Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam - <AUTHOR> http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam <comment><USER2> The use of the word "scam" is really inaccurate based on the rest of the post. He agrees that the demo is real, and calls it a scam since others are working on similar things and they are trying to get funding. Neither others working on the same thing nor trying to get funding make something a scam. It would be a scam if they weren't really rendering what they say they are in real time, but Notch doesn't claim that.

<comment><USER3> He calls it a scam because they're making hyperbolic claims, very carefully ignoring any mention of any of the drawbacks to this technology, and pretending that it's all brand new technology when it's actually been done before. And they're doing this to make money via investors.

It would be _fake_ if they weren't rendering it in real time. He didn't call it fake. He called it a scam.

<comment><USER4> The ridiculous used car salesman type pitch in the demo videos certainly doesn't help. They're made with the same sort of breathless breath-through narrative you hear in free energy and perpetual motion machine demos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am blown away by the number of people on HN and elsewhere who are posting about "how they must be doing it" and then calling it unimpressive or a technical dead end.

Reading the blog post, I now know how Notch would approach building such a thing, and that he thinks his approach wouldn't really work. I still have no idea how Euclidean's implementation actually works and neither does anyone else who I've seen comment on their demo video.

<comment><USER6> If Euclideon wants us to believe they've invented something unique and ground breaking then the onus is on them to at least show us something that can't already be done with existing technology, if not explain how it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The reddit thread [http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j6sr1/a_simple_and_e...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j6sr1/a_simple_and_efficient_explanation_of_the/) has a bunch of good comments that outline why Notch isn't really in a position to post stuff like this.

<comment><USER8> Anyone who's watched that demo has noticed exactly what he said, that their demo is basically a 2D tilemap of a few repeated 3D objects, most likely to make the memory requirements of storing voxels at that level of detail feasible.

<comment><USER9> If I recall in the demo, they kept on referring to procedural generation, and so perhaps they have a few tricks up their sleeve for generating content (trees being an obvious example) that would be varied yet take up little memory.

<comment><USER10> Procedurally generated assets take very little _storage_. They still take just as much memory to actually put into the scene graph and render.

<comment><USER11> Not with ray casting of sparse voxel octrees, which is probably what they're doing. Depending on how the procedural generation work, you only need to generate that which you render.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the unlimited detail refers to rendering speed, not memory requirements. The data has to be redundant to fit in memory. He also claims it runs on a laptop without GPU. So it can't be just octree or any other regular acceleration structure. So if it isn't scam, it's something new.

From the author (old post on Beyond3D): "firstly the system isn't ray tracing at all or anything like ray tracing. Ray tracing uses up lots of nasty multiplication and divide operators and so isn't very fast or friendly. Unlimited Detail is a sorting algorithm that retrieves only the 3d atoms (I wont say voxels any more it seems that word doesn't have the prestige in the games industry that it enjoys in medicine and the sciences) that are needed, exactly one for each pixel on the screen, it displays them using a very different procedure from individual 3d to 2d conversion, instead we use a mass 3d to 2d conversion that shares the common elements of the 2d positions of all the dots combined. And so we get lots of geometry and lots of speed, speed isn't fantastic yet compared to hardware, but its very good for a software application that's not written for dual core. We get about 24-30 fps 1024*768 for that demo of the pyramids of monsters. The media is hyping up the death of polygons but really that's just not practical, this will probably be released as "backgrounds only" for the next few years, until we have made a lot more tools to work with."

<comment><USER13> I'm fairly certain that "sorting to find the one atom for each pixel on the screen" is exactly the definition of raytracing.

<comment><USER14> I agree with what I think your unstated point is (namely this is basically raytracing). I think the detail here is that this is essentially a sorting/data-organisational solution rather than a geometrically calculated solution. Ray tracing generally takes into account more than one atom (often at complex geometric angles to the directly visible surface) to create a pixel. This claims not to (but to look really good I would have thought it will eventually have to).

So yes. This is a kind of raytracing but I think that the implementation is radically different to the commonly used raytracing implementaions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The guy behind Atomontage has stated that he's got his engine averaging less than one _bit_ per voxel (he estimates 753 bits or less per 1000 voxels)[1] by applying a variety of compression mechanisms[2], so at least that part of Notch's assessment can be disregarded out of hand.

EDIT: Taking a step back, remember that with an octree, contiguous areas require less tree depth to fully describe them, so open empty space (sky) and consistently filled space (uniform material underground) require much less data. This of course creates practical limitations in addition to the claimed maximums of what the engine can achieve (so art budgets aren't going anywhere anytime soon) but I think calling it a "scam" is a bit much.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE>

[2] <http://www.atomontage.com/?id=tech_overv>

<comment><USER16> Fine. Assume it's one bit per voxel.

512 petabits = 2 petabytes.

So _only_ 2 petabytes of data. I'd like to see the server that processed those 2 petabytes.

Notch also points out that even still, 8m is quite a small height. Take it to 16m and now you need 4 petabytes of space.

<comment><USER17> Nope, more like 2 petabytes plus 1 bit. Because almost all of that new top 8m is the same atom (empty air), if they are using an octree to store the voxels, then it would take 1 extra bit to store an empty top 8m. Obviously if there are things in the top 8m, it will take more space, but only for the things that are there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is the product considered worthless if it can't do animation yet? The demo clearly walked through examples of inanimate artifacts that are currently rendered as bitmaps on big polygons that could be greatly improved, today, by the technology in the demo. Backgrounds, cityscapes in the distance, the trunk of a tree, etc.

The argument that it's a scam if it can't render grass blowing in the wind is ridiculous.

<comment><USER18> Because they are claiming an increase of detail by a factor of 100,000, while the demo barely showed anything close to a detail increase by a factor of 1.

Trees & rocks are often animated in modern games, so animation is important. Additionally there is no point using a heavy duty voxel engine to render background landscapes that no one will visit in the game, especially if it's going to take gobs of RAM & CPU time to do it.

Hardware tessellation can already greatly increase surface detail, is already available in modern hardware & has better looking demos.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G9anRoYGko>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT_45RFFTx8>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HWZKGZcKoA>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The big unanswered question here is can they dynamically sort their data in real time?

If they cannot they can never have movement through the environment - something that they have failed to demonstrate so far.

Dynamic animation is a similar problem but can be solved using key-frame point data (although this could severely limit the fluidity of animation and greatly increase memory usage). You cannot do this smoothly for movement (without using tiles or a combination of tiles and key-frames).

There are many cool games that could be made despite these limitations but Euclideon is promising more than this: their comparisons are with modern FPS's.

I really hope that they have solved all these issues. But if they have, why aren't they demonstrating them?

If they haven't I hope they are being more honest with their investors than they are with the general public.

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one that agrees with Notch and does think that this "unlimited detail" technology is a scam?

Euclideon is asking for money to develop "new" technology that in reality has been done before and does not have any advantages over a polygon based engine. Everything in their demos can be done (if not better) using a polygon based engine and modern GPUs.

Seriously, just watching one of the videos by Euclideon makes me feel like I'm watching late night tv advertisments. If their tech is as "ground breaking" as they claim, surely they wouldn't need to do as much convincing as they currently do in their videos.

</comment><comment><USER20> First they say it's crazy. Then they say it's impossible. Then they say it's obvious.

</comment><comment><USER21> If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is just irresponsible.

<comment><USER22> "Please note that when you buy the game, you're paying for the game as it is right now! You will also get the full version of Minecraft when it is released. Read the copyright information for more information on your purchase."

<http://www.minecraft.net/prepurchase.jsp>

It sounds like you misunderstood what you were spending your money on.

<comment><USER21> It looks like Mojang don't actually provide you with a download for the game as it is when you pay for it. So they are in violation of their own Terms of Service. Of course, the ToS is just a clumsy attempt to absolve them of liability, and does not reflect the impression they have actively cultivated on the Internet. If you are going to apply a legalistic standard to Notch you should also apply that standard to Euclideon, in which case Notch is not justified in calling it a "scam".

<comment><USER23> Here you go: <http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp>

Download away!

Man, entitled gamers are the worst.

<comment><USER21> Nope. If I buy the game, and then download it a week or two later I do not necessarily get the correct version. Furthermore, any reasonable person expects that if you are truly only purchasing some specific version then you would be able to download it into the future. You can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER23> You clearly don't know what you are talking about. If you want the version of the game when you buy it, it is clearly your own responsibility to download the game. There is no violation of the TOS, to claim otherwise is absurd to the highest degree.

<comment><USER24> The guy you're responding to clearly created a new account here just to troll.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sony's Next Gen Hand Held - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/26/sony-announces-next-generation-portable-entertainment-system/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm what gives? Sony actually allowing android games to run on their device? Am I dreaming? Or is it just their ploy to get more android developers writing for them?</comment>


What happens when a private company acquires a public company? - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hackers , I like to know What happens when a private company acquires a public company ? <comment><USER2> I can share some anecdotes from a family member who worked as a Senior Design Engineer at a semiconductor company which went from being a public company to being purchased by a private equity group.

* His stock all converted to straight cash. This resulted in a pretty large tax bill as some of it was subject to capital gains tax since he'd only acquired it a few months before the acquisition. He probably should have planned for this better.

* The company went into serious cost cutting mode. Much of the R&D was moved offshore into Design Centers in Israel and India. This put US-based engineers like himself into a fairly miserable position and he left soon after. I suspect most of this was done to improve the balance sheet and make it attractive for another public company to buy it, which still hasn't happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your question is a bit vague.

Do you know what happens when a public company acquires another public company?

Do you know what happens when a private company acquires another private company?

What aspects of a private company acquiring a public company are you curious about?</comment>


Students Pay Services to Obtain Internships - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/business/09intern.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss <comment><USER3> [http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid- intern...](http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-internships)

<comment><USER4> Hahaha! Nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand this phenomenon. What company wouldn't take someone who was willing to work for free? Strictly economically, working for $0 should mean that you can choose any company on the planet to work for, as they all have something [marginal] to gain, and nothing to lose (on the provisio that they can't _rely_ on you, because that would potentially cost them money should you fail to be reliable. They'd have to treat you as a truly "redundant" subsystem to their machine, giving you tasks that they've already assigned others to complete in the hope that you'll do them better/faster/whatever-er.)

<comment><USER6> It costs time to come up with a project, for training, a coach, etc. In general, internships are a good idea (they give both sides a trial run), but some companies may not want to spend the resources on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice thing about compsci is that almost all the internships are paid.

<comment><USER8> Right on. I go to a large state school that a huge number liberal arts students. I've never met any students in the sciences (esp. not computer science) who have held unpaid internships (unless you count research for credit), but I know several students in the liberal arts who are doing internships completely unpaid. I even knew one who was living in London for the summer out of his (or maybe his parents') own pocket! I can't fathom the idea. Maybe when you have to /pay someone else/ to let you work you should take the hint that the market doesn't value the labor you are doing. But hey, we are talking about liberal arts majors here! (I kid, I kid...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems strange to me that in a recession, companies would want less interns (unpaid or paid), not more.

Yes, using interns effectively - especially in a large organisation - <USER2> considerable management resources. As well, their limited tenure (a summer, say) gives them very limited value as a useful, specialised IT employee's ramp-up period to break even can be longer than that.

Still, there are lots of smaller companies that use interns to build entire products over summers; I think the one that's most well-known here is probably Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. And I've run into several web-oriented companies that do the same here in Atlanta.

I would think they'd be foaming at the mouth for a chance to get unpaid, or very low-paid slave labour with a rather high skills to cost ratio.

Now, of course, I have little reference frame for the usefulness of interns outside of the IT profession. But, surely there has to be a correlate to this opportunity in other directions of commercial endeavour as well?</comment>


Git Cheatsheet (Visualization) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html

<comment><USER2> <http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/09/git-cheat-sheet.html> is the classic

<comment><USER3> I prefer this one as well because you can print it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just knowing this exists helps a lot. Haven't had time to go to git school.

Its great to visual everything but having a gui that enabled you to access all the commands would be even more powerful for non-brainiacs like myself.

I use Subversion a lot on the Mac and have done many subtle things with the available commands but there's often a learning curve to make sure I don't shoot myself in the foot.

Back on Windows there was TortoiseSVN that was a breeze to set up and use. And I know there are similar things for the Mac but haven't find one that was a nobrainer like TortoiseSVN. Its merge editor was pretty good too if memory serves.

</comment><comment><USER5> My favorite Git "cheatsheet" is easygit (eg), a Perl "porcelain" wrapper for git. It's training wheels wrapper for git. You use real git commands, so you don't need to unlearn anything when graduating to git. easygit has safer defaults and extra sanity checks (like forgetting to stage modified files). The help messages are more verbose and use more consistent terminology than git's man pages. For example, easygit always uses the term "staged" instead of "index/staged/add/hard/soft/mixed/cached/HEAD/etc."

<http://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a seriously awesome reference to have around! You should definitely consider wrapping it up in a chrome webstore app or something!

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice visualization. The other day I was looking for a all-in-one visualization like this. It would be for beginners so it wouldn't include all of the more advanced commands/flags like "add --interactive". I couldn't find a decent one so I created my own.

<http://i.imgur.com/EyrrR.png>

Google docs doesn't include a decent curved line/connector feature so I need to re-make it in Inkscape or something.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice, I like the interactivity. I realize it would make the chart really cluttered, but I wish there was a button to show all of the workflow arrows at once.

<comment><USER9> Agree. If all the arrows could be presented in a way so that they at least wouldn't overlap, the sheet would be printable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice, but can you normalize the height of the command-name strips? They can range from 17-19px (before +4 padding) in height, depending on the local font setup I suspect. Cumulatively that's enough of a difference so that in an unusual case (when they're all 19 tall, as they can be in a gentoo+chromium setup), the Local Repository column of strips extends down and obscures the description.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is absolutely the best one. It is easy to understand the relationship between the various repositories. Bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very nicely done, good visualization and organization of command reference.

It suggests using a 'git pull' for pulling changes from the remote repo. 'git pull' automaticaly merges changes to the current branch thus not giving the user an option to review the changes that are going to happen in the current branch. I think the better way to fetch changes from remote repo is 'git fetch' followed by 'git merge'. Also see: <http://longair.net/blog/2009/04/16/git-fetch-and-merge/>

</comment><comment><USER13> I think this could be really good as a way to explain Git to folks who maybe haven't had the exposure to DVCS or Git itself. Version control is surprisingly hard for some people to wrap their heads around. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is so good and useful and original that I recommend you try to get it linked to from the main Git website, and from GitHub. Great job! It really helps visualize what all the commands do, what they effect.

</comment><comment><USER15> really well done. i wish i had this when i first learned git.

</comment><comment><USER16> I really like the ndpsoftware.com home page. Very cool...

</comment><comment><USER17> I just see some colored blocks that change color on click.

</comment><comment><USER18> bazaar works well for me.

</comment><comment><USER19> thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER20> Please, replace courier and leave monospaced, I have my own preferences on fonts, and Im sure everybody else does too.

%s/courier,//g

<comment><USER21> Give him a break. Do you ask every website on the entire internet the same thing? _"PG, please replace the font of comments on HN from Verdana to DiscussionForumComment, I have my own preferences on fonts, and I'm sure everybody else does too. "_

It's not exactly a massive amount of code being displayed. The font might have been chosen to express a certain style of the designer. Changing the font to default on my system even caused the layout to break because courier new (firefox default monospace) is a lot wider than courier.

(Even though i agree that Courier isn't the best choice for code/console/monospace, neither in terms of design or readability)</comment></comment>


The Ouija Toggle - <AUTHOR> http://www.helloerik.com/the-ouija-toggle

<comment><USER2> Interesting to read that there is a patent on the Ouija, issued in 1916. Luckily it is a only a patent on the trademark :-)

<comment><USER3> The "spiritual communication and summoning device" toggle!</comment></comment>


Full-packet-capture society - and how to avoid it - <AUTHOR> http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2014/01/full-packet-capture-society-and-how-to.html

<comment><USER2> Personally, I _love_ the idea of a "person-hour" surveillance storage budget, but I fear there is no path from here to there. For such a scheme to arise in a representative democracy, the average voter would have to be much more sophisticated than the average American is today. Perhaps when we Gen-Xers are old and gray, USA as a whole will be that sophisticated.</comment>


Portability and Interoperability - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/portability-and-interoperability/ <comment><USER2> > This does, in a privacy context, make perfect sense. At the same time, it is > ground zero for how privacy regulation can often be at odds with encouraging > competition

No it's not.

According to the article: Facebook could argue that letting me export who I'm friends with (the "social graph") would run afoul of privacy regulations, because that data belongs to my friends, not me.

But if that's the case, why was I able to give this data to Facebook to begin with? It wasn't mine to give, right?

I can completely understand the logic that my contact list shouldn't "belong" to me. However, if we as a society want to proceed down that road, _a service like Facebook can never exist_.

As long as Facebook exists, my contact list is clearly my property, and I should be able to export it.

<comment><USER3> Is it your property, or is it Facebook's property? Facebook clearly has control of your friend list on their network. Perhaps you only have access to the data Facebook has without actually owning it.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's debatable now whose property it is.

But I'd imagine many people think it's their own property that they allow Facebook to hold and control on their behalf. The users still retain all the ownership rights associated with that contact list... or so they hope.

It's like buying stocks. Often times a brokerage will hold ownership of stocks that clients buy, on behalf of the client. Doesn't mean the brokerage can do just whatever it wants with my stocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Talk is cheap. If they care about interoperability, why are they not using federated instant messaging services? Theirs are completely walled.</comment>


Obama Is "Failure" At Google, "Miserable Failure" At Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-obama-is-a-miserable-failure-16286

<comment><USER2> Sorry, but this is such non-news that I can't believe someone took the time to write all this up.

The whole SEO "failure" thing around Bush was kind of humorous, but it mostly underscored the way that search engine results can be (relatively) easily manipulated if you just put a little bit of coordination into it.

Anyone with a tiny fraction of self-confidence would not be the least bit bothered by this.

I would also suspect the whitehouse.gov page is going to undergo several changes and updates, and this issue will manage to correct itself.

<comment><USER3> I don't know... I found it interesting purely from a "wow, that googlebomb still works" POV.

<comment><USER4> I agree, we should be discussing why this is still possible and the failure of the search giants to evolve their rank approach.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps they want to be gamed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we leave these inane issues to reddit?

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting asymmetry. Suggests Google is harder to spam than Yahoo.

<comment><USER8> surely google is easier to spam?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who cares? It was just a goof in the first place.</comment>


Interaction Rituals and the New Electronic Media (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2011/01/interaction-rituals-and-new-electronic.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the pointer to "interaction ritual" theory, which could be related with:

• Time-oriented Art — poetry, music, film, dance, theatre

• John Lilly's research with dolphins, leading to the "Lilly Wave" carrier frequency

• Haptic technology, e.g. Apple Watch mediated pulse sensor/actuator

• Resonance from wind stimulus, e.g. Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggxeuFDaDU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggxeuFDaDU)</comment>


Spike Nation: Synthetic marijuana has emergency responders scrambling - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/magazine/spike-nation.html

<comment><USER2> why do they always call it "synthetic marijuana"? its just another manufactured drug, it wasn't meant to duplicate the effects of cannabis, it was meant to get you high and still be able to pass drug tests.</comment>


William F. Buckley, Jr., Changed His Mind on Civil Rights (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/13/william-f-buckley-civil-rights-215129 <comment><USER2> Thanks Op for posting. I enjoyed the article. As of 15 years ago I used to be a republican voter but the party has become so distorted in its impulses it has become rancid. Even the most basic planks like (agreeing in several cases it was more talk than do) of conservative fiscal conservatorship has given away to institutional levels of perpetual debt. Even the talk is gone now. Too many sit on their hands and brains preferring to look the other way.</comment>


Nobody Cares What Michael Arrington And AOL Does - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonmendelson/2011/09/02/nobody-cares-about-what-michael-arrington-and-aol-does/

<comment><USER2> Harsher than it probably should be but it's hard to dispute his points. The only unfair criticism that I see is the GigaOm thing (I don't disagree with his point but GigaOm's basically a Freemium business model with the consulting acting as the top tier plan).

But the truth is the standards are low because the stakes are also pretty low. When we talk about startups that TechCrunch and others cover we're generally talking about consumer products. Cool things you can do with photos or a niffty new Twitter client.

This isn't War or Famine. No one in the Valley can launch a nuclear bomb. So if a writer has the talent it has become common place to over look indiscretions and honestly I'm not sure I have a problem with that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Completely off topic, but

      > Their are also marketers who [...], and their are celebrity investors who [...]

the OP should have a look at <http://www.theretheyretheir.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I like Arrington. Because he happens to be an ass like moì. I like

</comment><comment><USER5> Red herring article. And C-Net didn't make up the story.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nobody cares what Brandon Mendelson thinks</comment>


Minimal Project Management - <AUTHOR> https://hiltmon.com/blog/2016/03/05/minimal-project-management/ <comment><USER2> "That is, again, why I hired them."

That's easy to say when there's only five. The problem is, that doesn't scale. At some point you need to proactively implement a culture (and M&Ps) that does scale. If you wait til you need then you run the risk of having waited too long. Veteran team members will be put off, new hires will be updating their CV.

<comment><USER3> I've experienced the office of about 6 people (mentioned in a post on Epic Games) as an ideal environment for software development, better than cube farms or single person offices.

Maybe instead of struggling to apply management concepts to the development process, companies would achieve more by breaking things up into 6-person sized teams.

<comment><USER4> > Maybe instead of struggling to apply management concepts to the development > process, companies would achieve more by breaking things up into 6-person > sized teams.

How do you coordinate the six person teams, prevent them from ending up in contention, etc.?

<comment><USER5> user stories and delegation

<comment><USER4> Ah, the innocence that thinks that is enough.

<comment><USER5> The title is minimal :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this article satire? (some quotes)

> They do not need to be micro- or even macro-level managed

> Developers with nothing to do become disruptive or lazy.

> With all this advice and help, I can easily determine what work needs to be > done first, what next, what can remain on-hold, and can assign work to the > team.

> Once the Statement of Work is completed (and reviewed, filed and approved by > me), the person starts executing the tasks and we move into a work and > review phase.

If this isn't micro management, what is? Where is the team empowered to improve their process? Where is tech debt addressed? Is estimation really so easy? Ever heard of pair programming?

Note to myself: never work for that person.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't judge too much, but it's a shame the article is 3 years old. I would have loved to hear what he has learnt/adjusted in the meantime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Make sure to issue a summary email after each weekly meeting, in a broad circulation and including multiple stakeholders that should be kept informed. Have all owner/action/date triplets clearly marked. Don't be shy on the formatting, important points need to pop out clearly. Bullet points are your friends.

It's great for the team to use as their own reference, it keeps outside people generally informed and it's an immediate springboard for next week's discussion.

</comment><comment><USER9> My secrets of project mgmt

\- write down and agree what we intend to do \- (auto)record what I actually did \- review why there is such a big gap \- fix something, keep processing

</comment><comment><USER10> Good write up. I manage multiple ongoing projects and my company is growing a team under me. This is a great approach that I will put in my toolbox.</comment>


The Best Web Browser on the Planet  - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2243727/ <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Chrome so far, but I'm not quite sure Google's "everything is saved forever" approach is a good idea on a browser. I keep ending up with incriminating autocompletions, since there is no way to set it to not save your history.</comment>


DigitalOcean droplet admin app for iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/droplet-adminstrator/id957188519

<comment><USER2> Apparently this is not official.

Also the only action is "Power Cycle" ?

<comment><USER3> No, it's not official. This is only the first version and Power Cycle is the feature I wanted to do most while I was out and about. I plan to add more very soon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hint: DO has a website that you can actually open on an iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are a whole bunch of apps that do exactly what this one does and more, and many of them are free.

<comment><USER6> Yup, I'm using DigitalOcean Manager, it's free and works great:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digitalocean- manager/id63312...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digitalocean- manager/id633128302?mt=8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> $3 for a "Power Cycle" app? Why not just bookmark the dashboard (which is already good enough on the iPhone)?</comment>


EFF Says Google Chromebooks Are Still Spying on Students - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/eff-says-google-chromebooks-are-still-spying-on-students-515015.shtml <comment><USER2> Direct link to EFF report: [https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and- student-pri...](https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student- privacy)

<comment> joatmon-snoo Thanks - this is way more informative than the article.

Google certainly should be doing more to combat this issue, but the crux of this issue seems to be that there are a lot of intermediaries and consumers (teachers and schools) in the ed-tech industry with a very clear obligation to do more about this but aren't.

<comment><USER3> Well hold on a minute. Part of the problem here was that when Google Apps for Education (GAFE) was introduced, privacy and security were touted as huge selling points. For years IT administrators in Education were told that GAFE was different, GAFE was a service for schools, it respected FERPA guidelines, it was isolated from the rest of Google's ad services.

But years afterwards, once everyone had migrated over, integrated everything with Google, then they it broke that Google had lied. And it's not like people sat on their hands either - there was a lot of anger and many complaints. But that only goes so far when you have an Education IT budget - migrations take a lot of tim and a lot of effort, and a lot of money.

The schools got conned hard, and it's not something you can just decide to switch on a dime either. Some Ed-Tech folk certainly carry the blame for evangelizing for Google, but the Education IT Administrators need to be given a break here when everything led them to believe Google's advertising.

<comment><USER4> You're expecting me to believe a company that relies on soaking up personal data, and tried to pull the "We will do no evil", is stiĺl at it? Say it ain't so.

<comment><USER3> Well, yes. We expect that when a company presents a legal contract promising not to do something and that service X doesn't do action Y that it's truthful. If they want to enter into it to intentionally violate said contract, it just seems absolutely bizarre that they'd even present a contract in the first place.

I get the feeling that this wasn't some insidious conspiracy from Google to get us hooked on GAFE so much as internal forces at Google not talking to one another and data-collection ultimately winning out. I find that the more complicated explanation is Google decided to do this despite the risk of fighting fines and additional regulations from the government as well as potentially thousands of institutions, and potentially tens of thousands of individuals led to believe the terms and conditions of the contract were different than what Google presented, as opposed to Google made GAFE and presented it at face value, and other forces within Google decided to go ahead with the data collection anyways. Right hand not knowing what the left is doing just seems more plausible and reasonable.

I don't know either way, and cynicism can be healthy, but this just feels like cynicism for the sake of cynicism. Yes, Google is a data blackhole, and it's an unscrupulous company, but this would just be absolute incompetency on their part. I'm not denying the possibility, but that's a big pill to swallow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember being part of a School District who was GAFE for 5 years before Google rolled out its "Google Vault" feature. You enable it to give yourself access to email/google docs ediscovery for FOI requests.

Creepy thing is, when we turned it on we could see deleted emails including spam, everything imaginable that had been sent, received, or created for the entire previous years we had been a GAFE School. Before Google Vault even existed. We don't have control over the collected data, these companies just give us the illusion of it by letting us disable our own access to it.

Don't want Google now notification for in store deals on your android phone? Ok, you can disable it...but Google is still tracking what stores you go to when and where.

A big thing I've seen that keeps schools in GAFE is affordability and ease of management. IT department workloads plummet, so no arguments from them. Also imagine the nightmare of trying to export all of your google docs to another platform somehow.

I don't like it and it isn't right, but before this can change I think we'll need good open cloud alternatives with easy migration paths. As far as chromebook hardware is concerned, we'll need another viable cheap alternative that respects privacy.

<comment><USER6> CopperheadOS is a mobile OS based on Android (AOSP, specifically) which doesn't ship any closed-source code and takes your security and privacy seriously.

I'm nothing to do with the project, I just like it.

[https://copperhead.co/android/](https://copperhead.co/android/)

</comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux The privacy implications of using ChromeOS has always been horrible. You cannot use this OS to its fullest extent without signing in. And once you are signed in, it tracks everything you do online. Even printing to your desktop printer routes the print request through the cloud first (where its recorded by Google) and then back down to your computer. (Google doesn't look at your documents when you print but they still know when you print and how often. They also record the print job title, which can reveal a lot about what you're printing, and the printer you have.[1])

Imagine if every time you saved a document in Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, a record of when you saved, and how much time you spent in the app was saved by Microsoft or Apple. Now imagine every app you run in the OS tracks your activity to some degree, and every website is tracked too. Imagine this wasn't anonymous either because you'd signed into the OS and your account has your name, your gender, your location, your date-of-birth and even your mobile phone number. In other words, some of your most private and personal details tied to your activity in the OS.

No, this isn't a dystopian episode of Black Mirror, but real life. It's called ChromeOS and it's spread like wildfire in US schools. It should _never_ have gained a foothold in Education without stronger privacy assurances and a guarantee of no tracking of students (who don't even have any choice in the matter).

I'm just utterly baffled by the response of the tech community toward Google on the issue of privacy and data collection. There is a strong double standard.

Microsoft and Facebook are, quite rightly, criticised and scrutinised over the amount and the degree of tracking they undertake. Meanwhile, Google, who capture unimaginably huge amounts of data on users, escapes any scrutiny.

Assurances that the data is "anonymised" or aggregated are not enough. The sheer scale of the data collected, even in aggregated form, lets these companies interrogate the data in ways we simply can't imagine.

I don't blame ordinary users for not fully understanding the privacy implications and the myriad and insidious ways they are tracked. But what excuse does the tech community have for giving Google a free pass on privacy and online tracking?

[1] [https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/2541843?hl=en&r...](https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/2541843?hl=en&ref_topic=4456298)

<comment><USER7> This is typical modus operandi for Google. Ad company promises not to do its dirty analytics on students/health data/government data to get the contract, then it turns out they don't give a crap and do it anyway. Solution: don't use Google for anything, especially don't hand them contracts to handle data for large groups of people.

"Imagine if every time you saved a document in Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, a record of when you saved, and how much time you spent in the app was saved by Microsoft or Apple. Now imagine every app you run in the OS tracks your activity to some degree, and every website is tracked too."

You've just described Windows 10 telemetry. This is how low the privacy standards are for the US software giants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to work in edtech and spying on students was seen as "normal". Schools are the main source of feature requests that allow them to see everything a student is doing or has done. Worse is most SIS are very insecure and full of sql injection issues. Not to mention that they use FTP and not SFTP to transfer data.

On top of the chromebook Google has the classroom project which also pulls all roster data from a school and stores it on their servers...

</comment><comment><USER9> While I think that using Chromebooks in schools can make sense in many cases, I find it pretty bad that Google accounts are permanently tied to real identities of young kids. Schools should assign account names that are easy to remember but in no way use real names.</comment>


CSRF protection bypass due to Google analytics and weird server cookie parsing - <AUTHOR> https://hackerone.com/reports/14883

<comment><USER2> It might be interesting to some people that the "peculiarity" noted in some web servers is actually requested by the standard. It is noted in both the grammar and in the text (where it is described as for "future compatibility").

> cookie = "Cookie:" cookie-version 1*((";" | ",") cookie-value)

> Note: For backward compatibility, the separator in the Cookie header is > semi-colon (;) everywhere. A server should also accept comma (,) as the > separator between cookie-values for future compatibility.

[https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2109.txt)

(I believe part of the issue was that MIME of headers describes how to deal with multiple headers with the same name, which is by concatenating them with commas, and that spec was the basis for the definition of HTTP headers.)

</comment><comment><USER3> If I understand it correctly, the CSRF protection bypass is just an interesting consequence of the real culprit, which is an injection vulnerability in the data serialization format of the GA __utmz cookie.

</comment><comment> Syrup-tan I wonder which party should pay the bounty in this case. He seems to have reported it to Twitter, however wouldn't it be Google's responsibility to fix this?

Seeing as how it's a combination of an issue in the web server parsing cookies, and the client setting malicious cookies, I'm not sure which party should be responsible for the bounty.

<comment><USER4> They should both pay a bounty. But if you had to assign blame only one place it would be ECMAscript. Setting the value of an unintended cookie should not be so easy to do by accident.

<comment><USER5> Nitpick: strictly speaking setting cookies is not part of ECMAScript, it's part of the DOM api.

<comment><USER6> Cookies are, without a doubt, the worst "API" in the DOM. Here's the _entire_ API: document.cookie

That's it. That one property.To add cookies, modified cookies, delete cookies, whatever, you do an assignment. To read all the cookies, you do a read.

That's it. That's the API.

<comment><USER7> This is correct, and it's a source of madness.

One more thing: Cookies are limited to 4KB total due to the HTTP/1.1 specification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You are visiting this page because we detected an unsupported browser. Your browser does not support security features that we require. We highly recommend that you update your browser. If you believe you have arrived here in error, please contact us. Be sure to include your browser version.

<comment><USER9> What browser are you using?

<comment><USER10> Same issue here.

Google Chrome Version 42.0.2311.135 m on Windows 7 64bit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This vulnerability would appear to be mitigated by using a CSRF secret in a server-side session rather than solely cookie based.

For example, Cookie: SHA1(salt + secret), then CSRF-TOKEN header/value is taken, the salt extracted, hashed against the server-side secret and compared.

<comment><USER12> What's the advantage of still having the cookie with some value in it when we use a random token as a hidden form value plus this token being stored on the server? Your suggestion seems overly complex to me, so maybe I'm missing an attack vector that can be mitigated by throwing salts, hashing and a cookie at the issue.

<comment><USER13> There are a TON of different CSRF schemes and once you have billions of requests per day, storing and distributing each CSRF token for each user can be a large burden.

Most advanced CSRF schemes use some crypto primitives in a manner like client- side sessions work (Enc+Mac on the server, give token to user, Validate Integrity+Dec on the server when you get it back), or HMAC some user meta- data. This allows you to distribute the key and then any server with the key can validate the token without needing to know the token in advance.

I've written a blog post about a bunch of types of CSRF schemes and their pros and cons, but never published it. Is this interesting enough for me to publish?

<comment><USER12> It is. I want to finally understand why and how I can secure a _login_ form against CSRF (i.e. when I don't yet have a session for the visitor).

<comment><USER11> How we do it is a little wonky. Our web app calls GET /login which returns a CSRF cookie and an anonymous session cookie and an object that says there's no active session. The app then uses that CSRF token to POST to /login. Once the auth is successful, the anonymous session is destroyed and a new CSRF secret is generated on the authenticated session.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The comments mention this is also a problem with Django's CSRF cookie when using GA?

<comment><USER15> The default Django CSRF protection is based on a hidden field, not cookies. Thus, the default mechanism does not have this flaw.

One can always replace it with something that is vulnerable, so there are probably Django sites out there with this problem. But if you never thought deeply about it, your site is fine... What's a feature that I really love about Django, you'll see that same same phrase "if you never thought deeply about it, your site is fine" for lots and lots of security problems.

What I don't get is how is it possible to do CSRF with cookies? Aren't cookies always shared between simultaneous browsers sessions? Isn't the entire point of CSRF to avoid that?

<comment><USER16> > The default Django CSRF protection is based on a hidden field, not cookies.

This is not true. The default Django CSRF protection uses cookies for the session store[1]

> What I don't get is how is it possible to do CSRF with cookies?

The same as any other CSRF mechanism :)

1\. You provide the user a (preferably per-request vs. BREACH) token, often in a hidden form field. The field being hidden is primarily for UX reasons.

2\. You store a copy of that token in a session store. This is often a cookie due to the convenience of cookies (no server state required), but can be in a server-side store (memory, Redis, RDBMS, et. al).

3\. Upon any non-idempotent HTTP method (anything that's not GET/HEAD/OPTIONS) you compare the token in the submitted form to the value stored in the session.

The benefits are that you don't have to maintain server state. The downside is that you're transmitting your token over a channel at risk of MITM. Using authenticated cookies helps as any attempt to modify both the form value AND cookie value (i.e. so they match) should fail when you verify the MAC on form submission.

By default, Django's cookies are authenticated.

[1] [https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/middlewa...](https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/middleware/csrf.py)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So if I understand this correctly, people that use ad blockers that include the blocking of Google Analytics have been safe from this attack vector for months, while others have not, correct?

<comment><USER18> And people who use NoScript are safe from of any kind of javascript attack vectors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is hard to exploit if the CSRF token is a few characters from the cookie that identifies the user. Setting a new value for the cookie would log the user out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Due to a security risk, until further notice all corporate firewalls should be blocking Google Analytics.

<comment><USER20> A lot of sites break if Google Analytics is blocked (on purpose).

<comment><USER19> It's not that bad. I have it blocked, and it only affects a few sites. For those sites, there are alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting point of view</comment>


Quebec broke law in buying Microsoft software - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/06/03/quebec-microsoft-lawsuit.html

<comment><USER2> "... anyone who thinks replacing 10's of thousands of systems is a cakewalk is simply ignorant."

Anyone who conflates 800 workstations with tens of thousands of systems is a damn sight worse than ignorant.</comment>


How three successful startups built their product on the Bubble no-code platform - <AUTHOR> Visual programming tools like Bubble.is are becoming really powerful. There's a lot of (understandable) resistance and doubt from the coding community, but there's a lot of evidence that points to how tools like Bubble have made successful startups possible:
1. Impuesto Correcto, YC Backed - https://bit.ly/2HbhVxi
2. Sixty, YC Backed - https://bit.ly/2JbY8zt
3. Dividend Finance, 100s millions in funding - https://bit.ly/2swOVuI <comment><USER2> Same URLs without tracking/obfuscation redirects

[https://airdev.co/post/impuesto-correcto-tackles-the- univers...](https://airdev.co/post/impuesto-correcto-tackles-the-universal- pain-of-filing-taxes-1526331100099x574466958642005950)

[https://codefree.co/sixty/](https://codefree.co/sixty/)

[https://airdev.co/gallery?app=Dividend- Finance](https://airdev.co/gallery?app=Dividend-Finance)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mtmail</comment></comment>


Have you ever needed to generate a random number in code? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1012719876706840578 <comment><USER2> Have you ever needed to write a blog article and for some reason forced yourself to use Twitter to do it?</comment>


Would you bet on a duck to win a swimming contest? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jslogan.com/would-you-bet-on-a-duck-to-win-a-swimming-contest/ <comment><USER2> However, there is also the warehouse effect. If I need some small everyday item, I don't waste time looking around for a small specialized shop. I just go to the big warehouse that stocks every item I can possibly think of.

On the net, ebay and Amazon come to mind - and not because Amazon is the best vendor in selling Paris Hilton memoirs...</comment>


Governments of the world just ramped up spying on reporters - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/first_person/ft-nations-surveillance-attacks.php <comment><USER2> No date for this article? That's odd....</comment>


Europe Is About to Create a Link Tax - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160614/00545434700/europe-is-about-to-create-link-tax-time-to-speak-out-against-it.shtml <comment><USER2> Consultation ended June 15.</comment>


Announcing Image Scanning for Amazon ECR - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/announcing-image-scanning-for-amazon-ecr/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/image...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/image- scanning.html) indicates the use of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) database from the open source CoreOS Clair project</comment>


Princeton Piton Processor - <AUTHOR> http://parallel.princeton.edu/piton/# <comment><USER2> I keep telling OSS HW people to build on OpenSPARC given you have an ASIC- proven, badass design to start with. Good to see that they not only did that but put 25 cores on a 32nm node. We have Raptor trying to get OpenPOWER for a more open processor, RISC-V designs in the making for multi-core, and the RTL of a fully-open SPARC with 25-cores ready to go. We also have a need for high- performance, multi-core CPU's as our root of trust. Anyone see opportunity? ;)

Next step for any academics reading is modifying these suckers to have extensions like Watchdog[Lite] or CHERI CPU's. Dover is already doing SAFE with RISC-V. FreeBSD already runs on CHERI, though, so hardest work is done. Modify OpenSPARC & compiler backend for it as they did their BERI MIPS. Add I/O MMU & trusted bootloader. Boom! The beginning of a secure, open SOC. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's always cool when research projects show that they would work in the real world. Lots of times they are some professors pet idea and don't really go anywhere. It will be interesting to see if in a year to 18 months if anyone else is using OpenPiton.

<comment><USER4> Eh, Wentzlaff (professor behind this) co-founded Tilera. He can definitely make something others could use. I view him doing OpenPiton as an attempt to give back to researchers now that he has become a prof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not OpenSPARC T2 ?

<comment><USER6> I think it's because of these guys' strong focus on FPGAs. If you dig back on the opensparc scene a few years back, you'd find almost no materials on the T2 implemented in FPGA...

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I see some T1 related academic papers. Research on RISC-V [0] with this hyper-scale architecture would have been a better choice for PI.

[0] [https://riscv.org/](https://riscv.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can think of a lot of exciting custom silicon, so if as an Academic you get the extremely rare occasion that someone funds you a 32nm chip... why on earth would you then go and build something that all of the commercial players are also doing?

<comment><USER8> I suspect the grant was to build this chip rather than to go and have fun play times with a 32nm fab.</comment></comment>


Reddit: IAmA grad student who has tried nearly every "study"/"smart" drug - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b4duo/iama_grad_student_who_has_tried_nearly_every/ <comment><USER2> It is a bit weird that doctors are only supposed to prescribe these drugs for medical conditions and not enhancement. If the effects are beneficial and the drug is safe, why not allow healthy people to take it?

Of course, it's not hard to get a prescription if you want one. I just wish everyone didn't have to play this game of off-label prescriptions and lying to doctors.

Edit: Disclaimer: I take modafinil and I find it very useful.

<comment><USER3> Because our society has not debated the consequences of cognitive enhancement, and we are worse off for it. There are moral arguments for and against enhancement, but the way it currently is prohibited, yet tolerated (nearly everyone who really wants to can game the prescription requirement), is the worst way to handle it.

So why not allow healthy people to take it? Because it distorts the competition - not who studied the most wins, but he who enhanced himself best. If you allow some enhancement, why not others forms? What about artificial limbs for athletes? Where does enhancement stop? What about everyone then feeling pressured to enhance themselves to still be able to compete, if they want to or not?

<comment><USER2> I'd say the status quo is bad but not the worst. It would be better if cognitive-enhancing drugs were available for anyone who wanted them. It would be worse if using drugs for cognitive enhancement was illegal.

I don't think the sports analogy maps. Sports are artificial competitions and usually zero-sum. Commerce is cooperative. Intelligent individuals often benefit the less lucky. They invent new technologies that end up helping everyone.

 _If you allow some enhancement, why not others forms?_

My sentiments exactly.

 _What about artificial limbs for athletes?_

I guess that would be the Paralympics, but I don't have a problem with it. Cyborg kickboxing sounds more interesting than any modern day event.

 _Where does enhancement stop?_

Hmm... matrioshka brains I guess. Although I'm willing to compromise and limit people to Jupiter brains.

 _What about everyone then feeling pressured to enhance themselves to still be able to compete, if they want to or not?_

The same can be said for getting a college degree or some other kind of certification. Yes, people feel bad when they have low status, but the benefits of enhancement technologies outweigh the costs. I'd rather live in a world where Einsteins were 1 in 10. That world would have a better chance of solving humanity's problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Piracetam is the safest and cheapest nootropic that has consistently had positive effects on me. It is nothing like adderall, modifinil, or coffee. It just slightly improves motivation and short term memory. Have some pubmed abstracts and wikipedia articles:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropics#Nootropics_and_racet...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropics#Nootropics_and_racetams)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam>

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16007238>

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19517672>

<comment><USER5> Didn't do anything for me. My roommate said it improved his ability to do mental math, but the improvement wasn't worth continuing to take it.

<comment><USER6> You have to take it with a choline source. I noticed next to nothing taking it alone, but when I took it with some choline bitartrate, that's when I noticed an effect and my dual n-back scores rose a little.

<comment><USER5> We were taking it with choline also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One or two commentators on Reddit suggested that regular exercise and a healthy diet could work as well. Can anyone confirm or refute this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it takes a lot of confirmation to believe that regular exercise and a healthy diet will have a tremendous impact on everything you do.

But, if you need a bit... it works for me. When I am hiking or skiing 3-4 times a week, I get a lot more done.

<comment><USER8> Big lie as far as I can tell. I'd like to see exercise tested against a placebo.

<comment><USER9> <http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/preventionprogram/>

Here's one better. It's a type 2 diabetes study that compared exercise against metformin against a placebo. The conclusions were so overwhelmingly in favor of exercise that the study was stopped early.

<comment><USER10> This study is about type 2 diabetes. The question here is on the effects of exercise as compared to mind-enhancing drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, if you think you may have ADHD, you probably meet diagnostic criteria. If you would look to get medication, fill out an online adult ADHD checklist and bring it to your doctor.

<comment><USER11> Seriously - if any of these Ritalin / Adderall etc help you think clearly and do more than just let you work on less sleep, you most likely _have ADD_ , and can treat it in a structured way with a doctor helping you, instead of ad-hoc self medication.

<comment><USER12> I don't agree with this.

People without ADD experience significant benefits from using Adderall because it's an amphetamine--not because they have undiagnosed ADD.

Any amphetamine helps you think clearly through being more alert and ability to concentrate for longer periods of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am surprised by the amount of redditors that know all pros and cons of those drugs. The first time I even heard about it was when my sister started using ritalin. It helped her becoming a medium performer in school instead of beeing on the low end and also increased her social abilities.

What do you think is the percentage of academics using cognitive enhancers or similar stuff?

<comment><USER14> "I am surprised by the amount of redditors that know all pros and cons of those drugs."

How can you not want to hack your wetware? Or at least not be curious about what may be possible?

I'm surprised more people aren't up on this stuff and trying things out.

Feed your head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://sites.google.com/site/thinkinginanutshell/nootropics>

This link was posted a while ago here on HN, I believe.

It's more information dense, though it has testimonials from far fewer people. (That is, just one person.)</comment>


Tumblr is still recommending Godaddy - <AUTHOR> http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains

<comment> k-mcgrady I doubt it was a decision they made. That is a page that wouldn't be regularly updated, I think Tumblr made their position on SOPA very clear and Godaddy now opposes it (whether you believe that or not).</comment>


Bob Dylan's 17-minute song on the JFK assassination is a work of epic genius - <AUTHOR> https://forward.com/culture/music/443087/no-youre-wrong-bob-dylans-17-minute-song-is-a-work-of-epic-genius/ <comment><USER2> For more succinct genius, check out "Eleven Miles an Hour (the Abe Zapp Ruder Version)" by Was (not Was).

[https://youtu.be/CIWg95lnccc](https://youtu.be/CIWg95lnccc)

This was the American release; the UK version differs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Before I listened to any song 17 minutes long, I'd need to be assured that at least ten of those minutes were the guitar solo.</comment>


Apple: Fully ARMed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jroller.com/robertburrelldonkin/entry/apple_armed <comment><USER2> I think that some of these are a little far fetched (Steve seems to prefer less cutting-edge technologies), but ever since GrandCentral I have had the suspicion that Apple wants to have a runtime-variable number of cores. That would be most useful as a power saving technique, which is generally how we improve battery life without increasing weight. So, not having seen runtime variable cores in an iPhone (yet), but knowing that the tablet will have to outperform the phone with similar battery life, I think that we will see a large number of low power (ARM instead of x86) cores soon.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you join an invite-only community for engineering managers? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN - Andy here. I'm the co-founder of a startup that builds a modern wiki for growing teams.
Posting here with an idea that's been on my mind for awhile after talking to hundreds of engineering teams, but wanted feedback from the HN community first before decided to take action.
We're thinking about creating an invite-only community for engineering managers. The space would be a place to share knowledge and help each other learn to grow high performance team. From what I've been able to find, there's a lot of information out there on general management, but not a ton on managing engineering teams specifically. Our mission is to help teams grow and thrive together, so the plan is to make this free.
Would this be something you'd find useful? <comment><USER2> No.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes

</comment><comment><USER4> No</comment>


Ask HN: Serverless.com framework vs. raw AWS console? - <AUTHOR> I'm starting a new project using AWS Appsync as the backbone. I'm wondering if using the Serverless framework to manage this deployment makes the most sense.
Pros: * AWS config done using yaml files that can then be version controlled. * Avoid the horrible AWS GUIs. * Easier migration to other cloud providers (not sure how true this is).
Cons: * Potential lag time between AWS features and serverless? * Additional dependency on startup that might go bust. * Diverging from "standard" way of doing things? * Others?
What have you guys chosen to do? <comment><USER2> The CDK is pretty easy to use. It's a set of tools for creating cloud formation templates.

The problem with the console is that some options might be missing. For instance, when creating a cognition userpool, any auth0 standard attribute may be set to immutable; however, this option isn't available in the console. Serverless might be missi g options, but it allows that to be supplemented with writing raw cloudformation in the serverless document.

I enjoy the CDK because it's one less layer of abstraction to deal with compared to serverless, and what's actually being deployed isn't hidden behind the yaml. It's programmatic, maintained by aws, and the documentation is pretty stellar. The only downside is that it's not complete, so sometimes raw cloudformation will have to be written.

Another thing to keep in mind that serverless and cdk allow for you to recycle time spent while just using the console does not in lost cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Avoid the horrible AWS GUIs"

Say what ?

"What have you guys chosen to do?"

If you are making heavy use of the AWS GUI for any aspect of AWS then You're Not Doing it Right (TM).

Use the AWS SDKs, or if you don't like the SDKs, the APIs.

Hell, if you can't be bothered to program against the SDKs or APIs, then just make naïve shell script calls against the AWS CLI for your platform.

That's what all the native tools Amazon gives you are there for. No need to add un-necessary layers of third-party abstraction, which, above anything else, is a vast potential security risk.

RTFM as the cool kids say. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> I moved from CloudFormation to Terraform to manage AWS env. I won't go back. I haven't tried serverless though because I use other AWS components as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> sls just produces some CloudFormation with utilities to bundle the project. Honestly I like AWS SAM more.</comment>


An Introduction to Layers for WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://marketblog.envato.com/resources/an-introduction-to-layers-for-wordpress/

<comment><USER2> Envato have there own comment spam team?

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome and professional system solution :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great product, hard to believe its free!

</comment><comment><USER5> It is Simply Amazing

</comment><comment><USER6> Really cool!</comment>


Announcing StartupMonth.org (our November "Startup Sprint" project) - <AUTHOR>

Site: http://startupmonth.org
When I asked people "who's with me?" on getting a startup out the door in the month of November (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398), I was blown away by the response.  It seems I hit a common nerve.  Amongst the many comments on that post, people suggested various ways of tracking the progress of their projects and keeping in touch with each another (spreadsheets, google docs, facebook groups, etc).  I was personally not planning on anything other than an announcement on HN when I had completed my project, but by the end of that day it was clear there was something bigger going on, and that more would be needed to help track it.
So I started to think about what was /really/ going on.  It seems that we all feel drawn to be our better selves when we have a common goal, even though we may be achieving it in different ways.  What was needed was a site that could help people be accountable for their goal, and draw them together to finish them.
Thus, StartupMonth.org.
At this point though, it was still a pipe dream.  I have my own full-time consulting gig, a new full-time job to transition into, a part-time startup, AND side projects that need to be completed (the entire goal for November for me is to finally finish as many of the side projects as possible).   I had vague intentions of building a site for this, and even bought the domain startupmonth.org, but was not sure when I would be able to fit it in.
Thankfully, Jon Gilbraith (hn: inm) stepped up and volunteered to help develop the site, and Jake Stutzman of http://www.elevatevc.com volunteered to do the design.  So, for the last 30 days, we've been building and designing the site in the very little bits of spare time we had, and today we'd like to show it to you. We were hoping to get this out before November 1st, but had too many things on our collective plates to be able to get it done.
Now that 30 days has passed, there is still plenty of work to do to the site, but in the spirit of StartupMonth we are launching anyways, and will tweak and fix the site as it is used.  Shipping is a feature!  So, please let us know your thoughts on the site,  either here or as comments on http://startupmonth.org/apps/startupmonthorg.  We're aware that there are some missing features but everything we need to showcase, post news on and discuss our apps is there.
Also, need to mention the awesome site that the 21times guys have done that can also help with getting your startups off the ground:  http://hn.21times.org   Ryan reached out to me via email when they were finishing it up - My apologies Ryan for not getting back to you.   Would love to chat on how we could integrate and make these complimentary sites.
Cheers! <comment><USER3> Is there some way you can make the Lastest Apps list a little more relevant than alphabetical order? Maybe most-recently-active first, or at least most- recently-added first? This way everyone can get a little love "above the fold"?

</comment><comment><USER4> clickable: <http://startupmonth.org>

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! I had signed up mentally to your original post and have been working hard to make the November deadline for myself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I signed up, how do I add my app?

<comment><USER7> It should've been part of the sigup process - did that not go smoothly?

Either way, browse to <http://startupmonth.org/apps/new> you can add it outside of signup.

Will make a note to have that somewhere as a backup....

<comment><USER8> During the signup process, if you skip adding an app there's no way to come back. Update profile should include an option to add an app.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I think I even said 'you register your app later if needed' so I must have intended to add that link but forgotten.

I'll add when I get second, thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it possible that you can put a fields for two names?

<comment><AUTHOR> are you meaning two people on a project? if so, thats coming. if not, please elaborate?

<comment><USER7> And to add to what Matt's said, if you're meaning more than one to a team - <USER2> don't have the interface setup but we can assign more than one to a team manually, so post in the forum if that's what you're after and I can 'hook you up', as it were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can I change the name of the app after I've registered?</comment>


ArXiv vs. SnarXiv (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/ <comment><USER2> "\- If you're a graduate student, gloomily read through the abstracts, thinking to yourself that you don't understand papers on the real arXiv any better.

\- If you're a post-doc, reload until you find something to work on.

\- If you're a professor, get really excited when a paper claims to solve the hierarchy problem, the little hierarchy problem, the mu problem, and the confinement problem. Then experience profound disappointment.

\- If you're a famous physicist, keep reloading until you see your name on something, then claim credit for it."

XD

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussed a bit at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411359)

</comment><comment><USER4> Batting four for four, not sure what that means though, because I actually don't know what I'm trying to classify.

</comment><comment><USER5> Took a year of grad level particle physics and I only managed 16/20, haha.

</comment><comment><USER6> Highest score was 'undergrad'. This thing is rage inducing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would like something like this for deep learning papers.

<comment><USER8> That's even easier: [https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your thoughts on co-registration / CPL monetization schemes? - <AUTHOR>

Just got off a project for a guy who makes a LOT of money off of co-registration schemes (aka on signup, user is served a CPA / Cost Per Lead ad). Have any HNers have worked on coreg monetized sites? <comment><USER2> A close friend of mine works on a medium sized site that does this. A few of my thoughts:

* They seem to make a good amount of money selling leads (for example to moving companies, consolidations loans, etc).

* They drive traffic through SEM, but this has proven difficult recently because Google drives down Quality Scores for lead-gen and affiliate sites (I believe they call them non-value-add sites) which has made it harder and harder to stay profitable and competitive with original vendors.

* It's hard to get much traction in other channels (SEO, Affiliates, Media) -- so they tend to be dangerously tied to one marketing vehicle -- Google SEM.

* The whole area seems to have a bit of shady undertone to it, and I'm not sure my friend really gets much satisfaction out of it -- he'll probably be leaving shortly even though the pay is good.

<comment><AUTHOR> All good points. Interesting one about difficulty gaining traction in other channels, I had suspected this.

Apparently the SEM->Coreg model works _very_ well, and some are making millions in profit off the scheme, but completely agree about the shady undertone.

I had been independently trying to see if I could invent a way to make it less shady / spammy. No success yet, all the players in this area seem to be hellbent on hoodwinking folks with funneling tricks...

<comment><USER2> If you can successfully do two things you may have a good shot:

1) Convince Google and the web generally you are value-add somehow (say, by having detailed reviews).

2) My partner recently entered my phone number for a moving quote from one of these sites. Huge mistake - we got dozens of calls from different companies. Obviously this is what will kill the industry - there are a lot of suckers but eventually people will learn. If you could make this process more transparent and protect the end user, perhaps users would come back and you wouldn't be so tied to acquisition channels. (Sorta like an Angie's List but where the company pays instead of the user.)

Shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com if you want their actual website to check out. I wouldn't want to post their name publicly unless he said it was ok. (I get a feeling nobody in this space wants anyone else to know what they're up to.)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with performance anxiety during interviews? - <AUTHOR> I'm not talking about general nervousness. I'm talking about the kind of anxiety where you can't think clearly, where it feels like the part of your brain you use for problem solving has shut down. This is also called "Test Anxiety" but I've never had this problem with paper tests.
For an example in an interview today I was writing some code and wrote if (x > 0 || x < 0) instead of if (x !=0) ... I have been programing for over 12 years and I don't think I have ever made this mistake in real life.
Later on in the interview the interviewer asked a question that made me smile when she asked it because I knew I knew how to do it. Yet half way through after solving the hardest part of it I blanked out and spent the next 15 to 20 minutes going in circles with the interviewer giving me incredibly obvious hints. The answer was on the tip of my tongue but I just couldn't get it out.
This is not the first time this has happened to me. It happens to a greater or lesser degree every time I have a whiteboard or shared online coding interview.
I can do paper or take home tests fine. I can talk about my past experience fine. I can ask good questions. But I never feel like I am able to code to my normal abilities during a whiteboard test.
Should I try to get companies to give me a paper test? Or should I keep slogging through these whiteboard ones with the hopes that eventually I'll get enough practice that I'll get over it? Has anyone else here been able to overcome a similar problem? <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I run a for-profit in the space of technical interview prep: [http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com).

From what I see doing interview training for a living: more practice is the key. Practice with mock interviews until you reach a point of (almost) de- sensitization.

But before you take mock interviews, you must prepare. Otherwise the feedback and the experience is not very useful. Do a number of problems and a variety of problems from numerous sources available. Only then do mock interviews. Preferably with experienced engineers. Use pramp.com for free mock interviews.

The process can take months, but you're bound to get better that way. Practice is the only way anybody gets better at anything, anyway.

Also note, that this interview practice is going to be useful to you in your daily work also. Training for interviews is that beautiful hack, that has dividends in a number of different ways.

<comment><USER3> That's more of an advertisement than a disclaimer

<comment><USER4> His comment had the most actionable help of thread

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I relate to your condition and I have a similar cognitive interruption when and where severe anxiety kicks in. For me it includes a change of color and I sweat profusely. There is no hiding it.

I have always just powered through because I have found that once it passes I return fully. For me it is about some magic comfort level. Once I get there and it usually takes a little time(weeks not minutes or hours) this isn't an issue anymore. Interviews are the worst because I don't have that time and they are usually with people you don't know, which is at least part of the trigger.

I didn't want to use any medication to treat it, but I have helped to manage it. For me an exhaustive workout a few hours before the interview helps. The other thing is diet, in my case, if I focus on high-protein and low carb and that also seems to help.

These aren't recommendations, but I relate, and I thought it might be helpful to look at broad approach to managing it on your end.

<comment> J-dawg I get the sweating thing too. Powering through doesn't always work, it becomes so obvious that it's awkward not to mention it. It's had a major effect on my life and career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found that mock interviews helped me to some degree with this. It's hard for me to talk and write code simultaneously, so practicing in front of someone who is an experienced interviewer helped me gain some confidence in whiteboard coding.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense. I think its the talking while thinking/writing part thats hard. When I'm around strangers I usually want to fill the silence with some kind of conversation, silence feels awkward, yet I need to allow myself time to think.

<comment><USER6> This is exactly how I am. It takes a little practice to balance out the silence with speaking but when you find your comfort level, you'll be ok. :) I've told interviewers something to the effect of, "Sorry, give me one second to think -- it's hard to interleave my thoughts and talking aloud" and they were really ok with it.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Practice. I bought a whiteboard, mounted it on the wall, and practice questions from interviewcake as if I were in front of a live audience. It feels kind of silly, but definitely helped me improve recall under the pressure of an interview. Putting yourself in an environment that most closely resembles the stress of the real thing to induce some or all of the anxiety is paramount!

Repeating this exercise at least once daily has produced real results for me, and helped me get comfortable thinking and speaking about algorithms outside of my normal operating environment (i.e. in front of a keyboard ;).

<comment><USER8> > Practice. I bought a whiteboard, mounted it on the wall, and practice > questions from interviewcake as if I were in front of a live audience.

Do you think going through all the questions on Interviewcake prepared you well for interviews?

I've been going through them and I either find them to be very easy, or very hard. Not much in between. Actually, come to think of it, that's usually how interview questions go for me, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You might want to check to see if you have a local Whiteboarding Meetup. We have one here in Seattle where people can practice interviewing. If you don't have one you could probably set one up.

</comment><comment><USER10> The more you do it, the less nervous you'll feel. I'd suggest lining up a series of low-stakes 'practice' interviews (10 or more of them). Real jobs at real companies, but the kind of jobs you don't particularly want, and the kind of companies you wouldn't normally apply to. That way you won't feel any pressure to perform well; and you'll get practice interviewing. And who knows, you might luck into the perfect position just by chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think this seems to be the general consensus. Just do more interviews. Luckily the job market allows for us to do that now. I just wonder if I can push back the other interviews for jobs I care about that I have scheduled already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might be a tangent. I attribute my bombing a big4 interview in 2014 to restless and sleepless night the day before the interview (it was a very senior dev position and the role and responsibility described by the recruiter made me super excited. Actually, the whole week had been pretty much sleepless nights) which 'disabled' my hunger, and the lethal combination of sleep deprivation and overnight fasting manifested itself and I literally saw myself failing at things I shouldn't have but I could do nothing about it. It was a 9 am meeting and I was in a cold hall which added to the misery. I was groggy, about as articulate as a drunken child and utterly failed to benefit from the generous hints the interviewer was giving me. I felt sorry for _him_ TBH. It was the company that had contacted me and I felt pretty bad for the recruiter as well for having fared so miserably. The biggest takeaway from this experience was to get sufficient sleep the night before important events. And to bloody eat breakfast.

So, are you sure your failure is not due to external elements like mine (which was one off fyi)?

<comment><USER12> Would you say all of your shortcomings are due to external factors beyond your control?

<comment><USER11> In this specific case, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I try to center myself. For example, I focus fully on breath for a few breaths, think 'I am breathing in, I am breathing out'. Focus on how your feet/bum/spine are supporting your weight, readjust slightly if your posture is awful. Get whatever problem you're working on out of your head.

After a few seconds of this, I come back to the problem and usually am able to do at least slightly better. It's like power cycling your brain after it gets stuck.

</comment><comment><USER14> Smoke a big fat fattie before rolling into the interview. Eat three pages out of Cracking the Coding Interview for breakfast. This is how I got my jobs at Google, Facebook, and now currently a senior research fellow at MSFT.

</comment><comment><USER15> One technique I've found helpful is starting by writing tests for the interview puzzle (on the whiteboard), and then explaining that I will check these tests once I have a solution. That means if I get stuck or just have a bug I'm not immediately interrupted by interviewer, and the tests provide a way of debugging stuff in a structured way.

For more details: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/04/interview- puzzles/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/04/interview-puzzles/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just found this other Ask HN thread on the topic that has some good thoughts [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618500)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd say practice practice practice. Try to create a testing environment which is close to reality. Also if you currently applying and interviewing for jobs, I'd prioritize then and start with the ones I find less interesting.

Another idea: Find a local meetup group or something similar where you can _give a talk about performance anxiety during interviews_.

Just tell your story to others and you'll get invaluable feedback. That said I know you asked here for advice, but discussing on a forum is too asynchronous. More like a take home test as you already described.

</comment><comment><USER17> It sounds like a really shitty thing to do, but one thing that really helped me in interviews is basically going to more of them. If a company sounds you out, and you're not entirely sure that you want to join them, why not go to the interview anyway?

Obviously, don't go to an interview every month, but don't wait until you absolutely must have a new job. Get the feel of a few places, and if you turn them down then there's no harm done.

</comment><comment><USER18> Happened to me couple days back during a 3hr technical trial project / interview..

Was presented with a simple recursion problem but I completely blanked out even with the interviewer nudging me all along.

I was able to write it on my half hour bus ride home...</comment>


Ask HN: How do companies make their employees write blogs for them? - aman-pro <comment><AUTHOR> "Write this blog or your fired"</comment>


How the office was invented (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23372401?a=1

<comment><USER2> "You can tell if a teacher is teaching or a builder building, but with us office workers, the dreams, the ambition, the lust and the extreme boredom is all hidden."

So true.</comment>


12 No-Frill Steps To Get Things Done - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/twelve-steps-to-get-things-done.html

<comment><USER2> I must tell you that I just read your post, because I wanted to be able to say this: 12 steps??? I give you 3 steps to successful x-step posts:

1\. Don't overthink things! Make x<=5.

2\. Be the first to listen to your own advice!

3\. Help others not to procrastinate with writing only things who have value and where not written trillion times before!

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> These seem to be more "12 steps to be someone who people think gets things done". Most of these steps are about image management rather then production.

My GTD rules:

1\. Talk Less 2\. Make Shit</comment>


Started with fanfare, Verizon's Oath never stood a chance, ad execs say - <AUTHOR> https://digiday.com/marketing/oath-ad-execs-chance/ <comment><USER2> Oaths GDPR panel is one of the worst out there. Seriously, try and set your preferences.

You visit the site, it says it's tracking you and personalising adverts. No thanks. Click the button to change it. Get presented with a page asking you to visit somewhere else to change it. Ok. Click the link, get presented with a huge privacy policy and a load of not very useful sidebar links. Click around, no button to say "go away stop tracking me". And if you try and "find out how our partners use your data", good luck, all the links are 404's or behind login boxes.

Good riddance.

<comment><USER3> I find it all right actually, compared to the hot garbage that is yourchoicesonline. Once you've found the page with all the toggles at least you can opt out from everything in one place.

Both have the problem of needing you to go off-site with lots of redirects and having to allow js from tons of domains though.

<comment><USER4> The GDPR says it should be as easy to say no as it is to say yes. So if there's an "accept" button, there should be a "reject" button. No maze, no panels or toggles. No opt-out by default, either. The default is reject, so even if there were toggles, they should all be off by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say that Osth's GDPR cookie stuff is some of the worst I've come across. I usually back out these days.

</comment><comment><USER6> ex-Yahoo here. I left before the Verizon acquisition completed. I still have a bunch of friends who chat about these things. Yahoo never really had many home grown core products except yahoo.com, finance, sports & news. All other Yahoo properties were through acquisitions and Yahoo did a fairly poor job of integrating them. I believe only a handful of old acquisitions were properly integrated. Regardless there was massive overlap in tech that we had and the subsequent acquisitions under Marissa. Most acquisitions barring a couple had poor tech and business numbers and we were surprised at their huge evaluations. Coupled with massive cultural differences and turf wars, things were not going anywhere. I believe this situation exacerbated when Verizon acquired Yahoo and tried merging AOL with it leading to further overlap. It is fun to see how management thought they could beat Google, FB and Amazon with this strategy. The funnier (possibly sadder) thing was Yahoo always had more data on users than all of the acquisitions put together and then some thanks to Mail, Finance, Sports, News and Frontpage. We did not need their tech or their people or their customers. If only management would've gotten their shit together we probably would've been a decent player in the market. However, the leadership did not think Yahoo's tech was capable and the only solution was to acquire tech and talent. They were mistaken. Management was always chasing after the market leaders and never really wanted to differentiate Yahoo for instance we never talked about having privacy focused premium experiences for our users or ad-tech that preserves privacy at the same time helps advertisers reach the correct audience. This would've given users a reason to use Yahoo products and pay for them. Management never focused on building quality products. Barring Finance and Sports all other sites had issues with data quality. Yahoo News was wrecked. It used to be the source of trusted (aka non- fake news). Management never valued it. Imagine if they would've grown it and kept the brand reputation. Today, Facebook, Google are in hot water. Yahoo would've been a hero. Advertisers would've flocked to advertise on Yahoo because users trusted them and they had integrity (advertisers never want to be associated with shitty, bad content. It rubs off the wrong way on their brand identity and product reputation). All lost opportunities. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER7> It just seemed so obviously foolish to buy these overpriced and shrinking giant properties that Verizon gets one after another, Yahoo was perfect for them. My outside view is the leaders of that company succeeded by just throwing money at the phone and networking infrastructure against their competitors, and they can't rescue dying media properties with money.

</comment><comment><USER8> I usually close the tab when I run in a website that "is now part of Oath". The consent dialog just sucks.

</comment><comment><USER9> reading about all those different ad tech platforms they have been supposedly working hard to integrate into the one to rule them all, i could only see an image of mid&top-manager paradise...

</comment><comment><USER10> In other news, Oath is re-branding as Four Letter Word /s

</comment><comment><USER11> For anyone who didn't know Brightroll was rolled into Oath... which is amazing considering they are saying "it's worth virtually nothing".

</comment><comment><USER12> Fanfare? Hardly.</comment>


Google's Street View car hits donkey, keeps driving - <AUTHOR> http://maps.gstatic.com/m/streetview/?hl=en&ll=-23.527824,24.72265&spn=8.405416,14.27124&t=m&layer=c&cbll=-23.527824,24.72265&panoid=3L-F887yPcBnejtJvT6DoA&cbp=12,335.71,,0,19.65&z=7

<comment><USER2> The chronology is backwards. The donkey was lying down, the car drives up to it, it gets up and moves aside. If you move backwards (with the right chronology), there's a car passing in the opposite direction, making the correct chronology obvious.

[http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/01/never-ass- ume.htm...](http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/01/never-ass-ume.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks to me like the donkey started rolling around in the dirt after the car went by.... (Disclaimer: I know nothing about donkeys). Its interesting that you can kind of see what happened by shuffling forward and back on the images.

<comment><USER4> Good spot. Also, if you move along and look to the side, you can see the donkey standing by the side of the road as the car goes past.

No donkey was harmed here :D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The donkey is alive! See: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3882828/google- proves-it-a...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3882828/google-proves-it- avoided-hit-and-run-with-donkey-in-botswana)

<comment> mark-r A better link is one contained in the article, straight from Google: [http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/01/never-ass- ume.htm...](http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/01/never-ass-ume.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a non-story. This occurred in Botswana, where cars drive on the left side of the road, so the donkey is in front of the car. You can also see the donkey standing by the side of the road if you move slightly further along.

</comment><comment><USER7> The conclusion is clearly wrong. The dust from the car is in the opposite direction and this indicates that the donkey was ahead of the Google Street View car, not behind it.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's obvious the donkey is rolling around in the dirt, saw the car coming, felt awkward, got up and walked away. Nothing to see here, move on.

</comment><comment><USER9> When I first read the title I thought it was a self-driving car and thought "oh fuck, people will go nuts over this"

<comment><USER10> My thoughts exactly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The donkey was basically asking for it. What was it doing in the middle of nowhere, anyways? Probably slacking while another donkey from China was doing the work for it for a sixth of the salary.

</comment><comment><USER12> I thought this was about their autonomous cars at first. That would have been interesting.

This is just another random Street View driver error.

<comment><USER13> Nah, this turned out to be interpretation error; the Street View driver acted ethically. See other comments on this page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Flap closed, donkey fine.

</comment><comment><USER15> wow.

</comment><comment><USER16> The donkey was obviously trying to fraud google into paying him millions of dollars in damages

</comment><comment><USER17> Another way Google is making an ass of itself. (sorry had to be said)

<comment><USER18> No it did not.</comment></comment>


Chinese factory replaces 90% of humans with robots, production soars (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/chinese-factory-replaces-90-of-humans-with-robots-production-soars/ <comment><USER2> We want the cheapest cell phone and nike shoes. We really don't care where it comes from. We just want our friends to know we are at the top of the status pyramid. We are animals at the end of the day, each trying to maximize our goals of survival and climbing the social hierarchy.

Replacing horses with cars, bulls with tractors and humans with robots. This just means a set of humans are amplifying their power to do more so they can gain more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps the Chinese will have to be the first to try Basic income on a large scale.</comment>