. It produces theories that are then backed by varying weights of evidence: a theory with a lot of support stands until deposed by new results. But it's not that neat in practice either. The array of theories presently in the making is a vastly complex and shifting edifice of debate, contradictory research results, and opinion. You might compare the output of the scientific community in this sense with the output of a financial market: a staggeringly varied torrent of data that is confusing and overwhelming to the layperson, but which - <USER2> considered in aggregate - more clearly shows the way to someone who has learned to read the ticker tape.

"So how do you read the output of the research community for a particular topic of interest? Firstly you have to recognize that the output of any single researcher is meaningless when considered in isolation. At least a good half of the results produced by scientists are in some way flawed. That is par for the course when working at the cutting edge of new knowledge, and no slur upon the hard work of those involved - they know the odds. The high failure rate of risky ventures like scientific research is why we need the scientific method to weed out those failed results as time progresses and new results emerge. So when you read up on a topic of current research, you need to read around the subject: dig in to various sources, find the work of multiple scientific groups, and assess the support for different theories and interpretations."

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

In terms of evidence for greater health nothing comes close to the twin mountains of data in support of calorie restriction and regular moderate exercise. If you are doing other things in the hopes of health without covering those two line items, then you really have to accept that you're not taking the best, most proven path.

Well, actually that's a complete lie. There is one thing that exceeds both of those items, and that is progress in medical science towards better treatments. The faster that goes the better off you are - so you should also put in time and energy to helping that happen. As you get older the calorie restriction and exercise fade as determinants of health in comparison to the present state of medical technology, and thus it becomes ever more important that you helped back in the day, giving your contribution a chance to snowball in effect.

</comment><comment><USER8> Our way of life determines it.

I grew up in an Island in Greece, far away from polution and no way near fast food. I was eating things coming straight from the nature. Even when I needed meat it would be slaughtered the same day...

I moved to a big city. I can see how my fitness has changed a bit with the heavier breathing and the different hours plus the way that the eye cannot see beyond a certain block. Although I haven't adopted fast food life I can say that the things I prementioned have changed my fitness and peace of mind as well.

I wouldn't like my kids to grow up here.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been on a Ketogenic diet for 3 months now, lost almost 24 lbs. It's by far the best lifehack I've ever heard of.

<comment><USER10> I downvoted you because keto really has nothing to do with this article besides the association with its author, and tends to be an inflammatory topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A thorough debunking of Gary Taubes

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/gf8zy/a_thorough_de...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/gf8zy/a_thorough_debunking_of_gary_taubes/)

<comment><USER12> I think you mean a debunking of Taubes's insulin theory, which I've been convinced for a few years now is rubbish.

However, the posted article doesn't mention the words insulin or "carb" at all and it's a pretty interesting article about epidemiology. Taubes's _GCBC_ ended with some ridiculous speculations about carbohydrates, but there was some solid stuff in there about the history of nutritional science and how we ended up demonizing dietary fat.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about media on Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> Hello Hackers,
While the whole world is taking necessary precautions against SARS-CoV-2, we think the media is not doing his part.They are still trying to sell us with fear and nonsense approaches.
So, we have a Startup which is basically a platform where you can follow collection of links for learning a subject. I have created a list of Covid-19 resources just for that. Because media was either telling it is a dooms day or it's just a generic type of flu. I believe, it's neither of those. I hate media in those days.(There are some great mass media articles, I know. I mean overall
What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts on this. <comment><USER2> Questions the media is too busy to ask: \- What is the root cause of the cdc's failed test? Follow the money. \- What is the industrial capacity for ventilators in weeks and months? Anyone doing the math? \- How many beds are there in the bay area? How many are occupied? \- Has every hospitalized patient been tested? Various media claims about hospital counts and county numbers do not match up (One Kaiser SJ hosp. says half of 242 beds are filled with c19, county reports only 158 hospitalizations today) \- How many outpatients were given a "yep, you probably have it, but we're not testing and sending you home until you get worse" - are they suppressing the count, dont want to waste a test, or not even bothering?

</comment><comment><USER3> Given that the experts are still figuring it out (and the ChiComs tried to cover it up at first...) I think the media has done about as well as it could.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, someone just shared an article about this check out the original post, I liked the idea behind. They are doing bad generalisation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22697916)

I don't wanna go into ChiComs thing but I have a question about why the f*ck you have a regulation which allows you to hunt down wild animals and sell them on the bazaar? Yeah I know the famine history, but WTF it's 2020</comment></comment>


Ruby Lazy Enumerators - <AUTHOR> https://blog.saeloun.com/2019/10/23/ruby-lazy-enumerators.html <comment><USER2> A bit of a tangent: Ruby remains the most _pleasant_ programming language I've ever used, and I've come to the conclusion that it's in no small part due to blocks (and to a lesser extent due to the ease of metaprogramming, which ironically is also my biggest headache concerning Ruby).

<comment><USER3> Having to work on Puppet custom facts and functions I don't ever really feel like I've got a good understanding of what's going on under the covers with Ruby's meta-programming. And having blocks being a distinctly different thing from lambdas (and seemingly different from every other data type in the language) just makes it more confusing. Plus having blocks being passed as something that's not really a parameter(?) is just an extra complexity that wasn't really needed.

Ruby was the first non-PHP programming language I learned, and I used to love writing scripts in it, that I now write in Python instead, but the complexities outlined above kept me from ever wanting to write any complicated/large projects in it.

<comment><USER4> Recommend the now out-of-print book _Metaprogramming Ruby_ to grant insight into the hows and whys of metaprogramming. Also serves as a decent intro to Ruby for intermediate coders. Criminal that you have to buy it on the secondary market now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good to know: the lazy block is executed in a fiber, and fibers don't share Thread.current.

It took me hours to debug why Rails I18n.locale was not honored inside the block.

<comment> why-el Can you elaborate? What were you doing to the locale? Changing it?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps gp means that the i18n data was initialized as thread-local, so it was missing in other threads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The equivalent of these is one of the things I was most happy about when I was working on GNU Smalltalk (I first added them to version 3.1 in 2008). Smalltalk already had iterators (which you created from collections with "readStream" and turned back into an array with "contents"), but no ability to filter, map or fold them. It is really, really useful.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. Does anybody know when this was added? I tried looking in the ruby doc but didn't see. That is one nice thing about javadocs in comparison. They usually say "since 1.6" or whatever.

<comment><USER9> Lazy enumerators were added in Ruby 2.0 back in 2013: [https://www.ruby- lang.org/en/news/2013/02/24/ruby-2-0-0-p0-i...](https://www.ruby- lang.org/en/news/2013/02/24/ruby-2-0-0-p0-is-released/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks. I have not had occasion to use them so was curious if they were a newer or just less known feature.

<comment><USER10> I've used them quite a bit since they were introduced. Still, the plural of anecdote isn't data, so I couldn't tell you how widespread their usage is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Make Me Write HTML - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7293 <comment><USER3> Oh please. The time you spend learning HAML or Markdown (and all their potential intricacies) could be better spent learning to write clean HTML. I'm sure that both of those "alternatives" have their own quirks that must be worked around, not to mention the fact that you don't know _exactly_ what HTML the parsers will spit out (yes, you can learn the output, I suppose, but why?).

I can see these tools being useful in certain circumstances, such as a way to provide HTML-esque markup somewhere where you don't want to bother cleaning up someone else's potentially malicious HTML (a wiki, a comment form, etc.). However, for building actual websites, just do it the right way.

Sure, these alternatives are nice in that you can avoid the scary HTML, but in the end it is all HTML anyway -- so why not learn it from the start and produce better code than what a parser will spit out based on your abstraction?

<comment><USER4> I would agree with you if you were talking simply about Markdown, but it seems you don't understand the point of HAML. Markdown is a complex syntax that loosely translates to half of HTML. It's good for user-input, because it's designed to be written like users already write stylistic formatting when the result will be plain ASCII, but it's not HTML.

HAML _is_ HTML—it's a one-to-one conversion—but it's simpler and more concise to write. It's what HTML _should_ be: no closing brackets, no line noise, and simple syntax to access DOM-relevant attributes (class and id). If I had the option of immediately converting all HTML worldwide into HAML, and all HTML parsers into HAML parsers, I'd sign up in a second.

Also, I don't _need_ to see the raw HTML any more, because that's not the point: it's like looking at machine language instead of assembler. They're equivalent, so why read it the painful way? When debugging a page layout in HTML, I actually find it more useful to convert it _into_ HAML first.

<comment><USER5> Having had to use and debug HAML before, I absolutely hate it. I would argue that it is more difficult to read HAML and leads to buggier code. Missing what amounts to two spaces can break your layout without you realizing it until much later.

This is especially true if you use a CSS framework where you have lots of nested elements with several classes each.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't make me click past an advertisement. I mean, what the hell? Since when did super-obtrusive advertising _not_ alienate people?

(It doesn't show up all the time, so you may not have seen it.)

<comment><USER7> I didn't see it the second time I clicked the link so I don't think it's something the linker can control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The closing tags of HTML and XML are a nuisance. In SGML (their common predecessor), named closing tags were optional (you used </>), but were deliberately made mandatory in HTML and XML, to improve readability of long documents. It was contentious at the time, and it still is. But we must at least accept the data points that both HTML and XML have been _phenomenally successful_ , without knowing for sure whether this particular feature was for or against.

One thing about dumb, regular, symmetrical formats is that their redundancy makes them less scary and easier to understand. Perhaps, this is accessibility is crucial for adoption.

 _EDIT_ I guess indentation enables you to match up start/end tags even better than named close tags... and it's certainly become more familiar to developers since Python's success. But maybe not so good when you have many levels of indentation, and terrible if you want to insert/delete a nested element, because the indentation of the elements within it must also be changed.

<comment><USER9> I think you'd be surprised at just what you're allowed to omit in HTML. For example, the following document is valid HTML 4.01 Strict:

      <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
      <title></title>
      <p>

The 'html', 'head' and 'body' elements -- opening and closing -- are inferred at the correct points by a compliant parser, as is the closing of the lone 'p' element.

Once upon a time on my personal blog, I used minimal HTML 4.01 Strict (omitting tags and other bits of syntax whenever and wherever possible -- I had a Markdown fork that knew how to do this within the constraints of the spec); my one concession was a longer DOCTYPE declaration to deal with anything that didn't know how to resolve the public identifier. Browsers actually handled it just fine, but some other systems (in particular, OpenID autodiscovery) failed, because they weren't actually doing HTML parsing.

<comment><USER8> You're right, I'd forgotten about omitting the closing </p>, but I think that's the only one (omitting a whole element - both open and close - <USER2> something different).

Of course, in practice, most HTML parsers will do a wonderful job of interpreting malformed HTML.

<comment><USER10> It's not the only one. You can omit closing tags for td, tr, th, li, and probably others I don't remember. I actually do this; it doesn't make the resulting document any less clear for humans, and so if I'm typing it myself, there's little point in inserting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've spent so much time dealing with needlessly complex, over-engineered web applications who's primary architectural goal was to allow the primary developer to never code HTML that this article makes me sick.

An HTML form is the simplest representation of a form's presentation you're going to get. Suck it up, use HTML templates.

</comment><comment><USER12> I agreed completely with the first comment:

 _Please don't make me write in any of these simplified markup languages, either. And, really please, don't ask me to embed code in the language, or one of these languages in code._

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not a big fan of using markdown for creating HTML, but using a CSS compiler has definitely been helpful for me in writing CSS. Nested styles makes your code much more maintainable, and makes inheritance easier. Plus, variables and basic arithmetic operations are nice.

CleverCSS is a CSS compiler pretty similar to Sass, which I tend to prefer for the simple reason that Sass requires my indents to be two spaces, and it doesn't matter in CleverCSS. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, and there are a couple of annoying bugs in the official release. I submitted patches but to no avail, so I'm hosting the patched code here: <http://django-css.googlecode.com/files/CleverCSS-0.1.2.zip>

I was so pumped on CSS compilers that I wrote this so you can use them in your Django projects: <http://django-css.googlecode.com>

</comment><comment><USER14> Lately, I've been using Pandoc (<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>) which is a better markdown than markdown (uses a parser rather than regexes). It also knows how to convert between lots of different markups it can read LaTeX, HTML, reStructuredText and markdown. It can write that and many more. I use it to convert LaTeX into S5 presentations and HTML; very nice for giving talks.

</comment><comment><USER15> That is so funny: Programmers, that don't know what to do with their time, develop an api so the don't have to read documentation. Or programm a framework, or another abstraction layer on top of all the others or some meta- something to simplify the easy 80% of a job.

Sadly, creating things totaly disregarding the environment seems to have so much more sexapeal than just using what's at hand.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't feel comfortable using something like markdown until I had a firm grasp of how it works and the kind of html it writes.

And at that point, I guess I might as well write good ole html... Unless browsers _universally_ supported a new better language, I'd hate to have to think of browser nuance in two different markups...

<comment><USER17> I use Markdown when I'm writing content-heavy prose, like wiki pages or READMEs. When I need more control over the exact classes and tags, HAML is a good alternative to HTML.

In the case of Markdown prose, I don't /care/ what kind of HTML it writes. Headers, paragraphs, links, all taken care of. I write text, it gets run automatically through a parser/html generator (I use maruku), and I don't think about it. HAML is great for templates & layouts, when I care about DIVs and ids and classes, without being the wordy, ugly HTML itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this link a recursive joke?

All I got is a grey page with "Click here to skip this or wait 15 seconds.". The link does not work.

I have JavaScript disabled with NoScript FireFox extension.

Judging from the HTML code of the page it seems that the authors of linux- mag.com don't know how to use noscript or meta redirect tags.

</comment><comment><USER19> Use a WYSIWYG? I mean if you seriously can't wrap your head around HTML/CSS maybe you're in the wrong business...

</comment><comment><USER20> killerweb's comment at DZone is pretty insightful -- <http://www.dzone.com/links/dont_make_me_write_html.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess I am the lazy one - I just use an IDE web designer in design view, then switch to code view as needed. Benefits from both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER22> If it is basic listing table and the sort - Use Mac TextEdit and save as html or use the MS html editor. There are tools.

</comment><comment><USER23> why not just use an editor that has shortcuts and automatically closes tags? textmate and others "write" a lot of the html for you.</comment>


Tell HN: Join rubysec-announce for ruby security vulnerabilities notifications - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/group/rubysec-announce

<comment><AUTHOR> Also see related projects:

\- <https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db>

\- <https://github.com/postmodern/bundler-audit></comment>


Looks Like "Google +1″ Was Just Accidentally Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/07/google-plus-one-pic/

<comment><USER2> Huh?

What exactly are we looking at? A very generic-looking toolbar which might or might not be related to so-called "Google +1"?

TechCrunch looking for cheap publicity based on, well, nothing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah after looking at it for a couple minutes, trying hard to figure out what's so special about a Google News screenshot, I came to the conclusion they all must be getting exited about a "Share"-Button? This whole thing would be far less interesting without the big red CONFIDENTIAL letters.

<comment><USER4> I think what got to the author was that it looks more like an app menu, and less like a bunch of html links (compared to the current state).

I think it's cute, but I'm also easily impressed by shiny UI things.

Loop and Google+1 seem to be the current designations of their social developments.

Edit: the fonts were changed too. I hope they'll remember to keep accessibility in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I subscribe to the idea that the eventual evolution of social networks is "openness" (eg, fb will either be killed by an open 'social protocol' or or be forced to open itself).

Google's strategy shouldn't be another social network, or a closed social layer atop their current properties. They should invest heavily in the technologies that would kill fb and open them up, completely - opensocial, diaspora, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would love to see someone compete with FB to prevent it from becoming a total monopoly. Having said that, it is really difficult to believe that google can do that, based on the last few new products from google.

<comment><USER7> If Google really wants to succeed at organizing that segment of the world's information, it should write a facebook app that ties in to your (and your friends') account info.

If you could sync your information on FB and other social networking sites to Google so that it knows the relationship outright, I think they could give you much more useful information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google invents the Facebook/Twitter/etc share button, and somehow this is the #1 story?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't get the "accidentally" part. Somebody inside Google shared a screenshoot of something they should hane not...

Anyway, I don't see much of a product here.

<comment><USER10> Terrible redaction job by the editor, too... that blur might as well not be there.

<comment><USER11> When I've posted this sort of thing before, I totally erase the text that's there, put different (wrong) text there and then do a terrible job of blurring it.

Just to annoy people like yourself!

Probably a bit mean, but I like to make these things a bit more interesting.

Anyway my point is that could easily be what's happened here, you don't know it's really a bad job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the very limited information and a screenshot of a small portion of what is to be Google+1 - my opinion is that it isn't meant to be a social network in the sense of Twitter or Facebook, but more a social sharing service like Digg or Reddit - if this is the case, there could be potential from both a centralization point (they already have the links and content and ranking and everything) as well as a identity control point with knowing more about what you like and dislike based on your sharing trends.

From that perspective I think it's a pretty interesting reveal..

</comment><comment><USER13> On a slight tangent, I really love Google simply because they are a search engine. I mean how easy is it for us to start using Bing? We could do it instantaneously. Google could easily start hemorrhaging users, and every day their engineers fight their best to prevent that from happening. I just love how these smart-ass people obviously enjoy trying to tackle tough problems while creating a business that depends on happy customers (at least that's my idolized opinion of them).

Although Google wants to create a social graph of it's own, I hope they don't let it go to their heads. That is false land that they are seeking to claim.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would have expected the following google reply:

"While we don't typically comment on confidential matters, we do believe that social initiatives are important to the future of the company,"

Reference: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/google-pay-hike/>

</comment><comment><USER15> I dont really see how is this amazing or interesting...

Its just a toolbar, nothing important has been leaked, and also to me it looks like a leak with marketing purposes, to make us start hearing about the google product and wait for it with more anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope Google get +1 right.

And all I got from this article is how beautiful Google is looking these days.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand why Google would need to build a new social network when they already have orkut...

<comment><USER4> Sure, but nobody know that, nobody is actually in it and it has a weird name.

It also fails to present an immediate usefulness that would lure people.

On the other hand, most people already have a regular Google account, so if they manage to push some social integration in there which a less crappy name (ok, that's a personal opinion, but I think loop sounds much smoother), then they might get a chance to get a foothold in the segment.

Something like a cross service interface with other social networks would be of course the real launcher, but that will be a long and bloody way, as we saw in recent history.

<comment><USER18> Man, everyone keeps dumping on the name of Orkut, but nobody seems to know it's the surname of the guy who originally wrote it before Google scooped him up. So everyone who dumps on Orkut as a product name also accidentally dumps on his family name. Even if they don't mean it, that must totally suck. :(

<comment><USER19> It's actually his first name :x

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kte...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found this (if true) to be an interesting concept which I blogged about. Or you could just go through the comments sections over tech crunch.

[http://techstopmuse.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-1-unraveling...](http://techstopmuse.blogspot.com/2010/12/google-1-unraveling- mystery.html)

gist of it is, its their own way of entering the social graph/search space and their way of telling facebook to stay off their space.

<comment><USER21> Hmm. Facebook iterating into full on search (and not just product recommendations from friends, which might be possible) is a vastly more difficult task than Google finding a way to enter the social market (where they have a small foothold anyway).

I highly doubt this will be a generic button to share to your other social networks; that would be a poor product choice from their perspective.

<comment><USER20> Well I'm wondering what else it could possibly be. This was all formulated with the name kept in mind as well. Google +1. If that is correct then everything is about +1ing what you find on the web. Or this could just be an elegant hoax. But given that it is Tech crunch they are pretty much the best at grabbing leaks.

By the way, just to point out one thing, I'm not entirely sure either task, FB iterating into full on search and Google entering the social market is simpler than the other. But yes Google already has its very firm foothold in search. But then again you might not be considering that Bing could easily partner up with FB is the past trends are anything to go by. In which case Google should be doing there best to come up with something special.

And question. Why exactly would it be a poor product choice? I'm basing my thinking on the design of rockmelt, it has the share button and the friend edges which basically let you watch your twitter feeds and chat with fb friends from the browser. I hid the friend edges when demoing the software, wanted to save it for the final blow. I tell you I could have left with the share button and they would have thought it was a pretty neat idea.

That is obviously not a majority vote but it might be an indicator that the share button is cooler than we think. Although yes. With all the hype that was surrounding Google Me... This does feel like a kick in the head.

<comment><USER21> Rockmelt is a browser; it is apathetic which social site you want to use. That you are using one is a plus for them :)

For Google acting as a clearing house for social data is fine.. but even better, have your own social graph which, linked with search data is incredibly valuable to them.

Google have wanted their own social graph for a long time now - I don't think they would drop that lightly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If Paul Graham is a lisp advocate, why does he use Vi instead of Emacs? - <AUTHOR> Paul Graham about using Vi: http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html<p>Important notes: (i) I am a big fan of Paul Graham essays/work, (ii) I am still a beginner/intermediate level learning programming, (iii) I have been using Sublime as a text editor so far but I am planning to learn Vim or Emacs asap, (iv) last year I learned a little bit of Racket/Lisp while doing the SICP and I really enjoyed the language. <comment><USER2> There are aspects of a text editor that might outweigh the implementation language somewhat.

In particular, vi's model of user interaction is compelling. In normal mode, command keys take on the role of nouns and verbs in (rather terse) language for describing edits. In principle, this makes editing very fast while requiring you to learn only a short list of commands; there can be a very large number of combinations that arise from even a very small set of well- chosen commands.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because that's what he's used to. It's just a text editor.

<comment><USER4> I've used vim about 10 years and switched to Emacs, when decided to dive into a Common Lisp seriously. Because it has much better integration (thanks to the Slime and Swank).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm associated with Lisp and also use Vim.</comment>


Why I Quit Algorithmic Trading to Do Web Startups  - <AUTHOR> http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/why-i-quit-algorithmic-trading-to-do-web-startups

<comment><USER2> It's hard to underestimate the impact that working in a secretive industry has on your career and tools you can build on (points 4 and 8). Trading technology is driven by a really fantastic set of challenges. There are only a few other problem domains where you are forced to react semi-intelligently to millions of messages each second with microsecond latency. So there's some real innovation going on. But what Jason says about the closed culture is spot on.

Information only flows from one firm to another through hires. There is little open dialog between developers at different firms. For most of the last decade that I've been in the industry, the sheer scale of the technical challenges we were facing kept most of us innovating ahead of the consumer web (in terms of infrastructure tech -- don't ask us about UI). But now that the consumer web is going real-time, I expect that edge to evaporate quickly. Unless you want to play the high frequency game (and have access to the requisite large amount of capital), I would recommend a web start-up over a trading firm. Your salary will likely be lower, but you'll be happier, and may even have more upside.

\- Ben

Disclaimer: I haven't fully made the leap myself yet. But I'm doing my best to spin out a real-time web start-up from our trading firm.

<comment><USER3> I doubt consumer web is every going to reach the performance requirements faced in the financial world. Even in gaming where latency is key, sub-100ms latency isn't necessary because humans can't process data that fast.

When I was working at financial data provider where we were serving several hundred thousand users with real time equity prices we looked at the rate which human traders could follow price updates on screen and throttled displayed prices to that speed. I imagine any kind of consumer web product will stop at a similar point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting post.

It is good to see that the author sees that there is no free lunch.

My semi-outside perspective is that there are firms in an arms race to be the quickest at providing liquidity, but his is a small fixed pie. Everything else is being paid to take risk. It is a tough game, especially for folks with skills marketable elsewhere.

It takes a while, but great for the poster to realize money isn't everything.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really enjoyed your post; I, like many programmers I would assume, look at anything like financial trading or sports betting and wonder if it's really possible to build an algorithm that could consistently beat the market.

The assumption is that once logic is removed, a machine could execute based on data. But humans crunch data so much faster than CPUs at this point (at least until around 2020 probably), it's still hard to pinpoint the minute logic that goes into a successful trading strategy.

Your post really shows the realities of how challenging it is, even when guided by humans who have past success at trading.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was very interesting. I would also recommend reading the article about increasing your luck surface area ([http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck- surf...](http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface- area)). Luck is a concept people think about a lot in terms of startups and "luck surface area" is a great way to quantify this.

<comment><USER7> Agreed - this was also my favorite part of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> i came to the same conclusions as this fellow, and left electronic trading for the startup world almost exactly a year ago today.

i couldn't be more pleased with my decision.</comment>


The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html <comment><USER2> This was a great article, thank you for sharing (it was originally posted earlier this morning - but I didn't comment on the dup share)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you a cook or a chef? Programmer or entrepreneur? Or are we all following the "startup" cookbook like good little cooks?</comment>


Redesigning the Uber Surge Pricing Screen - <AUTHOR> http://startingup.me/post/15141134089/redesigning-the-uber-surge-pricing-screen

<comment><USER2> UX problems aside, the surge pricing idea is creates fascinating window into the true perceived value of the service. To give an example, Uber would normally be ~$35 from the party I was at last night in SF's Mission to my home.

With a 6.25x multiplier in place it would have been just under $220. There is just NO WAY I'd spend that to go 2 miles to get home. But obviously some people were prepared to, and that must be _golden_ information for Uber in terms of future pricing planning.

I also wonder whether that could be used in other pricing scenarios, such as SaaS, where if some level of (artificial/real) scarcity could be put in place you could see how much people are really prepared to pay for your service.</comment>


Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It - <AUTHOR> http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/new-yorks-stack-overflow-14-times-bigger-quora <comment><USER2> To be honest I don't really think Stack Exchange and Quora are the same thing. Or, to be jargonny, "we're not in the same space."

Quora is Yahoo!Answers done really well... it's more social and bloggy, and it's for chat and subjective questions. It's kind of like Twitter in a Q&A format with long, blog-type answers. It's full of VCs and tech journalists, unlike Yahoo!Answers which is full of teenagers asking questions about reproduction in mammals.

Stack Exchange is more a reference tool... something you use when you NEED a specific answer to an actual question that actually _has an answer_. We're the reference section of the library, they're an awesome salon where smart people are shootin' the shit.

<comment><USER3> I'm from Europe and I know SO. I didn't know Quora until I forced myself to click on one of the Quora links on HN.

To me it looked like a SO knockoff and I guess it looks that way to most people.

<comment><USER4> Look deeper. Quora's magic sauce is that it only shows you questions that either your contacts have interacted with or that correspond to topics you are tracking. As a result, every time you visit you get stuff that you are genuinely interested in.

<comment><USER5> Or you see no new stuff at all (if you don't have enough contacts/topics) while there are lots of interesting things going on in the other parts of quora that you have almost no way of finding out about without heavy searching.

This pretty much made me stop using quora.

<comment><USER4> I guess that's why they push you so aggressively to pick up contacts and topics - some of the stuff they do there is really clever, like inviting your friends to suggest topics for you if you don't have any yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Boy, this is exactly what I have been thinking! Quora gets all the press (and it is a great service), but Stack Overflow/Exchange have been so much more helpful to me because of its specificity. Plus, Stack's game mechanics really work on me and encourage me to want to write good answers and help people.

<comment><USER7> if you were the main source behind the movie "the social network" you can make a door handle and you will still get press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Go to StackOverflow.com and you can instantly see what kind of questions are being asked and answered. The UI may feel a little cluttered, but the information is there. Hang out for a few more minutes and you can appreciate the value of this service. You might as well sign up and start using it.

Go to Quora.com and you're asked to log in or create an account. No idea what's behind that login. Not even a search bar. Since there isn't any useful page that I can browse to, I might as well just contribute to their bounce rate. Why would I create yet another online account without even knowing what the benefits are?

<comment><USER9> Part of the reason for quora to do that might be to limit their user base to people who already know what it is (people who are referred)

Exposing what it is and making it really easy for anyone to sign up will make it degrade into yahoo answers in no time.

Stack overflow on the other hand embraces new programmers asking and finding answers to questions because they're all going to be related to programming (if not it gets modded down really quickly). Quora doesn't have that niche/topic restriction and is much easier to troll.

<comment><USER8> Maybe you're right, and maybe they want to stay small for now. In which case the linked article is misleading in comparing Quora with StackOverflow.

That doesn't change the fact that I do everything I can to avoid websites that tell me to sign up first. It just feels incredibly disrespectful.

Facebook might be able to get away with "sign up first, and we'll show you what this shit is all about", but not your average startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd also like to point out that Stack Overflow's database is available to the public under the creative commons license. Quora's database is not.

<comment><USER11> SO made available a CC'd database during a period when many -- including many on here -- were arguing that there should be an open-source, wikipedia-like alternative, coupled with a lot of nonsensical "I could make that on a weekend" claims.

That movement disappeared once SO started making the DB available for download.

<comment><USER2> Historically untrue. Stack Overflow promised that its data would belong to the users _from the very beginning_. The data was created by its users and belongs to its users. We saw what happens when a commercial entity starts to try charging for content generated by its users (mostly experts-exchange, but also imdb and cddb) and wanted to ensure that could never happen. Our creative commons data dump is a promise to the community that the content they've created can never be locked behind a paywall.

<comment><USER11> _Historically untrue._

What's untrue about it? While SO had a CC policy since the early days, the actual CC database, which was the subject of my post, was made available well over a year later, coinciding with a outpouring of foolish developers claiming that they could recreate the site on the weekend. I recall the timing simply because it was interesting seeing how that momentum disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _"If a proposed site doesn't have critical mass, we just won't create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we'll close it down,"_

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making the web a better place.

</comment><comment><USER13> Quora is killing itself.

Quora wants my information before it lets me take a peak. I have never made it past the homepage of Quora as I don't want to logon to a site without knowing what is in there. I think there are several more people like me who are avoiding it fr the same reason

I never see Quora in the results' sites when I type in a question in Google search bar. Instead I find yahoo answers, ask.com in the results.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't really get Quora. It seems to have some good questions, but many inane ones as well. My guess is that with time, there's going to be some crowding out, too.

<comment><USER11> Quora is a bit like Twitter in the sense that many signed up because Bruce Willis' son was on it. On Quora there's that elite selection of superstars who draw the proles in.

It's entirely unsustainable though. It is a community destined to fail, as cool as it is right now.

<comment><USER15> Seriously, you think Quora is cool? No. It's already uncool and getting more and more uncool as we speak. You can see how the quality has degraded over the last month or so, before they made it invite only again. You already see mega- important SV people like Scoble posting inane images on questions in order to game upvoting, &c.

<comment><USER15> Karma to burn, and I'm hardly the only one here making the 'entropy' argument: Quora will wind up like Yahoo! Answers given enough new users + time, and by then the cool SV people will have found another plaything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I'm still a big fan of Stack Overflow (and a couple others), I find Quora to be more... friendly, useful, and usable.

Usable in the overall layout is cleaner, less cluttered, more intuitive. Also, the question suggestions are incredibly accurate and prevent _me_ from asking duplicates (many will inevitably ignore them). However, if someone asks a duplicate question it usually is given a friendly response, recommended to the previous question, and probably closed.

Stack Exchange sites tend to crucify people for asking a duplicate. Their recommendations aren't as useful in my experience. However, when dealing with programming it's possibly harder from the questioner's point of view to tell a duplicate (they may not know what they're trying to ask, hence going there instead of searching). Their rules just seem so punitive and stringent that every time I go to ask a question I feel like I'm going to get slapped on the hand.

Finally, I seem to get more responses on Quora right now. This is just an observation, not based on quantitative data. Likely this will change as people get sick of it or it's swarmed with more takers and less givers.

<comment><USER17> Crucify people for asking a duplicate? When you flag a question as a duplicate, SO asks for the previous question's address, posts it as a comment, and when four people confirm the duplicate, a big link to the original question is put at the top of the page. AFAIK, there's no crucifying step.

<comment><USER16> Just my experience. When I've seen duplicates people seem to jump at them, look down at them, yell and curse and scream things your mother wouldn't want to hear you saying. Maybe crucify is too harsh a word :)

Obviously these are my observations, others probably have differing ones. Maybe mine are worsened by the fear of rejection, not following one of their fascist regime style rules, or overall timidness about sounding dumb.

(I exaggerate a little, clearly. However, it does push me to the point of doing a good fifteen minutes of digging up permutations and variations before asking a question to determine it has never shown up before. I understand that is along the lines of what they want, but always feels like they go overboard.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone on Forrst? Their service looks like something I woudl like. On the technology end, it looks easy to post images and code for the purpose of discussion, and that would make my life a little easier. The community looks like one I'd like to be a part of, too.

On the other hand, I'm currently re-working my own blog and am really enjoying designing the front end and tooling the backend to fit my needs precisely. It's a labor of love and I don't want to let it languish.

If you've used forrst, what do you like about it? What don't you like?

<comment><USER19> I've used Forrst and really like it. I wouldn't compare it to your blog any more than any other social site: it's going to enable social interactions + discovery that you wouldn't get on your site... but give you less control. (A fair trade I think. Both have their benefits.)

Like HN, Forrst is full of people who are earnest and invested in their behavior there. It doesn't mean everybody is always right or perfectly behaved, but they are sincere and really care about the topics at hand. I also like how Forrst users particpate when they have something of value to offer, rather than just to hear themselves type. (that's one thing that bothers me about Quora: people speak up without any really compelling reason to. Compare to HN when most skip threads if we're just going to repeat something.) Forrst also has excellent design and that permeates the culture and people treat design both as a craft and a technical skill.

The only thing I don't like about Forrst is probably just me: they have some etiquette guidelines i don't totally get. You can show work that's in progress, but i once saw a guy show a fully completed piece of work that a moderator thought was too self-promote-y. Then I once got modded because I showed some industrial (non digital) design ( because it wasn't graphic, though featured graphic typography on a sign). It's possible this policy has evolved OR I just didn't read the fine print closely enough, but i felt confused.

I would encourage you to check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've said before that I simply don't get the success of Quora. Their secret sauce is little more than a ketchup bottle with the label scrubbed out (IMHO). The one thing they've managed to do well (and exceedingly well at that) is draw in the Valley elite. Their software isn't really anything remarkable and I'm yet to be convinced that what they're doing will have any general appeal beyond the Valley.

SO is interesting. I think their format for programmers and technical people works exceedingly well. The main SO site itself absolutely kills it for programming related questions, much more than mailing lists, forums and every other programming Q&A site before it.

That being said, I really wonder how applicable that model is to other fields. The other original trilogy sites (serverfault and superuser) haven't mirrored SO's success. I wonder how well the other incubated sites have done or will do, particularly in already crowded spaces like for games and gadgets.

Programmers by their nature self-organize. I don't think that's generally true for other groups although it'd be undoubtedly true for some.

So I like Joel and Jeff. I like SO although I've been fairly inactive there for months. I like the platform but I'm just not convinced of the viability of building a large portfolio of niche verticals on that idea.

<comment><USER21> > Programmers by their nature self-organize. I don't think that's generally > true for other groups

Where does this come from? I think _people_ by their nature self-organize. Programmers are often _less_ social than their non-programming brethren.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> StackOverflow is to Quora as Wikipedia is to Encarta.

Give it some time and Quora will simply disappear.

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought Quora was a Stackoverflow clone.

I never really understood wtf is the point of Quora. I go the main page and it wants me to sign up. Really? No, I'm not gonna sign up just because you say you're awesome. How about you prove to me that you're awesome by showing me the real homepage that registered users see, huh?

</comment><comment><USER24> Just a rehash from the Joel's blogpost how they are better then Quora.

</comment><comment><USER25> Quora hasn't hooked me yet. What impresses me most about SO is the quality of the Q's and A's, yet there are minimal barriers to entry; it's all right there to see. Quora, on the other hand, is pretty much a brick wall until you give credentials. It was mildly annoying when a friend emailed asking me to vote up his answer on this new site 'Quora' and upon arriving there I had to give my name just to figure out what the deal was.

I guess Quora's not for me. And I don't think Quora wants me, anyway. I was blocked from editing by an admin because I didn't use my full real name when I did my single upvote to support my friend.

</comment><comment><USER26> StackOverflow hopes to be Quora of programming!

<comment><USER27> Or the opposite? Quora hopes to be Stack Overflow of varying topics.

Stack Overflow is _the_ Q&A for programming.

<comment><USER26> I was being sarcastic, these days it's fashionable to be the _Quora_ of something.

<comment><USER27> I get it now :)

Let's nope that Quora will get it's momentum, and userbase - the way Stack Overflow has, because it it doesn't only people following social media news this period will know what means to be the Quora of something.

<comment><USER28> Does "being the Quora of something" mean that you get hyped up a lot but ultimately are beaten out by a more focused (albeit less hyped) competitor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll be happy as long as one of them solves the "route this question to the best person to answer it and then motivate them to answer it" problem.

<comment><USER30> I think the Stack Exchange sites have the motivation tools with the game mechanics. There could really be some improvement with the routing / notifications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Aside from the idea of competition & killing, but also related to NYC, there is an interesting Quora thread gaining attention,"How can New York City use technology to serve citizens?" [http://www.quora.com/How-can-New-York-City- use-technology-to...](http://www.quora.com/How-can-New-York-City-use- technology-to-serve-citizens)

</comment><comment><USER32> Does this headline mean Stack Overflow is actually killing Quora, ending its very existence? Fine.

If it only means Stack Overflow is succeeding, am I the only one tired of this figure of speech?

</comment><comment><USER33> Interesting emphasis on 'New York'.

<comment><USER34> The majority of the team is in New York, and I believe it's now considered SO HQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Isn't Joel (one of the founders) in El Cerrito in the Bay Area?

<comment><USER36> Joel, in fact, is in New York.

<comment><USER34> How do you know?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> thanks, Readability</comment>


Deutsche Bank Inadvertently Made a $35B Payment in a Single Transaction - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-19/deutsche-bank-flub-said-to-send-35-billion-briefly-out-the-door <comment><USER2> Rank sort all of your transactions by size. With 100% probability require double signoff from two senior bankers on all top 5-percentile transactions.

<comment><USER3> that's in the 1000s if not 10s of 1000s of transactions a day.

<comment><USER4> Computers are very fast at sorting even 10s of 1000s of numbers these days!

<comment><USER5> They meant that, at a bank's scale, "the top 5-percentile" requiring human sign-off would mean 1000s of transactions per day requiring human sign-off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, the interesting bit was why the bear trap didn't catch this one, and sadly they don't say anything about that ...

</comment><comment><USER7> I once saw a $1b payment error for postage... Each day the supplier's software mistakenly billed the month-to-date total instead of the new day's work. That MTD amount therefore doubled each day. And since they were a trusted supplier, it was automatically paid... The error was only discovered a week later, when the business's main bank account went $1b overdrawn.

<comment><USER7> Of course, the software bug was found pretty quickly and the release rolled back.

The funniest part of this story is the next monthly software release accidentally reinstalled the old buggy code, not the new release. So the incorrect payments happened again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bitcoin doesn't handle rollbacks for this kind of thing unless both parties agree.

<comment><USER9> Both parties seemed to agree on this one, so it doesn't really matter if they were bitcoins, euros, unmarked dollars, or cows.

In most transactions there is no need for a third party to get involved, and if there is, you can always get an escrow. The fact that drug markets, where you are dealing with criminals, are able to work over crypto should make people see that there are indeed alternative ways to VISA/Mastercard/Bank Transfers/PayPal.

<comment><USER10> >Both parties seemed to agree on this one, so it doesn't really matter if they were bitcoins, euros, unmarked dollars, or cows.

Not entirely true. Having been drunk at a livestock auction, I can attest that unilateral refunds of cows are possible, if you have a big enough truck and it's late enough at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know its easy to joke about but this happens at all levels. While the outcome here did not end up as a bad story it might have been. While the number here is phenomenal its usually the small numbers that we don't hear about that cause a lot of harm. Any dealings where money is involved over trivial amounts needs a series of checks and balances. You would be surprised at how many professional and hobbyist organizations don't have them. Then again you may already be nodding your head having read a story where money was embezzled from a charity or the like.

I do know of a certain pure breed canine group which is out 10k or more because the treasurer did not verify the received email was from the group President and paid an invoice which obviously was not a real invoice. If you are part of a club or non profit always verify your officers claims to licenses and experience. then still put in the checks and balances, three people minimum to pay non trivial and more for extra ordinary values. if they don't agree its probably not a good place to be

</comment><comment><USER12> all this sounds a little fishy, Deutsche Bank as at the moment $60 Trillion exposure on derivatives, it's a financial bomb ready to explode any time, wonder if this occurrence is in any way related to the high derivative exposure.

<comment><USER13> What does "$60 Trillion exposure on derivatives" even mean?

<comment><USER14> It's largely there to sound scary. While stocks can have their exposure measured based on their face value, derivatives cannot. For example, you could have a 100 million interest rate swap, where you either pay or receive the difference between a floating interest rate and a fixed interest rate depending on their values. You'll never get close to ever losing or gaining 100 million dollars, and that 100 million is never exchanged, but you still have that much exposure.

To further complicate things, these banks may have hedged their exposure, meaning they may have an equal but opposite interest rate swap. Now they have 200 million of exposure, but no matter how the interest rates have changed, there's no risk (all of this assumes no counterparty risk, which may or may not be valid, but for now ignore it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I accidentally the whole bank

</comment><comment><USER16> What kind of account do you keep $35B dollars in?

</comment><comment><USER17> In my company we require a second approval for transfers over $30 billion.

<comment><USER18> We used to, but at some point my job just consisted of signing off on trivial stuff like moonbases and space stations all day.

<comment><USER19> About a week after I started university, I received an email along the lines of "the final payment for the new biomedical engineering building is awaiting your approval, £80 million to be transferred please".

It turns out I shared the first initial and surname of the financial director of my university, and the other senior staff hadn't noticed they were emailing a first year undergraduate. My first name was earlier in the alphabet than his. (Not my name, but "Graeme" and "Graham" would be equivalent.)

I replied saying I was the wrong person, but the email didn't seem to be noticed, and I continued receiving emails on the subject. I replied a few more times over the next week, and eventually received a long and sincere apology from the rector's secretary, CCd to pretty much the whole of the university's senior management, saying they needed to take care not to email me ever again. They didn't.

<comment><USER20> You should have emailed back that you'd negotiated a cash discount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The errant transfer occurred about a week before Easter

What an odd time standard to use in a financial news report.

<comment><USER22> Well, Easter occurs up to a week after a full moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Imagine if this took place on the blockchain :)</comment>