An employee whose job was to be sacked (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://henrytapper.com/2010/01/09/an-employee-whose-job-was-to-be-sacked/ <comment><USER2> Yes, while working a telemarketing job for quick cash secretly I encountered just this sort of thing. I had spent all of my graduation gift money meant for my first apartment right after high school and had to take a night shift somewhere. I found this telemarketing place and they had a dead simple test they used for prospective hires. My friends told me they would hire anyone no matter what. Surprisingly, someone failed the test and left angrily. Later I found out that they hired someone specifically to stage this event night after night. The reason was because if a group of people witnesses somebody fail it makes them feel they need to hold onto the opportunity. I saw this work time and time again- every single person who showed up for the job took that job and didn't question it. They also did this because they cashed every last check of every employee that left and there were a lot of those. It was grueling and I would even leave on a bike and ride through the woods to get there just so my family wouldn't notice. Made my money back and then some then quit all in time for college. You see, I learned that fake employees are just a part of growing up and growing wiser.

<comment><USER3> Sorry if this should be obvious, I've read it 3 times and still don't understand this bit:

> They also did this because they cashed every last check of every employee > that left and there were a lot of those.

"They also did this" \- Who also did what? The candidates accepted the job? The company hired the fake guy to get sacked?

And who cashed whose checks? Did they cash them before or after they left? And why does that mean the first set of people did the first thing?

<comment><USER4> The company kept the "last check" of the employees who quit (probably by no- showing which is why they didn't pick up their last check) so the company got a few hours of free labor from each employee.

"They did this" means they had the actor convince the applicants to take the job. The more employees they hire, the more free hours they get (since the quitters don't pick up their last check)

<comment><USER5> Is that legal? Don't they have to mail the check to the employees if they don't come in to pick it up? And why wouldn't some one pick up their check? If they are working a job like that, I imagine they need the money?

<comment><USER6> A lot of people don't know their rights, or know their rights but think they'll need a lawyer to deal with it and don't have that sort of money.

In reality a call to the Department of Labor or whatever the local equivalent is will get the money, though usually with a pretty big lag time (a threat to call the DoL can be faster).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many years ago I delivered pizza while in college. When it was time to move on my manager and I decided to have some fun. For the last three days I was there I delivered to every terrible customer we had, then had a little fun at their expense. Like the guy that routinely refused to tip a single penny and said 10 pennies make a dime. I handed him a dime and told him now he didn't have to wait for 9 more pizzas.

It was terrible, but fun at the same time. Every call back to the store was greeted with an "Oh that's terrible", "we've had a few other complaints about him" and "I promise he won't be here tomorrow".

<comment><USER3> I understand that it's a bit impolite not to tip, but surely it's much more impolite to hold a grudge against someone for not tipping.

If you want more money, put your prices up.

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing you're not american? Their attitudes towards tips are different than, for example, those in continental Europe.

The way I understand it, service staff are criminally underpaid (by our standards). This is workable because they make up for the income using tips, which works because tips are larger (I'm not sure which way around cause and effect is here).

This means that when someone in the UK might withhold a tip due to bad service we're just removing a bonus, whereas in the US we're effectively removing their pay for serving us. Not tipping is a _much_ stronger action.

To respond to your 'prices' comment directly - the person delivering the pizza doesn't get to set the prices. They have to take the job that they can in a service industry that pays peanuts on the basis that people will earn tips. And the business doesn't have any incentive to do anything about it - they get to pay people less and therefore keep margins high and/or charge lower prices to compete.

<comment><USER9> > I'm guessing you're not american? Their attitudes towards tips are different > than, for example, those in continental Europe.

It's not attitude, they do underpay certain people. But at the same time various US pizza places do include a service or delivery fee which still doesn't go to the driver. As a result you might pay a delivery fee which is isn't a delivery fee.

In a restaurant if they don't get tipped enough the restaurant has to make up the difference / pay them minimum wage (though this rule to differ per state). So not paying still should result in minimum wage.

From what I understood in US it's rather arbitrary whom you pay extra and which persons you do not (e.g. even pay extra to get a haircut). Once you travel more you'll notice these rules are rather arbitrary (custom in one country, totally unexpected in another). For restaurants I often don't go back to the same place twice so I don't see the point of randomly paying more. As result I'm trying to stop doing that (it feels impolite, this despite me sometimes being unique in adding giving a tip). Paying by bankcard helps to avoid tipping.

Going back to pizza delivery, in my country (not US) the delivery fee is often included in the pizza. This is done by offering a pretty huge discount for picking up a pizza.

<comment><USER10> > In a restaurant if they don't get tipped enough the restaurant has to make > up the difference / pay them minimum wage (though this rule to differ per > state). So not paying still should result in minimum wage.

In principle this is true; in practice it is rarely honored.

> From what I understood in US it's rather arbitrary whom you pay extra and > which persons you do not (e.g. even pay extra to get a haircut). Once you > travel more you'll notice these rules are rather arbitrary (custom in one > country, totally unexpected in another). For restaurants I often don't go > back to the same place twice so I don't see the point of randomly paying > more. As result I'm trying to stop doing that (it feels impolite, this > despite me sometimes being unique in adding giving a tip). Paying by > bankcard helps to avoid tipping.

All customs are arbitrary to some extent, but the rule of thumb is that if you're getting a personal service from someone who's not a professional you should tip.

<comment><USER11> My barber has been cutting hair for two decades and a masseuse I go to has various certificates. I assume they're all professional yet still have to tip on top of the regular prices. I don't tip at the dry cleaner or after having clothes altered. Working as a barista in various cafes, tips were few and far between, vs pouring beers. Not much difference in the actual experience.

Good rule of thumb but I think it can still trip up non-Americans to some degree.

Best tipping I ever had was working at a fancy hotel - paid a decent service industry wage and would regular get tips of $10-20.

<comment><USER10> Well, the idea of "professional" is a bit slippery, I guess, but let's say the exempted categories are mostly tradesmen and white-collar professionals.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think that works. Honestly, one of the 'surprises' of American adulthood was finding out how many different categories of folks are expecting a tip. I would much rather have prices up front - whether it's someone doing a job or taxes (like a VAT) be included with prices so you actually know what to expect to pay.

<comment><USER10> A handful of restaurants have gone no-tip but I think there's a pretty clear disadvantage to being a first-mover here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's the beginning of the excellent book "au bonheur des ogres", where you learn that the hero's karma is to be a scapegoat. It's his job. It's his relationships.

Also when a bomb explodes, of course, all evidences point toward him even though is the very definition of innocence.

Wonderful work from the great Daniel Pennac, which can stand on it's own, but has follow up tomes that are just as nice.

And I just looked it up, it's been translated to english.

The title, is, well, "The scapegoat".

<comment><USER13> Daniel Pennac certainly stands among the many great french writers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of the jobs in China where you can get paid literally walk around being white. For example, being a white guy who cuts the ribbon of a factory opening and walks around shaking hands can make $1k/wk.

[http://www.chinawhisper.com/the-5-weirdest-but-best-jobs- for...](http://www.chinawhisper.com/the-5-weirdest-but-best-jobs-for- foreigners-in-china/)

<comment><USER15> Apparently that's going to be a lot harder as the Party starts looking a lot closer at foreign work visas over the next few years.

<comment><USER14> Maybe we should revisit our immigration policy that punishes China for having "too many" immigrants to the US and also our University policies which racially discriminate against the Chinese for being over-represented. If this trade/economic war is going to keep heating up, we might as well try to steal as many of their best and brightest as possible.

<comment><USER16> I do think we get their best and brightest. Gaming credentials is an art form in China and can't be taken at face value.

<comment><USER14> East Asians have some of the best outcomes of any demographic: higher income, more educated, lower criminality, lower divorce rate, etc. In a country that is arguably designed to maximally benefit whites, they are beating white people at basically everything. This goes far beyond gaming credentials, it's real world outcomes. We could stand to lower our bar with them a little and still get ahead.

<comment><USER17> or you could say we are for the most part only taking in a certain segment of the population from these countries. Educated and already middle class or higher. You are not comparing apples to apples.

<comment><USER14> Do you suppose we're selecting East Asian immigrants in a special way compared to other regions?

<comment><USER17> One need not suppose anything. Look who has a majority of the H1-B visas or who comes here for higher education.

Those who are not educated from East Asia can't easily come to the US illegally as those who can cross overland (Mexico and central America) can. Poor Chinese villagers are not boating to America.

<comment><USER14> How is that significantly different from Western Europe? Or the Middle East? Or Sub-Saharan Africa? Are the poorest of the poor there making it here? Why are East Asians over-represented in higher education or H1-Bs compared to other places?

<comment><USER18> Two thoughts, to begin.

First, much of East Asia has extremely demanding placement tests for elite high schools (and sometimes lower schools). You might reasonably say that we're only taking students from good high schools around the world, but that's a comment about school quality, not students. As people often point out, Harvard dropouts are almost as successful as Harvard grads - merely getting in represents a powerful filter. So it's plausible that we're taking rich/educated elites worldwide, but in East Asia we've got a talent/skill filter comparable to college admissions being applied in advance.

Second, your point: there's a non-trivial penalty for being a Chinese applicant to a US college, and it's not particularly obvious what impact that has. I suppose it could be that the harsher requirements for acceptance are driving the difference, and we don't have any real evidence on how responsive outcomes are to changing that restriction. (Is there a good breakdown of outcomes for a given group by visa type? That might show whether nation- specific admission rules on some visa types are changing outcomes.)

(The third thought, of course, is "it's a huge multifactorial mess and there's probably not enough data to trust any conclusion we come to".)

<comment><USER14> First: Great, so their culture is what is causing them to outperform us in virtually every positive metric. That certainly doesn't make me want to be _less_ welcoming to them.

Second: The non-trivial penalty came AFTER Chinese people became over- represented.

It's not as complicated as you're trying to make it out to be. Something is causing East Asians to outperform us in basically every positive trait. They have higher IQs, higher incomes, lower criminality rates, lower poverty rates, etc. And these stats hold true even generations after immigration. Maybe it feels complicated because you're concerned about the root cause analysis. I'm not. They're doing great, we should want great people here.

<comment><USER18> I wasn't the same person you were replying to upthread, and I'm certainly not arguing against offering more visas. I just thought your "given that we're taking elites, what's different?" question was interesting, and wanted to raise a possible answer.

(I agree that if the penalty came after better outcomes, it's not a relevant factor. I wasn't familiar enough with which restrictions were in place when to say.)

But yes: the complicated part is root causes, and that's not relevant to whether we should expand our visa/citizenship program; we certainly should. If someone in the thread disagrees with you there, it's not me.

<comment><USER14> It's almost certainly IQ. IQ also correlates to all those other positive traits. East Asians have higher average IQs than most other people, particularly spacial reasoning and math which explains their over- representation in engineering. Conversely Ashkenazi Jews have higher than average verbal IQs which explains why they appear over represented in media. But that doesn't get us very far because it just gets us back to East Asians outperforming us on IQ tests created by mostly white people and is supposedly culturally biased to have white people outperform. There's something definitely going on here. Maybe it's genetics, maybe it's diet, maybe it's culture. Possibly a combination. It's not really helpful to try to have a discussion on IQ, so I just focus on the positive traits that are derived from IQ. It tends to trigger people less and raw IQ isn't actually important to me compared to things like criminality and economic output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not surprising that large companies would have 'stooge' employees in place for just this sort of thing. I have heard of it happening in at least one major store chain here many years ago.

Kind of reminiscent of one of the first episodes in the series 'Suits' where Louis Litt is interviewing a new junior employee for the firm, and he pulls in another junior mid-interview to dress him down and dismiss him in front of the new employee, just to put the fear of his authority and power into the newbie. The 'fired' employee then just goes back to the bull pen to await being called in for the next new recruit interview so he can walk past and be 'randomly' called in.

<comment><USER20> I also heard the story of a digital agency that rented a huge space, painted the walls with bright colors and hired a bunch of actors to pose as employees. The idea was to deceive and close a deal with a potential big client that insisted in visiting their offices.

<comment><USER19> Uh, a good friend of mine did that a couple of years ago when he started a new design agency. He was going for a large government contract and they insisted on an in-house meeting as part of the pre-tender process.

He had a large office space already, in preparation for growth, but only 1 employee at that stage, so he got his high school aged daughter in, as well as some of her friends to sit in the empty desks and pretend to work. A couple of the PC's at the back facing away from the meeting room weren't even plugged in, and were just screens on the desk and keyboards attached to nothing.

It worked - he got the contract, and as a result, now has REAL employees at those stations, and in fact has to look at a bigger space to expand into.

<comment><USER21> > pre-tender process

If that wasn't intentional, it should have been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ticketmaster the employee

There's actually a good Freakanomics episode on this[1]. How tickets are undervalued and part of Ticketmaster's value is that they take blame for the high prices.

[1] [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market- scr...](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-screwed/)

<comment><USER23> There are a lot of assumptions in that piece, especially regarding the motives of artists and the fan/idol relationship.

It is absolutely not a normal type market, and it shouldn't be treated like one. The way forward is not to inflate ticket prices, ensuring only the richest fans can afford to go to concerts, and screwing over the ordinary people.

The way forward is to make it illegal to resell tickets at higher than face value. That was implemented some years ago here, and scalping is a minor issue now. Fans are generally very good at self-policing and reporting price-gouging scalpers. Ticket prices did increase slightly over time, but certainly not on the level of $50 becoming $500, as posited in the article.

They do touch on that, but I don't think the solution is to completely stop resale. Just limit it to face value or less.

If artists were only interested in short-term profit, they would jack up the prices and only sell to their richest fans. But most of them look at the long perspective, the fact that there's a lot more to be gained in the long run by having a loyal fanbase that doesn't feel exploited.

For the fans who were complaining that they couldn't get tickets for low- seating high-interest events, well that's just too bad. You had the same chance as everyone else. I've sat in ticket queues (offline and online), I've furiously refreshed ticket pages for events with room for less than 100 people just to be sure to get a ticket, 5+ months in advance. I really like the system we have here, where a big wallet is not some kind of guarantee that you'll get a ticket.

If events get sold out, the onus is on the organizers and artists to either book additional shows, or come back again in 6 months or a year, possibly at a bigger venue.

If someone is a true fan, they'll be bummed about missing out, but also adamant to not miss out next time. And they certainly don't fly across the Atlantic for a Broadway show without having somehow secured a ticket beforehand. That's just silly.

<comment><USER24> > For the fans who were complaining that they couldn't get tickets for low- > seating high-interest events, well that's just too bad. You had the same > chance as everyone else. I've sat in ticket queues (offline and online), > I've furiously refreshed ticket pages for events with room for less than 100 > people just to be sure to get a ticket, 5+ months in advance. I really like > the system we have here, where a big wallet is not some kind of guarantee > that you'll get a ticket.

These same arguments are / were used in favor of unpaid internships. Except, of course, that it takes a certain level of financial freedom or support to do things like wait in lines for concert tickets. Just because your paying time instead of money in these queues, does not mean that it doesn't carry a cost.

<comment><USER23> I don't it's the same as unpaid internships. You can never completely eliminate the cost, as there is a limited supply and you can't give away the tickets for free. But you can certainly minimize the costs.

The tickets have to be put up for sale at some specific time that is usually advertised well in advance, which allows (most) people to plan for it. For some artists, a number of tickets are sold earlier to members of the official fan clubs and so on.

What is the alternative? Putting the tickets up for sale as a slow drop? I'm pretty sure that would significantly harm sales.

<comment><USER24> Use a lottery system with prepaid authorizations? Pretty much any system where people can put up some money and walk away. Fixed price, no queues.

<comment><USER23> Then it's just random chance. People usually don't like that sort of thing, outside of literal lotteries.

<comment><USER24> That's the entire point. Anything other than random chance means that someone has "priority". Priority which is typically decided by spending resources. Either time by waiting in queue. Or money by buying at higher than face value from a scalper -- who probably waited in queue, thereby exchanging their time for money.

If the principle being striven for is _fair_ , then most fair to me would be to allow all potential attendees to participate in the sale. If there are more participants than tickets, then the most fair mechanism which does not reward time-rich participants is random lottery, not a queue. A queue rewards those who happen to be available for registration the moment it opens.

<comment><USER23> Fans don't want a lottery, though. They want to be 100% sure they have a ticket to the show. It's a gratification thing.

Not everything can be 100% optimal and profit maximized. The current ticket sales method works great, if you eliminate the rent-seeking scalpers, through simple regulation.

However, ideally we should also consider it shameful to buy from scalpers. You run a high risk being scammed, they can resell the same ticket multiple times, and you have no recourse.

<comment><USER24> Your original response was that there wasn't a similarity between unpaid internships and concert ticket sales. And now your response is that more optimal systems are less desirable, which is a fine answer. But it's certainly a _choice_ to choose the less-optimal system, with the understanding that that choice is going to lock out some people due to resource constraints. And the current method rewards time-rich people in a very similar way as unpaid internships. They receive access to experiences that others can't "afford".

<comment><USER23> That only goes for very high-profile shows. The vast majority of shows do not sell out in minutes, or even at all.

<comment><USER24> The bit quoted in my original comment called that out already. Of course it's not an issue when it's not an issue...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had a boss that used to scold me in front of others to show that he was tough and impartial. It took two or three times to see the pattern (he expected me to see by myself). Too good I didn't overreact...

<comment><USER26> Urgh. That's such a basic leadership thing (scold in private) that it just infruiates me that someone wouldn't get that.

Hopefully your boss figured that out or was moved out of a leadership position.

It's roughly the equivalent of a developer that writes shit code with concurrency issues, basic code smells, etc...that would be drummed out in short order. For some reason, we don't hold leaders to the same standard.

<comment><USER27> It's shocking how many people with poor leadership skills end up in positions of power.

<comment><USER28> It's because positions of power attract people who desire power, not people who have leadership skills, and there aren't good metrics for what makes someone a good leader that you can use to filter out the bad ones.

See: Politics throughout the entirety of human history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Isn't that kind of what a Chief Compliance Officer is there for?

So that if something goes so badly wrong that the CEO would otherwise be the one put in jail, in this case the CCO goes instead?

</comment><comment><USER30> A pipe-smoking ficticious entry.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry)

<comment><USER31> I don't see the connection?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This job exists today and it is called CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) or other variants :D

<comment><USER33> You need to be highly qualified for that job

<comment><USER34> OP is jokingly referring to the FB/Cambridge Analytica scandal

<comment><USER33> Or Equifax

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I imagine that in companies imposing the requirement that managers periodically purge the "bottom" x% of their workforce, "to be sacked" accurately describes the real purpose of many of the new roles hired for.

</comment><comment><USER36> I worked at a startup where we had a floor of empty offices. We sometimes would paid people to walk around the office floor and sit in offices when major customers wanted to come and visit. When the customer was in the boss' office discussing the deal, one of the "employees" would always stick his head in the office and say "Hey, I needed to ask you a question. Should I come back?" and the boss would be like "yeah, why don't you come back in an hour after I am done with John here."

</comment><comment><USER37> Sometimes it feels like I also have this job. Except for some reason, my employers only sack me once, and for real.

</comment><comment><USER38> No less an authority than Danny Baker . . . the comedy writer, born in '57? Or else who? How would he know about this?

<comment><USER39> I think that's the authors way of saying the story is unverifiable in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> From the title I expected a procedure to test if management & HR will act on unacceptable behavior. The story makes more sense, but could still be a good idea, seeing as how many underperformers and bad apples there are in some companies.

</comment><comment><USER41> This works as long as he doesn't get fired twice in front of the same customer.

<comment><USER42> The point is to discourage the customer from complaining because of the harsh treatment the customer will receive. Therefore yes, if it comes to that, it has failed.

<comment><USER43> Some people complain just so they can watch the boss chew out some employee. That's satisfaction for being badly treated/buying something that was faulty.

<comment><USER41> It's also satisfaction because you failed to get laid, you are going through a divorce, your own job is a shit experience or your life otherwise sucks in some fashion and you are the kind of asshole who enjoys taking your crap out on other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure I saw Friends episode with almost exactly the same premise.

<comment><USER45> Yep: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583611/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583611/)

"In order for her kitchen staff to acknowledge her authority, Monica hires Joey so she can fire him in front of them."

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there some reason this worker can't actually also work? Presumably in the backroom, where customers will never see him.

</comment><comment><USER47> I thought this might be about a company testing whether it was any good at getting rid of bad employees.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sounds a bit like: "Send this jerk the bedbug letter!" [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-bedbug- letter/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-bedbug-letter/)

</comment><comment><USER49> If I made a penny for every time I accepted blame for a managers dumb mess- up..... (As an over paid IT contractor)

Oh! now that I think about it.. guess who always gets called back by those managers for new projects! :)

</comment><comment><USER50> Why don't they have a normal employee play the "be fired" role? Unless he gets fired 8 times a day, I don't see why he's idle...

<comment><USER51> It is a bit embarrassing when they keep shopping and see the guy that was fired working in the store, or see them the next day or the next week. They might just catch on.

<comment><USER50> Ah, I was imagining a sales warehouse, where the customers typically only talk to the sales employees by phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone remember P.L.E.A.S.E.

<comment><USER53> I do!

 _P_ rovide

 _L_ egal

 _E_ xculpation

 _A_ nd

 _S_ ign

 _E_ verything

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> what happens the next time lady ponsonby waffles has a complaint?

<comment><USER55> That's why in the real world you fake fire the next guy going to lunch, so his reward for being yelled at a bit and fired was an extra long lunch hour.

Also when I worked retail back when high school kids held the minimum wage jobs, annual retail turnover often exceeded 100%, so if lady waffles is having multiple problems in a couple months, your store has a problem far beyond angry waffles.

The American version at the store I worked at both as a labor drone and eventually as a night shift manager while in school, was to send coworkers to the office to be yelled at. The store was urban and near the bar district so at night, customers were generally drunk and guilty until proven innocent. Drunk people usually don't want to draw attention to themselves, mostly, so we had few complaints.

Its a mid to high skilled workplace thing to assume employees are yelled at. For manual labor work, the cost of replacement, either of the job or the employee, is very low, and most firing offenses had legal involvement (stealing cash or product from the store, for example) so discipline never went much beyond asking someone "WTF?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Now that's funny.</comment>


The Magic SysReq Key On Your Keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key <comment><USER2> Having had to use REISUB just last week for the first time in a long time, this is rather useful knowledge about the penguin.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, right?! This is the first I'd ever heard or read about it and I've been using linux now for ... wow. since 2000? I remember several distros had ctl+alt+backspace mapped to something that would kill your X session and boot you back to the graphical login but I haven't seen that in a long time.

(edit, I had to google REISUB: [http://blog.kember.net/articles/reisub-the- gentle-linux-rest...](http://blog.kember.net/articles/reisub-the-gentle-linux- restart/))</comment></comment>


How DNA Transfer Framed Lukis Anderson for Murder - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/04/19/framed-for-murder-by-his-own-dna <comment><USER2> This is one of the reasons I'm categorically against any kind of DNA databases. Yes, they can be useful. But if a crime is a bit harder to solve and there is a nice & convenient match against a DNA database of for instance known offenders (or babies whose blood was sampled right after birth...) then policework will shift from 'whodunnit' to 'howdidtheydoit'. Rationalization after such a detail comes up is a path that is a lot more tempting than to come up with suspects for which there is no evidence at all.

> a limp handshake relays less DNA than a bone-crushing one

Bowing seems to make good sense in this context.

Finally, shocking he wasn't compensated for spending a long time in jail.

<comment><USER3> 'Hard cases make bad law', as the saying go. We know they won't lead to a massive crime wave of false convictions because DNA databases generally aren't abused like that, and the effects on crime are enormous: "The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders" [http://jenniferdoleac.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/DNA_Den...](http://jenniferdoleac.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/DNA_Denmark.pdf) , Anker et al 2017.

<comment><USER4> Part of the problem is that as the size of the database grows -- i.e., as every police encounter turns into a mandatory sample collection -- the false- positive rate will also go up.

Remember: DNA "matches" are probabilistic, and most of their utility has been based on the low probability of a sample taken from a crime scene "matching" a sample taken from a suspect. Prosecutors (committing the prosecutor's fallacy, of course) love to tout the "one in a billion" type statistics for a match being a false positive, but it doesn't take a very large database at all for "one in a billion" coincidences to start occurring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A sampling of nice good articles about Forensic Pseudoscience, courtesy of Google search:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=forensic+pseudoscience](https://www.google.com/search?q=forensic+pseudoscience)

This is a broad-based problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the > lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus > grip, or the barista who handed them their afternoon latte.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another conspiracy theory that became true. Is there a list already?</comment>


F.T.C. Drops Google Inquiry on Street View Data - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/f-t-c-drops-google-inquiry-on-street-view-data/?src=twr <comment><USER2> Good.</comment>


[Please review]Our small twitter app - <AUTHOR> http://dmplusplus.com/

<comment><USER2> > Send direct message to users not following you

But, they still have to follow you.

> Receive direct messages from users without having them to litter into your > timeline

It doesn't litter my timeline. In fact, I've never seen a direct message on my timeline. It gets emailed to me, and shows up in the "Direct messages" tab.

> Decide who you want to receive direct messages from

Don't I do this already by just not following them?

Not seeing a use for it, sorry.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you fully understood what this thing is. (I'm not affiliated, I just feel the overwhelming urge to clarify.)

They don't have to follow _you_. They do have to follow @dmpp. (I think this may be what you said. "You" seemed ambiguous. Sorry.)

No, direct messages are not in your timeline, but if you want to direct message someone, the rest of their tweets _will_ have to be in your timeline. Using this service, you could direct message some people without following them, hence their tweets not littering your timeline.

Yes, you do decide who you receive direct messages from already. In context, that sentence meant "now that you've opened yourself up to direct messages from people you are not following, we do actually offer some level of control over what direct messages you receive."

I haven't decided yet whether this is useful to me personally or not. Nonetheless, I find it clever.

<comment><USER2> I guess I just read it literally as opposed to thinking about it. Personally, I've never had the need to direct message someone who I'm not following. I _guess_ there's probably an example I could come up with in where I wanted to DM someone that wasn't following me...

<comment><USER4> Think of it something like this.

"U can now receive DMs from people you have @replied sometime, even tho' you dont follow them anymore."

The above represents the default behavior, however, U could modify access to be able to receive DM from anybody/only followers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scoble follows everyone and hates DMs, so that's a bad example. I like the idea of trying to break through DM access levels, but this doesn't seem like the ideal solution. I can't imagine enough people following @dmpp to make this work across the board...just seems like _another_ service to monitor.

<comment><USER4> Actually, Scoble follows everyone _because_he_can_receive_DMs_ from them. Now, all he has to do is to follow @dmpp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like this app is actually solving a small problem people have on twitter. I don't actually use dm's on twitter(unless really necessary), so this app would be of little use to me.

Also i am seeing a small percentage of people using twitter as their mail id. As twitter grows more and more, there might be more people sending dm's to people who are not following them back. Also there are a bunch of purists on twitter who follow people whom they really know well to keep their timeline clean, it would be useful for them.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing regardless of your apps utility. The logo on the top has color profile information in it and thus does not display correctly on mac computers with safari meaning it does not match the background.

I see a lot of startups make this mistake. Here's a quick post i wrote about it back in March with screens explaining what i mean: [http://danielrhammond.com/post/29596079/dont-embed-color- pro...](http://danielrhammond.com/post/29596079/dont-embed-color-profile)

<comment><USER8> Speaking of the logo, that little bird looks a lot like the [Twitterrific icon][1]. Especially in [sm12.jpg][2]. Do you have permission to use that icon?

[1]: <http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/> [2]: <http://dmplusplus.com/images/sm12.jpg>

<comment><USER4> I have specifically verified it from the designer, we do have rights to use all the images that have been used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the para 'Using twitter and @dmpp: (new, intelligent way!)' the @dmpp links lead to a 404 not found.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the proposed benefits are to subtle. The only possible benefit I see is the access levels.

</comment><comment><USER11> there's a reason why you can't just dm anyone.

Your spam filter better be perfect, which it's not, or else people are going to fetch your whole followers list and dm everyone on it spam.

</comment><comment><USER12> what this tweet said (ironically on your site) bottom line: <http://snapplr.com/p81m></comment>


Data Structures for Text Sequences [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf

<comment><USER2> This should also have a [1998] in the title, like it was when first posted here a couple of months ago at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8827887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8827887) .

Also, why is this 17 year apparently unpublished paper interesting? The reason it came up two months ago is as a research response around [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8826689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8826689) .</comment>


How to delete all wall posts on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://impulse.kirillzubovsky.com/post/3630106590/how-to-delete-all-wall-posts-on-facebook

<comment><USER2> Does not do what title says</comment>


Codecademy Launches New API Course Track with Parse - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parse.com/2013/01/09/codecademy-launches-new-api-course-track-with-parse/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032504>

</comment><comment><USER3> The Parse documentation is already pretty good but the Codeacademy lesson should be even better for beginners.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice work, guys!</comment>


Air Force still cannot identify 19 of 64 satellites from the "ride-share" launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/2/18277344/space-situational-awareness-air-force-tracking-sso-a-spaceflight-cubesats <comment><USER2> To be clear the Air Force knows the owners of the 64 satellites that were launched in the "ride-share".

They're just having difficulty in identifying the satellites while they are in orbit because of the similarity of the signatures of many of the satellites

</comment><comment><USER3> India's Isro has also been recently sending up large numbers of small payloads, so may be the situation is similar with them also. In fact there were Americans satellites which were not having requisite FAA clearances being launched as payloads on the ISRO rocket.</comment>


Law firm bosses envision Artificial Intelligence to replace young lawyers - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/law-firm-bosses-envision-watson-type-computers-replacing-young-lawyers/ <comment><USER2> Where will old lawyers come from? Or are they next?

And if we don't have old lawyers, where will judges come from?

"A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision"</comment>


Why doesn't Google just use YouTube as their social network - <AUTHOR>

What do you guys think? <comment><USER2> YouTube comments are about the worst "social" interaction possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Go to any fan page on FB and you will see the same thing.</comment></comment>


Hidden portrait 'found under Mona Lisa', says French scientist - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35031997 <comment><USER2> As someone else pointed out before, this was probably nothing noteworthy. Artists always make multiple layers and improve upon a base, this is just standard technique. This isn't some Da Vinci Code hidden Illuminati story.

<comment><USER3> They also reuse canvases because they tend to be poor and hey, they've already got this perfectly serviceable canvas sitting around with something they don't care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't they be pentimenti?

</comment><comment><USER5> pics or it didn't happen (i mean the real layer back light see-through stuff).

preferably before and after substraction of what can be seen without the backlighting..</comment>


Ask HN: Advice on pricing an idea to present to my company - <AUTHOR>

I work for a software and services company. I have the ear of the exec team/founders/board (We have google execs on our board) about some ideas for the direction of our software/platform.
I have already spec'd some functionality out - but I would like to pursue getting a more specific spec/functionality defined as well as getting it quoted from an external dev.
What is the best way to do this?
I have previously gotten a quote from a dev - but I really didnt trust their numbers given the way they quoted it (e.g. "Setup development environment, 40 hours -- Define Interfaces, 40 hours" etc..)
Has anyone tried to price out even with a ROM something they want to propose?
What are the pitfalls, best practice? <comment><USER2> The problem is that you're asking them to decide up-front how long it will take, make risk assessments, getting the spec right before they have even started looking at the problem, etc. It's extremely difficult to develop code like this; it's waterfall all over again. Needless to say, they are going to give you numbers that aren't grounded in reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please educate me:

How is your comment true for ANY outside developer asked to quote the development of any product. Especially a mobile app.

We have _thousands_ of IOS developers these days, are you saying NONE of them can give an accurate quote for software?

<comment><USER2> Sure they can give you a quote, it just won't be a very accurate one. There are entire schools of software development - lean, agile, etc - based on the idea that you simply cannot hand someone a spec upfront and expect them to provide you with all the time and costs figured out.</comment></comment></comment>


NoSQL is a Premature Optimization - <AUTHOR> http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/nosql-is-a-premature-optimization/ <comment><USER2> This is a great post, however I think there is one caveat... NoSQL is a premature optimization for _relational data_. NoSQL isn't necessarily an optimization if your dataset is one that isn't relational, where you gain flexibility and get the scaling for free.

However, the truth is that most business datasets are relational, and because of that relational databases do an excellent job of storing and accessing that data in an efficient way. I completely agree that people who try to force what would be a simple relational database into a complicated NoSQL system to gain scaling in the future are making a huge mistake.

<comment><USER3> _NoSQL is a premature optimization for relational data_

I don't know about that either. Graph DBs have been around a while and are ideal for relational data (you don't have to mess with tables and joins because everything is explicitly joined), but Web developers are just starting to realize their power.

If I am developing a website that uses the Facebook Graph API (<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/>) or the Twitter API to store my users' friends and followers (and many modern auth systems are doing this), a graph database is ideal because you can use a graph query language like Gremlin (<https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki>) to do all sorts of cool stuff, like find a user's friends of friends:

      g.v(user_id).outE('friend').inV.outE('friend').inV

This says for the graph database "g":

1\. Start at the vertex for the user_id

2\. Follow the outgoing edges labeled "friend" to the incoming vertices (these incoming vertices are the user's friends)

3\. From the user's friends, follow the outgoing edges to the incoming vertices one more time to get their friends.

This is so much simpler than messing with joins in a relational database, and it's much more performant on large data sets.

<comment><USER4> Funny thing though, a well designed relational database will execute your graph queries faster. It won't do generic graph queries faster, but if your sql data model and code are optimized for the type of graph data you are storing, sql will almost always be significantly faster, orders of magnitude in some cases. Obviously not a data model argument, but a real world argument nevertheless. If you then need to scale further you will probably end up putting up the same caching layer between your database and the front end, but at least all your data will be in once place (the sql database).

<comment><USER3> _a well designed relational database will execute your graph queries faster_

Why do you say that? -- see "MySQL vs. Neo4j on a Large-Scale Graph Traversal" ([http://markorodriguez.com/2011/02/18/mysql-vs-neo4j-on-a- lar...](http://markorodriguez.com/2011/02/18/mysql-vs-neo4j-on-a-large-scale- graph-traversal/)).

You can represent a graph in almost any data structure, including a relational database. But the difference between a graph database and everything else is that in a real graph database (like Neo4j), each node has an internal/local index for its adjacent nodes so it doesn't have do an external look up for each traversal step.

Watch this video on "The Graph Traversal Programming Pattern" to see what I'm talking about (<http://vimeo.com/13213184>).

<comment><USER4> From the article:

"However, no attempts have been made to optimize the Java VM, the SQL queries, etc"

Emphasis being on optimizing the sql. We have run tests comparing neo4j and postgres, and postgres comes out with greater throughput for our data set, where our database implementation was done people who know postgres extremely well. Where you will see especially great differences is aggregate queries, such as if you want to count the number of a certain type of connections coming into a set of nodes, and then sort these nodes by that number. A sql database is much better at stuff like that.

<comment><USER3> What were you using to query the graph?

Gremlin has significantly improved what you can do with graph aggregating and sorting:

      // count incoming friends for each node and sort by most friends
      m = [:]
      g.V.inE('friend').outV.groupCount(m)
      m.sort{}

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full Disclosure: I work for Clustrix, though I don't speak for them in any official or unofficial way. These are my personal opinions.

I think the author of the blog completely missed the point of what Michael Stonebreaker (VoltDB), Jim Starkey (NimbusDB), and Paul Mikesell (Clustrix) said. All three companies make scalable, relational, ACID compliant, SQL databases. None of them are advocating using NoSQL.

Not to put words in their mouths, but they are saying you need what MySQL gives you. You should not have to move the relational and consistency logic to your application, that's the job of the database. The problem with MySQL is not that it is SQL, it is that MySQL doesn't scale. In the case of Clustrix their database is MySQL compatible, it uses the same library interfaces (e.g., MySQLdb in Python), the same command-line tools, and it can participate in a MySQL replication setup as master or slave. The difference is it actually scales, so you don't have to shard.

With MySQL, once you reach the performance limit of using massive hardware, lots of read slaves, and memcache, the only thing left is sharding. With sharding you are breaking up your database into lots of databases running on different machines. With separate databases you lose a lot of the relational ability, or you move it into the application. What the "NewSQL" databases are offering is the ability to keep a single database, and when you want to scale performance or capacity you just add another node to the DB cluster.

To those that say NoSQL is easier and more flexible than SQL, that entirely depends on your data. You should pick the database that fits your data, which might be multiple databases for different datasets within your organization. Facebook uses a lot of NoSQL, but they also use a lot of MySQL. They have obviously decided that some of their data works best in NoSQL, and some of it works best in a RDBMS no matter how hard it is to scale.

So build your app using whatever works best for you. If that's CouchDB and Redis, cool. If it's MySQL, go for it. Once you've proven that there is demand for your app, and it takes off, then deal with scaling.

<comment><USER6> I think MySQL NDB is worth mentioninig there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wrote this comment on the OP (waiting for moderation):

NoSQL is not just about scale (although it can be). In my opinion the main benefit of giving up relational constraints is flexibility. Find me a relational system that can credibly do offline replication to mobile devices. Each of the options I've seen are full of gotchas. But if you replace the relational model with an MVCC document model, you can suddenly solve an entirely new class of problems.

Read about how Apache CouchDB is being used in rural Africa to bring collaborative data and web technologies to health clinics that don't have reliable internet access: [http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/couchdb-zambia- healthcare.h...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/couchdb-zambia- healthcare.html)

These same patterns are applicable to mobile connections in the 1st world.

<comment><USER8> I'm unsure what you're asking for, but isn't SQLlite suitable as it's used by many applications even on mobile?

<comment><USER9> He's not asking for anything. He's pointing out how a different data model allows for solving a different set of problems. The MVCC page on Wikipedia might give you a better background so that you're able to contrast the two models and determine for yourself where they are useful: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_contro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a complaint looking for a problem. NoSQL is a very broad term -- are you talking about Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Memcached, Tokyo Cabinet, neo4j, etc.?

Scalability is one piece of the puzzle; picking the best tool for the job is a much bigger piece. Work with what you are comfortable with, but realize that an RDBMS may not be the best way to deal with a graph. Logging is probably not best done through an RDBMS. We have tools that we can use to solve problems in a more efficient way, so we should use them.

RDBMS are not a panacea and neither are NoSQL database solutions. Use the right tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER11> One could argue that SQL is a premature optimization as well if all you need is a key/value store or a document store. Using SQL just in case you may need ad-hoc queries could be as harmful as using NoSQL just because you may need to scale.

Each application is different and you need to pick the appropriate tools.

<comment><USER12> And that would be a perfectly fine argument! Though I am not aware of anything significant that can be built without a relational db. Even the simplest college assignments about building an address book involve querying and referencing primary keys across tables.

<comment><USER13> You can do queries and reference other documents many NoSQL databases; look at the documentation for GAE's datastore: [http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/datastore/queries...](http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/datastore/queries.html#Fetching_Results)

Or for MongoDB: <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries>

<comment><USER14> That is relational though. In those cases, Redis and MongoDB must create some kind of key reference table like MySQL would.

<comment><USER13> It depends on what do you mean by relational. I mean, even the simplest key- value store has to have keys, so if you store the key of another record/document, you have a "relation."

But you can't set _constraints_ that enforce such relations, which is the whole point of the relational model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I call bullshit.

Basically, Nosql is not just about scale but flexibility. Give me a schemaless engine anyday

</comment><comment><USER16> Wrong from point 1. I use MongoDB and Redis because first is easier to prototype with ad hoc and second offers unique features one has to remap manually if SQL is used. In short, NoSQL requires less investment than SQL for my use cases.

<comment><USER17> Definitely agree. Getting Rails up and running on MongoDB is a lot faster than with ActiveRecord on top of some SQL. Especially when your data format is changing quickly, it's nice to just make a few changes in the model rather than having to track migrations.

<comment><USER18> You realize that this has nothing to do with sql/nosql and everything to do with your chosen framework, right? If, you used, say, a framework that autogenerated itself from your schema at build time, then changing the database would be as simple as changing the database, which is trivial.

I think a lot of our perceptions about technologies are influenced by the things that sit between us and those technologies. A lot of the talk about this particular issue has nothing to do with Relational databases or key/value stores.

<comment><USER19> Either I didn't get your point or you don't know what what Rails migrations are. Migrations are just a way to "change the database" in a repeatable way.

<comment><USER18> Right, but the grandparent's complaint was that you had to change your model, then write migrations to match.

In other frameworks, you use your tool of choice to change the database schema, then build the project and you're done. All the "model" stuff regenerates automatically. Thus, schema/model changes have no pain associated with them whatsoever, so there's no particular advantage to using nosql vs sql.

<comment><USER19> With Rails' ActiveRecord the model introspects the database schema at run time and figures out field changes automatically. What it doesn't figure out is relations and you still have to specify them in both the database schema and the model. Since you're mentioning project build, I suppose you're referring to Java or C# frameworks. Are those frameworks able to generate code for relations as well? (I suppose this requires following naming conventions or setting referential constraints)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, conventions cover pretty much every case you tend to come across. Got a column called CompanyID that has a foreign key constraint over to the Company table? Perhaps this is a relation... Nice of Rails to make it acceptable to simply ask you to name your stuff in a consistent way so that things just work.

The added bonus of a build step is that you don't need to keep regenerating the same classes and SQL code every page load, but it's not really any different from the programmer's standpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Obviously, it also depends on exactly what kind of application you are building.

If you primarily want to persist objects and indices that don't have good or easy analogue in the SQL world, a NoSQL solution is good solution because you don't have to bother with the unneeded SQL overhead.

If you've doing something that maps reasonably well into the relational model, well, that's what you should use. Rational technology has been around a long time and has been scaled to huge levels. And it seems fairly clear a social network maps pretty well to a relational model.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been trying to tell my colleagues and higher-ups this for the last few weeks as I've planned out a new platform that "needs to scale." They've heard that some of our business partners are using MongoDB and want to know why I'm using Postgres.

The truth is that our traffic could wildly exceed our most hopeful projections and we still wouldn't nearly be in the position of orgs like Twitter, Facebook, or Netflix, stretching the limits of what an RDBMS can do without becoming a nightmare to maintain.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like my experience applying to companies who list every NoSQL option under the roof in the job description and yet looking at what they do, I can't figure out why they'd need all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In theory you should use the right tool for the job and there shouldn't even be a discussion.

However in reality not all DB's are created equally. It comes down to this: do you want to spend a known amount of time hammering in a screw, or do you want to spend an unknown amount of time optimizing your state of the art, but unproven screwdriver.

This is important for people starting a business. You don't start a business to test out new technology, that's what weekend projects are for. They need to be focusing on the product and not spending time 'just getting it to work'.

Mysql/MC aren't sexy, but it takes a trivial amount of time to set up and tune them.

There are lots of caveats to this; the entire argument can be nit-picked to death. But I think it holds for the generic webapp template that just needs data to persist and then be served back to users.

</comment><comment><USER23> A lot of the confusion and furor over NoSQL vs relational vs NewSQL is caused by the idea that these technologies demand any sort of mutual exclusion. At my shop we use Redis and MySQL and SQLite extensively and - to the best of my knowledge - they have never gotten into scuffles with each other, holy wars of relationality. In fact, this seems to be a proclivity unique to their users.

That being said, I think it is - wait for it - premature to call NoSQL an unwarranted early "optimization." For our real-time analytics app, we use Redis because we are just storing key (page name) value (hits). With millions of writes a day for relatively simple data, it is nice - and in no way premature - to run Redis on a medium-sized instance. Data retrieval is fast and after a year and a half we haven't had any problems.

Other apps, use MySQL exclusively. For our many-many forests of tag, entry, source, author, etc etc relational data, we rely on the easy oversight of MySQL and the rich ORMs that have gracefully evolved to cut through the jungle.

What's more, there are many applications that use both Redis and MySQL. My Silver gem <https://github.com/tpm/silver> wraps MySQL requests in a Redis caching layer to speed up queries. This is not terribly novel or that different than, say, memcached but it does what we need it to.

The point is that just like apps are as multiform as the imagination is competent, so should be the tools and strategies we use to create them and solve their problems. Yes, people will use NoSQL incorrectly. People use MySQL incorrectly and inefficiently more than not. Hell, you can use YAML in a bad way. Those aren't the cases we should focus on. We should focus on all the systems that do work.

I'd like to see, for every mind-thinky post about whether or not MySQL is a death trap or NoSQL is a nu-wave panacea, a post about how some company is making the technologies that they have chosen work for them. At the end of the day, there is no uniform march toward optimal global technology efficiency. Just the small victories of a startup that needs to record cat GPS movements, a newspaper that needs to analyze a million pages of leaks, a broker who needs to pour through SEC dumps. NoSQL, NewSQL, SQL, HithertoUnknownUnPostSQL: I say let em all in. Someone will find them useful.

<comment><USER14> What about lock-in though? What if you decide you _do_ want some relationship or way of filtering the keys you're storing with Redis. After you already have it in Redis as keys/values.

What then?

<comment><USER24> Hopefully you abstracted as much of the database code as possible, so you can switch to (for example) MySQL without serious pain. This only gets tricky if you're using some of the more fancy features of Redis, like sorted sets, which are a bit more clunky to do in SQL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone explain to me what NoSQL equivalents are for concepts like primary key and general data consistency?

My other question is that I've read several places that NoSQL makes most sense for full-text documents. And yet I see company after company with little apparent full-text data boasting about their NoSQL use. I am especially aware of this as someone in the job market seeing terms like Hadoop and MongoDB just thrown around in the job description. How? Why?

<comment><USER13> There isn't a single model, but an eventually consistency is the most common: [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/12/eventually_consi...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/12/eventually_consistent.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't a key-value store (NoSQL) simpler to use than a relational database? (I haven't used one so I don't know for sure).

Hierarchical and network stores were popular before RDB was invented; although RDB was slower, the big advantage was that you could transform the data into whatever form you need (instead of having to use the specific hierarchy used to store it). At least, that was the key benefit according to my reading of Codd's 1970 paper.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I can see this argument going either way. If you're avoiding SQL for NoSQL for scalability reasons, that might be premature optimization, especially if your data is pretty easily relational (and e.g. you have something approximating a schema).

But if you just need to persist a data model, don't care too much about the schema, and come up with the solution of, "I'll just serialize my hash table to a CSV flat file", that's just taking the ultra-simple solution, not really an optimization. If anything, pulling out the big iron of SQL when all you need to do is serialize a hashtable would be the premature optimization (or at least, premature architecting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Awful post. His example for why NOSQL is "difficult" to start with, is a company with a huge RDBMS trying to transition. Had they started with NOSQL, it would have been easy to architect around that from the beginning, rather than cramming it in later. He then goes on to argue that it's much easier to transition to NOSQL later, which is the exact opposite of his example.

NOSQL isn't one catchall group. There are different tools there for different jobs. His arguments rest on the assumption that NOSQL is hard(er). If it's not hard, and it solves a problem, then it's not premature optimization, it's just optimization.

There are certainly situations where using a NOSQL database to start with gives you a competitive advantage and makes things easier down the road. This same argument is made every time a new technology comes onto the scene. People who made a living using something else will argue that learning the new thing is too hard, and isn't worth the time. If he doesn't want to bother with learning about new tools, that's fine, but it's silly for him to argue that learning them is pointless or a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER28> NoSQL is not only about scale, but also about flexibility?

the flexibility and schemalessness of NoSQL is actually a consequence of the scaling possibilities - it's hard to manage horizontal partitioning and maintain consistency between multiple tables with foreign keys and rollback transactions in a distributed environment; and easy when you have only one table with two fields: key and value.

when, like in mongodb, the value is actually a tree-like document, and you need to have an index on some of the element, you gradually return to schema, because this element should be in the same place/surrounding in all indexed values.

i am saying that flexibility is not why you should choose NoSQL, but actually the scalability that you might need later.

(and non-relational data is kept ok in blob fields or in files and indexed by lucene - if you want (i don't))

</comment><comment><USER29> I found this article fairly uninformative.

His first point is 'all NoSQL is less mature'. Second point is 'there is no advantage to NoSQL except scale' Third point is 'you'll have time to scale later, which includes moving to NoSQL'

None of these arguments is novel. Developers pick NoSQL for other reasons as well.

I didn't find a pioneer tax to setting it up. It worked extremely well for non-uniform data. I found its design easier to handle for failover.

This entire debate is old. NoSQL is a tool. His arguments add nothing to the debate.

</comment><comment><USER30> Fantastic post. Tells the truth.</comment>


Startup Hackers, it's the Sales skills that you need to learn next - <AUTHOR> http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/2008/10/startup-hacker-its-not-the-new-technology-its-the-sales-skills-that-you-need-to-learn-next.html <comment><USER2> I don't think it's neccessary for every guy who wants to start a business to be a salesman. If your main skill is technology, you should know enough about sales to get you so large that you can hire people who specialize in sales. Then focus on your core competency, which is technology.

Sales is not what creates the real value of a company - it's the product. If your main skill lies in creating an excellent product, then don't distract yourself by focusing too much on sales. If you do so, you'll always see your product through the prism of 'sales' and this will change your product.

Every company has to be pulled by two forces - the force that wants a kickass product, and the other that wants to sell it.

So the product guy should say:

* Let's make this tool where one can download and play any song in the world for absolutely free

The sales guy should say:

* We can't make any money that way. Let's put Ads every 10 seconds in each song

The middle ground would be:

* Let's put DRM in the songs.

Something like that. If everyone in the company is just thinking about sales, there is no counter-balance in the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> By salseman, I mean you need to learn the art of selling. You need not think of money only. Even convincing your technology to internal/upper management, or explaining your idea (let's say a Free service) to a single user and enticing him to signup to your service can be also considered as Sales act.

I've worked in a situation, where we were 2 co-founders, coming from technology background. It wasn't a Consumer Internet startup. So we couldn't wait to code in the room and then let "virality" spread out. We had to make new introductions, go to customers' site, present them what we are doing, understand what exactly they want, and then re-define spec based on majority of customer feedback. We were small tech team, in the process of building something. So we didn't have sales team. So we had to roll our sleeves, and pitch the customers. We couldn't wait until we hire sales guys. Once the startup grows, we'll hire sales team.

But my point was, we need to have that selling attitude - always.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where I work, one of my bosses motto's is to always have everyone do sales in some small way, atleast a bit each week.

I am the lone programmer at the company, so essentially I am the CTO (It's what my business card says, shrug) ... Apart from my day-to-day programming and online marketing tasks (seo, google adwords, etc etc) I pick up the phone at least a few times a day.

Not only that, but when your boss gives you all the info behind what we're buying, how we're doing it, and why it's good for us, you begin to learn a lot.

I totally disagree 100% on anyone who thinks all they should be good at is hacking away. You may be damn good at that, but diversity helps so much.

</comment><comment><USER4> sales is important

But it's not everything. There are other aspects of marketing that hackers are usually pretty good at (for instance, giving the impression that your company is honest and hires smart, competent people.)

Many companies skip the "buy a suit, meet the client, buy them expensive dinners" kind of sales. Selling to consumers is much easier (well, for me) you still have to market your company (like I said, can be as simple as giving the impression you are smart, competent and honest, depending on your target market.) but the actual sales consists of posting the prices and setting up an automated system to take money. No fast-talking is required.

Some people say you need sales skills to attract investors and partners. Personally, I wouldn't take an investment from someone I wouldn't want as a partner, because they will act as a partner. And I don't want a partner who is willing to give more money to a smooth talking salesguy than to a smart, honest hacker.

Granted, I do want a good salesperson on my team, but I don't want to put anyone who is vulnerable to sales anywhere they can make decisions that effect my company. It is critical that small companies buy products and solutions that provide the best value, not products or solutions that are sold by the best salesperson.

My current plan is to get the technical side of my house in order (and I have no trouble selling to technical consumers, so far I haven't had any trouble selling faster than I can put up new capacity) and get a customer base under me. After that, it should not be difficult to get a sales person to do corporate sales or the like, if I choose to go that direction.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to track website changes? - <AUTHOR> What SaaS service or self hosted tools do you use or recommend for monitoring and being notified when website content changes? <comment><USER2> I haven't found anything that would satisfy this need. I really would like to see a service around this need.

Currently I use acrchive.org which is far from what you and I are looking for :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been using [https://www.followthatpage.com](https://www.followthatpage.com) for about a decade. It works, but it seems that development has long ago halted and I'm curious if I've missed any of the alternatives out there.

Ideally, I could submit URLs for monitoring with an authenticated API call, could receive both email alerts and webhooks on modify, and there would be an option to have the Internet Archive archive a copy when a modification is detected (and possibly attach a WARC file of the http request/response when a modification was detected).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use [https://distill.io/](https://distill.io/) for this, specifically their Firefox add-on. For a fee, they offer more powerful cloud-based plans as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


All your drives are belong to us - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fortinet.com/all-your-drives-are-belong-to-us/

<comment><USER2> The interesting part of this is that it claims to encrypt the drive, but really just overwrites the MBR. Much easier, and probably gets them money from at least half of the victims that they would have done anyway.

<comment><USER3> Wow, who would have thought malware writers would be such low-lifes as to lie to us about their impenetrable security? I thought only marketers did that.

<comment><USER4> Well, then it sounds like the malware writers got themselves a marketing department.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another reason to employ multiple backup techniques. In this case, raw partition backups would have probably saved a lot of worry (although they wouldn't have got rid of the original vulnerability, which is arguably more important).

<comment><USER2> Why would fixing the original vulnerability be more important than backups?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps there is a subtlety I have missed, but if the original vulnerability is not fixed, no amount of restoring backup copies is going to allow your users to consistently access their data. A vulnerable system will inevitably be attacked in exactly the same way, particularly if the hacker is keeping a log of which systems have been compromised but not unlocked online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Spent an hour last night on the phone with my Grandpa dealing with a fake antivir called "ThinkPoint". Malware writers are scum.

<comment><USER7> Ah, yes, I had to remove ThinkPoint from my wife's computer a few weeks ago. It's not that hard, it's just a bunch of work, and requires more knowledge than can be expected from the average computer user. Unfortunately, since I "know about computers", this job is always for me (which doesn't really improve my mood, or my opinion of Windows, to say the least).

I do wonder how this malware got on the PC, since she is usually careful, doesn't use IE, doesn't download any weird stuff, runs Windows Update regularly, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just this weekend I helped remove a trojan from a friend's Win7 PC which Antivir did not detect. It put itself in the registry and autostarted. From there it set a system proxy to 127.0.0.1:40521

What it did with my friend's data, I can only suspect. But it was one of those days that I'm glad that I use different flavours of Unix since ten years. Using Windows (for anything) just seems so naive to me.

<comment><USER9> The last remaining Windows box I had suffered the same fate, and when I had finally finished removing the worm, I made a decision never to use Windows again.

It's not that it can't be secured, but it's the most targeted platform, thus making it a part-time job to keep it secure.

Remember the day when Anti-Virus worked?

<comment><USER8> > Remember the day when Anti-Virus worked?

Actually nope. Back in the day on DOS 6 I had Microsoft AV and like half a dozen virii on every other floppy disk. Did it ever work?

Plus: I don't get the most targeted platform thing. Everyone says that since decades, but Macintosh now is a major player in consumer hardware and Linux/Unix is on more servers than Windows. So why is Windows the most targeted platform? I guess, because "it can't be secured". Sorry, nhangen(;

<comment><USER9> OK, well I believe you. I'm just not an AV expert, so I don't want to pretend to know anything in that realm. All I know is that my Windows box always has worms, and I'm not an idiot when it comes to protection...that's a big issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach - <AUTHOR> http://haveibeenpwned.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting and good idea. I had a couple of accounts in the Adobe breach, though I don't think I got an email from them (maybe it was spamfiltered or I changed my passwords before they sent those mails out), but I wish that there was some sort of long term service for responsible disclosure of breached accounts - eg you sign up, they make you verify your account, then they list and contact you whenever your email appears in some password list. If this one didn't show anyone my email addresses' status, and there was the ability to mark individual hacks as resolved this would fit the bill

</comment><comment><USER3> Lol and you are the first to be notified..</comment>


Cult app Cheddar up for sale, solo hacker explains why - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/05/cheddar-for-sale/ <comment><USER2> "Cult classic"? I've only ever heard the name via self-promotion.

<comment><USER3> I thought the same when I read the sensationalist title and opening remarks. Personally, I've always thought task warrior and org-mode were the most popular among hackers with OmniFocus being the go-to program for Mac die- hards.

It's also worth mentioning that the developer of Cheddar works for the author's husband as seen in the footnote.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for reminding me of TaskWarrior, I'll take it as my annual reminder to check it out :-)

My entire life--from work and home projects, to future someday/maybes--is in OmniFocus, and it's been irreplaceable so far.

> It's also worth mentioning that the developer of Cheddar works for the > author's husband as seen in the footnote.

Yeah, I guess it's just a silly fluff-piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No offense, I love Sam, he is brilliant and cheddarapp is fantastic. But from a business side of things: Who in their right mind would buy a $12k/year revenue business for $125k?

<comment><USER5> If I recall, this is the same fellow who wanted to charge some astronomical fee for iOS project consulting. I suppose this strategy has paid dividends before for him?

<comment><USER6> No, that was Mike Lee.

<comment><USER5> <http://soff.es/one-thousand-dollars-an-hour>

<comment><USER6> Ha, didn't realize he did it too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with Cheddar is that it's a todo app. There are a billion of them already. I wasted an entire afternoon trying to decide which productivity app to use (the irony was not lost on me). There's already too much choice.

FYI: I almost went with Nozbe but settled on Trello.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this seriously a todo app that has a monthly subscription fee?

<comment><USER9> Paying for sync services isn't weird at all. Apparently it has upwards of 600 paying customers.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, it's weird to me. More power to the author for finding a revenue stream but it certainly brings out my cynicism. The revenue stream is on a house of cards since there is no "service" being paid for and the fact the author is asking $125k for such a fragile revenue steam is just strange.

<comment><USER9> How is synchronization not a service? It requires maintaining remote servers, and someone has to pay for them. Not that I think the price is reasonable, but that's a different matter.

<comment><USER8> iCloud provides this for free

<comment><USER9> Good joke. You've already paid for it, remember?

<comment><USER8> Somehow I doubt your 1 kilobyte todo list will require you to alter the amount of iCloud storage you purchase beyond your first free 5gb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just switched from Asana to WorkFlowy which seems very similar to Cheddar. WorkFlowy is awesome, because it is so simple. In my mind, it is perfect for software development management and managing bugs, todo's, etc.

Here is a nice intro video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SOPYrxvojVo)

Shameless, I know, but if you signup for an account use my referral code, we both get 250 more items a month free.

<https://workflowy.com/?ref=eaca8a6>

<comment><USER11> Is it free? I'm a solo freelancer and can't afford a 10$/month service.

<comment><USER10> Yeah it is free, with a premium version. The free version does everything I need so far though. They also have mobile versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> $125,000 to buy everything? I can see why he'd ask for that, seeing as it's popular, has a growing user base, includes everything you need to continue operating.

$125,000+ to hire him or somebody else to build something similar? That's what seems slightly absurd to me.

<comment><USER13> 800 hours (20 weeks) of consulting service for $125k. That's about $6.25k per week, which seems reasonable for high-quality engineering. Some folks would charge more. The key is if you believe it would take 800 hours to re-create Cheddar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Because he got bored working alone and lost his motivation.

</comment><comment><USER15> Usually people open source their projects when they want to stop working on them.

<comment><USER5> This project is already open-source.</comment></comment>


Swift Evolution for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://app.swift-evolution.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hello guys,

I created an iOS version to help the Swift community to follow the proposals from Swift Evolution. I really appreciate any comment, suggestion or any kind of feedback you provide.

Here, you can find me twitter.com/tholanda

<comment><USER2> Nice job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very well done! I'm using it to keep track of the proposals</comment>


Ask HN: How to develop and maintain online community of very high quality? - <AUTHOR>

Hi! What are some ideas on creating an online community that has the level of quality similar to HN/LW?
Are there some methods that can help me to keep my community positive, intelligent, creative?
Please share your thoughts and advice.
P.S.
Specifically, I am developing a community for writers, and I want it to consist of the kind of people who like to hang out here, on LW, and on /r/rational. If you can share some ideas on how I could go about doing that - I would really appreciate it. <comment><USER2> I tried to build an online community of youths interested in politics and failed for lack of people. (We did have a very narrow target group: German youths who were both interested in social matters and enjoyed writing. That probably killed us, since we didn't (yet) manage to spread our advertising net wide enough to attract enough people for a snowball effect.)

So I think you're first problem isn't going to be how to _keep_ your community, but how to _grow_ it. I'd like to hear what ideas others here have on that?

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Good content, advertised occasionally

2\. Heavy moderation

3\. Esoteric writing

The first two are pretty simple. The third one is theoretical, based on the book I've been reading lately: Arthur Melzer - _Philosophy Between the Lines_. It's a dense and exhaustive but compelling history of esoteric writing in philosophy and its sudden disappearance in modern times. Writing esoterically acts as another, explicitly elitist filter because it locks out the people who would reach wrong, unenlightened conclusions.

(I recommend the book, it is a slow read though. I'm only about halfway through it.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Write high-quality content, and allow people to discuss it. It worked for slatestarcodex.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is LW?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://lesswrong.com](http://lesswrong.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clearly state - in writing, what the true objectives of the community are.

compare slasdot to [http://www.slashdotmedia.com/](http://www.slashdotmedia.com/)

Many engineers object to facebook for many good reason. I rather enjoy it but I havent configured any favorite books or movies because I dont want SkyNet to comoute my psychological profile.

I dont by any means object to advertising but I do object to tracking.

</comment><comment><USER7> The only way is to be exclusive. Every community that allows everyone in eventually gets watered down and destroyed by the masses.

<comment><USER6> "Forty below keeps the riff-raff out." \-- Marguerite Payne, Muskegon, Michigan

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In general: Pick a specific topic or set of related topics. Limit the audience to the literate. No pictures. No video.

I don't think writers will go b-tard on you.</comment>


Ask HN: Talk a solo founder through the high level stack to build - <AUTHOR>

I'm a solo founder who has built the prototype and pre-MVP all by myself.  I build (MS/BS CS)/hustle/hack well.  This is a niche product, and I will not go into recruiting issues here.  Users are itching to try the product, and I wanted to talk through the high level rough (correct) steps of the v1.0 build, and get input on best practices.
The objective is to build a minimally featured end-to-end system.  Users can sign up, create an account, pay, and access the core technology that is hosted on the cloud.  The core technology is a separate component that is not part of this discussion.
Specifically, this pertains to the website and everything that goes on behind the scenes during a user interaction.
Key considerations: this needs to scale, be reasonably quick to implement, and secure so someone else can take over at some point.  Also assume that UI/UX design is ready.  I expect that this will take time, which is fine.
I'm going to start this discussion with the first steps:
1) WP to get the front end up: 1-2 days 2) Flush out landing page: 3 days
Right away I know I'll need one or more of php/js/jquery and mySQL, and integrate with payment processors and gateways.
Thoughts, best practices? <comment><USER2> It's hard to give advice when the product is so vague. But depending on how users can "access the core technology", it's possible you could just integrate a membership plugin into your WP install and achieve most of what you want.</comment>


Direct Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421 <comment><USER2> For a more critical look at this concept, I recommend "Mission to the Gravitational Focus of the Sun: A Critical Analysis".

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06351](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06351)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is insanely cool. I had no idea this was possible.

If I'm reading right the spacecraft would have to be placed at about 600-850 AU from the sun to take advantage of the solar gravity lens. For reference, Pluto's orbit is located at (roughly) 40 AU.

<comment><USER4> could we use New Horizons to do it? ...I suppose not, it's taken 10 years for it to go 40AU so for it to go to 400AU it would take 100 years...

<comment><USER5> You'd probably need to pack a multi-mode propulsion system. Launch it so it can get a gravity assist from the Sun, deploy a solar sail after closest approach (or when safe) and ride the light pressure from the Sun to get as much delta-v as you can, then ditch the sail and fire up nuclear-powered electric thrusters for the rest of the trip. Dropping the solar sail part may be a good idea if its weight could be better used as propellant for the ion drive.

Then you have a hope of making the trip in a couple decades

<comment><USER6> Presumably when you get to the right distance, you'd want to circularise your orbit so you can use your new solar lens to look in many different directions.

Even more dV and time required to do that...

<comment><USER5> Yes... There will be a lot of braking involved, but we may start doing observations well before it reaches the intended circular orbit. I wonder how much such a mission would cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like moonshot-level complexity. It invokes solar sails, laser communication at 550 AU, as well as "advanced propulsion, lightweight telescopes, membrane mirrors, inflatable/rigidizeable structures, and novel coronagraphic techniques." All that for a telescope you can't aim...

<comment><USER8> Moonshot x Manhattan Project with a dash of Star Trek. Basically we need the next few generations of novel materials, and controlled fusion reactions. Assuming no major setbacks for humans, we'd need more than a century before considering this kind of project. It would be a worthy project, although I wonder if some other tech might not supersede it by the time this was ready? Gravitational astronomy is just getting started after all, and who knows, maybe the dream of neutrino astronomy could happen.

<comment><USER9> Interesting that you mention neutrino astronomy - if you mean imaging, I don't know of anything but gravity that could focus neutrinos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've wondered for a while if this could be done. I guess now I know. The potential for exploiting the Sun as a gravitation lens comes up on Centauri Dreams from from time to time (see [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gravitational+lens%22+sit...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gravitational+lens%22+site%3Acentauri- dreams.org)).

</comment><comment><USER11> This is the workshop where some of these ideas were discussed: [http://kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/ism/ism.html](http://kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/ism/ism.html) There appear to be several groups working on related designs for gravity-based imagers.

One of the three organizers of the workshop is Ed Stone, who is the Voyager PI.

</comment><comment><USER12> NASA's WFIRST mission is trying to do gravitional microlensing observations, but Trump's latest budget kills it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Tel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Field_Infrared_Survey_Telescope)

<comment><USER2> Note that gravitational microlensing is a completely different technique from solar gravitational lensing discussed in the linked paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there anyone who's sufficiently qualified in astronomy/astrophysics who could point out what advances in HPC/modelling/signal processing will be necessary to accelerate things like this?

I don't know telescopes but I know enough about DSP to make me suspect this is gonna need all sorts of fun high performance deconvolution algorithms....

</comment><comment><USER14> Related projects [0]

Imaging With Nature: Planet Sized Sensors (July 24th, 2010)

Imaging With Nature: A Cloud Based Sun Imager (July 25th, 2010)

A Galaxy Wide Single Pixel Camera (November 6th, 2010)

[0] [https://sites.google.com/site/igorcarron/thesetechdonotexist](https://sites.google.com/site/igorcarron/thesetechdonotexist)

<comment><USER15> Using the sun as a gravitational lens is our current best option for interstellar communications, presuming we settled a planet within a hundred light years:

[https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/11/06/the- gravitational...](https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/11/06/the- gravitational-lens-and-communications/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While forming a complete image is no doubt very cool, just a few fragments of light spectrum would give us incredible insight on its own.

I'm wondering now if with BFR we could pre-place fuel in the slingshot path to get it there quicker and depend less on the Sun gravity slingshot.</comment>