How To Lose Your Best Employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3019050/leadership-now/10-ways-to-lose-your-best-employees <comment><USER2> 11\. Make decisions that affect workers for which they have valuable input, but don't seek that input.

12\. Make decisions that affect workers for which they have valuable input, seek that input, but ignore it and do what you want anyway.

13\. Say one thing and do another. (Mission Statement = A, What We Really Do = B)

14\. Have no idea what it actually takes to get things done.

15\. Have no idea who people are and what they do.

16\. Believe that management is "over" workers. (Fail to understand that until a worker actually builds something, management has nothing to manage and ownership has nothing to count.)

17\. Treat workers as unequals.

18\. Act like children.

19\. Pay late.

20\. Drive the business into the toilet.

21\. Make work so difficult or pointless that you drive your best workers to Hacker News.

<comment><USER3> _" 13\. Say one thing and do another. (Mission Statement = A, What We Really Do = B)"_

This, a thousand times over.

Mission statements are uniquely infuriating when their values are in blatant contradiction to how the business is being operated. I'd rather a company not have a mission statement _at all_ than have a hypocritically practiced one.

A hypocritical mission statement turns into a cruel joke, and it serves only to reinforce employees' disenchantment with the firm -- especially when it's being touted in the press, or waved in employees' faces.

<comment><USER4> Judging from spending a year in a US high-school when I was 16 this is as a character trait that's woven deeply into the American psyche though.

<comment><USER5> Please keep in mind that you are judging an entire spectrum of people based on your experience in one high school among many thousands of high schools, across thousands of counties, and across fifty states.

That's like saying I met someone from a foreign country once, didn't like him, and therefore I know all people from that country are jerks.

<comment><USER4> Very true; that's also why I made sure to explicitly mention what my judgement was based on.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you understand my point.

<comment><USER4> I think I do understand your point, but I think that my statement has more emotional content for you than it does for me.

I've spent significant amounts of time in a few different cultures and through that I have developed deep appreciation for the various dimensions in which cultures differ and, like the famous story of the fish in the water, how it's inherently impossible to realise what is cultural and what is not until you enter a culture which exists on different point in these dimensions.

If you're familiar with Hofstede's work [1] he already provides us with five cultural dimensions he found most salient and useful in describing cultural differences.

I merely posited that, based on my experience and compared to Dutch culture, the US I saw was far on the far end of a dimension I would call "distance between the projected identity and real-world behaviour." This manifested it in all sorts of ways, from abstinence only education and large amounts of teen pregnancy, to being harsh on drug use but doing it much more than I was used to, to the more well known examples of exaggeration on resumes being the norm.

It is also not surprising that this is the dimension that was most salient to my mind, since Dutch culture is famous for being extremely parsimonious and straight-forward so the cultural distance on this dimensions is probably very large.

P.S. Hofstede is actually a Dutchman, so interestingly enough this perspective itself could very well be a Dutch cultural trait, perhaps caused by us being among the earliest cultures who conducted world-wide trade.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede's_cultural_dimensions_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede's_cultural_dimensions_theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems so obvious and straightforward, but it bears repeating:

If you value someone as an employee, show them.

Whether this is through salary increases, promotions, or even just pulling someone aside for five minutes and saying "Hey, you're doing a great job." ....show them. Especially on younger employees, its amazing how powerful a moment of unsolicited praise from a manager or senior level employee can be.

Obviously a bigger salary and promotions help as well, but companies often act surprised when someone they considered their "best employee" walks out, but how would this so called "best employee" even know they were highly valued in the first place when they cant get a raise that keeps up with inflation, or their manager can't even take five minutes every now and then to congratulate him/her on a job well done?

<comment><USER7> >"Hey, you're doing a great job."

I never understood this advice. Not to sound arrogant, but I know I'm good. What I need from you is enough financial compensation so that my skillset/experience matches up with a competitive salary or I'm going to go elsewhere for that salary. I'm not a child. I don't need reassurance and tricks like "hey lets have casual Thursdays and a pingpong table" are NOT substitutes for the money I deserve.

<comment><USER8> Completely agreed. Praise from the company is basically worthless to me; I don't need to be told that I'm good, if I'm doing well I'll know it. If you truly value my services then the only meaningful way to show that is through increased salary. Anything less is simply an attempt at manipulation.

Recognition in front of peers is good for other reasons, but its not a replacement for financial reward.

<comment><USER9> >I don't need to be told that I'm good, if I'm doing well I'll know it.

This might sound strange to you, but some subset of the population won't know it. Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger_effect[1]? Actual competence may weaken self-confidence and the unskilled might have illusory superiority.

There are also many cultural and social environments where an individual person comes from which gives them a negative self image no matter how well they are performing. It might not even occur to them they are doing a good job. Victims of abuse, for example.

Taking a second or two to say "good job" gives the person actual feedback. I'm not saying you should make a show, but job feedback is important.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

<comment><USER8> My point didn't quite come off how I intended. I do agree that a "good job" here and there are essential. Praise for a job well done should be an integral part of being a competent manager or tech lead. But this can't be seen as a replacement for communicating worth to the employee by financial rewards. When the company itself tries to set up some process for praising good work as an alternative for financial rewards, that's where it becomes manipulation.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another very common one is chipping away at any and all costs until it's ridiculous. This is usually because cutting costs is an easy way for management to make their numbers if revenue is flat. At first it really is cutting the fat, but eventually you run out of fat and start making life difficult for employees.

It's especially bad when the size of the cuts is meaningless compared to the cost of a given employee. Making a $100k+ employee work with a 3-year-old $1000 laptop for an extra year shouldn't make any sense in a proper company, but it's incredibly common.

<comment><USER11> IT here. We have the hardware debate with the business guys relentlessly. Understand that the business guys just see it like this: If <replacement parts> \+ <Tech time> is less than the cost of a new machine, then repair the old one. Additionally 'why throw out something that works?' These two thought processes lead to some harmful decisions regarding hardware. I've seen 5-7 year old machines being used by people who bring in millions.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like you tried to confront them with the argument that "investing another 1000$ in this guy's machine will change your bottom line in the millions". What did they say in response?

<comment><USER11> I've tried various angles, some more successful than others. The 'increased productivity' pitch fails universally. I never even mention that anymore. On average it has a negative impact. Managers are too jaded to that pitch. Their 'I'm being sold something' antenna goes up. It's not that they have some cogent counter argument, it's just that the discussion stops.

If you want to make the hardware situation better. I recommend these two approaches.

1\. Loss aversion. Detail what an unplanned outage costs. Lost work, man hours, even lost business if it's bad enough timing. Business guys have a respect for the missing nail that lost the war.

2\. Cheapness. Buying a $1000 laptop every two years is better than a $2000 laptop every four. Better average hardware and less paying guys like me to fix broken machines. Business guys are more likely to write small checks. Paradoxically you are spending the same amount of money, but you can sell it to them like you are spending less.

Above all be respectful. They aren't idiots, they may have issues to worry about that you aren't aware of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'n') Require Director-level approval to spend about £20 on 2 USB powered hubs AND have the director visit to inspect the two laptops that need the hubs just to make sure you're not being extravagant.

</comment><comment><USER14> The only worse thing to training employees and losing them is NOT training them and keeping them.

\--Zig Ziglar

</comment><comment><USER15> Lets be fair guys. Someone needs to articulate "10 ways to get fired by your best employer", now too.

<comment><USER16> Man, now I want to write that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My #1 - Treat your employees not as assets but as negative impacts to your bottom line. You'd do it better yourself if you had the time, but instead you had to hire me.

I have Stockholm Syndrome. My biggest problem is that I'm now being overworked so much (intentionally) that I collapse from exhaustion when I go home and don't have the energy to spend looking for a new job.

<comment><USER18> Just quit. Then you'll have all the time in the world to look for a new job.

<comment><USER19> Not everyone has the luxury to tolerate that risk. I considered doing that myself, but considering how long it took me to find a job while employed I would have been looking at multiple months of unemployment before landing something, which would have caused its own stresses, pressures, and exhaustion.

<comment><USER17> This.

At least here I know what I know, even if I don't like it. But that's also me convincing myself that I'm ok here.

The worst part is the demoralization that happens. You start to feel like you are becoming less useful to other organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My #1: Act as if you only have to do what is legally required. Bonus points if you use this as an excuse to play hardball and avoid keeping promises.

I've had two employers change their employee benefits packages/bonus structures sharply negatively within <1 year of being hired. In both cases I went up the chain and asked what other compensation I could expect. I was very reasonable and offered them several alternatives. I'm empathetic to a tough situation, and am willing to be flexible.

In both cases it was like talking to a tape recording. 'benefits are not guaranteed, and legally we are within our rights to change at any time' and 'sorry it's policy hands are tied'. Yes I understand that you _can_ do that, but you've effectively rescinded what we negotiated when I recently agreed to work here.

The most frustrating part of the whole thing is how quickly things change once a two week notice is given. As if the retention offer does anything but underscore their dishonesty.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Keep decision-making securely ensconced in the airless bunker of the > executive wing. Avoid empowering mid-tier employees lest they suddenly > become entrepreneurial and unpredictable.

Just my opinion, but I think (8) is the most insightful of these and perhaps the least obvious (though they are all obvious to an extent). (8) is also the hardest to do right. You don't want to drag a developer to five executive meetings a day so that he doesn't have time to do development; that could in itself drive him/her away. But you also don't want any of your developers to feel like they don't know what's going on with the business at a higher level, and if they have an insight there should be an easy and comfortable avenue for them to discuss it.

</comment><comment><USER21> A shortened list

#0. Force usage of shitty/hopeless tools/frameworks at work.

#1. Pay late

#2. Ask for TPS reports

#3. Recruit a bunch of abusive retards for middle/senior management

These four, for sure!

</comment><comment><USER22> #0 Be in a time, place and industry where employees have options.

..

</comment><comment><USER23> There is a problem with the suggestion in #6 and it applies to management. Some companies believe they need to do this for management, and since the managers know they will be moving, they optimize for short term gain at the expense of long term sustainability.

A favorite tactic of managers is to fire Q&A and support staff. This is a short term win on the bottom line, but will kill things later. It makes them look good as they get to say they "optimized the workflow". Another excellent one is to put a freeze on equipment buying and let it rot.

If you become a big wig and are in a company inclined to move people around for experience, please, please, please add something to your evaluations that look at the position they left 1 year ago and judge them on the sustainability. If they don't help enforce a sustainable process, then they will be fired as they are just a selfish, game-player.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article is a little sparse, but great points. I put a Haiku Deck on something similar but from a Good Manager vs Bad Manager perspective in terms of what bad managers are doing that affects their ability to retain talent.

I can link it here if anyone is interested(?)

<comment><USER25> I am, can you link to it? :)

I also want to find some research a professor once mentioned, about the traits that employees associated with good managers/bosses (I recall that almost all were personal, almost none technical).

<comment><USER24> Here's the deck: [http://www.haikudeck.com/p/BdYQODxkxD/good-manager-bad- manag...](http://www.haikudeck.com/p/BdYQODxkxD/good-manager-bad-manager)

For the research you could try looking up the works of Patrick Lioncini, he also has a great book on the subject called "five dysfunctions of a team".

In my experience, poor talent management and execution always comes down to egos, so yes, you would be right in thinking that it's almost always a personal level issue. When egos are involved, that's what you'll get.

See an answer of mine on Quora also: [http://qr.ae/I5brc](http://qr.ae/I5brc)

<comment><USER25> Thank you, will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> more bloggers should use creative rhetoric. instead of yet another soapbox "10 things you should do article" he plausibly argues the other side.

"training is costly, don't do it."

the irony here is like a cup of coffee.

</comment><comment><USER27> #0 Don't pay anything close to what the employee is worth. Underpay, furlough, slow-pay your best employees to really build that desire to see if the grass is greener elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER28> Don't even say "thanks" when you save them 10000€, when nobody asked me to do anything...

</comment><comment><USER29> Pretty sure the last place I worked did all ten of those. And it did lose anyone who was any good. The joke was that the only way to get respect was to leave and get re-hired.

<comment><USER19> The defense industry has three paths to real advancement:

1) Become the rock star/golden child for a higher-up who pulls you along as they rise 2) Move from company to company every so often to get positions with higher salary grade and responsibility 3) Become the oracle of technical knowledge in some narrow but crucial specialty

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> it's 10/10 for my current employer :)

<comment><USER31> Um, errr, eeek...... you have implied you are not one of their best employees, since its 10/10 and you are still there....

Doh? ;)

<comment><USER32> Given the smiley at he end of the parent post, he probably won't be there for a long time.

<comment><USER30> Bingo :) Although they are promising some advancement so I'll see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Paying MIN("DOE", "market rate", AVG('other employees')) to the best employees.</comment>


4 co-founders... who's on the board and how would you determine that ? - <AUTHOR>

I have been told from potential investors that having a large board could be a potential hindrance to further investment.  Any advice on this issue...has anyone gone through a similar situation? <comment><USER2> The CEO is typically on the board, and/or the most senior and experienced technical (co)founder in most cases, as far as tech startups are concerned.

Rarely have I seen or heard of more than 2 people in total from the actual company itself on the board for at least the first several years.

Also, from my observations, the number of founders on the board is probably roughly proportional to the amount raised, and the perceived value of the founders. IE: it wouldn't surprise me to see a startup that raised $80MM in capital to create a new hybrid commuter vehicle, with GPS-based auto pilot, to have 3 founders on the board. As long as those founders also have previous experience/wins to justify their board seats vs. just having a really good idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> You want enough founders on the board to maintain control if things go sour.</comment>


The software engineer's guide to asserting dominance in the workplace - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-software-engineer-s-guide-to-asserting-office-dominance-ddea7b598df7#.961h4brcc <comment><USER2> I thought this was very well done and hilarious.

However, I'm not sure how I feel about the particular emphasis on mocking people who lift and take protein supplements. It's definitely obnoxious when people define themselves by the fact that they lift, but at the same time, almost everyone I know who exhibits some the "alpha" behaviors described in this article w/r/t working out (like showing up to work in gym clothes) is not doing so in a deliberately show-offy way. They just like working out. If anything, in my experience people who do things like that tend to have serious confidence issues and being "swole" helps them with that.

I know it's just a joke, just seems like a stereotype that's very erroneous to me. And for the record, I do not lift and probably never will. I've always been a more run/bike/swim type of person, although I should probably exercise more in general.

<comment><USER3> As a developer who lifts, it's pretty obvious the author does as well and is only mocking us in jest as opposed to being critical or derogatory. The idea for the article probably came from the lifting community where asserting dominance in your gym is a popular joke/meme.

<comment><USER2> Haha, the possibility of this occurred to me, interesting to have it confirmed. I guess I'm reflective of the hostile culture I was pointing out, lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Name-drop as many of the latest software frameworks and technologies as possible throughout your rant. Use words like big data, cloud, and scalability. Mention test-driven development at least three to four times.

If we don't immediately adopt agile scrum kanban test-driven development processes there is no way we can scale to harness the power of big data analytics using our cloud-based deep machine learning artificial intelligence neural networks for quantum computing the internet of things. Furthermore, I'm rewriting the whole architecture in Vanilla JS on the front end, ReactJS on the back end, and using Docker containers to achieve a more scalable continuous integration work flow optimization process for our test-driven development integrations in the cloud using the legacy waterfall methodology.

Any questions? No? Good, now get back to work.

<comment><USER5> TDD used to be cool, BDD or 'Behavior Driven Development' is way more hipster IMO. You must be old, like over 25 or something.

Docker is also like sooooo 2015, it's all about Docker clusters now - Swarm or Kubernetes and the like. I'd go with Kubernetes cuz it sounds way cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that's really changed in this business is that coding went from being about constantly solving things that had never been done before, to work where the solutions are about doing things the "right" way.

For decades the field of technology was brand new. Nothing had been done before. Everything was about building something from nothing. It used to take a tremendous amount of creative brainpower and unique perspectives on problem solving to get things done.

Now it's all about solved problems.

People who thrive doing creative, complex problem solving have to look at the world with the eyes of an outsider. They need to see things differently to hit on the right solutions quickly. They're outsiders - geeks, on the fringes of society. So coding was a geek's world.

But now tech has matured. The majority of the work is about ripping out the creative hacker madness of the previous generation and replacing it with things that are the "right" way. The work of coding (for the web at least) is not about solving for unknowns anymore.

You take away the creative thinking, you don't need outsiders. The work becomes simpler and more accessible to the average Joe. People who just want a job that pays well, who are motivated by routine and doing things the "right" way. Who are happy to spend all day gutting a codebase to replace it with boring well trodden solutions.

The new replacement coders aren't motivated by the creative satisfaction of building things from nothing. Their motivations are completely different. Things like money, like social status. These are the guys who are thriving in the business now. For those of us who like building things and creative problem solving, our time here is done. It's a bro's world now.

</comment><comment><USER7> when i graduated from university, law was the coolest profession--there were tv shows about them and they got paid a lot. I don't know where cs grad/programmer was on this list but definitely not in the top 10 (maybe around 5,630 or so). In any event, during that time, if you were a senior at a top university with a 3.8 in Elizabethan Poetry but no definite career goal, people would reflexively say "you should go to law school"

A decade or so later, it seemed to shift to investment bankers. (And again, pretty sure programmer was nowhere in the top 5,000)

articles like this make me wonder whether in fact programmer is the new cool job?

</comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't tell if joking after reading the bit about walking out when you see they don't use git ^_^

<comment><USER9> "Bro do u even use git?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gone is the day of the humble 90's engineer. A new era has started...

The dawn of the Brogrammer.

Software engineering culture is shifting. Nice article, sadly have seen it fairly often.

<comment><USER11> It's time we take over the world, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somehow I interact with other people that they always have the feeling they owe me something. Sometimes this goes so far, that people even feel bad to ask me when I owe them something. Also, my GF told me, I always seem kinda bugged out when working.

Both is kinda funny, because I'm mostly a chill guy. But it kept many people from bothering me at work...

</comment><comment><USER13> I brought my Cherry MX to work...

<comment><USER14> Reds are usually okay. Blue or green, you're pushing it (depends on your office environment though)

<comment><USER15> Reds are absolute garbage for actual typing. They're best for gaming or specialised keyboards like at a POS.

Brown is best in my opinion, which is one I will vehemently defend by drowning out all opposition with furious typing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great Satire! But, I don't see too many of this exact stereotype around, especially the weight lifting type. I mean I see little bits of these behaviors in other people, but not all wrapped in 1 person.</comment>


Ask HN: What software do you use to monitor your servers? - <AUTHOR>

I want to setup a monitoring solution whose overall purpose is to be able to fix server problems. What tool do you guys find best for doing this?<p>I've been leaning towards Nagios, because it has the notifications set up and has a few plug ins, but it still doesnt feel like it is all there, especially when it comes to performance metrics. <comment><USER2> Operational monitoring: Nagios

Error monitoring: Rollbar (<http://rollbar.com>) - yes, we use it on itself

Performance monitoring: Rollbar, Pingdom, and some custom instrumentation

</comment><comment><USER3> We are using our own tool JBison (<https://jbison.com>), which was recently enriched with performance metrics monitoring.

</comment><comment><USER4> New Relic + Airbrake</comment>


The Novel That Norman Mailer Didn't Write (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-novel-that-norman-mailer-didnt-write <comment><USER2> > "Norman Mailer was one of the most original and powerful writers of the > twentieth century, but he never wrote a truly great novel."

What a bizarre thing to write about the author of The Executioner's Song.

I mean it with absolute sincerity when I say in 100 years, The Executioner's Song will be regarded as the single greatest literary work of the English language.

Greater than Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hemingway, Wallace, Milton, transcendentalists, feminists, poets, colonial philosophers and political scientists.

I mean, is it stupid to try to force rank all English literature? Yes, absolutely.

But if you did, I'm telling you The Executioner's Song is coming out on top.

<comment><USER3> I would disqualify it just based on the fact that it is very based in American politics and culture at a distinct time period. It also doesn't really push form in any interesting ways.

<comment><USER2> It pushes form in one of the most amazing ways of any book. The economy of writing is amazing. It's a masterclass in how to say more with less - and it's a long book. A long book full of extremely short passages that somehow feel full of vivid detail. I think it's a very deliberate style and form to reflect American culture with that way of writing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Company offering a Talent acquisition - terms?  - <AUTHOR>

A large company has approached our startup to discuss an "acquisition". During the meeting they were offering a talent acquisition where we join them in their management team.
We,ve been bootstrapping since launch (10 months ago)
A few questions: What terms should we ask/negotiate about?
Some things that pop to mind are salary, our new roles in the larger company, stock options or cash? Other things ive read are "retention bonuses etc"
What do we need to be weary going into further discussion ?
The ball is with us now to get back to them on whether we are willing to give-up our own startup and join them. Our team have decided we are - how should we approach it? We also have a small shareholder who isn't full time and would want to work at this larger company - does that mean he will not gain anything from this acquisition if it is purely a talent* acquisition?
 Thanks! <comment><USER2> Talent acquisition sounds like a polite way of saying you no longer believe in your startup's business plan. That's a bigger question than any terms they offer. From what I understand 3 million per founder is the going rate, so just do the math of whether you think your startup will be worth more than that in a few years.

<comment><USER3> Where did you get the gong rate from if you don't mind me asking? Seems pretty high, even for the Valley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A talent acquisition means the company buys your company and then hires you -- all the shareholders make money, even those which the new company doesn't hire.

This is very different from dissolving your company and getting big sign on bonuses. If that is how you are being approached, your small shareholder is going to be mad.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources to teach myself Statistics? - <AUTHOR> All are welcome, what seems to be in short supply is stuff at either end, the fundamentals and what a master student might encounter.
To briefly explain why I'm asking this, and why the answers may be of value to others in this community:
I'm trying to break into AI, to understand a large amount of the theory you effectively have to be well versed in statistics. I come from an engineering background where it's really more understanding abstract concepts at speed and applying them correctly with frameworks. While I understand a lot can be achieved by going through projects in TensorFlow and doing some Googling, I feel like I don't understand the internals. Thanks for taking the time to read this. <comment><USER2> "𝗘𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴" 𝗯𝘆 𝗛𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗲, 𝗧𝗶𝗯𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗶, & 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱𝗺𝗮𝗻

This is one of the clearest and most respected statistics books ever written.

I personally owe the start of my machine learning career to this book!

You will find so many people around the world (online and IRL) who consider this the bible for statistical learning.

It is so readable, and yet filled with gems and insights from one of the world's most preeminent statisticians.

Free PDF: [http://ow.ly/v5Uw50obzpO](http://ow.ly/v5Uw50obzpO)

Datasets & code: [http://ow.ly/a8UZ50obzpN](http://ow.ly/a8UZ50obzpN)

R Code: [http://ow.ly/EEdf50kXUBS](http://ow.ly/EEdf50kXUBS)

Videos: also available at various sources.

</comment><comment><USER3> For a "Stats 101" experience:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5102DFDC6790F3D0](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5102DFDC6790F3D0)

For Probability Theory:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60hI9ATjSFg...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60hI9ATjSFgLZpbNJ7myAg6)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2SOU6wwxB0uwwH80KTQ6...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2SOU6wwxB0uwwH80KTQ6ht66KWxbzTIo)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Per comment by @ystad above, I'll add that, if you're looking for maths resources beyond just Stats, that same guy from my first link (Professor Leonard) has really good videos on everything from pre-alegbra to differential equations. He is, imo, a really good lecturer and does a great job of explaining things.

His content is a mix of two modes: in one mode, he's actually teaching a college class and just recording the class. In those videos, you get to hear the questions from the students and some more banter back and forth with the class. The other mode is him teaching "to air" so to speak, where it's just him in a room with a camera and a whiteboard. Diffeq is done that way, because he didn't have a Diffeq class scheduled to record. As best as I can remember, this Precalc, Calc I, Calc II, and Calc III series, and that Stats series, are done with a live class. Not sure if that will matter to you or not: I've found his style engaging and enjoyable in either case.

If you want Linear Algebra, people swear by Gilbert Strang's videos on Youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DDD91010BC51F8](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DDD91010BC51F8)

(There are also videos of Gilbert Strang teaching Calculus)

There's also a series of videos out there from a class called "Coding The Matrix" which was taught at uummm... I don't remember... Brown, maybe? Anyway, the class was based on teaching Linear Algebra from a programming perspective.

[https://codingthematrix.com/](https://codingthematrix.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the effort you put into this comment and of course the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree you'll definitely want to read Elements of Statistical Learning but there are a few more, namely Think Stats and Think Bayes.

Since no one has really said much about Bayes yet, I think it worth mentioning just how useful it is in DS and ML. A Bayesian approach makes a very good baseline and often one that is hard to beat.

If you're not particular fluent with Probability and Statistics now, let me suggest you add in Khan Academy (make sure to pick the CLEP version) and JBstatistics. Khan has the advantage of quizzes (so you're not just kidding yourself that you know the material). JBstatistics has the advantage of really good explanations. You'll probably want to watch Khan at x1.5 speed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ian Goodfellow has a nice free book that includes an "applied math and machine learning basics" section that gives a nice overview of linear algebra, probability theory etc that make it a nice starting point. It's also specifically written for software engineers I believe: [https://www.deeplearningbook.org/](https://www.deeplearningbook.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think your question is I want to understand the math behind all of this: I would start by doing Andrew Ng's courses on ml and DL at Coursera

Math is wide for AI and moves into multiple disciplines such as calculus, linear algebra.

Once you have done the above courses you can dive accordingly [http://sgsa.berkeley.edu/current_students/books/](http://sgsa.berkeley.edu/current_students/books/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "All of Statistics" by Larry Wasserman is a very good - if concise - introduction to statistics. Doesn't require too much background, although the problems can get pretty hairy. Unfortunately, many of the proofs in the field are based on "tricks" that accumulate, which makes the learning curve steeper for people who don't have as much background in finding/using these tricks.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a easy, short and classic read: [https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cartoon_Guide_to_Statis...](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cartoon_Guide_to_Statistics/sjUcgxEz4x0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover)

EDIT: Also very basic. Should have added that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Manga guide to Statistics</comment>


Branding workaholism as a desirable lifestyle choice - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-work-life-balance-.html <comment><USER2> Anecdotal, obviously, but:

I worked 80 hour weeks (including some time on weekends) for about a year and half as an early developer at a startup (employee 15) a bunch of years ago. The startup failed (pity-acquired by an investor a couple years after I left; common shareholders got nothing). I did learn a lot, and was fortunately paid very near market-rate, but it was at the expense of my physical and mental health, and social life during that period. And boy was I burned out by the end. Fortunately I was single and had no family, and even then it took a huge toll.

At my current company (been there 6 years, joined as around employee 70), I tend to work ~45-hour weeks (with occasional very-short-term spikes near a product launch). The company is successful (IPO last year). I've learned a lot, but most importantly I'm _happy_. I have a busy social life, time for a SO, and take 4-6 weeks of vacation a year (as one of the relatively few people who actually takes full advantage of the unlimited vacation policy). Don't get me wrong: I work hard. I get a lot done. I just get it done without grinding myself down into nothing.

In my experience there's a negative correlation between long hours and success&happiness. Certainly there are people who have found success through (or perhaps despite?) long hours. And maybe many of them have brainwashed themselves into believing all that has made them happy, and maybe even some of them are genuinely happy.

I just don't think it's worth it -- for me. Everyone has a different definition of success: for some it's making 7 figures and retiring at 30 comfortably. For others it's making 9 figures and retiring lavishly. For others it's making less, but having a steady, secure job, and having copious time for hobbies, friends, and family. And everything in between.

I think it's difficult to draw the line. For some people, working themselves nearly to death is actually what they want to do. I think that's fine, but the problem becomes when that is (as it somewhat is now) the norm, and people who don't want to do that, have to do so anyway just to survive in the industry.

<comment><USER3> _" and even then it took a huge toll"_

There's a real lack of awareness of an openness about the toll crazy hours extract from all too many people, not just in startups but in many larger companies as well, and the prevalence of them not just in tech but among so many professions.

A tiny fraction of society can lay back and relax off of a 2% or less interest on their investments, while so many of the rest are working until they collapse (physically or mentally), and it's considered business as usual -- and if you can't keep up you are stepped over and forgotten as the rest get on with getting ahead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The guy is developing an app that lets you visualize how a coffee table from a catalog might look in your living room._

Something Autodesk has offered for years and gives away.[1] Available for IOS, Android, and browser. This guy is killing himself to build a me-too product.

[1] [https://www.homestyler.com/mobile](https://www.homestyler.com/mobile)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing this. Its sad, but I see soooo many startups that (somehow) get funding to:

* Build an idea that already exists, is cheap, and well-executed by another company

* Build something that is so limited in scope that it could be replaced by a competitor (or your OS) basically overnight

<comment><USER4> You could do something interesting in that space.

Autodesk stopped offering HomeStyler. It's now offered by 北京居然设计家家居连锁集团有限公司, which is www.shejijia.com, a big furniture retailer in China. The software isn't the hard part. It's the furniture catalog. Such programs are only useful with a big 3D model catalog, and the party that has the incentive to provide that is a furniture dealer.

Amazon needs that capability. Develop a good 3D capture program specialized for furniture and you might have something. Something that guides you through taking enough images to get the whole object into the model cleanly. Make that available to Amazon sellers. Or eBay sellers.

<comment><USER6> Autodesk also used to offer 123D Catch[1]. A free app that used photogrammetry to give you a 3d object. I'm pretty sure it gave you textures (and UVs).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_123D#Additional_appli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_123D#Additional_applications)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I were to sell my soul to work insane hours (80+ per week) I'd work in finance instead of software development. The prospects of making it big in software are pretty slim, even with "hustle", because the important thing is not due to your work ethic as much as luck, capturing the right market, and being able to capitalize on it effectively. If you're doing a startup, you don't often start with much money and won't make good money until you're well past the point of profitability. Contrasting to finance, where you can (apparently, I don't know first hand) pull in mid 6 figures easily if you do your time and get the right clients (and once you get the right clients part of that high work time is meeting the client anyway). I consider workaholism just another form of addiction, and at least I'd like to get paid well for that addiction, and if I had the drive to start a business I'd at least have the capital to do it then.

Beyond this, as an employee I think it is insane for a company to expect you to work the same as a co-founder for relatively little. If the culture was to be working 70 hours per week or essentially always needing to have your phone with you and be available, then it's the sign of a toxic work culture. I can kind of understand around "crunch time" even though I think it's a symptom of bad time management and probably announcing something before you should have. I can kind of understand a founder putting in that much work, even if I do think it's unhealthy, but not an employee.

<comment><USER3> _" If the culture was to be working 70 hours per week or essentially always needing to have your phone with you and be available, then it's the sign of a toxic work culture."_

Or it could be a sign that you work in ops.

<comment><USER8> Ops here. Never been on-call or had to work more than 40 hours in the previous 5 years of doing this as a career, but then again, I've always been a consultant in some capacity for multiple clients so YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A VC doesn't care about your health. If you don't look after yourself, no-one will.

</comment><comment><USER10> I ended up getting fat and a few health issues working at a unicorn start up. It took me 18 months to realize how badly I was handling it. Correcting for that work culture required a decent about of self reflection and introspection, that was hard to manage while working 60 hours a week.

</comment><comment><USER11> From the article: "The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the Stanford economist John Pencavel. "

I don't see how the study, which was done on manufacturing / production workers, necessarily applies to knowledge workers or entrepreneurs?

My experience working 80-90 hr weeks was that as long as I had flexibility to vary the tasks I didn't sense any drop in productivity. In many cases the fewer context switches increased the amount of "flow", and projects went more quickly than they would have.

<comment><USER12> > My experience working 80-90 hr weeks was that as long as I had flexibility > to vary the tasks I didn't sense any drop in productivity. In many cases the > fewer context switches increased the amount of "flow", and projects went > more quickly than they would have.

Did your experience rigorously measure how many mistakes (bugs, if you're a developer) you made during hours over 56 relative to baseline, and how much it cost someone else down the road in cleanup and opportunity costs to fix them?

With programmers, at least, they can keep writing code well into 100 hours a week and beyond, but the trustworthiness of that code falls off, and that's a problem. It's a well-known result that fixing bugs costs many times more than not making them to begin with.

<comment><USER11> I saw no difference in quality of work, nor did I get reports on any. I believe the key reason is the ability to change tasks. Been writing code for 4 hours and tired of it? Switch to documentation, regression testing, managerial tasks, ticket triage, spec writing, or something else from your list instead.

Want to go see a movie in the middle of the day, take a nap, or take a two hour lunch to regroup? No one cares.

For startups especially it's do-or-die, so this type of pressure will never go away.

Imagine you had two 5-person startups each building a social media management platform to capitalize on a growing market. The space is quickly becoming crowded, and while not winner-take-all, most entrants will fail.

Company A: They work 90 hour weeks, weekends included. The willingly give up their social lives, take no vacations, and work as hard as they can. They'll sleep at the office if they have to.

Company B: They work 40 hour weeks, and take a normal amount of time off. At the end of the day they go home and relax with family/friends.

Either company could succeed in the end, but which has the better chance? Which attracts more VC interest? Who gives a better impression to prospective clients? Who builds a fully functional platform first?

In my experience Company A often trounces Company B.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You don't need to work 24/7\. At most jobs, you just need to seem like you work 24/7\. Batch up all your emails for the day, then space them out to be sent at odd hours like 11:30pm and 5:45am using something like Boomerang for Gmail.[1] Everyone will think you're working constantly.

[1] [http://www.boomeranggmail.com/](http://www.boomeranggmail.com/)

<comment><USER14> I work at a company that's extremely supportive of good work life balance. We offer lots of flexibility on hours, facilitate working from home, and encourage people to work at a sustainable pace.

That didn't stop one fellow, many years ago, from trying exactly this. He'd commit code that was simply reindentation/style changes, send emails, etc, late at night, in an attempt to paper over the fact that he was simply a weak contributor that produced low quality code.

Everyone saw straight through him and recognized the absurdity for what it was.

Maintain work-life balance. If the company you work for doesn't support that choice, work somewhere else. It is an absolute lie that "most jobs" need you to "seem like you work 24/7", and perpetuating that lie only makes it easier for the bad actors to justify their behaviour.

<comment><USER13> Completely agree. Was joking in my original comment. Obviously having a healthy lifestyle will lead to increased productivity. Fetishizing workaholism is dumb and a big part of why Wall Street is struggling to retain talent these days.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I figured that was the case, but, as my experience demonstrates, some people might actually take that suggestion seriously!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This sort of attitude is extremely toxic.

Hey, guess what happens when you tell someone you work in programming in a large (tech) city? They immediately write you out of their life as someone who is A) boring and B) working 24/7 anyways.

Typecasting sucks.

<comment><USER16> That's not been my experience of Seattle at all. One of the reasons I have stayed here so long is that there's so much cultural overlap between techies, artists, musicians, burners, etc.

Maybe this is something that has been changing recently - I hear people griping about "brogrammers" now, though I've never actually met one, so far as I know. And perhaps Burning Man culture is not the binding force it used to be, now that the event has gone mainstream.

It did take me at least a year before I really started making any friends here, but my experience has been that... once you find your way in, you're in.

<comment><USER15> >I hear people griping about "brogrammers" now, though I've never actually met one, so far as I know.

Yep, that's been 100% my experience. I don't know what a "brogrammer" is, only that apparently I am one and they are scum. And I've been here for 3 years. It's been getting worse; two years ago people would at least talk to me for more than a few minutes at a time. One year ago people would grudgingly give me a chance, but you could see them clocking out once tech stuff came up.

This year, the resentment is palpable. And I'm so tired of putting in so much and ... I just can't do this anymore.

<comment><USER17> Can you blame them? You took their homes. I would resent anybody who took my home.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I can. I didn't take shit; I don't own property, and at this rate, their precious houses are in no danger from me.

So mission accomplished; congratufuckinglations.

And I'll bet you dislike Trump's anti-immigration policies, to boot. So do I, but unlike people here I put my money where my mouth is.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure why you made it about me.

Every tech worker in Seattle and SF is able to afford the very high rents in those cities while the local population cannot. They are absolutely being pushed out by the influx of these people who are raising the pricing floor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not in SV, but so happy my NYC startup has never asked me work outside of 10-6. Good startups exist!

</comment><comment><USER19> Its very disheartening that Silicon Valley would promote such lifestyles. As a tech worker outside the US, US has always seemed more promising than the rest of the world when it comes to innovations and myriad number of opportunities to realize dreams.

So far I had been whining about how we have really bad inherent work cultures here in Japan. Its a norm for everyone to work overtime : 9am to 10pm is extremely normal. "Hardworking" guys send emails at 2 am and next day when I check my inbox, I'm somewhere burdened if my boss would expect the same of me. Clearly no one here understands that longer hours != more productivity.

If the pioneer locations in the industry were to promote such culture, I wonder if countries like Japan would ever grow out of its current mindset validating their methods even more so.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work 9-430 most days and it doesn't seem to be hurting the ole paycheck. I'm not buying Maseratis but I am financially independent after around a decade in the valley. Hard work and cleverness and a reasonable helping of luck can get you paid out here, even with regular hours.

</comment><comment><USER21> "The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the Stanford economist John Pencavel. But the point may be less about productivity than about demonstrating commitment and team spirit."

My main disagreement with this type of quote is how do you account for R&D? You have to try things out, not all of them work out, you throw things away, things don't work out as expected. If you're in a true startup, money is tight, deadlines are agressive, you have to put in the time.

These types of statements discredit the "do or die" moments on which companies are built on.

<comment><USER6> You need downtime to have a Eureka[1] moment. I see a lot of wasted time spinning wheels on the wrong thing.

My wife's job has offices in a bunch of countries. Recently she was talking to someone they borrowed from Europe for a few weeks. They observed that in the U.S. they work many more hours, but take coffee breaks and intermingle work and leisure. They were suggesting they work fewer hours, but are more focused when at work. It's hard to tell, but I'd say their "output" is comparable (maybe an edge to the team in Europe).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)#Archimedes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_\(word\)#Archimedes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have never experienced such extreme attitude to work anywhere personally in my 10+ years of experience working in SV, across four different employers, I do, however, hear anecdotes of tough demands at some startups but that does seem all that pervasive either.

</comment><comment><USER23> I absolutely work too much. I always have and probably always will. I am the first to tell people to have a better work/life balance and to go watch their kids play ball, etc. I enjoy work and always have and thankfully my family understands. That being said, when I go on vacation, I really want to be on vacation. I don't answer email, participate in conference calls, etc. I work hard but when I am off, I am off.

I respect people who say they don't want to work the hours I do, but there are those who enjoy work and spend lots of hours at work. Just because it is not for everybody does not mean that there are not those who choose to spend a great real of time at work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Rage-porn bunk. As if Vaynerchuk is representative of anything, let alone SV.

</comment><comment><USER25> Plug: come work for Pivotal. We do 9-6 all day everyday.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure I want to work 9-6 everyday. I still like my weekends.

<comment><USER25> Fair enough, it's only Monday through Friday.</comment></comment></comment>


Domain Tasting Goes Sour: ICANN Will No Longer Issue Registration Refunds - <AUTHOR> http://www.dotsauce.com/2008/01/29/the-end-of-domain-tasting/ <comment><USER2> Excellent! +1 for ICANN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better late than never!

</comment><comment><USER4> Haha, gotcha good spamming suckers.

</comment><comment><USER5> great news! ICANN++</comment>


Brazil builds its own fiber optic network to avoid the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.sovereignman.com/personal-privacy/brazil-builds-its-own-fiber-optic-network-to-avoid-the-nsa-15551/ <comment><USER2> I think this is good news. Multiple paths to pass information is a good thing for the world, independent of the reasons behind it.

But I don't think the economic impact, with American firms losing revenue is nothing more than political PR blablabla. Market forces (price and quality) still drives a lot of traffic from Brazil to USA. For example, there is no hosting solution or email provider in Brazil that comes close to using dozens of american firms.

Of all the startups here in Brazil I would guess that 80% use servers from american firms (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Softlayer, Digital Ocean and many, many others). Our local host solutions are used mainly for amateursih website hosting (of local restaurants and small non-tech companies).

A possible law forbidding national companies to use data centers out of Brazil is being discussed around here. And the general reaction among national startups is "if this happens, we are all fu __ __". There is simply no local solution in quality and price anywhere near those big american ones.

But, again, despite market forces still going to drive a lotof traffic to USA, I think it is a good idea to have alternatives. For sensitive government and academic data at first, but maybe creating the environment to better infrastrucuture companies rising in Brazil or Europe.

<comment><USER3> On the plus side building something like this establishes a capability and track record, and could be of future benefit for contracts abroad.

In a similar sense a push to getting more than 20% of your local startups on local hosting - which is already quite a good number - might attract foreign customers.

Long term the economic impact might be worth talking about but in the immediate term I agree that it is just noise.

<comment><USER4> Main problem with local hosting solutions is pricing, I think.

I can get a DO VPS machine with a reasonable performance for US$ 5/mo, while most known Brazilian providers would set me back about US$ 20/mo for a similar machine. If latency is not a big issue for you, it just doesn't make sense to host it here, unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> With AWS having brazillian hosting and established firms already there operating at a high price, it does seem like the skillset is in place for someone in brazil to do something entrepreneurial.

<comment><USER5> What exactly do you mean?

Are you talking about undercutting Amazon's price? The prices are that hight because of taxes, nobody can undercut them on Brazil.

<comment><USER3> No I am talking about undercutting the other local Brazillian businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate the effort but 1) If the NSA really wants the data they will pull the cable up and put a tap on it like they are doing now. 2) Even if not "buying American" on the hardware, they will at some point end up on an American network[0] and the NSA will get the data anyways.

What we really need is another Snowden to grab recorded private phone calls of Congress. I'd imagine we would see their funding dry up rather quickly (then again they didn't seem to mind the CIA's adventures).

[0] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network)

<comment><USER7> As an undergrad I had a job working as a ecologist for the Highways Agency in the UK. My job was to perform endangered species surveys and supervise roadworks sites to make sure they didn't cause (too much) ecological damage.

One job I worked on was resurfacing 12 miles of road in Somerset. At one stage I was supervising a crew as they dug out a trench beside the road overnight. After a couple of hours, a blacked-out 4x4 rolled up to the site and out get three guys in suits demanding to see the site manager.

It turned out the JCB bucket had damaged the tunnel housing a major national fibre-optic link and they had detected the damage. We uncovered the damaged concrete housing and they had a crew come out to repair it.

Moral of the story: at least in the UK, the integrity of cable networks is remotely monitored. I wouldn't assume the NSA can easily tap into a major fibre-optic cable without being detected.

<comment><USER8> Interesting story. Maybe those guys in the dark glasses and suits weren't the cable provider, but the NSA! The fibre provider hadn't noticed.

<comment><USER7> Hah, I didn't consider that! I expect that GCHQ happily share the data with the NSA so they don't need to get it from direct taps. So I think it's more likely they were who they claimed to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great, but misses one important fact. Knowing the level of corruption in the Brazilian government, this assumes no one who works on the optics can be bribed by the NSA. I suspect that is improbable.

Short of doing like the DOD does for their classified dark fiber, where they put each strand in a metal pipe, which is pressurized with gas and monitor the pressure in the pipes. When the pressure changes (due to a break in the pipe or someone trying to tap into it), heavily armed security will be dispatched to said location with a quickness.

<comment><USER10> >This is great, but misses one important fact. Knowing the level of corruption in the Brazilian government, this assumes no one who works on the optics can be bribed by the NSA. I suspect that is improbable.

It likely doesn't matter in any case. Read up on the USS Jimmy Carter. It's likely that this submarine has the ability to directly tap into undersea cables.

<comment><USER11> Can you not have end to end encryption of the frames that go over the wire? I guess it's immensely expensive when you're transmitting at 100Gb/s.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure you can, and cost isn't really an issue for the various three letter US agencies. They still treat tapping into said encrypted comms lines as a hostile act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Surely its cheaper to drop a stack of servers at the start point and end point, treat everything in between as hostile and encrypt the hell out of it for transit over the open internet?

<comment><USER13> In an ideal world, any traffic entering and leaving a private network would be encrypted, but the issue is with near-realtime services like VoIP and remote presence where latency isn't acceptable. When you add the large number of users that use these networks, the amount of hardware for both redundancy and performance load balancing becomes a problem.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how this is a problem? You just saved a ton of money by not building a cable.

The WACS cable (a fairly minor project) cost well over half a billion USD. I'm pretty sure that with half a billion I can do quite a bit of realtime encryption....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google is also building a fiber optic cable from Brazil to the US, so not sure how that changes things.

[http://www.zdnet.com/google-to-build-brazil-us-fiber- optic-c...](http://www.zdnet.com/google-to-build-brazil-us-fiber-optic- cable-7000034562/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Article says they're not using any American firms for the infrastructure. This just makes me wonder what companies are they using (Chinese maybe???), and why/how do they trust those people not to spy on them.

<comment><USER16> They can't seriously trust them (or anyone, for that matter). It's just PR, as usual. Some friends of the government are likely expanding their wallets.

<comment><USER17> They don't have to trust them entirely. They just have to trust them more than they trust us.

Honestly, I'm not sure I blame them. At this point, I'm not even sure I trust us to do the right thing and I live here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a political editorial, and those are off-topic for HN. If anyone can suggest a more substantive article on the same topic, we can change the url.

Edit: I originally wrote "masquerading as news", but someone emailed to complain that such language suggested deception where there wasn't any. I didn't mean it that way, and have tried to make the point more clearly.

</comment><comment><USER19> The NSA can tap communication cables in the deep sea. Tapping cables in Brazil on land shouldn't be much of an issue. Also the alternative to US telecom equipment is Chinese, and well, I wouldn't trust that either.

</comment><comment><USER20> And this is the reason why Google is that worried about 'european privacy'. Being less reliant on american companies is not that bad for the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER21> Brazilian government probably has its own NSA, as it is a perfectly socialist government.

<comment><USER22> NSA is part of military, not a part of police force. Socialism or capitalism - this is irrelevant. As long as country has aggressive foreign "interests", organization such as NSA is a nice tool to have.

<comment><USER23> It's relevant because a Capitalist nation properly has a very small, very limited government. Under Capitalism, taxes - to the extent they exist at all - are supposed to be extremely limited. See: US in 1910.

You can't fund the military industrial complex with anything other than a modern welfare state, backed by something like the Fed. It would be impossible under Capitalism. That switch-over happened with WW2 in the US, with the massive enlargement under FDR of the federal government.

<comment><USER16> So the US is what? Communist? Capitalism, socialism, communist... none of that matters when national interests (of the elite) are at play.

<comment><USER23> The US is a very large, highly regulated, highly taxed welfare state, in which the total government system spends roughly 40% of the economy (that's about as far from the structure of spending that a Capitalist government would have as you can get). It hasn't been a Capitalist nation in a very long time. 30 or 40 years ago, it might have been a mixed economy. Regulations and the breadth of taxes have grown substantially since the early 1970s.

<comment><USER22> "That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From Brazil's rejection of American IT products alone, it is estimated that American firms will lose out on over $35 billion in revenue over the next two years. Yet, they still listen to Justin Beiber.

<comment><USER25> I fully support the creation of redundant fiber optic links for the purpose of routing around listening to Justin Bieber.</comment></comment>


Twhoops - Rails app built in 5 hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.twhoops.com/ <comment><USER2> What took 5 hours there? I assume it is mostly the design part and css tweaking, since the functionality is pretty damn simple (and a few lines out of a gem).

I'm not being snarky, I'm curious where the time went on that project.

Also, a small plug for Sinatra, that app is perfect for it (or any other microframework).

<comment><USER3> I guess I'm going to be the cynic here and ask, how is this an "app"? Unless I'm missing something here, where is the utility that constitutes the label of 'application'?

Like "cloud", I think a lot of people are misusing the word "app". In my opinion, an app suggests a meaningful purpose... otherwise it's very much akin to "art" in relation to design. Sure, art is beautiful and often conceptual... but design is form AND function.

A widget - maybe - but calling it an app seems a little overkill.

<comment><USER2> Code that runs with a purpose. Why is this not an application?

I get what you're saying, but a widget is a subset of application. Widget has all attributes of application (code that runs), and then has additional attributes (limited size & scope).

I don't think the word application has any semantics that limit it to "useful".

<comment><USER4> In my mind, a web-app requires interaction... otherwise it is just a website.

Now, the website can be backed by a rails-app, but to call this an app bit much. In my mind, it's a dynamically generated website.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's fair enough - I wouldn't call it an app either, and I made it. There's a rails app in there, but it's only generating a page. Rails made the generation process much easier, though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this would be more useful if we also got a statistic of total tweets per hour vs. total oops-related tweets per hour in order to chart some sort of unscientific likelihood that someone on the Internet will make a mistake.

<comment><USER7> And once you know that the mistake happens ... <http://xkcd.com/386/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Rails App built by Dave Troy that I believe set the standard for 'he/she coded it in how much time?!' is <http://twittervision.com>

"He wrote it in four hours using Ruby on Rails."

[http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/22/meeting-the-geek-behind- twi...](http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/22/meeting-the-geek-behind- twittervision/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fun. But this isn't even a rails app. Make a static HTML page with some javascript that parses <http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=oops>

You should put a tipjoy twitter widget on your page though :) <http://tipjoy.com/twittertools>

</comment><comment><USER10> Shameless plug: I thought it was a neat idea so I built a similar app in with FeedVolley: <http://feedvolley.com/oops> \- no code required :)

If anyone's interested, you can clone this with the "Create a page like this" link on the top right and use your own HTML and search terms...

<comment><USER5> nice work! Can you get it to load in avatars, too?

<comment><USER10> Thanks :) The avatars are in the Atom feed, so theoretically yes, but I currently don't have a tag that accesses this particular item. I guess I should some generic 'parse XML' tag..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd give Tumblr a shout-out in your about page for design inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey, I built this :) - thanks danw.

Edit: moved @replies around.</comment>


The Code Design Behind Linux's Philosophy: Everything Is a File - <AUTHOR> https://leandromoreira.com.br/2019/08/02/linux-ffmpeg-source-internals-a-good-software-design?date=08/31/2019&query=polymorphism <comment><USER2> I thought that was the Unix philosophy...</comment>


GCHQ to be grilled on live tv about spying - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24847399

<comment><USER2> About time.

The standing of the UK with the rest of Europe has been damaged further by this. IMO, the long term damage from the spying scandal will be much worse for the UK than for the US.</comment>


3 Types of Breakpoints In Responsive Designs - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/3-breakpoint-types/

<comment><USER2> In all of my projects the only breakpoints I ever use are; 768px, 480px and 320px that's it. You shouldn't need any more than that to be honest because you should be using a fluid grid for your site with a container using a max- width instead of a fixed width. The Semantic Grid System: <http://semantic.gs> is perfect for creating fluid layouts and then adjusting the layout on smaller screens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah! I'm afraid you didn't read the article. It's not about those absolute device-width breakpoints.

This is indeed interesting. I suggest reading it. :-)

<comment><USER2> I did read the article, although it was very difficult to follow due to the way it was written. The point of my comment relates to the discussion of "tweakpoints' the article refers to at the end actually. Only tweaking particular parts to get it to work as opposed to rethinking how something works.

I can almost guarantee you can't build a site that won't require the use of; 768px (sometimes), 480px and 320px media query rules to help tweak your layout, these are the problem widths hence the need to use media queries.

There are two types of "responsive design" one is adaptive where the site only changes at particular breakpoints but can look horrible inbetween and "fluid responsive" where the site will continually scale down and you set a few breakpoints to make things look nicely.</comment></comment></comment>


William Zinsser, Author of "On Writing Well", Dies at 92 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-dies-at-92.html

<comment><USER2> He was the oracle of sound writing practice. I studied the example page[1] from his book with his hand-written edits like it was ancient cuneiform. Always the consummate perfectionist in the professional sense of the word, Zinsser was part of the reason I was a technical writer for nearly 15 of my professional years.

1\. [http://i.imgur.com/UGWP4vi.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UGWP4vi.jpg)

<comment><USER3> ...and on the other side, a linguistics professor is a bit more critical about his advice:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345)

(I expect there will be a post on that site about Zinsser's death too.)

<comment><USER4> I read the language log pretty regularly and they tend to have quality content. Then you got a post like this which says the book is bad and everything about it is bad after skimming it in a book store. An entire review based on skimming and a few out of context quotes does not make a well researched and thought out position on a book. At no point does the author say they actually read the book cover to cover. This is just a rant against being prescriptive in your writing since it is not "the one true way".

I have read On Writing Well and there is a lot of material covered in this book. I recommend the chapters on editing as that was Zinsser's day job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On Writing Well is available online.

[https://archive.org/details/OnWritingWell](https://archive.org/details/OnWritingWell)

It helped me go from low 70s to high 80s at Uni.

</comment><comment><USER6> Given the subject, would it be amiss to point out that the title as written here is missing a comma?

<comment><USER6> Now corrected.</comment></comment>