Programming is Not Terrible - <AUTHOR> http://blog.m1cr0sux0r.com/2013/10/programming-is-not-terrible.html <comment><USER3> I have a hypothesis. Is it possible that the people who talk with wide-eyed wonder about programming after doing it for ten years and the passion that they have for writing software haven't come to appreciate the banality of almost every problem that they're going to be asked to solve in the software space? If you find putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms challenging and engaging after ten years, you may lack the mental capacity to really appreciate and understand why programming is terrible.

The reason open source software exists is because programming is terrible - <USER2> programming were the digital orgasm that these people pretend it is, people wouldn't have been bitching for years about how bad the open source ORM they're using is - they would have rewritten it already, twice.

Programming is a menial mental task for anyone with the capacity to properly abstract their real world problem into a solution that a computer can understand, with a few bits of crunchy debugging on top, that has no reward on its own.

We program, not because it is fun, challenging, or fulfilling, but because it is morphologically necessary for our continued existence as solution creators and problem solvers.

90% of the time spent programming is a slog. All of the enjoyment comes from the 10% of time spent solving cool problems, but more and more as open source technology gets better, sturdier, and more engrained into IT, the 10% problems are being solved before ldconfig is done doing its thing, and so you're left with 95% slog or 98% slog.

Are there domains where programming is still hard? Most definitely, but for most programmers programming is no longer drole.

<comment><USER4> Oh please. I have a theory about people who talk with patronising disdain about how programming is easy and you can do everything with open source already. Work is work, if it was all fun you wouldn't get paid for it.

If most programmers want a challenge in their day job they could try learning how to communicate or how not to assume that everyone else is an idiot or even try and improve the processes their team use so that everyone benefits.

The biggest problem I find programmers coming up against is cummunication and understanding and yet 95% of them would rather point out how their immediate coding problem isn't challenging enough to their almighty brains.

<comment><USER3> I guess you're assuming that I'm one of those semi-autistic types who isn't happy unless he's slugging down coffee while trying to hack the Gibson or whatever.

I'm not - the social aspect of problem solving, and especially the social aspects of requirement gathering, is the best part of my job.

<comment><USER5> > one of those semi-autistic types

This is vile. You aren't semi-autistic. You are or you aren't. And what qualities are you referring to when talking about semi-autistic? Are you referring lack of communication? Stimming?

How the _fuck_ does stimming have anything to do with slogging down coffee while programming?

Seriously, "semi-autistic"? People like you are vile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _If you like writing software, if you look forward to getting your next assignment, then you should probably go ahead and pursue it as a career. If you trudge through it and show some aptitude for it, but you don 't enjoy it, please choose another career._

Exactly. It seems that recently there have been a lot of young people who are treating the Software Engineer position kind of like the RN position. They think "There is high demand for this profession so I'm going to study for it in school and make big money, and this will be awesome."

But money !== happiness. RN is considered to be a good profession to study for in college. But not everyone who studies to be an RN can be happy taking care of sick and dying people all day, even if they are getting paid well. Likewise not everyone who studies to be a software engineer can be happy sitting at a computer writing code all day, even if they are getting paid well.

Some of us are happy to write code all day, and to "waste work" by rewriting systems frequently whenever the business changes directions because we love the challenge and the sense of progress as we get to see our coding skills improving month after month as we learn new technologies and techniques. I'd probably still be coding even if it was a low paying job, but I'm fortunate that because I enjoy coding so much and do so much of it I've become quite good at it and am able to make good money as a side benefit.

<comment> UK-AL "If you like writing software, if you look forward to getting your next assignment, then you should probably go ahead and pursue it as a career" -

The thing is academic/personal assignments are probably novel and interesting, while 99% of business programming isn't. The jobs that have problems that are novel or interesting, are damn hard to get.

So if you enjoy it at school/hobby, that has no relation to if your going to enjoy it as a job. So you can easily end up hating your job.

<comment><USER6> _The jobs that have problems that are novel or interesting, are damn hard to get._

I disagree. The monthly Who's Hiring thread here on HN is full of great jobs solving interesting problems. If you find those jobs "damn hard" to get maybe you need to learn some of the in demand skills or build a better portfolio of projects that you've worked on. A github full of open source activity can get you an interesting job quite easily.

A while back I put a very simple entry on an HN contractor thread and started getting two to three job offers a month in my inbox, many from very interesting companies doing interesting things. This was while I was still in college, not actively looking for a job yet. I accepted interview offers from a few of those companies and basically picked and choose who I wanted to work for, which eventually lead to me getting a job at the startup I work for now (storydesk.com) without ever needing to send out a single resume.

Maybe my experience is unusual, but I don't see it as being that difficult to get an interesting job as a software engineer if you leverage a community like HN.

<comment> UK-AL some of the in demand skills? Such as?

Mobile Development Skills? I know that. The majority apps are boring though, interfacing with a web service, saving and displaying data etc.

Web Devs Skills? I know Django the best, but again 99% of people using web frameworks are just doing the normal inputting and outputting data out of a database routine.

ML? I know that, but most companies only hire serious academic researchers, or people with previous experience of it. I have MSc in CS with quite a lot ML in it, but most are looking Ph.Ds;

Compilers? I've built a few prototypes. But very few companies actually need this.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like you have enough skills. Maybe the only skill you need to develop is how to sell yourself to the type of companies you want to work for.

If you don't mind some completely unsolicited advice:

I just checked out your HN profile and found a link to your blog. I checked the blog and it is fairly empty with only two posts, and I see no Github link. That's the first thing a good startup company is going to look at if they think you might be a candidate for a position: your blog and your github.

I managed to track you down on Github via a Google Search and while two repos seemed empty for some reason, Harlan looks pretty cool and non trivial, showing a good level of technical skill.

The primary things I'd do if I were you is simplify and expand the message on your blog to explain who you are and what skills you have and link to Github prominently. Maybe on Github put up some more projects from a variety of different domains, and write a few more blog posts about those projects.

Additionally blog theme says a lot about you. Right now the ideal blog design if you want to come across as a "startup engineer" is something that looks like Medium or Svtble. Your blog theme looks like a Tumblr.

(No offense intended but another slight thing to adjust might be the photo on your blog. Obviously appearance isn't everything but in that photo it looks to me like you have a smirk instead of a smile for some reason. If you choose to include a photo it has to be one that makes you look like someone goodnatured and a great employee, because people hiring in behalf of a company are going to get one of their first impressions of you based on the photo, before they even look at the Github.)

Anyway, once again I hope you aren't offended by my well intentioned by completely unsolicited advice. For what it is worth I'm sure that you can get an interesting coding job at an interesting company.

<comment> UK-AL ok, what interesting problems are you working on? And I'll tell you if they're interesting or not?

Because 95% of startups I've come across are solving trivial problems.

<comment><USER6> These are the things I've been able to do in the past year or so that I thought were pretty interesting and enjoyable:

* Code to render PDF's into images using asynchronous streams to make it extremely fast.

* The same thing for videos, to recompress them for delivery to iPads.

* Code to use AWS to create a service that can be fairly easily scaled up and down dynamically in response to demand.

* Creating a highly tuned Node.js server capable of serving thousands of requests per second. Even basic CRUD operations can be pretty interesting to code when you are fine tuning server system level settings, optimizing database queries, using caching, etc to make sure that response times are all around 10-15ms even at hundreds to thousands of requests per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just a slight suggestion that doesn't actually have to do with the article itself: Make your links stick out more. Maybe I just have bad eyes but I really can't tell if a word is a link until I hover over it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input, I have since modified this a bit to make the links more visible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good post.

The original article (which this article addresses) falls straight out of the most entitled kind of thinking ("the world owes me a living I enjoy"). I'd go further: even if you don't enjoy programming, there are far more horrible ways to earn a far worse living, and plenty of people have little choice.

Yesterday, I ordered pizza which was delivered by a guy older than me (and I'm no spring chicken -- I learned programming on an HP calculator) who wasted ten minutes finding my apartment because the delivery instructions were so poorly printed as to be unreadable.

</comment><comment><USER9> This 'response' was needed. Thank you! If anyone is interested in getting a refreshing perspective on job and life satisfaction, you might consider reading 'So Good They Can't Ignore You' by Cal Newport - great read on what provides for a fulfilling career. I think the original writer of the post could benefit from that.

[http://www.calnewport.com/books/sogood.html](http://www.calnewport.com/books/sogood.html)

Enjoy

</comment><comment><USER10> I got really burned out on programming my senior year at university and after 2 years of working alone on a massive web app. There are many other things I'd rather be doing, like running a company or killing people for money or something exciting, but I suspect that those jobs would get boring/old after a while too.

The important thing to keep in mind is that your day job is a way to earn an income. If you don't enjoy it, at least do yourself a favor and find one you care to show up to every day.

If you really want to work on "hard problems" and other groundbreaking and cutting edge technologies, you can always do it in your free time. Whether you want to write software at work and then do it at home is another story, but keep in mind that if you're successful, you can turn your side project into your career, one you actually do give a shit about doing every day.

The great thing about software is that you are only limited by your knowledge and determination. There are very few problems you need a massive expensive computer to solve (at a small scale, at least), so your home computer is usually just as capable as your work computer.

If you're bored with programming, why don't you start digging into the parts that really get you excited. For me, that's functional languages and dynamic typed languages, computer vision, and machine learning.

Don't be afraid to try new things and fail at them. If you just sit around doing the same mundane work all day, don't be surprised when you believe all of software is mundane.

I actually agree that programming sucks, but that's more to do with the fact that you have to turn an idea into logic and math before you can make a computer do it.

</comment><comment><USER11> _This would make one think that in the 70 's all software engineering was awesome and exciting and everything that was done was cutting edge. The truth is that at this time it was the same as it is today. They were writing machine code (because they had to) and drivers for everything. They used punch cards and time sharing machines. They didn't have GitHub or the Internet so code sharing was not really possible outside your immediate social circle. I think that there were some people then (just as there are today) who worked on exciting stuff, but the majority were just doing a job._

This is very true. It's easy to have some appreciation for being closer to the machine in prior eras, but it is a much better time to be a programmer today. There are many more tools, and much more collaboration available. The time from idea to completed project is much shorter. The ability to scale projects is much higher. The wait time for code to compile and run is much shorter. I can go on and on...

</comment><comment><USER12> Huh. I understood the article he's referring to as something more along the lines of "don't make «programming» your job, make it your tool". Similarly, not becoming a "software engineer" means not becoming a merely guy with a hammer, but a guy with and idea and a hammer. That idea I liked pretty much, actually.

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent. This is what I wish I could have said in response to that other article, but couldn't find the words for.

This post is exactly right -- and I've seen a few newly-hired programmers in their first job out of college who had a very difficult time adjusting to the "real world", where programming isn't about fun and games and self-fulfillment any more, it's about creating real-world value.

There's nothing unique to programming in this -- journalists discover they can't write about whatever they want, scientists have to follow the funding, etc.

However, I do wonder if programmers, on average, might have particularly inflated expectations of what their jobs will be like? Just like the original blog post expressed. And what makes this so?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I wrote this to just to show that there are still people who enjoy their work and think that it is a great profession.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Programming is programming.

It depends on what you are programming that makes it terrible or a joy.

Im right know payed to do another CRM in PHP and Id rather gauge my eyes out at the end of the day than continue with it. Im not solving any problems at all. Its just business/stakeholders/managers/whomever that decided a few months ago that their CRM needed a "facelift" and here we are. We use some new frameworks (slim), TDD, bootstrap/jquery, talk about agile/lean but in the end the problem we are solving is just some stupid shit like making a document or presentation better than what it was before. And the users are joyful. They got to look at something new while at work. They compete with each other with who will be picked to be among the pilot group, the new the cool. Like kids. A day looks like, fix some "bug" in on the server in an older application among arcane spaghetti-code, or some client-side jquery platitude (oh its you ie8 again?), write some new "functionality" which is fetch this data put it in there display it like this, take this data validate, serialize and send it over there. This is not even programming, it is bullshitting.

Then I go home and relax and read, after a while Im ready to play with python and C, solving minor and sometimes bigger problems. Trying out some machine learning at the moment. Ah the joy of hacking. It fills me up for next day.

<comment><USER15> I am in a very similar situation. Except I do not have the energy to sit down at home and do more programming, I am happy to get away from it until the next day.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I make my lack of education less unappealing to employers? - non-entity It's been a huge trope for a while now about how you dont have to (or even in some cases shouldn't) go to school and get a CS degree to be a developer, but I deeply regret not going for a number of reasons, but have mixed experiences personally with interviewing. I dont currently live in a tech hub (would like to work my way toward one) and while I've been able to find work, it's always been difficult and I always feel like I come out underpaid from jumping in the first offer I get. I've interviewed at both tech companies (startups, etc.) and (mostly) non tech companies and my education eventually comes up in the interview as theres no section on my resume. I've had recruiters/  interviewers visibly or audibly display disappointment when I mention I'm self taught and on occasion have had interviews or phone screens cut short because "this position requires a degree" despite "sounding really good for the role". Just minutes before. I have a couple years of professional experience on top of contributions to large open source projects and years of hobbyist work, but its proven to still be an issue.<p>Is there anything I can do or any way I can market myself to beat this sort of issue? <comment><AUTHOR> >>It's been a huge trope for a while now about how you dont have to (or even in some cases shouldn't) go to school

I think there's been a huge misrepresentation of the value of a degree. You hear this from people that have a degree already because a degree does not seem to be life-changing once you have one. It's not but it gives you an edge. At the very least a degree signals to an employer that you have some knowledge and are able to work towards a goal. Any employer will hire someone with a degree over someone that does not have one given similar resumes. Also, employers will almost always require some kind of degree if they are filling a management job. So if you ever plan to go above developer you'll mostly need a degree.

Here's my advice: build a network of contacts that understand your skills. Take the time to meet people in the industry. You'll need to find a way to do that.

\- Try meetups

-take classes where you might find people that are professionals and hire people.

\- Become friends with the HR people of the place where you want to work.

\- Find bars where these people might meet

Additionally, work on your education. At the very least get a certificate that is given by a recognizable and respected school

Please don't take the, "no degree needed" advice. It's wrong no matter how old you are.

</comment><comment><USER2> First, that's really unfair, and I sympathize. But, that's not what you're looking for, so on to the advice.

Second, if you can get past HR, you have a better shot. That is, if the person who will be your eventual supervisor has met you, they will often tell HR to go ahead and send you in for an interview. The HR (or recruiter) doesn't have the authority (or knowledge) to do that, but they will if the person they're headhunting for says to (typically).

This is hard, but going to programmer meetups and such can sometimes help, as does emailing the tech lead or supervisor directly whenever you can find that out.

<comment><USER2> p.s. a CS degree, in particular, is certainly unnecessary, so if you have an easy way to get a non-CS degree (e.g. a history or music major that you didn't quite finish), it might be worth doing that. But, definitely, there is a (wrong-headed) class bias about having a degree of some kind. It's not undefeatable, though, if you get past the people who are the usual gatekeepers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Degrees are not useless, but they definitely aren't worth the weight some people place on them either. In your case what is hurting is the lack of experience tied with the lack of a degree. If you had a degree with 2 years you'd have little issues assuming you can get through the interview process. But without a degree and with only a couple years experience it is much harder to get past a lot of the gate keepers.

If you really want to work at a place that "requires" a degree or enough experience to offset it you'll need to find some smaller businesses, or even some of the larger enterprises where they will interview you as a person and not worry so much about the piece of paper you don't have. This will let you get your 5-6 years of experience that will mainly offset the lack of a degree. Also, for your resume you'd likely do better with a functional resume with projects/accomplishments on it, rather than a chronological resume. The functional will let you highlight more details about your open source and hobby work. Chronological will show your relative lack of experience just by the dates shown, and generally makes it harder to show all the relevant stuff you have done since you are trying to summarize a job position instead of talking about different projects/problems you have solved.

Just a personal note and from my own experience. I have over 20 years in the industry and I do not have a CS degree and I do not list my formal education on my resume as it is irrelevant for what I do (generally). When I have applied for positions in the past I'd use their response about a degree as a good filter about the company. Because if they are calling me to talk but then tell me that without a degree that I am not worth chatting with then I just found a company to avoid. I say this because intelligent people want to associate themselves with other intelligent people, and a degree does not make someone intelligent. A degree may help to increase someones intelligence, but it more so just proves you can endure a level of memorization for a few years to pass some exams, not that you are intelligent or even competent to do the job. Personally, I prefer to work and associate with people who are intelligent because they have a thirst, desire and hunger for information and learning, then I do someone who uses a degree or a specific school as a filter to whether another human is intelligent or worthy. This is the reason I do not let my teams use the lack of a degree or where a degree is attained to influence whether we interview someone, the only things we look at are the resume & cover letter and if we like what we see we interview the person.</comment>


Leo Tolstoy and static code analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0105/

<comment><AUTHOR> Abstract. This time we checked Apache HTTP Server with PVS-Studio. As we had expected, we found errors there. The errors are few. We expected this either. Other developers come across this situation too while testing PVS-Studio on their projects. Unfortunately, the first conclusion you would like to draw on seeing just a few errors is that a tool like this is useless to you. I have just invented a good analogy to show why it is not so.

</comment><comment><USER2> Tolstoy is perhaps not the best example because he had little to do with the spelling, grammar, and sentence structure of his English language works. This was all done by the respective translator after the fact.

A better author to use would be someone like Nabokov or Hemingway who originally wrote in English.</comment>


Work Examples from the NIST Engineering Statistics Handbook Using R - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/better-than-average.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The NIST Engineering Statistics Handbook is a great resource that covers statistical topics of interest to engineers. R provides an interactive statistical environment to work through the examples in the book. Calcuations that would take dozens of lines of code in many popular languages performed by R in a line or two each. Not much of a surprise to hardcore Lispers and the like - but still novel to those of us who spend some time in curly brace world.

</comment><comment><USER2> There has been talk of an R based language on Lisp before: <http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/3726></comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to communicate with your early adopter community? - <AUTHOR>

What tools do you use to communicate with and receive feedback from your early adopter community? (especially for web services) Google Groups? Facebook Groups? Or does services like Uservoice and GetSatisfaction work well? Would love to hear pros and cons. <comment><USER2> I use FriendFeed.

Pros: Great email integration, real-time conversation, sweet UI designed by ex-googlers, powerful search capability.

Cons: Search doesn't always work. Although Facebook keeps the service running, it isn't as high-priority as their bigger product.</comment>


How I Bypassed State Bank of India OTP - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-i-bypassed-state-bank-of-india-otp-f145469a9f1d#.bd535hpl5 <comment><USER2> Nice Article</comment>


CNN Thinks HTML Is Computer Espionage - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5854035/cnn-thinks-html-is-computer-espionage

<comment><USER2> See also: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/lr0ij/which_one_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/lr0ij/which_one_of_you_put_me_on_cnn_yesterday/)</comment>


After 100K Covid-19 cases, it's clearer where Californians are getting infected - <AUTHOR> https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavirus-cases-its-clearer-where-californians-are-getting-infected/ <comment><USER2> In Canada, the vast majority of cases have been associated with long term care facilities, hospitals, prisons, and meat packing facilities. The majority of _deaths_ had been associated with long term care facilities -- because that's where the old (and thus highly vulnerable) people are.

These all share in common the traits of having lots of people in close contact for extended periods -- and in many cases, have a steady influx of new people coming in.

The most important health measure taken in British Columbia -- aside from providing workers with masks, of course -- has been to restrict long term care workers to working in a single facility. In other places, workers routinely work multiple part-time jobs and have spread the virus between facilities; fortunately that was stopped very early in BC, and our death toll so far is only around 150 (out of a population of over 5 million).

<comment><USER3> It's the same in Belgium. At some point half of the deaths came from care homes. Here they even restrict workers to a certain floor or area in the care homes.

<comment><USER4> Why are there so many deaths in Belgium? It's terrible!

<comment><USER3> I can't answer this. But I heard that Belgium actually counts cases differently from other countries. We also count the deaths of people that have not been tested but who are strongly suspected to be Covid-19. Whereas other countries only count those who actually tested positive.

[https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/belgium- sa...](https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/belgium-says- transparency-explains-high-virus-death-toll/)

<comment><USER5> I've heard "actually counts cases differently from other countries" for at least 3 other European countries.

I don't think that phrase means very much.

<comment><USER6> Yes it does, since Belgium was the first one to do it like this.

It's possible that other countries now also count this way, but I'm not aware of that/haven't heard it. So, I don't think that other countries count the same way.

Our way of counting has an average of 2 * more deaths in statistics. Since we count suspected cases as confirmed in the statistics.

It's a huge difference.

\--

What are the other countries + sources then? I have only seen it mentioned ( and mentioned it myselve) for Belgium.

<comment><USER5> I've heard it often in both British and Italian media to explain why their figures are higher than neighbouring countries, using the same exact reason: we (did) count suspected cases as confirmed.

Not saying you're wrong, just pointing out the fact that all these figures have huge margins of errors and we'll know the true extend of it when we'll be way past it.

<comment><USER6> I checked some resources and none mentions Britain or Italy counting suspected cases.

I only did Belgium that does this. What is your source of information?

Not saying you are wrong, but according to me, Belgium is the only one that does it like this.

Even after looking it up, I can't find something that says what you are claiming

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The idea that it takes significant viral load to initiate infection makes it quite interesting to try and form a mental model of how transmission takes place. For example, you have a globule of viral particles that float through the air and lodge in the respiratory system. According to the "viral load" theory, this is unlikely to initiate infect by itself. We need repeated doses, possibly over a period of time.

You could theorise that the inflation of risk is no more than that from the linear sum of the doses, ie: any given "dose" has the same probability of inducing infection. However the "viral load" idea suggests that multiple exposure is worse than just the sum of independent random events. It suggests there's some sort of interaction whereby multiple doses within a short period of time are especially potent, as if the viral products from independently replicating infections in the respiratory system are able in some way to reinforce each other and make it more likely than two independent chances that an overall infection will take hold.

Curious if there is any work in this regard that would elucidate the underpinning process of infection.

<comment><USER8> Maybe; but that theory is a little suspect since presumably this entire pandemic started from a single viron and viruses grow so quickly that a single infected cell can produce ~1,000 new virus particles (dunno how may a coronavirus produces, that figure is something I Googled for HIV).

Starting dose does matter but surely people risk infection from even a tiny dose.

<comment><USER9> I thought the theory was that the first infected human acquired it from an infected animal? So it's quite possible that infecting humans requires significant exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> CA, NY and NJ were the states that forced their nursing homes to take C19 patients.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200430140410/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200430140410/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/nursing- homes-coronavirus.html)

CA got off easy, relatively speaking. Probably fewer nursing homes. It's amazing how idiotic government officials can be.

<comment><USER11> > "Whoever made this decision, whoever did this, I consider this a sentence of > death for all the older patients, whoever is in a nursing home," he said.

Wonder what the justification was. Hindsight 20/20 as they say, but wasn't it known the age and various conditions that older patients might have are risk factors early on?

<comment><USER12> > Hindsight 20/20 as they say

Sorry, but that excuse won't fly for several reasons:

1) We had sars-1 and mers earlier, both corona viruses

2) China was slow in providing info initially, but eventually they did. There's a number of papers to read online. (Same as in sars-1, where world notification was delayed from Nov. 2002 to about Mar. 2003.)

3) The CDC and other agencies are supposed to be on top of pandemics. The White House has a pandemic playbook. These are paid professionals who are supposed to have foresight, not blame hindsight.

(FYI: one of the US disease pros involved said that false alerts essentially neutered pandemic response since 2010 in this country. I empathize with that. All I can suggest is to point out that sars-1 killed thousands, and mers and sars-2 are also coronas.)

<comment><USER13> "The White House has a pandemic playbook."

The white house HAD a pandemic playbook. They didn't use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How are people able to read this? I get a screen that demands I disable my ad blocker.

The exact same article is available without demands here (at least when I accessed it through Google): [https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavi...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/30/after-100000-coronavirus- cases-its-clearer-where-californians-are-getting-infected/)

</comment><comment> rv-de > Why meat plants? The CDC said it's hard for those workers to stay separated > and wear masks on the job, and there are "sociocultural and economic > challenges" with a diverse, low-wage workforce, including language barriers > and employees living in crowded settings and sharing rides to work.

"An important factor could also be the ambient temperature at the workplace. Cold temperatures prevailed in the rooms, some of which were the size of a hall. "I have been asking myself more and more whether these high transmission activities in slaughterhouses do not indicate something that we will otherwise experience over a large area in winter, namely this temperature effect. In other words: When it gets colder, the coronavirus will probably be better transmitted."

Prof. Drosten

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/drosten-zu-corona-in- schlachtb...](https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/drosten-zu-corona-in- schlachtbetrieben-moglicher-hinweis-auf-schnellere-ubertragung-bei-kalten- temperaturen-ZKMI34M52VBFDM7EORCE5Y63GM.html)

<comment> oh-well-111 I was downvoted and criticized in a hilariously condescending manner for suggesting that warmer temperatures are slowing down the spread a couple for weeks ago.

But it seems that the infinite lockdown proponents are getting a littler quieter now.

<comment><USER15> My theory is that it may not be the heat exactly, but the way in which heat rises that may cause the viral particles to disperse away from people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been waiting for some analysis like this. There have been pushes for hazard pay for a lot of critical lobs, but there hasn't been much information show what's actually risky.

A big takeaway from this is that the main part of the food supply that's at- risk is meat production, so while people might have to eat rice and beans, the food supply should otherwise hold up.

<comment><USER17> ... and meat production is only at risk if you have working conditions of the sort Upton Sinclair wrote about in "The Jungle" (1906). Meatpacking here is a skilled trade that is done without conveyor belts, so our meat packers have had no problem keeping 2m distance.

(Rice and beans are yummy, but the pastafarians have better comics: [https://xkcd.com/2287/](https://xkcd.com/2287/) )

Edit: (please bear with me for replies, I hit the rate limit so it may be a while)

<comment><USER18> Since meatpacking plants are trouble spot in the US that would imply that meatpacking plants in the US have the same conditions as The Jungle but that seems somewhat counterintuitive as The Jungle is often pointed to as having changed the US meatpacking industry for the better.

<comment><USER19> Yes, it's back. US Immigration enforcement has been soft on the meat industry. Part of this was the political backlash after there was an ICE raid on a meat plant in Iowa in 2008, and a prominent Jew went to prison.[1] (Trump recently pardoned him.) ICE enforcement against employers has never been strong, and was even weaker after that. There hasn't been a big raid like that since.

In countries without cheap labor, much meat processing is automated. The technology is available. Lamb: [2] Beef: [3] Chicken [4]. "Against Brazil, USA and Asia, we're a high cost manufacturer" \- Australian plant manager putting in automation. Right now, lamb deboning can be totally automated, chicken deboning almost is, and beef is coming along. (This reflects the technology coming from Australia, where the sheep industry is huge.)

Possible area for a startup.

(Videos not safe for vegetarians.)

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

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg)

[3] [https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus](https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus)

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

<comment><USER20>
      (Trump recently pardoned him)

No,he wasn't pardoned. His sentence was commuted. He remains a convicted felon.

<comment><USER19> Right, although some press reports say "pardon", it was just a commutation to time served.[1] There's not that much difference in practice.

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/politics/kushner-rubashkin- tr...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/politics/kushner-rubashkin-trump- clemency/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TLDR: The virus tends to get spread in confines spaces (presumably, though not confirmed, airborne with a low infectivity per virion). The more people in a confined space (meatpacking plant, prison, care facility, etc), the larger the outbreak.

<comment><USER22> I thought the tl;dr was we don't know for sure and we need to collect more data.

"But the question remains — beyond these known clusters, how did the tens of thousands of Californians who aren't accounted for in publicized major outbreaks become infected?"

...

""We don't know if people just going to parks or beaches, just sort of casual social gathering, contribute a whole lot to infections," Riley said. Public health officials "really need to identify the high-transmission settings and then target those and not have these unfocused measures on social distancing.""

<comment><USER23> Good point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Apparently 42% of the covid deaths in the US have been in nursing homes, which house .62% of the population. In some states, the share is as high as 70% of the deaths.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing- homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s- covid-19-deaths/#4adf6d2b74cd)

<comment><USER25> Based on that, it doesn't really make sense to shutdown all of society. Measures focused purely on the vulnerable would achieve the same result for significantly less cost.

<comment><USER26> Does it? If we'd had 330k deaths, and 70% were coming from nursing homes, focusing on care homes would still be more efficient, but we'd be left with 100k that weren't.

I realize there is some (necessarily vague) policy threshold past which the resultant damage to the economy is not "worth it", but the fact that there is a particularly vulnerable segment doesn't obviate the need for less efficient mitigation measures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> LA times has an excellent dashboard on coronavirus. The most stark thing that I saw besides the overwhelming number of cases in health care facilities, jails and Meat plants was the outsized infection rate of Latinos vs other races. The rate was almost double the demographics if I remember correctly which was shocking

<comment><USER28> My understanding is that there are a large number of Latinos working in meat packing ad healthcare facilities, and also in jail

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In Michigan they've been very stingy with data but this tracks well in our state as well. However densely populated poor neighborhoods have created a lot of cases as well, especially in Detroit.

In Detroit over a thousand police attended a pancake breakfast in mid-March including the top brass. Nearly all the cases in the police department stem from this single event. The police chief was infected and the chief of homicide died.

</comment><comment><USER4> I heard about a study mentioned on the german NDR coronavirus podcast. You're 19 times as likely to get infected indoors. Go outside! If you are in a closed room with others, open the windows! If you can't due to bad weather, cancel the gathering/school lesson/restaurant visit/whatever if possible.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is this particular article the only possible vehicle for obtaining the information? It has an ad-blocker screen and if you comply you get an auto- playing video. And after apparently 24 hours no alternatives seem to have been posted.</comment>


Ask HN: Should HN require you to click on the story link before commenting? - <AUTHOR>

I don't think it's a huge issue here, but I know it happens. (I know I do it occasionally.) You get people who just click on the comments and read them and then based solely on the title they begin to jerk their knee. You can't actually force people to read a story before they comment but you can force them to at least click the link. Maybe since they've already gone through the trouble of clicking through to the story those people would be more inclined to read first before commenting.<p>Just create an outgoing link redirector. Something like http://news.ycombinator.com/out?[url]. Once the site logs that you've clicked the link then you are free to comment. <comment><USER2> Then people will create a javascript tool that auto-clicks any URL on news.ycombinator.com that it hasn't yet seen in order to enable comments. Or they'll just tab-open other the links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, it's not tamper-proof. It's not really intended to be. As long as it forces them to make a habit of clicking the link then we can get more of those people to read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's the point? To increase comment quality? People clicking on the link would most likely not do anything to improve quality. If you look at the comments underneath most news articles, you'll see that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Saving all this clicks and checking who clicked in what will require resources and will have a small return.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes people will admit they didn't click the link or read the article but have something meaningful and valuable to add in response to a specific comment. I don't see any reason to discourage such contributions by increasing the burden to participate. It's easy enough to downvote people doing the knee- jerk thing and making themselves look like jerks. So I think there is already a mechanism in place for addressing this issue. In most cases, upping the ante with increasing attempts to control people (which is basically what this suggestion amounts to) are a net social negative.</comment>


Ssh-uncopy-id: A script to remove a ssh pub key from a remote host - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/snippets/11229 <comment><AUTHOR> I uploaded it as soon as I finished and tested it, there's still a lot to do, but I'm surprised nothing like this already exists?!

</comment><comment><USER2> Would be nice, I've contributed to a mac port of ssh-copy-id once. Looking forward for your release.</comment>


Apple Buys Shazam to Boost Apple Music - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-11/apple-buys-early-iphone-app-hit-shazam-to-boost-apple-music <comment><USER2> >> "Shazam, the 18-year-old company..."

Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia:

>> "Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name."

SOURCE: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_\(company\))

<comment><USER3> I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.

<comment><USER4> At that time, I wonder if there was any technology actually identifiying the song, or if it was a big mechanical turk sort of operation.

<comment><USER5> Amazon's Mechanical Turk service launched in 2005.

<comment><USER6> The concept of the "Mechanical Turk" has been around for over 200 years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk)

<comment><USER7> It's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines.

Asserting otherwise is an example of the etymological fallacy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy).

<comment><USER8> Ehh, I have seen references to using a person instead of an algorithm before Amazon released their service. Basically, if your automating human dexterity it's robotics, if your automating the brain it's AI. Sorting vegetables being a useful early example where humans could be thought of as a replaceable black box if you can break down what they are specifically doing. Thus Machine vision and classification where two common tasks because you need to play any game not simply replay a specific one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love Shazam but honestly, if they remove integrations like "Open in Spotify" which seems likely, I would probably switch to using SoundHound.

<comment><USER10> Apple is probably going to kill the app. They probably just bought it for the tech.

<comment><USER11> (removed)

<comment><USER12> This has the smell of a comment written by someone with limited real-world experience. Simply writing down the list of problems you would have to solve to build Shazam would take an entire afternoon.

Yes, deep neural networks have proven remarkably useful for machine perception, but you would still need to collect a colossal amount of audio data, fingerprint all of it, build a low-latency processing infrastructure for making inferences, and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model performance.

<comment><USER11> > and convince a hundred million people to install your software to feed you > copious real-world training data that you can use to improve model > performance.

That's actually the easy part. You already have the music. Distorting it by superimposing background noise is really not difficult.

<comment><USER13> Lol. When you superimpose noise, the original data is still there. When you have a FM radio playing staticky, heavily compressed music through crappy speakers in an acoustically terrible store and being captured by a terrible microphone and then being compressed, a significant amount of nonlinear distortion has taken place. That is extremely hard to model. And you would have to model it or have real data to train a neural network. Neural networks are extremely hard to train without excellent data.

<comment><USER11> > playing staticky, heavily compressed music through crappy speakers in an > acoustically terrible store

I think you just confirmed how easy (and cheap) it is to actually generate this data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, that is an unusual exit after 6 rounds of funding. Crunchbase has it at $143M in funding up to that point.

It goes to show how the switch from radio (station directed programming) to streaming (user directed programming) has put a huge crimp in music discovery and music promotion.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shazam)

<comment><USER15> Question from a non-Silicon Valley professional: Where does all that money go? Obviously, some [likely big] portion of it is still on the balance sheet, but does an app like Shazam really cost that much in engineering talent to update it and iterate it and server space to keep it running?

<comment><USER14> It varies quite a bit from company to company. They were founded in 2001 so I expect most of it was salary and physical plant.

The business is/was connecting resale opportunities to brands and artists[1] so you'll have a fairly significant sales and marketing effort although typically you will pay sales people for performance so their compensation will track revenue.

But to give you some things to think about, if you have an engineering team of 15 engineers, median salary $120K, and an 'overhead' (office, health plans, insurance, etc of 60%) then that is $200K/engineer/year (or $3M/year or $48M for 16 years [2001 - 2017]) that is just integrating cost per engineer over time using constant engineering. You can put any function in you want for head count (does it grow exponentially? does it grow in chunks? etc) and then add a C-suite team (higher median salary) and an 'overhead' team (IT, marketing, HR, etc) and you can burn through that fairly quickly.

It is a useful thing to build models for this stuff as your 'pre- operationally-cash-flow-positive' costs are really the health and future of your company.

[1] [https://www.shazam.com/company](https://www.shazam.com/company)

<comment><USER16> For a company with offices in the most expensive cities in the world $120K is likely closer to the starting salary than the median.

<comment><USER17> There are a lot of people that work at tech companies that aren't highly paid engineers. GP specifically called out engineers at a higher salary, so GP was obviously including receptionists, admin staff, etc. I'd be shocked to find that the starting salary _anywhere_ around here is 120k.

<comment><USER18> Ok, but you also seem to be doing math that assumes salary is fully loaded headcount cost; fully loaded cost is (rule of thumb) 1.5-2.5x salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The data that Shazam can gather must be incredibly useful to record labels, in that many people wanting to know the artist/song is a strong signal that a track is a potential hit. Since Apple already have data about what people are actually listening to (by location), this gives them additional data about what people might want to listen to.

<comment><USER20> Forbes, or was it BusinessWeek, actual did an article on that (i.e., selling data to record labels) a year or so ago. If I get a moment I'll try to track it down later.

<comment><USER21> Maybe this? [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the- sha...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam- effect/382237/)

<comment><USER20> Ah. Yes. Damn. I knew it was a mag I read on the regular but didn't think to think The Atlantic would cover such a think.

Good catch. Cheers mate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a bit shocked that they're paying $600M. Is Shazam even profitable? It feels like a clever tech demo from 10 years ago that's already been replicated in search engines like Google.

<comment><USER23> Yes, they became profitable in 2016 via mostly brand advertising [1][2]. The company has nearly 400 employees according to LinkedIn. With a very conservative personnel estimate of $125k/employee/year, that's $50M alone. Let's throw on another $25M for everything else and they need to be doing at least $75M+ in annual revenue.

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands- user-...](https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/20/shazam-for-brands-user- activity/)

[2] [https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7526322/shazam-1...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7526322/shazam-1-billion- downloads-profit-advertising)

<comment><USER24> Perhaps I have limited understanding of running a £40m a year business, but why does an app like Shazam need 400 employees?

Even if selling data and/or advertising, do they need (say) a 200 people sales team.. ?

<comment><USER23> I have no idea, it's bewildering to me frankly. Take two recent IPOs for example: MongoDB had 820 employees as of July 31st. StitchFix had 5,800 employees as of July 31st [2].

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917006014/a2233365zs-1.htm)

[2] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576942/000119312517...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576942/000119312517313629/d400510ds1.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anything replaced "Into Now"? I loved using it, and ever since Yahoo bought them up and then shut them down, I've always wondered why Shazam or Sound Hound hadn't integrated the audio from TV shows and movies into its database. ([http://mashable.com/2011/01/31/intonow/](http://mashable.com/2011/01/31/intonow/))

</comment><comment><USER26> from now on it will only identify U2 songs.

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be nice to have the song identification feature on iOS while on standby like the Pixel 2 does.

<comment><USER28> I still can't understand how that feature works. They stated that everything is done locally on the device, so privacy is not an issue. But how can they host a huge catalog of songs fingerprints without blowing the storage? Are they only saving the top charts?

<comment><USER29> They only store a catalog of the most popular songs. (Where 'most popular' is determined by your geographical location). This catalog is periodically updated.

<comment><USER30> Isn't the use case to find obscure music? Weird to have just popular ones. To "discover" a top 10 hit I can just ask someone nearby.

<comment><USER31> I think the Pareto principal kicks in hard here. If it stores the top 20,000 songs as the other comments suggest then I expect that would include the vast majority of music you'd come across.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> personally I've found Soundhound to be much better. Havent used Shazam in a long time though.

</comment><comment><USER33> > The 18-year-old company, which has required twice the average time to > deliver an exit for backers, was valued at about $1 billion when it closed > its last funding round in 2015.

If the last round had a strong liquidity preference then it wasn't really valued at $1 billion, and those investors might have even come out ahead.

</comment><comment><USER34> Shazam operates on my street! Was an interesting surprise...

This feels like a natural acquisition to compete w/ some of Googles offering w/ the latest Pixel 2.

The fact Shazam is 18 years old is crazy. Pre-dates "apps" with the "2580" service and was one of the first apps on the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER35> Spotify remains a far better experience and product than Apple Music. Why not buy Spotify?

<comment> yoz-y Apple does not seem to like to do big purchases. Even though they probably could. Spotify is not (yet) profitable so they would probably have to hike up the prices. At this point they are probably better off doing their deals on their own and slowly catch up.

<comment><USER36> >and slowly catch up.

I don't want to be anti-apple because I like most of their stuff but iTunes is complete garbage compared to Spotify.

With the stuff they have now they will never catch up.

<comment> yoz-y I should probably try Spotify as so many people say it is better than Apple Music (which I do genuinely like). Spotify currently offers 3 months premium subscription for 1€ so it may be worth a shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is (unfortunately) a huge testament to patenting technology. I remember Shazam shutting down a lot of early iOS apps that provided music discovery services. The technology it's self became relatively simple in the last 10 years, but their ownership of the patent has kept them on top.

I suspect it's due to end soon, and they realised once it's gone they would just become a feature of music streaming services. Good to get out now while there is still some exclusivity for Apple to milk.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've used Shazam for years but lately for some reason I've been running into more music that it can't identify from two separate phones (so it's not possibly a bug limited to one device).

Hoping this doesn't mean there service is degrading because I've really benefited from it over the years.

<comment><USER39> My issue with it was that it got too good.

I used to use it to identify music in shows or soundtracks, but it started just saying "Breaking Bad Episode 4" which while more accurate was less helpful.

Shortly after that everyone else had music discovery natively anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone think of another brand that has become generalized as an action, the same way as "Googling" other than Shazamed? To me "Shazam it" is shorthand for use whatever music ID service you have.

</comment><comment><USER40> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15881896](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15881896)

</comment><comment><USER41> Probably a way to pay less taxes; they won't have to bring EU cash to US, and get to cash it out before Brexit.

It's also a nice acqui-hire; Spotify already snatched Echo Nest a few years ago, so they get to catch-up with Shazam.</comment>


Proposal to build electrical pylons as statues - <AUTHOR> http://www.choishine.com/Projects/giants.html <comment><USER2> I like it. We need more people asking, "why can't <functional element> also be art?" Old-world cities have an embarrassment of riches in this area (this starkly contrasts with American cities), to the advantage and well-being of their citizenry. And they got that way because people asked _that_ question.

Most people never ask, or worse knee-jerk assume that any "impure" design must have some huge hidden downside.

<comment> vanilla-almond These are the pylons dotted over the landscape in the UK. They were designed in the 1920s and don't look too bad. But many people consider them a blot on the landscape:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/andysimspon43/10081837164/size...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/andysimspon43/10081837164/sizes/l)

They are are to be superceded by a new design from Danish architects Brystrup who were the winners of a 2011 competition to design a new pylon for the UK. Their winning design uses much less material than current pylons but the appearance is a little utilitarian and bland.

Here is a small gallery of entries from the 2011 pylon design competition including Brystrup's design:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15293922](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15293922)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Proposal to make something that is expensive; but simple in design, and easy to fix. Into something that is super expensive, complex to fix, and some may say.. cheeky in design.

<comment><USER4> Is it that expensive? In terms of raw materials it may cost more, but not double. The use of prefabricated parts (torso, limbs) reduces each tower's uniqueness and therefore complexity of repairs. Fabrication of unique beams is well within the repair capability of a mobile crew. Is the actual material cost of each tower a major component of a transmission line cost model? I am betting no; transmission wire, ongoing maintenance, land and rights acquisition, and monitoring probably make up the bulk of a transmission line's cost. Finding actual data on this is proving to be difficult, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's already a "Mae West" pylon: [http://www.hydroquebec.com/comprendre/transport/types- pylone...](http://www.hydroquebec.com/comprendre/transport/types-pylones.html) (top left picture)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is fairly tasteful, but in general I dislike making things look other than what they are. It's _so_ easy to get wrong and become kitsch and tacky like fake candles and fireplaces and those fake palm tree cell towers they have in SoCal and Florida.

<comment><USER7> The fake tree cell towers are all over (they are saguaros in AZ and pine trees in Northern California). I don't think they're meant to be art, but rather are meant to reduce impact on wildlife.

<comment><USER8> They're meant to reduce the impact on influential people who would oppose cell-towers in certain places.

The company that invented the towers also make fake lighthouse and windmill cell towers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I 'm not sure i d like to see a perpetually electrocuted giant coming at me. They should be proposing a few more, inanimate designs. De gustibus ...

<comment><USER10> I don't know, that's got an aesthetic of its own. At the very least it would make a great metal album cover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems neat until someone has to actually climb up one.

</comment><comment><USER12> I once read that the design for the first electric pylons, when they were created in the 20s/30s, were designed by German architects from the Bauhaus school, around the time when they were experimenting with metal (tubular furniture, etc.). Gropius apparently liked pylons. However, I never found any sources to this. Anybody know?

<comment><USER12> Found it. The Milliken brothers [1], together with the architect Reginald Blomfield, designed the first standard pylon in Britain. Also see [2].

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/may/22/national...](http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/may/22/national- grid-pylons-design)

[2] [http://www.gorge.org/pylons/structure.shtml](http://www.gorge.org/pylons/structure.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Disney already did this</comment>


Tell me what you love and what you hate. Seriously. - <AUTHOR>

Things I love
startups							 memorable marketing stunts New York Mets Kanye West Rap people who speak their mind people who genuinely do what they love Internet Finding way to make money for myself and others
Things I hate
Boring corporations wasting money on boring, expensive ads New York Yankees Small talk Superficial people College and the fallacy of a degree = only way to succeed "Impressing" people with embellished credentials Resumes
Now tell me what you love and what you hate. Then absorb what you wrote, assess your current situation, and MAKE IT BETTER. Do what you love, no matter what. Don't build a business because it's cool, but don't not build a business because you're afraid, or it takes too much work, or you don't know what to do, or you're not "qualified". Fuck all of that. Just do what you want to do. <comment><AUTHOR> I probably should have separated all of that with commas. But I didn't. And that's ok. I guess I don't like to use commas.

<comment><USER2> I added commas for you :)

Things I love

startups, memorable marketing, stunts, New York, Mets Kanye, West Rap, people who speak, their mind people who genuinely do what, they love Internet, Finding way, to make money, for myself, and others

Things I hate

Boring, corporations wasting, money on boring, expensive ads New York, Yankees, Small, talk Superficial, people College, and the fallacy, of a degree = only way to succeed "Impressing" people with embellished credentials Resumes

Now tell me what you love and what you hate. Then absorb what you wrote, assess your current situation, and MAKE IT BETTER. Do what you love, no matter what. Don't build a business because it's cool, but don't not build a business because you're afraid, or it takes too much work, or you don't know what to do, or you're not "qualified". Fuck all of that. Just do what you want to do.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to best motivate website agency? - <AUTHOR> I am having the hardest time to get the agency and programmers to stay on top of and on schedule with our website build. We are happy with some things they are delivering but are finding it very hard to keep them on task and on time. Do you have any tricks or tips that have worked for you in motivating an agency or developer that might be a creative approach we could take to nurture this relationship and get things back on track? Please share your experience or ideas. <comment><USER2> Gamification / token economies have been studied in scenarios such as this.

Things to seriously consider: Do you want them to be motivated by personal gain or be motivated by passion? Which employees are currently motivated by personal gain and which are currently motivated by passion? Which projects might require extra consideration to be considered motivating and which projects might be worked on for free?

[https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/GoAtlassian/the- extraordin...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/GoAtlassian/the- extraordinarily-motivated-team-gamification-and-the-atlassian-tools-daniel- green)

[https://accessibleaba.com/blog/token- economy](https://accessibleaba.com/blog/token-economy)

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C50&q=tok...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C50&q=token+economy+task+motivation&btnG=)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing these insights. Gamification is an interesting suggestion I had not even thought about. In our situation we are having a hard time since money and integrity are not motivators so far.

<comment><USER2> You're welcome.

Sounds like fun might be the go-to motivator then. Try finding ways to provide fun at the end of every task or sprint.

<comment><USER2> A random sprint bonus check every now and again wouldn't hurt, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This should have Ask HN: in the title

<comment><AUTHOR> Still getting used to HN, thanks for the heads up. Is that protocol or just how the users differentiate posts?

<comment><USER2> It lets your post appear on [https://news.ycombinator.com/ask](https://news.ycombinator.com/ask)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody here uses an iPad Pro as a personal device? - <AUTHOR> Fellow hackers, I am thinking of buying an used ipad pro to replace my scattered handwritten notes and hopes of using them as a portable device that I can use for meetings and discussions where I dont need to actively code.<p>Anybody here use IPad Pro (wih Apple Pencil) in any good usecases? <comment><USER2> I have tried -- really tried -- to replace a laptop with an iPad Pro. The big one, with a keyboard and pencil.

Failure. I am one of three people I have seen this happen to. A MBP is vastly more capable.

When I see iPad sales continue to slide, I don't wonder why. It is not all that useful.

I'm a tax lawyer so my needs are modest. I'm no power user. But spreadsheets, omnigraffle, Scrivener, etc are all better on a Mac. Multiple windows are a necessity.

The people I have seen who evangelize the iPad Pro as a primary device (macstories.net, brooksreview.net) seem to put far more effort into bending their lives to the tool. I'd rather get shit done.

</comment><comment><USER3> The good use cases are:

\- drawing (painting),

\- manual (hand-written) note taking and sketching.

\- I like Omnigraffle on it, too, and other vectorial drawing.

\- musical composition both partition editing (with the pencil), and synthesizer/sequencers programming. Also, there's a Logic Pro iOS annex but I've not tried it yet.

\- and of course, classical tablet media consumption and social, with the added value of multi-tasking.

However, I feel that currently applications don't exploit fully the ergonomic potential of tablets and of the pencil. But as a programmer, you should be able to write applications matching your needs and expectations, and notably, integrating an application with user interface parts on both the tablet and the desktop.</comment>


Fiction: The Time Rift of 2100: How We Lost the Future – And Gained the Past - <AUTHOR> https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=49308245 <comment><AUTHOR> A whimsical story inspired by IoT, NTP, crypto, grandular chipset technology on ever-smaller scales, and a glitch. Against a backdrop of society of increasingly rare engineers and hypothetical technology for easy 'cloning' of prototypes and other devices whose workings are no longer understood. At the time I was struggling with Bluetooth devices that disconnected constantly and refused to re-pair, which colored my optimism for the future.</comment>


Intelligent intelligence – Just how good are government analysts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21607765-just-how-good-are-government-analysts-intelligent-intelligence <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, there is no method that goes untested for forecasting. The CIA's Sherman Kent school is a treasure trove of analytical methods, techniques and processes that have been studied and implemented over the decades. A lot of the research has been put online for free [1].

As the article states, nobody outside of the business will ever hear about 99.9% of successful intelligence work done, and 90% of the people inside won't hear about it either. So unless you are directly involved in analysis, colletions or operations, it's impossible to get a good feel for efficacy.

[1][https://www.cia.gov/library/kent-center-occasional- papers](https://www.cia.gov/library/kent-center-occasional-papers)

<comment><USER3> Let me try out my media spin skills on that. ;)

"Due to a shocking lack of transparency and accountability, we can't even tell if CIA analysts are doing their job. It would appear that up to 90% of analysts collect a paycheck without producing any measurable output."

<comment><USER2> Ha, while tongue in cheek, that is something that is heard a lot _within_ agencies.

So much so that over the years significant layoffs happen and programs get cut when higher ups in agencies don't have a proper understanding of some of their organization's capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone who is interested in this topic, Dr. Tetlock just released a new book about it ([http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-The-Art-Science- Predi...](http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-The-Art-Science- Prediction/dp/0804136696)).

We're also hosting a public forecasting tournament for him and his team that focuses on geo-political forecasting: [https://www.gjopen.com/](https://www.gjopen.com/)

<comment><USER5> I'm about half-way through the book. Very easy, enjoyable read. Left wondering why some of these Amazon reviews try to make it sound as if it's quite academically/technically rigorous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The more famous an analyst is, the more likely he is to be confident in his abilities, and the less likely to second-guess himself, to analyze his analysis. Those analysts who must defend their work to superiors do a better job.

The same thing seems to happen in other lines of work - when an engineer is accountable to code review, he might do better. When an author is subject to the will of an editor, his work is ultimately achieved faster, and with better quality; witness George RR Martin's speed on the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire versus the glacial pace of the last two.

<comment><USER7> Your last sentence has me doubting: I think that 'faster and better' is potentially true in measurable fields with reasonably objective criteria for success (writing code is one), but it strikes me as untrue in the arts, especially regarding experimental work, which is often all about defying the norms and expectations a reviewer is in place to enforce.

<comment><USER8> If your argument was correct, we'd see authors make their best work later in their career, when they can ignore editors and publishers, because their name alone will carry their work.

I haven't done a big study in this, but it seems to me that early works are, on average, better than works made after artists have become famous. If anything, they become complacent. It's not just GRR Martin: Look at the Harry Potter series, for instance. In general, the commmercial success makes things worse.

<comment><USER9> An alternative explanation is that famous artists struggle to replicate their initial success because it often required a large amount of luck.

<comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean)

Authors often do get noticeably worse after becoming famous, though. Take the reasonably well-known example of Robert Jordan, who wrote a series of 5 great books followed by 5 lackluster books. It's hard to say he just got lucky five times in a row.

And you can look at the same question another way by reading self-published (therefore, unedited) books -- I used to be quite open to reading those; bitter experience has taught me not to bother.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > they were underselling themselves, tending to err more than necessary on the > side of uncertainty

That's not how it works. If you consistently misreport your calibration, you're still miscalibrated. Consumers of the intelligence would (should) notice the miscalibration and correct for it, regardless of direction.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very Interesting, though I still wonder if intelligence agencies can out perform betting markets (at least on questions with enough interest to be able to generate a liquid price).

<comment><USER4> There was an article in NPR a while back about the Good Judgment Project (which was run by Dr. Tetlock - mentioned in the article). In some cases, betting/prediction markets (& other similar tools) were beating intelligence analysts - [http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so- you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent)

<comment><USER13> I participated in GJP for a couple seasons. Honestly, I didn't do that well.

But I was approaching it very differently than I would if it was my job. Since the system that was set up gave high rewards to unpopular predictions, I just gambled on the few most unpopular that had at least some shot at reversing. It wasn't the smartest approach, but it was the most fun. If I was doing it for real, obviously I'd go a different way.

The people who did best, at least from what I saw, tended to ride waves of popularity on the more active questions, buying low and selling high.

What I did was like betting on a few biotech startups, what the best scorers did was like riding waves of the market leading stocks.

In the end, I'm not that sure it had much to do with actual prediction of events. Then again, neither did my approach. I guess I'm not sold on the version of prediction markets they were using.

<comment><USER4> Kinda depends on which platform you were on (GJP used several). Some were prediction markets while some were opinion pools, both of which are scored/rewarded differently.

Our company (Cultivate Labs) recently acquired Inkling Markets (a very early YC company that built prediction market software) and have been building a new version of the PM platform, which will hopefully address some of the risk/reward quirks.

If you're interested in this stuff, you might be interested in the two topical PM sites we're launching: -[https://sportscast.cultivateforecasts.com/](https://sportscast.cultivateforecasts.com/) (obviously focused on sports) -[https://alphacast.cultivateforecasts.com/](https://alphacast.cultivateforecasts.com/) (officially launching later this week, focused on global finance, politics, & tech).

<comment><USER13> Ah! I didn't know Inkling was a YC company. Interesting.

I'll definitely check out your new sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Adam Curtis' article on the competency of these people is entertaining and contains some really quite disturbing information about the incompetency of some professionals in this field.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460)

I don't always agree with Curtis, but his articles and documentaries are always worth the time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Intelligence "works" in the same sense that torture does: to further the unstated private interest of whoever hired the intelligence and torture agencies. If we're interested in the truth rather than The Truth, we can't trust non-public sources that have repeatedly failed in public ways.

<comment><USER6> I would encourage you to read the article. While I am inclined to agree with your sentiment, the article presents a study that actually deals with the concrete effectiveness of intelligence analysts.

<comment><USER15> Yeah I read the article; it wasn't very long. Either the authors of the study are "insiders" with clearances, they have seen only redacted material, or (most likely) both of those are true. All of those conditions ask me to believe non-public sources. I won't do that.

[EDIT: I hesitate to join the ranks of those who complain about shitty-but- common HN habits, but assuming for no reason that anyone didn't read TFA seems nearly as common as it is shitty.]</comment></comment></comment>