The Postgres Rule Manager (1988) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/tse88-rulemgr.pdf <comment><USER2> There are a few good questions on StackOverflow on Postgres rules. For instance:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5894142/what-are- postgre...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5894142/what-are-postgresql- rules-good-for/)

TL;DR: don't use them except in a few edge cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I found interesting is that the paper claims they use the mechanism internally for a bunch of relational DB features:

"Lastly, our rule system can provide database services such as views, protection, integrity constraints, and referential integrity simply by applying the rules system in particular ways. Consequently, no special purpose code need be included in POSTGRES to handle these tasks."

Is that still the case or, considering the Rule Manager is not recommended, has it been replaced for internal services?

I remember Stonebraker's Turing Award Lecture, where he talks about their attempt at an "ALWAYS" command not working, so I was wondering whether the Rule Manager talked about here is that thing that didn't work or the thing they replaced it with.

Looking at the talk again, he says that they figured out ALWAYS wouldn't work around 86-87[1] and this paper is 88, so I am guessing this is the replacement.

[1] [https://youtu.be/sEPTZVGk3WY?t=1843](https://youtu.be/sEPTZVGk3WY?t=1843)

<comment><USER3> Modern PostgreSQL views are internally implemented using rules ([https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/rules- views.h...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/rules-views.html))

<comment><USER4> True. But it's imo sad thing that it is so (at the very least it leads to duplicated functionality and duplicates query tree copies, but it also makes it harder to implement functionality like automatic matview usage etc). I'm quite sure that nobody would implement views in today's postgres that way. If there weren't the fact that there's still resistance to removing rules, I'd argue we should reimplement them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Techshop Closes Doors, Files Bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> https://makezine.com/2017/11/15/techshop-closes-doors-files-bankruptcy/ <comment><USER2> I worked for them as an instructor, course developer, and general staff mentor for a while at one location. My opinion is that this isn't a failure of the model as much as it is a failure of strategy, management, and opportunity exploitation.

They flat out saw the tools as their only asset which was an almost criminal mistake. They utterly undervalued the potential of their educational group and bled them dry out of a misguided attempt to focus on a core competency that was already not working. It left new people with limited ability to develop new projects and the use of new tools as they learned new competencies. They provided a service that too few people new how to make value of. They waited for the world to come to them, and it never did in sufficient numbers.

<comment><USER3> Can you expand on your thoughts on the following? "They utterly undervalued the potential of their educational group and bled them dry out of a misguided attempt to focus on a core competency that was already not working. It left new people with limited ability to develop new projects and the use of new tools as they learned new competencies. They provided a service that too few people new how to make value of. They waited for the world to come to them, and it never did in sufficient numbers.".

How were they undervaluing their potential educational groups? How were they bled dry? Were classes just too expensive? Why was it misguided to focus on core competency? Why wasn't that working? How else would new and/or novice members get 'checked out' to use use a dangerous tool safely?

I'm genuinely curious and hoping that you/anyone have some better insights. I've worked with makerspaces in the past and I've seen a lot of these same arguments and problems but I haven't seen many sustainable solutions the would allow a makerspace to run, grow and keep members safe and happy.

What would you of done differently if you were in charge of TechShop? That is a question for everyone. We all love our makerspaces and are sad to see a behemoth like TechShop go under. It doesn't bode well for other makerspaces.

How do you make a makerspace not only sustainable, but profitable enough to add new tools and the instructors to go along with it?

<comment><USER2> >How were they undervaluing their potential educational groups? How were they bled dry? Were classes just too expensive? Why was it misguided to focus on core competency? Why wasn't that working? How else would new and/or novice members get 'checked out' to use use a dangerous tool safely?

Briefly, the problem I saw was that classes were entirely of the mindset of enabling people to use the tools. It assumed they were already members, already bought into the Makerspace/Techshop mindset, and already knew which tools they needed to use. That isn't an absolute but it was common. Everyone knew about that 3D printers were cool, but nothing empowered them on projects...just on tools. The education was not used to extend the value of Techshop to members, it just served as an impediment to them using certain tools.

>What would you of done differently if you were in charge of TechShop?

I'm honestly hesitant to Monday morning quarterback them and regret my original (somewhat emotional) post a bit. A lot of good friends became unemployed yesterday and I reacted. What would I have done differently? grow differently, grow with a different mindset, understand my users better.

>We all love our makerspaces and are sad to see a behemoth like TechShop go under. It doesn't bode well for other makerspaces.

I had an interesting conversation with someone at another makerspace about techshop one time. I think they serve two different markets, and I think the Techshop problem was that it found itself stuck between them...one is the hardcore makers the other are more of the general public. Noisebridge is and will always be Noisebridge. I don't think you are gonna get people in off the street to stay all that often. Techshop wasn't trying to be that, but they didn't have the mindset that really let them be something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's stay in touch if you're interested in keeping the bay area maker community together. I started a slack group, maybe we can all coordinate. More details here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Techshop/comments/7d7e0m/san_franci...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Techshop/comments/7d7e0m/san_francisco_san_jose_area_makers_group/)

I know a number of people, artists, machinists, hackers, entrepreneurs, some who became friends who have used Techshop to jump start their livelihood, startup, or bootstrapped business. I'd like to see the community workshop live on.

\---

Some alternative options open to the public:

[https://thecrucible.org/](https://thecrucible.org/)

[https://www.noisebridge.net/](https://www.noisebridge.net/)

[https://www.hackerdojo.com/](https://www.hackerdojo.com/)

[http://biocurious.org/](http://biocurious.org/)

[https://www.acemonstertoys.org](https://www.acemonstertoys.org)

[http://beniciamakerspace.org/](http://beniciamakerspace.org/)

[https://695space.com](https://695space.com)

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

Some private options, generally by invitation, education, or business:

Autodesk Pier 9

Berkeley Tool Lending Library [https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/locations/tool- lending...](https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/locations/tool-lending- library) (You need a library card and I think residence in Berkeley)

[https://doubleunion.org/](https://doubleunion.org/) (Possibly Women only?)

\---

Edit: Our group is growing quickly! If you have a need for tools, equipment, or have them available for use you should join. Members of Wood Thumb, 695 Space, and others in the community are active. Thank you everyone!

</comment><comment><USER5> Site was down for a little bit but an overview presentation is back up here: [http://techshop.ws/techshop.pdf](http://techshop.ws/techshop.pdf)

I've been a member since forever and learned so much just by working on my projects next to other people and chatting. I had tried unsuccessfully to create online meeting places (FB groups, subreddits, bulletin boards) to connect with other makers I met there but because of the hands on nature, most people were too busy to be chatting somewhere online. A lot of makers were also a bit older and weren't into social media. There were so many resources like the San Jose corkboard that had lists of local raw parts suppliers that I just could never find online and now it's all gone...

</comment><comment><USER6> I was one of the small-time investors in TechShop and really believed in their mission. I still do, and I'm sad that they weren't able to get a sustainable business model. I learned a lot at their Austin location and made some pretty neat objects. They had said in their last investor meeting that they were trying to pivot to provide services for non-profit makerspaces, but it didn't happen fast enough due to their cash position.

<comment><USER7> I spent a good amount of time at the Austin shop, I loved it but it was just a little too far out of the way to make it worthwhile as a hobby space.

<comment><USER8> I looked at joining a couple of months ago, but it seemed kind of expensive for a hobby-level interest of mine, something I might come in and use on a weekend several times a year (that's probably a difficult market to serve). Its really too bad, I liked the idea of that place a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is sad to see them go so completely (chapter 7 is liquidation not reorganization) but I also think they informed a lot of questions about what it takes to run such an operation.

<comment><USER10> What do you think was learned? I was a member for a few years, but don't feel like I have an understanding of the economics.

<comment><USER9> Hopefully I'll get a chance to ask Jim the next time I see him. But to speculate based on my own experiences and those of others that I interact with socially there were a couple of huge challenges;

* When you had a project it was "easy" to justify the monthly cost of membership, when you were between projects it was not.

* Scheduling vs flow - you could schedule an hour on a machine tool to make a part, spend half of that hour just getting the machine trammed again from the previous inexperienced user, then discover you needed a small change that you could sit down and make and come back, but the next available time on the tool was the next day. It really interrupts your flow when that sort of stuff happens, and wasting "your" time tramming was always annoying. I and a number of other people suggested that there be 10 minute breaks in the schedule so that when the previous person's time was up, a 'pro' would come over and make sure everything was ready for the next person to start.

* Space to keep things in progress was always tight. If your project was half done, and you need to leave it there over night, that wasn't too bad unless someone decided to come over and have a look at it. There were also some issues where people would bring in some of their own tools and other members would see them over by a project and assume they were Techshop tools. Never a good outcome there.

* Instruction isn't a P/L center. It bugs people to pay to be given the safety lecture, many felt that the lecture on how to use the tool should be part of the monthly membership not an add on. When you go to the gym they don't charge you extra to explain how to use a machine, they do charge you extra if they are consulting on your training program. Similarly at Techshop (and this was more true later) the money is in having someone consult on the aspects of a problem they are more expert on than you are.

* Meetings and outreach, there is a opportunity for a "low cost" membership in a center where meetings can be held for groups of 30 - 100. When the robotics club was meeting at Techshop it was valuable but not everyone wanted to become a full time member just to go to a once a month meeting. A $10 - $25/month 'attend meetings here' sort of membership would have worked well for a lot of those folks.

Those things just sort of pop out easily. The challenge of being too flexible is an interesting one (if you can do any number of things, its hard to support any one area as well as you would like). It gave me a bunch of ideas for my "Prototype Electronics" store idea :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hardware is hard. I was a TechShop member back in 2013. I thought it was a great idea, but I noticed that the laser cutters/engravers seemed to be the only machines that were regularly booked up. I wonder if a model of 'kinkos for laser cutting' could have succeeded?

<comment><USER12> I think Danger!Awesome in Cambridge, MA is doing this model and so are many others. Also, Ponoko is the online version of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I toured the Techshop in Pittsburgh, and took an industrial sewing class to see how their instruction was.

I have my own workshop with a full-size lathe, mill, etc.

The part of techshop that I thought was fundamentally flawed was the tooling provided. Yes, every section from woodworking to welding to machining had beautiful machines. But that's all they had. There is so much other support tooling and semi-consumables required, particularly, in metal work. You never just use a Vertical Mill to do a project. Where are your cutting tools? your myriad clamping solutions? Your various measurement gauges? That stuff really adds up, too, in price and in quantity.

So when I toured Techshop I was thinking, "none of that is provided, so what? if I came, I'd have to wheel a 300lb dolly of parts and bits to enable me to use their beautiful machine?"

And, no, I don't think the solution was for Techshop to provide that stuff. Just a simple dial indicator or calipers is going to get lost, broken, stolen in very short order.

That's why I went away thinking, "what a shame -- a good idea in theory, but the reality of machine work makes this model of "man walks in off the street and builds a robot" pretty impractical, or at least not nearly easily as a casual daydream would suspect."

<comment><USER14> Not that it changes your argument, but Techshop did actually provide some of those things, dial calipers, gauge blocks, dial test indicators. You just had to check them out, and not everyone know what/where they were. As far as work- holding tooling, it did seem pretty random and probably varied depending on the location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite a shocker for me since I go there everyday (redwood city). What are my options? (Palo Alto, Stanford area - not stanford student).

Am I SOL?

<comment><USER4> Have a look at my other comment. Possibly hacker dojo

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really sorry to see this resource go away. I was one of the early members at the Menlo Park shop. I built devices there that I couldn't have done otherwise, and it was inspiring to see many others doing the same 24/7\. I learned a lot from other members. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER17> Probably a good time to mention there are hundreds of hackerspaces throughout the USA.

My local hackerspace in San Francisco is Noisebridge[1]

[0] [https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/United_States_of_America](https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/United_States_of_America) [1] [https://noisebridge.net/](https://noisebridge.net/)</comment>


The Goethe Auction (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://cheaptalk.org/2012/11/04/the-goethe-auction/ <comment><USER2> I am not sure why this has been linked as the Vickery auction page is a better description [1]. I have to say I have a soft spot for auction theory with a weakness for Amsterdam auctions [2].

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction)

2\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory)

<comment><USER3> I guess because it's historically interesting.

For your convenience, the paper mentioned in this article, "Goethe's Second- Price Auction", can be found at [https://www.econ2.uni- bonn.de/pdf/goethes_second.pdf](https://www.econ2.uni- bonn.de/pdf/goethes_second.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. This is much more interesting :)</comment></comment></comment>


Clinton's e-mail scandal another case of the entitled executive syndrome - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/clintons-e-mail-scandal-another-case-of-the-entitled-executive-syndrome/ <comment><USER2> when working physical security, you occasionally hear 'do you know who I am?'. this attitude completely undermines the security of the asset being protected.</comment>


Ask HN: Best books/resources to learn about blockchain tech? - <AUTHOR> After mostly ignoring the hype over the past several years, I'm looking to learn about blockchain tech.<p>Though technical myself, I'd like to start with a less-technical overview of the technology and it's potential, before taking deep dives into the more technical aspects. There seem to be a number of well-reviewed books on Amazon, but given how new the space is and how fast things are changing, I'm not really sure what to trust/where to start, and was hoping the wisdom of the HN community could point me towards some good starting resources :) <comment><USER2> Course on Hyperledger, enterprise grade blockchain [https://www.edx.org/course/blockchain-business- introduction-...](https://www.edx.org/course/blockchain-business-introduction- linuxfoundationx-lfs171x)

Course on cryptocurrency: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency](https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency)

I have taken both, the coursera course actually walks thru some other data structures needed to build a blockchain, and points you in the direction of more heavy math if you want to go there.

Both of courses are solid introduction to blockchain tech. And best of all they are both free. :)</comment>


Yahoo Mail Beta Rolls Out Worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2010/10/yahoo-mail-beta-rolls-out-worldwide <comment><USER2> All the integrated apps seem like a cool idea. The big Ad on the right is a huge turnoff though. Just what I want in email, American Express spam... just like snail mail...

It looks like they could make better use of the blank space in the inbox area. There are no columns after the flag.

There are little things that are off in the UI as well, like the mouse icon turns in to a hand when you hover over the inbox, even if you're not hovering over an email. Small things like that irk me.

Anyway, looks like they're at least trying.

</comment><comment><USER3> Positives: It does seem to load pages faster. Nearly instant instead of the 1-2 second delay I was used to with the previous version.

Still seems a little buggy though. Unread count in my browser title includes all the spam messages. Can't turn off automatically signing in to IM.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hopefully this will cause GMail to take a look at their own performance. Loading some labels/searches takes 20+ seconds or it just times out.

I do like that they left console.log() on in production to give you a glimpse at how quickly it loads up.

</comment><comment><USER5> I for one am looking forward to this. Yahoo Mail has been my default spam email address account for about 13 years now. I will now be able to login quicker so that I can click those email address validation links thanks to this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd be pretty pissed if I got shot in the face every time I checked my email.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's time Yahoo just gave up.

<comment><USER8> And do what? Shut down the company, all its services and fire the employees?

I'd rather see Yahoo continue to try and improve its services. To, you know, become competitive again.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Starting a business without a bank account - <AUTHOR> What would you do if you wanted to start a SaaS project, but: - No proof of address, and possibly lack of ID documents - No bank account, or untrustworthy local banks - Stripe and PayPal have blacklisted your country.
I'm curious if there are good solutions to this. I've heard of Stripe Atlas, but it's a little pricey as an upfront fee, and I'm not sure it solves everything one would need.
Would you lean on a friend somewhere first world to run things for you? Start accepting payment through something like fastspring and worry about payout options later? Incorporate somewhere weird?
I'm hoping to find a reasonable path that I can recommend to entrepreneurs (and potentially try myself, if I can find time for a side project). <comment><USER2> AFAIK Estonia has a program in order to facilitate starting a business there. You might want to look into that.

Best of luck!

[https://e-resident.gov.ee/start-a-company/](https://e-resident.gov.ee/start- a-company/)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe you could do this in the US. You could likely get by without a bank account but not with your other restrictions.

You could probably start an affiliate site and use a check cashing service, but even they would require docs.

Crypto payments maybe?

Why all the constraints?

<comment><AUTHOR> I live somewhere (Zimbabwe) where a lot of that stuff we take for granted is very much not the default. Most folks have mobile money, and maybe a national ID, but that's about it. Currency changes have meant 'USD' accounts have changed to local currency overnight a few times, and the banking regulations change continually, so they're not the most attractive option. For someone here with an idea and some technical skills, I'd love for there to be a way to start something without all the obstacles that are present simply because they're in Zimbabwe. I should probably have kept the constraints list shorter, but I am curious what options are out there. Crypto is starting to get adopted here, so maybe that is a potential route. It still needs a way to go from *coin to cash, but if bet most places have some system available.

<comment><USER4> So is producing a Zimbabwe ID/passport and address an option or not? Zimbabwe nationals should be able to incorporate in America (and probably many other places) and get everything setup this way. But besides Stripe Atlas, most banks will generally require you to show up in person to open an account.

Searched for payment processing options in Zimbabwe and it looks like 2Checkout accepts businesses from there. It's a pretty solid processor, supports many local payment options, which will help a lot if targeting Africa.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I do if I don't get a summer internship? - <AUTHOR>

Next year I'll be a senior (majoring in CS). I am currently studying abroad, so unfortunately I won't even be back in the US until mid June (and then have about two months left until uni starts again). I have a meh GPA (3.0) but a couple of side projects that I've put some time into as well as brief, crude work experience doing web dev for two university organizations through the university. Essentially, I'm looking at graduating without a whole lot of formal experience, so how should I look at spending the rest of my time (2 months of summer + 2 semesters) in preparation for getting a job? I'm quite concerned about getting a job doing something interesting where I feel like I have some sort of positive impact on the world, and I'm worried that with my current situation my options will be limited. <comment><USER3> > I'm quite concerned about getting a job doing something interesting where I > feel like I have some sort of positive impact on the world,

It's great if you get some sort of shiny job like that right out of the gate. But for most people, their job-related positive impact on the world comes on top of some years of experience.

If you don't get the shiny job right off, enjoy the normal job, learn about your field, the world and yourself. Take the long view, and enjoy the days. Eventually you'll focus on what _you_ want to contribute, rather than the needs of some particular early employer.

It'll be fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you don't get a formal internship for the summer, I suggest you try to build something useful that you could show a prospective employer. Given your background, this will probably be a web site. Two and a half months is enough to build something real.

Does either of your side projects solve a real problem that people have?

If not, look for some sort of frustrating inefficiency that you or your friends at school run into all the time. Then build a solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my tentative life plan...assuming I can convince my parents that this is, in the long run, the best use of my time for the summer instead of working somewhere else. This brings into question though how big of a project are we talking? I always hear this advice tossed around, yet never with any specifics regarding time spent/users/LOC/metric of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I'm quite concerned about getting a job doing something interesting where I > feel like I have some sort of positive impact on the world, and I'm worried > that with my current situation my options will be limited.

The first thing right here is to realize you are putting yourself under way too much pressure. The world doesn't work like that.

Enjoy your summer. Go on lots of hikes and enjoy every moment you can.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to make a positive impact on the world, I would go out and see the world. People like to live in fear of not following the right path - <USER2> diverging from the norm is what makes new possibilities happen. Take some time to relax, recharge, and think about what it is you want to accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER7> Have a really good rest. Because after that you'll be working your ass off for the rest of your life.

</comment><comment><USER8> Go and help/work for/talk to/ random people who need it. It will make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER9> 4th year CE major based in bay area also looking for internship here

</comment><comment><USER10> Where are you based right now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean where am I abroad? Istanbul. In the US I go to school in Montana.

<comment><USER11> Which university in Istanbul ? Are you Turkish ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kadir Has Üniversitesi / No, I'm just on exchange</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google can't search for vendor-specific CSS propertie - <AUTHOR> http://user.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/google-cant-search-for-vendor-specific-css-propertie/

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not every day that you can find a usability issue with the planet's most popular search engine! :-) And it's ironic that this issue is related to a basic need of web designers on the planet's number one website!</comment>


Ask HN: How to explain LulzSec in layman? - <AUTHOR>

I was trying to explain to a non-CS friend the other day exactly what LulzSec is?
Hackers? Security? Radical futurists?
Thoughts...? <comment><USER2> You should start with what they actually understand. Do they think LulzSec is a bunch of social parasites with too much time and tech knowledge? Build on and/or correct what they think.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 12\. This is where Topiary comes in. They all form lulzsec to be "hacktivists".

Source: <http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=iVujX4TR>

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://cdn5.movieclips.com/mgm/w/wargames-1983/0580137_9495_...](http://cdn5.movieclips.com/mgm/w/wargames-1983/0580137_9495_MC_Tx360.jpg)</comment>


Silk Road successor Sheep Marketplace users scammed of $40m+ in bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rsb1v/proof_from_mod_that_they_stole_all_the_bitcoins/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is more information:

[http://www.sheepmarketscam.com/](http://www.sheepmarketscam.com/)</comment>


New Historical Debugger for .NET - <AUTHOR> http://www.timemachinefor.net/ <comment><USER2> Does it work with CoreCLR on ubuntu?

<comment><AUTHOR> They haven't tried it yet but plan to support CoreCRL on Linux (and Xamarin on mobiles).</comment></comment>


We're F*cked, It's Over. Or Is It? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/were-f-cked-it-s-over-or-is-it-5abe1432471d#.dx6055kel <comment><USER2> Let me save you some time:

In the end they ditched their "sharing" economy model of food production and delivery, rented a kitchen and hired staff, and became a delivery service with a teeny tiny menu.

It may be successful; the model is as old as civilization and the market allows for new entrants. But it's not easy.

<comment><USER3> And their conclusion that "cooking is dying" is a huge stretch. It might be more believable if they had a huge menu of truly authentic items, but that would eat into their business model.

Similarily, claiming that "fast food is dying" is because they haven't realized what most fast food engineers have discovered through many years of iteration: at scale, the masses prefer salty, greasy food with habit forming taste characteristics.

Still, I wish them luck in their current business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _The plan was simple yet ambitious:_

> _One month to set up a new business (rent a kitchen, hire a chef, hire > motorbike drivers, create the menu, design logo, website, build mobile app > for drivers, build first version of the routing algorithm plus complete all > the legal and admin paperwork)._

So... they opened a delivery restaurant with its own app?

<comment><USER5> Oh god, as I read through it I kind of just started laughing to myself. They opened a chain restaurant -- surely VC-money worthy.

<comment><USER6> Surely a chain restaurant _with its own routing algorithm_ is worthy a bazillion dollars?

<comment><USER5> "We placed ants in a scale model of the entire city. Placed food at the delivery points and recorded their steps. In the end it's the first swarming, multi-node, organic-learning food delivery algorithm."

<comment><USER7> Now you only have to figure out how to make the ants not take short-cuts (eg. walk over houses)

<comment><USER5> "We soon realized that ants took unexpected short-cuts. To solve this we switched to a drone based delivery model, cutting out the middle-man. In our second-generation organic-learning model we also switched to bees. We call this algorithm, buzzfeed."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is _just_ like the time I created a startup where a group of friends in separate locations could select custom drinks and alcoholic beverages using our app which would then be automatically delivered to a location equidistant from each friend in the group.

But then we pivoted and just opened a bar.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand. It sounds like they ditched the "Uber for home-cooked meals" model and started... a restaurant that offers delivery via app? That doesn't really seem like "the first truly scalable food tech company"; it seems like they are trying to compete with e.g. Seamless by vertically integrating. Which sounds... less scalable probably?

But kudos to them for the clever marketing - they got me to read about them, which I guess is the only point.

</comment><comment><USER10> So the whole "what is my mother no longer doing for me?" thing has spread beyond SF?

[https://twitter.com/azizshamim/status/595285234880491521](https://twitter.com/azizshamim/status/595285234880491521)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm starting to wonder if most "sharing economy" models wouldn't be better served through some form of co-op. Basically the business equivalent of open- source. Sure, that won't produce a golden egg goose but it might actually serve the users better.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was hoping for an in-depth discussion of Global Climate change, and instead this is a long-winded blog post about what appears to be a failed recipe app.

How disappointing.

<comment><USER6> Oh please, it's not a "failed recipe app", it's _Uber For® cooking!_

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'Cooking is dying'

ugh.

</comment><comment><USER13> Once you get into it its a great article on finding out what really matters to your customers. I also love the name Forky. The title is not really meaningful.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's weird: all of the images are blurry beyond recognition.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please change the title to something else.

<comment><USER16> I agree. The title isn't useful at all. Neither was the first paragraph, had no idea what the article was about.

<comment><USER4> Neither are the next several. It takes awhile to get down to the meat of it: "having your neighbor cook for you doesn't work for shit as a business, so we're just going to open a restaurant."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> CTRL + F

"revenue"

0 results

backspace x7

"margin"

0 results

backspace x6

"profit"

0 results

backspace x6

"cost"

0 results

give up on meaningful data x1

Good content marketing though.

<comment><USER6> Psst, ctrl+backspace is a thing.

<comment><USER18> Woah.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are people using for Continuous Deployment with Docker - <AUTHOR> I have a git repo. I have Kubernetes. How are people going from a git checkin to a deployed container? <comment><USER2> With jenkins</comment>


Ask HN: Non-programming jobs that require programming mindset? - <AUTHOR> I really enjoy programming when it comes down to the problem solving, logic, creativeness, building something out of nothing, etc
What I don't like however, is sitting in front of a computer.
I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations on careers, industries, jobs, etc where you can utilize the logic & creative problem solving of thinking like a programmer - without having to be in front of a computer all day. <comment><USER2> If you're planning to become a professional philosopher and you don't have experience with programming, you're liable to fall into language traps and make Wittgenstein sad. So, philosophy is a field that benefits from a programming mindset. (It doesn't _require_ one, but neither does programming, as I'm sure we all know from experience with some coworkers.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Large Project Construction Management. Has everything a programmer needs, logic, abstraction, modularizing the problem, keep an eye on the big picture, working under pressure, people skills, planning skills, mythical man-months and unfortunately long hours as well. It is very rewarding to see something rising literally on the sand (from where I am).

<comment><USER4> However you are not "creating the baby" only "raising him".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Architecture.

However you must be really careful not to slip into full time CAD drafting where you will be in front of a computer all day also. By the other hand, the sallary of an young architect is, on average, an order of magnitude worse than programming..

</comment><comment><USER5> Probably not what your looking for but, you never know:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/hololens)</comment>


Ben Carson Thinks Egyptian Pyramids Built by Joseph to Store Grain - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ben-carsons-unusual-theory-about-pyramids/ <comment><USER2> Ben Carson is perhaps the best example ever to support the old adage, "Don't quit your day job."</comment>


US Troops to Spend Month Painting Fence on US-Mexico Border - <AUTHOR> https://taskandpurpose.com/us-troops-painting-border-wall <comment><USER2> Is this a workaround for the POTUS to "send troops the border" after staff told him he couldn't just do that at will?</comment>


Microsoft acquires Metaswitch in telecom push - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/14/microsoft-acquires-metaswitch-in-telecom-push.html <comment><USER2> My first thought is, didnt they get out of the cellphone biz?

Next, isnt SpaceX going to have the ability to provide similar service? Is there room to compete?

I then read its related to cloud services and competing with AWS.</comment>


Tech Jobs That the Cloud Will Eliminate - hands-on technical work - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2009/07/22/22idg-the-tech-jobs-that-the-cloud-will-eliminate-4509.html <comment><USER2> A reminder to take nothing for granted. That being said, _local_ technical work - where one's physical presence is required - continues to be in demand. The non-techies will continue to need hand-holding.

This applies even in technological backwaters such as I'm in - maybe even more so. Living out here does present some challenges for start-up work, but more and more luddite businesses are finding they _have_ to be web-connected if not web-based. So they need _me_ (and can have me - until my night job becomes my day job).

<comment><USER3> _local technical work_

That's only partly true. What matters is competitive advantage. No company is more competitive because its (say) email server is more reliable than its rivals. Therefore email is ripe for outsourcing. But in any area where IT/software/computation _is_ a competitive advantage, that will stay in-house (possibly using cloud-like technologies, but that's not relevant to this analysis).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, as they say:

""Some percentage of the jobs actually performing infrastructure services, monitoring, and datacenter operations in-house will shift to cloud service providers like Google, Amazon, and the telcos..."

But for start-up entrepreneurs, this can be the _good_ news: that the creative work of assessing a consumer/business niche of need can move more quickly to the creative work of filling that niche need in better ways.

The cloud can really be the _friend_ of our enterprising spirits.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. I see cloud computing as more enabling than disabling since people don't have to focus on the mundane as much as they can focus on the things that are unique to their idea. This is progress! Not something to be feared...

<comment><USER6> The point is there are people out there highly trained and experienced at focusing on the mundane, and if their jobs go away, what will they do?

Besides, poking about with hardware and sysadminning can be pretty fun, in limited short bursts.

<comment><USER5> _The point is there are people out there highly trained and experienced at focusing on the mundane, and if their jobs go away, what will they do?_

They should learn something new... Just because they're highly trained doesn't mean they get a free ride for the rest of their lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Horseless carriage to eliminate animal husbandrists"

</comment><comment><USER8> However, some of us entrepreneur-wannabees still rely on "hands-on technical work" while working nights to plan a start-up. This may call for extra resourcefulness for future start-uppers.

</comment><comment><USER9> My experince with "cloud computing" has been that needs always grow to fill all available capacity.

As your capabilities expand within a given budget, new needs arise. All of the marginal applications that were impossible to pitch under the old cost structure are suddenly compelling choices.

Firms provision VMware environments in order decrease labor costs and consolidate servers. Before you know it, the business "needs" ten times as many servers as before.

</comment><comment><USER10> Alternate title:

"Tech Jobs That the Cloud Will Produce - hands-on application development"

</comment><comment><USER11> but who will administer the cloud ?</comment>


Ask HN: First employee hours - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
I don't really have a mentor / know anyone to ask advice on this, so hoping to grab some here.
I'm a young co-founder (developer), and we're growing pretty damn fast. It was time to hire a first employee a few months back but its a long process - which I'm sure most of you know.
Its going to be damn awkward managing someone significantly older than myself. I've read up on tons of tips and have a more or less general idea how I'm going to behave (ask for lots of advice, but make clear decisions when they need to be made).
My only remaining concern is working hours. I'm currently working crazy hours (worked nineteen hours today - so far). The new developer should relax the workload but I doubt I'm going to hit eight hour work days any time soon -- but I don't expect him and I'm not paying him to work more than that.
Does anyone have experience with this / how have you dealt with it? I'm going to expect him to come into the "office" daily atleast for the few weeks - so we can sort out the groundwork and maybe do a little pair programming.
Does anyone here use the 'rough' nine->five model? Should I just expect him to come in for around eight hours a day?
I really don't feel comfortable asking or even suggesting he works close to the same hours I do. We're paying him a decent salary - but he's an employee; not a founder.
[we're profitable enough to cover his salary so theres no crazy "if we don't get this done by xxx we'll go bankrupt"] <comment><USER2> _Its going to be damn awkward managing someone significantly older than myself._

Only if you make it so. There is no reason why it has to be that way. I have often had this "problem" - unfortunately as I am getting older, less and less :-) It has never been an issue for me.

Bear in mind, managing is hard. Managing well is harder - many people never get it right. Good management is not based on exploiting the power imbalance between manager and employee. So an age differential (socially a power imbalance issue) should not matter.

As to your specific question: a software developer is generally an exempt employee. She or he are not paid by the hour, they are paid to do the job done. However, depending on how much you are paying them, you need to make sure that "getting the job done" can be done in 40-hour-type working week.

In terms of office hours, I believe that sheer contact hours are very important in the beginning between co-developers, so that they can have a chance to get in each other's head. After that, you should do whatever works well for you. If you work round the clock, identify a slice of the day where you want to interact with this person that fits with his or hers natural rhythms (ask them!), and call those "core hours" where you expect this person to be physically present. Trust them to develop their own schedule around that, and again, focus on monitoring outcomes, not hours.

The most important thing about team schedules is predictability. I would rather have someone who was in the office 6am-noon every day, rather than somebody who was at the office for longer but with an unpredictable schedule.

I really have to point you to this blog - askamanager.org - go read the backlog. It is full of some terribly sane advice about managing people. It's not about a technical setting, but people are people. Here's a good start:

[http://www.askamanager.org/2010/06/deathbed-advice-for- manag...](http://www.askamanager.org/2010/06/deathbed-advice-for- managers.html)

You know what a difference there is between a good developer and a poor developer. The same difference is there between a good manager and a bad manager. If you work at being a good one, you will be.

</comment><comment><USER3> In your questions, I see some conceptual confusion between managing individuals and supervising them.

Good management is about facilitation and planning -- proactively getting people what they need to complete tasks without sacrificing the long term. Managing individuals is not inherently hierarchal and occurs not only down, but Up the organizational chart as well. Importantly, management relationships can be reciprocal and cooperative. In my experience most people have an intuitive sense of good management because it can be practiced as a subordinate; of course study, training and experience are needed to build upon that intuition.

Supervising people is about enforcing requirements. Unlike management, supervision is solely based on a formal hierarchical relationship and a disparity of power. Supervision always requires expression of the formal difference in power and the supervisory relationship is non-reciprocal. Unlike management, I believe our natural instincts toward supervision are crap; because new supervisors by definition lack experience with the power, they tend to use a heavy hand, and this is the danger you face.

As a manager expectations regarding schedule should be discussed as part of the interview process. Particularly in your situation when the signals regarding corporate culture are so mixed. You're working 19 hours, the employee is expected 9-5 only, and yet there's pair programming. The age of the employee has nothing to do with it.

As a supervisor, the place to start is treating your subordinate as if they had just handed you their two week's notice and you need to maximize their productivity before they leave – because that situation is always only one day away.

The moment you think, "If the employee doesn't do 'X,' I will fire them," it is a warning sign and should first trigger a deep reevaluation of your conduct, expectations and requirements within the context of the reciprocal/managerial relationship with your employee and the long term goals of the organization. The age of the employee has nothing to do with it.

If after that reevaluation of yourself, you still think "If the employee doesn't do 'X,' I will fire them," then it's time to fire them regardless of their course of action because the management relationship has failed. The age of the employee has nothing to do with that either.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should expect him to work 8 hours day and depending on the culture you wish for your company, I also suggest you be laid-back with office hours. The most important is that things get done regardless of when. Losing good employees is very costly, you want to maximize your chances they are happy. Having strict rules and implying that employees are more or less "required" to work more than 40 hours (because everybody else do) will eventually burn them out and they will leave. Great developers have a lot of opportunities!

<comment><USER5> I've been involved with a number of startups, and I can't think of a single occasion when early employees worked less than 10 hours a day. I think setting a lower expectation is wrong for at least three reasons:

1) It is entirely possible to work 50 hours a week and have a good work/life balance without burning yourself out (I say this as an actively involved father who works more than that).

2) The first few employees are absolutely critical to how the company and culture will evolve, and if you want to build a high-performance team, you really need employees who are driven to work harder than they would an established company. Setting clear expectations about work hours is a good way to screen out those who aren't ready for the challenge.

3) The very first employee is practically a founder and needs to think and act like one. Which isn't to say they need to work as much as you do, but certainly a good bit more than a 40 hour week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Make sure s/he's on-board with the objectives, make him/her part of the estimation process, agree targets (features, fixes, etc) with timescales, point him/her in the right direction and let go. Hand over the responsibility.

Occasionally when passing ask how it's going, whether it's ahead or behind. Check roughly every day or so, asking if there's anything needed to unblock progress, or if it's going well.

As you work on the agreed timescales/workload, hours will settle out naturally. Let them work whenever they like to achieve the goals, but make sure they're in fairly frequently so you have the communication.

All this can be mutated, but that's what works for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> My advice is to just have reasonable deadlines and milestones, and let him work as often as it takes to hit those goals. If that means crunch-time occasionally, so be it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I just started at a very young company. There was already a clear expectation that I work 40-50 hours per week (since it is written on the contract).

On the first day, one of the founders asked me: "what are your hours going to be? I come in at 10, Bob comes at 7, and Frank at 9:00.".

I liked this approach.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even if he worked a ton of overtime, would you work less hours? Or would you still find stuff to do with the freed up time?

</comment><comment><USER10> There is little point to worrying about hours in the age of commit logs.

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you work 19 hours a day?

<comment><USER12> That's 19 hours 'today', not necessarily each day. I've had days where I've arrived at work at 6am and then not stopped (save for short breaks) for 40 hours. Or worked 15ish hours at the office, driven home in 15 minutes, and then worked another 5-6 hours.

19 hours/day on average over an extended period might be a different story!

<comment><USER13> I know what it's like bud, I spent most of last month averaging about 18 hours a day on my new startup. I started to burn out within 3.5 weeks as the initial adrenaline wore out. Doing more regular hours now. Take care of yourself, and keep in good health :) Best wishes.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix begins audio description for visually impaired - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2015/04/netflix-begins-audio-description-for.html

<comment><USER2> a non-press-release version of this story, from the washington post: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act- four/wp/2015/04/14/ne...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act- four/wp/2015/04/14/netflix-makes-a-blind-superhero-accessible-to-blind- viewers/)

this is the result of a multi-year fight by disability advocates, most notably Robert Kingett from the accessible Netflix project ([https://netflixproject.wordpress.com/](https://netflixproject.wordpress.com/)). What finally put them over the edge was the release of Daredevil, which made for a story the popular press finally bit: blind people can't enjoy a show about a blind superhero.

honestly, the fact that netflix remedied the situation so quickly once the PR situation got bad enough does not improve their reputation on this issue in my eyes. For a long time, I thought that maybe there was some great technical complication I just didn't understand that made this much harder than it seemed from the outside. Apparently that wasn't the case.

Also, as Kingett has said, "now comes the easy part." Adding description tracks on Netflix for all of the movies and TV shows for which they have been available all along.

<comment><USER3> Don't know how it is in English-speaking countries, but Netflix's laughable subtitle translations are as common a conversation topic as the weather and sports where I live. I have no idea why they don't bother stepping it up.

As someone who is only very slight of hearing - no problem talking with people in person - it is also immensely frustrating that I usually can't get English subtitles on Netflix instead of a translation. And when I can finally get it in English, it's closed captions, which kind of ruins my experience by captioning every sound effect in a movie or TV show.

I have no idea why this isn't a bigger focus at Netflix given there must be a whole iPod generation with some minor hearing problems.

<comment><USER4> You probably already know this, but the 'pirate' community has your interests well served. There are probably very well-written subtitle tracks for any major movie available in your native language. You won't be able to use them with a Netflix stream (thanks to DRM), but VLC lets you add subtitles to any video file.

<comment><USER5> > You won't be able to use them with a Netflix stream (thanks to DRM)

I think you're wrong, and to blame DRM is ridiculous.

You can load your own subtitles on Netflix, html5 or silverlight.

You don't even need a Chrome extension for the Silverlight one, it imports DFXP directly from the debug menu (alt+shift+click iirc).

There are even browser extensions that largely automate the process for HTML5. (Downloading the subtitle file and displaying it.)

I don't know about Super Netflix but fwih Netflix Subtitle Downloader also gives you a couple of buttons to adjust subtitle sync if you need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matt-attack For those who aren't aware, Hollywood studios have been doing this for 5 years or so on their theatrical releases. Every title that goes out contains a track for both hearing impaired (boosted dialog, reduced sound effects) and visually impaired (a complete narration of what's on screen).

Additionally, there's an on-screen caption track for theaters that wish to schedule entire screenings for the hard-of-hearing as well as an off-screen caption track that can be sent to hand-held or worn devices.

<comment><USER6> > boosted dialog, reduced sound effects

As a normally hearing person this would actually be useful on some films, I struggle to follow dialog when there is so much background noise on-screen and in the cinema.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very cool. I recently helped a couple of visually impaired people pick a movie through a stack of DVDs they had at home, using the [http://www.bemyeyes.org](http://www.bemyeyes.org) app.

I didn't know how they watched the movies, so they explain me that some come with some sort of aid that describes de scenes. Some kind of story telling, along the audio. I was fascinated.

However, they complain that there is not a lot of content that has this aid. I'm glad Netflix is bringing their content to this audience.

</comment><comment><USER8> I doubt they will do it but I'd like to see Netflix add descriptive audio to older shows. I know a lot of American shows that get aired in the UK have narration for visually impaired people, it would be nice if Netflix would make this narration an option for stuff besides there original series.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now if we can get Kindle to support dyslexic friendly fonts.

<comment><USER4> The Kobo series of ereaders support both Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic out of the box. If you care about accessibility, don't buy a Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Timely blogpost around the release of Daredevil ! ;-)</comment>


Go Builder Plan - <AUTHOR> http://golang.org/s/builderplan

<comment><USER2> Sort of off topic, but one thing I really enjoy about the Go project is how open development and intent is. In addition to this, the Go team has shared plans (and invited discussion) for many things, some examples:

Internal changes: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e8kOo3r51b2BWtTs_1uADIA5...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e8kOo3r51b2BWtTs_1uADIA5djfXhPT36s6eHVRIvaU/edit)

Linker overhaul: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xN-g6qjjWflecSP08LNgh2uF...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xN-g6qjjWflecSP08LNgh2uFsKjWb- rR9KA11ip_DIE/edit)

Garbage collector changes: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Y4IsnNRCN43Mx0NZc5YXZLo...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Y4IsnNRCN43Mx0NZc5YXZLovrHvvLhK_h0KN8woTO4/edit)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ditto on the Darwin builds.

Since Apple ditched the Xserve forever ago and the legal issues of Mac OSX on non-apple hardware, builds on mac are a pain in the ass for everyone. You get to buy your Mac Pro, deal with VMware when you want to build for more than one OS (which of course means someone always loses days at a time doing something minor), and hope you have a nice 6U square peg available for your cylindrical trashcan peg.

<comment><USER4> Not 6U, a pair of mac pros needs only 4U of rack space.

[http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacpro.html](http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacpro.html)

<comment><USER5> Seems like overkill, with the unused graphics capabilities, I guess the cards could be removed. Could a couple of macbook pros fit into a 1U?

<comment><USER4> Well most of the computing power is in the GPU, so for some sort of specific application you could take advantage of them, but for this sort of thing, yeah, it's not a great fit. I'm not sure about laptops. You could probably do it, but there was an article on here a while ago about using chromebooks for ARM native compilation, and the result was that the machines weren't quite up to it. The load would kill the machines and cause their batteries to swell up alarmingly. I'm not sure if a macbook would fare better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sweet. I'm in the same boat, using buildbot to produce binary packages (from git) for Debian unstable and the most recent Ubuntu release.

I'm particularly interested in the orchestration part of what they come up with in order to quickly boot VMs on GCE (or other cloud providers), do a build, and turn them down again.

</comment><comment><USER7> Should I assume that this topic directly relates to building Go the language and not Go binaries that we use Go to write?

I see some comments here that seem like overkill for building cross-platform binaries which is why I ask.

</comment><comment><USER8> _For Windows, we throw out some of our principles..._

I hope that they saw the Drawbridge announcement[0] and discussion[1].

[0] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/drawbridge/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/drawbridge/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8257250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8257250)

<comment><USER9> How does this research project help us today?

<comment><USER8> Today? Not at all, unless you have some connections at Microsoft Research. But it would seem to be just the thing to address some of the concerns in the Windows section of the OP.</comment></comment></comment>


Wasted Space in Container Shipping - <AUTHOR> http://airfcl.com/waste.html <comment><USER2> The logic of this falls apart. The more the containers are filled, the more they weigh. The more they weigh, the more fuel must be expended to move them from point A to point B. While there are some gains that could be made by eliminating wasted space, there are losses that offset it.

Granted, there is not a strictly linear relationship between weight and cost. However, the economics of shipping, or any distribution system (like passenger airlines), are such that the need to move a product to its destination in a timely fashion runs up against the desire to maximize the efficiency of a shipping medium. Customers expect their product to arrive on time, and they pay for this to happen.

That said, I love the idea this company is proposing.

<comment><USER3> Think of FedEx dimensional shipping. You don't pay by weight. You pay by length width height. If the shipping containers can be parted out and packed densely to be closer to their max dimensional weight then it's a deal for me, the intermediary shipper, I can ship stuff "for free" by taking up space in an already paid for container.

Just like AWS Large dedicated systems and packing it to 90% utilization by selling back the unused capacity on the spot market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to figure out how this is any different from standard LCL. You're just working with another shipper rather than a freight company arraigning it? If that's the case, what's to stop the first guy that unloads from helping himself to some "free samples" of my goods? What ensures that the loads are balanced so the trucker doesn't have one axle overweight? What happens when the other guy's goods get stuck in customs for 2 weeks because he used the wrong HTS?

I'm all for a cheaper LCL option, but LCL is expensive for a reason. I'm interested to see how these guys plan to address the issues here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi pitaa,

Thanks for your comments, all valid an need to be addressed by the service.

LCL shipments usually consist of many different vendors and are very expensive and slow to despatch (waiting to consolidate) and deliver (unpacking the other end). What airfcl will allow you to do is 'hitch a ride' on a container with spare capacity on the same route. Less waiting time and less expensive.

We are integrating a feedback/rating system to help with, amongst other things, possible pilfering by one of the importing companies.

The loads will be balanced and rearranged if required at point of loading like any other shipment.

Customs are always a problem, I've had goods held for weeks for no reason and you can get unlucky. Having said that, we'll integrate a tariff guide and make shipping stages/requirements very clear to all parties to make sure shipments clear customs cleanly.

Please let me know of any other issues you've thought of, as they're v useful for development! Either here or jonathan at airfcl .com

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the comment! Wasted cost is purely the cost of shipping the air as a percentage of current cost based the cbm of a full container. Good point, you're right it will cost more and will offset slightly, but the saving in money, fuel and more importantly the environmental impact more than outweighs it!</comment>


The Case for Kill Switches in Military Weaponry - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-for-kill-switches-in-military-weaponry/ <comment><USER2> What well-intentioned utterly terrible idea.

Even the proposed solution of "Well, we'll just give the kill-switch to the country's government!" assumes that a) the custodian won't be compromised and b) the government won't turn against us.

You want your weapons to _just work_ , no magic goofiness.

Let's not even go into the electronic warfare stuff the author identifies and seemingly just goes "welp, yeah, that could be a problem lol".</comment>


Ask: famous Greenspun's Tenth Rule manifestations? - <AUTHOR>

Here are some examples I'm aware of of large software systems bucking at the brutally low-level nature of their implementation language:<p>- Mozilla/Firefox - XPCOM, a COM/CORBA-like thing the codebase has, implements message passing and garbage collection.<p>- (allegedly) Yahoo's rewrite of Viaweb<p>- X Windows, though I've never studied its source code so I don't know for sure<p>- Apache: implemented using the "Apache Portable Runtime" library that provides things like hash tables and memory mapping.<p>Are there any other instances you're aware of? <comment><USER2> About X Windows...the last person to study its source code mysteriously died 7 days later: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29>

</comment><comment><USER3> Every time I pick a programming language to write contests in, I work on extending the language more and more until, eventually, I hit a wall. C++ didn't allow closures, C# does have even simple macro-expansions, and then I literally start writing an interpreter for Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER4> Emacs. :)

The Yahoo/Viaweb story is correct, according to usually reliable sources. Their fatal shoal was the RTML parser.

MySQL's parser and query planner are pretty suspicious, too.</comment>


Antartic glaciers melting passed point of no return - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/12/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-stability-sea-level-rise/9001819/

<comment><USER2> Most people don't like the idea of destroying the planet. But we can't save it by "like"ing articles on Facebook or tweeting about them. Unfortunately, most of us don't want to give up the second car and replace it with a bicycle, to give up long distance travels for work or holidays, to give up our tropical fruits in the middle of the winter, to give up eating too much red meat, etc. etc. etc. therefore almost certainly we're not going to leave a better planet to our children.</comment>


PHP Coding Standards at YourSports - <AUTHOR> http://chrisamccoy.com/php-coding-standards-at-yoursports

<comment><AUTHOR> We're building a web service driven by PHP, Javascript, Elastic Search, and Redis. We take a design-first thinking to product development in a custom product development process we call "Henry Ford".

Very interested in getting feedback on the PHP Coding Standards we use. Would love to discuss, answer questions, etc.</comment>


Twitter – new profile pages - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2014/coming-soon-a-whole-new-you-in-your-twitter-profile

<comment><AUTHOR> my first thought: that's facebook!</comment>


HP Spectre looks remarkably like the Apple Cinema Display - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/photos/hp-spectre-xt-one-hands-on/

<comment><AUTHOR> Whenever people copy Apple's hardware design they miss the point completely and wreck it with a giant brand name smacked on.</comment>


Artificial gravity breaks free from science fiction - <AUTHOR> https://www.colorado.edu/today/2019/07/02/artificial-gravity-breaks-free-science-fiction <comment><USER2> This isn't artificial gravity, its just rotational force.

The wikipedia article even suggests that the solution to motion sickness is slower rotation, achievable with larger diameters.

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

Says it takes a ~224M radius at 2 rpm to get earth gravity. Given the ISS is 108M wide seems pretty doable with current technology if we really wanted to.

There is also a pretty interesting chart here [https://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/view_picture.asp?id=748](https://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/view_picture.asp?id=748) about asteroid size vs rotational speed.

</comment><comment><USER3> This headline should win the clickbait of the year award.

<comment><USER4> For shame colorado.edu, eh? I got actually angry for a minute.

<comment><USER5> Don't let that go or you're condoning dishonesty.

<comment><USER4> ?

I already let it go, but I still don't condone dishonesty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't "artificial gravity", this is just a centrifuge, and those have been used for decades in High-G training. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- G_training](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-G_training)

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was achieving gravity by means other than rotation :(

<comment><USER8> Hey, rotation works.

There was a NASA-funded NIAC proposal about using linear acceleration (oscillating up and down in an elevator) to do the same thing, but it's pretty strange compared to just using rotation.

<comment><USER9> Centrifugal and coriolis pseudo forces cause objects to act strangely in rotating frames. Also, in small-diameter rotations, the tidal forces can be very noticeable (differential acceleration on different parts of an object).

<comment><USER8> That's what this article is about: those (primarily psychosensory) effects are apparently able to be mitigated entirely with training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This title needs editing. It has nothing to do with gravity.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not use this on Earth to build more robust humans, might be an athletic training hack. Wouldn't you get the opposite of bone loss and muscle loss? So, increased bone and muscle density. Must be good for something. Might be tough on the cardiovascular system though.

Oh, and "artificial gravity"? Please already.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is cool and seen on many science fiction show. The engineer in my head wonders, how do you make the transition between various 'donuts' compartments and various levels without getting limbs chopped off? Only by the center via a tube?

<comment><USER12> You don't need to transition unless you want a microgravity lab or possibly docking another spacecraft. Stopping is also an option, though debris and even furniture might float around.

Picture a long truss connecting an office building to a nuclear reactor. It spins end over end. There are multiple ways to connect a non-rotating part at the middle.

One way involves an air lock. Pass through that, shut the door, and then adjust the relative rotation.

Another way involves a large and troublesome seal. I suspect this might best be done with ferrofluids to seal the gap.

Accepting a bit of air loss is another option. If the gap is tiny, it might not be bad. It would just be part of the accepted loss, just like the loss from spacewalks.

For docking, you could skip all that if you accept the complexity of docking with a spinning object. You could even dock away from the center if the rotation is slow enough.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your elaborated response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ah yeah, professor Clark has been doing this for a few years. He's a cool dude and the whole BioAstro group is really top notch.

I was very nearly a test subject in this experiment.

</comment><comment><USER14> For space travel I really like the idea to accelerate (and after halfway decelerate) with 1g.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dumb question: in deep space, how do you "know" that you are spinning?

</comment><comment><USER16> I think there are still lot of technical challenges to design something like this for long space missions but the design needs lot of space and resulting structure can be enormous.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty annoyed that this article doesn't mention it, but the whole point of Prof. Clark's research is to find the human tolerance for rotation so that these structures can be made as small as possible. I suppose the news here is that his candidates made it to 17 rpm, which appears to be a new record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well that was disappointing</comment>


Distributed Buddhabrot Fractal in ClojureScript - <AUTHOR> http://nakkaya.com/2011/12/15/fractals-in-clojure-distributed-buddhabrot-fractal-using-clojurescript/

<comment><AUTHOR> It'd be interesting to push a version of this up to Heroku and see what the Hacker News community can generate.

</comment><comment><USER2> Anyone got any pointers to 'Cloudy' versions of this or similar?</comment>


The DAO Hub is now live - <AUTHOR> https://daohub.org/ <comment><USER2> So many buzzwords. What is a DAO?

<comment><USER3> Eventually I found on the page "decentralized autonomous organization." Cryptocurrency seems important somehow ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER4> A business whose by-laws are encoded in an algorithm that runs autonomously, and is published. I think the algorithm says that people can submit proposals (i.e. "send X money to Y") and they'll be voted on by all members, and if the vote passes then the algorithm itself performs the action. There's no-one in charge outside of the emergent behavior of the member votes.</comment></comment></comment>


Google open sources image recognition AI model, VR audio tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/15/google-open-sources-image-recognition-ai-model-vr-audio-tools/ <comment><USER2> Direct link to the github project:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/de...](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/deeplab)

And the blog post of the announcement:

[https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/semantic-image- segme...](https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/semantic-image-segmentation- with.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Resonance looks really interesting. It's similar to Steam Audio, but AFAIK Steam Audio's core is not open source and Resonance should be more mobile-friendly due to optimization/compromises in head-related transfer function computation. Unfortunately both Steam Audio and Resonance focus on just 3D spatialization and skip on basic functionality like pitch shifting.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is a amazing how much cool stuff Google gives away.

</comment><comment><USER5> It did a really poor job on the pictured cat sample. No separation on the back legs and the back is nearly a straight line. It doesn't seem very good at separating like colored objects.

<comment><USER6> This comment is just confounding. Why would the back leg be separate? It's a cat. Cat's don't have detachable legs.

<comment><USER5> The selection has the cat's back legs fused together. Same for the dog. Adobe's magic wand could do a better job than this example.</comment></comment></comment>


The $2,400 "Introduction to Linux" course is now free on edX - <AUTHOR> https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-introduction-1621

<comment><USER2> Has anyone already taken this course or know specifically what it covers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check the link above

<comment><USER2> The course description seemed vague to me that's why I asked if anyone knew specifics. "This course explores the various tools and techniques commonly used by Linux programmers, system administrators and end users to achieve their day-to-day work in a Linux environment." Various tools and techniques could be bash, sed, awk or it could be anything else in the vast capabilities of a linux system.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux- courses/introduct...](https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux- courses/introduction-to-linux/outline)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Your Product A Vitamin Or A Painkiller? - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230736

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear this analogy used all the time, with the implication being that you _must_ sell a "painkiller" to be successful. But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am. I mean, ok, analogies are only analogies, but "in real life" guess what... a TON of money is made selling "vitamins" and "nutritional supplements". I got bored once and looked up some data on this point, and the numbers were pretty staggering.

The other issue I have with it is this: Talking about "pain" is talking about something that exists NOW and is, presumably, rooted in something that happened BEFORE. That is, "I stubbed my toe THEN, so NOW my foot hurts, give me ibuprofen". This means that selling painkillers is inherently backwards looking, rather than looking forward and looking to opportunities.

"Here kid, use this protein shake and you'll get buff and then you can pick up all the hot girls at the beach this summer". That's forward looking, that's selling a "vitamin" as opposed to a "painkiller", and for a lot of kids, it's a pretty compelling message.

Is it really necessary to focus on selling painkillers? I don't think the answer is as clear-cut as some people want to make it out to be.

<comment><USER2> To be fair, in your kid example, the kid IS feeling a pain NOW: low confidence, and muscles will help him build that.

I think anything forward looking is seeking to solve: 1) things that are painful now but current execution on technology isn't optimized. Either you combine existing technology in new ways or develop new technology. 2) things that will be painful in future. For example, we're building drones to help with the pain and cost of shipping physical goods. Someone is going to develop software to manage those drones, someone is going to develop expertise in drone laws, etc. All pains that don't exist today because drones aren't widespread enough yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> _To be fair, in your kid example, the kid IS feeling a pain NOW: low confidence, and muscles will help him build that._

Well, yeah, to some degree you can usually (always?) fiddle with definitions and find a way to position a "vitamin" as "painkiller". That's actually an important point in it's own right. If nothing else, it illustrates that the vitamin/painkiller dichotomy might not be intrinsic, and may be mostly about messaging / positioning.

The book _Mastering The Complex Sale_ by Jeff Thull has an interesting little tidbit there about some processing room anti-corrosion stuff made by, IIRC, Shell. There was some sample dialogue about the stuff to illustrate this point:

Person A: What's the business value of the anti-corrosion stuff?

Salesman: Business value? Well, it doesn't generate revenue or cut costs. I don't know how you'd talk about it's business value.

Person A: What happens if a refinery doesn't use this stuff?

Salesman: Well, corrosion builds up and will eventually cause a leak that could result in a fire or an explosion.

Point-of-view counts for a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This analogy seems 100% backwards to me. Maybe because I have lived with chronic pain for enough years to really understand these materials...

Painkillers mask deeper problems, letting you continue to get by without fixing root causes. In and of themselves, they do nothing for your health. On the contrary, they make you less sharp and restrict your capabilities.

Vitamins are either completely redundant in your system, and thereby useless, or they fill in crucial gaps that let everything else work as designed. They are not needed by everybody, but if you have ever truly experienced a chronic vitamin deficiency, then fixed it, you will never again think they are a "nice to have".

I know that this is just an analogy being used to make a point. But a more true analogy could make an even better point - you don't need to sell to everyone... just make sure you truly solve a serious problem for a specific audience.

<comment><USER4> _[painkillers] make you less sharp and restrict your capabilities_

From one perspective, that's what you get when you outsource something to another that is providing the "painkiller" product or service. You gain agility in general because you don't need to concentrate on something that isn't your core competency (pain management). It does make you less sharp because you don't need to be, and thus won't be, an expert in providing that service for yourself. And it restricts your capabilities because you're tied to whatever limitations the painkiller provider feels like operating under or exposing you to.

Sometimes the "serious problem" is something that "causes pain", and removal of the pain may be the solution. Agreed, though, that it's better to actually remove the cause of the pain (and thus the pain) rather than just mask the symptoms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article was a waste of electrons.

 _" Vitamins are "nice to have," but not "need to have." "_ I'd like for the author to go for several months without Vitamin C.

<comment><USER6> Presumably he meant vitamin supplements as opposed to any/all vitamins ingested through food/drink, though that assumption only makes the analogy marginally better since most contemporary research puts vitamin supplements somewhere on a range between useless and actively harmful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> "So what do you do, Mr. Levie? You help businesses sync files locally across computers for quicker access? Sounds like a feature Sharepoint will add to its roadmap, removing the need for your business."

</comment><comment><USER7> Nir Eyal behavior design work includes an interesting thought on this: apps that are vitamins can become painkillers.

If you haven't gone through his slide deck, I'd highly recommend it. He goes through the vitamin/painkiller part pretty early in the slide deck.

[http://www.slideshare.net/nireyal/hooked- model](http://www.slideshare.net/nireyal/hooked-model)

</comment><comment><USER8> One underlying assumption the author seems to be making here is that he is discussing B2B businesses rather than B2C. I actually think this message is much more applicable in the B2B space than the B2C (where I think it is wholly wrong).

</comment><comment><USER9> Facebook wasn't painkiller.

<comment><USER10> for some people, not knowing what their friends/ex are up to is painful

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hm. What do you get when your product is both a painkiller and vitamin?</comment>


Beating Atari Games with OpenAI's Evolutionary Strategies - <AUTHOR> https://blog.filestack.com/thoughts-and-knowledge/atari-openai-evolutionary-strategies/ <comment><USER2> I see the mention of memory consumption being lower, any idea on compute load for ES models vs reinforcement learning?

<comment><USER3> Reinforcement learning using gradient descent, for instance, requires backpropgation and thus much higher memory loads, as each parameter gets updated via the chain rule. ES does not require gradient descent and so each individual agent has much lower memory consumption during training than a deep Q-learning agent would.

You may end up using more memory in ES, but only because you can parallelize with as many processes as your system can handle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the difference between "evolutionary strategies" and "genetic algorithms"?

<comment><USER3> From Quora ([https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between- genetic...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-genetic-and- evolutionary-algorithms)):

"Genetic Algorithms (GA), characterized by a binary string representation of the candidate solutions.

Evolution Strategies (ES), which use vectors of real-valued numbers as representation. One of the most famous ES is the CMA-ES , (Covariance Matrix Adaptation ES).

Genetic Programming (GP), one of the most recent techniques (1990s), that uses binary trees (or other complex structures, such as directed graphs) as internal representation of candidate solutions. This type of representation is incredibly powerful, as it allows for evolving almost everything, from Bayesian Networks to equations, from Assembly programs to gene regulatory networks."

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I saw this answer and it seems wrong. I really doubt the difference is "binary string vs. vector of real valued numbers". I've seen things characterized as GAs that use vectors of real numbers.

Anyone familiar with the subject willing to answer this themselves?

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't call myself familiar, but from just looking at how they both work, evolutionary strategies don't appear to have a crossover step.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SEC Wins Jury Trial in Layering, Manipulative Trading Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2019-236 <comment><USER2> I'm sure Matt Levine will have something interesting to say about this one!

Here's the original SEC complaint from March 2017: [https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2017/comp- pr2017-6...](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2017/comp- pr2017-63.pdf)

First thought: settle with the SEC. Don't fight it.

Second thought: and a quick perusal of the original complaint finds multiple examples: if you're going to do something illegal don't write about your illegal activities in an email. Let alone explain "layering works like this..."

Third thought: I'm surprised it took this long to get these guys. There were a few spoof related cases back in 2016... Famously the London spoofer with s&p futures. This one didn't show up until 2017... And then took almost 3 years through a jury trial.

<comment><USER3> He has recently written about something similar: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-24/we- had...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-24/we-had-been- hoping-to-get-paid)

I personally don't see the crime here though. What does it mean to place orders you don't intend to execute? (It is not like they have some way of reneging on the transaction if their bid/offer gets hit.) And in the manipulation of prices, why would simply flashing new non-executing orders on the screen cause market makers to change their prices? Don't the market makers have some responsibility / agency around deciding what to price something at?

<comment><USER4> Market makers decide a fair value for a product, decide the volatility and therefore quote a bid/ask spread. One important input into that decision is what other players in the market are willing to trade at. If there's a huge volume offering to buy at 10, I can buy at 11 safe in the knowledge that generally I can offload that at 10 if things don't go well.

Remember, market makers aren't making a profit on every trade, they're making a profit over many trades by taking on risk. Sometimes the market will genuinely move due to outside news and they'll take losses in those cases. They don't know they're going to be able to sell their position for a profit, they just know if they quote correctly that they can extract a premium for taking on that risk (and then alpha for being able to price better than other people).

If you start systematically putting orders in the market that you don't want to trade in order to influence other people's willingness to trade and then pulling the orders out then you can make money off those market makers. The problem is, that if you can trick people into doing bad trades they're going to be systematically losing money. This means they'll change their strategy - they can no longer trust the offers in the market as a source of information. So now, because they don't have reliable information on what other people in the market are offering, they can't be as confident, so they have to quote a wider spread between bid and ask. So now the average punter who wants to sell their position is going to pay a bigger premium to the market maker. So there's less liquidity and it's more expensive to use the market- which goes fundamentally against what the markets are there for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The precursor settlement to the Ukrainian entity, Avalon's jury trial loss

> Lek Securities will pay a $1 million penalty plus $525,892 in disgorgement > and prejudgment interest, and Sam Lek will pay a $420,000 penalty.

Curious what Avalon will do with the $25 million it earned. Sam Lek being an owner of Avalon as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> How does this differ from HFTs flooding the order book and then cancelling?

<comment><USER7> HFT market makers are often responding to an IOI (Indication of Interest) which an exchange will broadcast when they have orders on the book. A responder that's interested in the trade will typically respond with an IOC (Immediate or Cancel) order. The order book is handled on FIFO (First-in, First-out) fulfillment method. If the IOC order isn't filled/partially filled, it is immediately cancelled. This is standard practice and encouraged by exchanges of their market makers.

Spoofing can be done many ways, but it's usually something like submitting a day order at an unreasonable price, then cancelling, say 10ms later.

Of course, reality is a bit more nuanced than that.

Source: I've worked in IT in Finance my entire career and have often dealt with SEC/FINRA/FBI requests for order history, and identifying which of our client(s) made the orders. Typically for specific tickers on specific dates, but sometimes for all tickers on specific dates, or for specific tickers for several years. Last I had to run these reports, it was for a small dark pool (like an exchange with unpublished prices). We typically had 10s of millions of orders a day. Quite a bit smaller than an HFT firm will be handling, but still quite a bit of data to work with and have to hand over on DVDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great but what jurisdiction does SEC have over Ukrainian entity? Sounds a bit like robo-callers with gozilian in fines issued and near zero collected.

<comment><USER9> Interacting with the US banking system is necessary for trading on US stock exchanges, which means that they can be essentially banned from the US banking system on pain of getting all their money seized.</comment></comment>


Ten reasons why CSS sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.raizlabs.com/graiz/2006/09/25/ten-reasons-why-css-sucks/

<comment><USER2> This is from September 25, 2006, so the sentiment is now seven years old.

<comment><USER3> Yet it remains, sadly, all too accurate. Newer tools like SASS and LESS help a little, but not enough.</comment></comment>


Myanmar Election app, using electron.js & golang - <AUTHOR> https://wiredcraft.com/blog/high-security-electron-js-application/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here: I came across this while looking for ways to combine C++ with electron.js and thought it was interesting.

My next project graphs/plots some realtime data and allows recording/saving/retrieval to a database (SQLlite). I'm considering doing it in election.js instead of WPF/C#. I'd welcome any helpful thoughts or links you might feel like sharing.</comment>


Remaining time calculator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/indatawetrust/remaining-time <comment><USER2> Couldn't you use ago instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> no</comment></comment>


Version Control and Higher Education - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/education-today/78dc8e3f66f1 <comment><USER2> I haven't met any developer who was incapable of learning a version control system on the job. Why should universities spend the student's _very expensive_ class time to learn about this? That time would be much better spent learning about fundamental knowledge such as algorithm design rather than learning about a specific tool that could be obsolete by the time the student graduates. Also, in a first semester course on programming, learning version control is a distraction from all the other things you need to learn to write a working program, like programming language syntax and building a mental model of how program execution works. (Not every CS student gets to college already knowing this stuff!)

Which is not to say that universities shouldn't make these tools available and encourage their use for class projects. But that doesn't require them to "integrate version control into their curriculum" like the article suggests. The documentation for git is freely available on the web and anyone who wants to can read it on their own time and ask their fellow students about it.

The larger philosophical question here is whether higher education is a vocational program for creating good "team players" who are productive with the current technology on the first day of their employment, or rather to provide an education that teaches them fundamental knowledge and how to learn new things on their own.

Side note: I've taught a first semester CS course in a well-known university, so I have some experience with the difficulties that even some very smart students face while trying to pick up the basic concepts. Adding in version control would have made it harder for some of them to successfully complete the course.

<comment><USER3> > Why should universities spend the student's very expensive class time to > learn about this?

To turn this around, why should businesses pay former students to learn about this on the job instead of paying them to be productive?

From my experience, there's a large number of developers (both young and old) out there who are very capable programmers, but seem to not spend any of their spare time learning things on their own after leaving school. It's insanely frustrating having to teach new junior developers how to properly use a tool like git when they've never even been exposed to version control, all while they're supposed to be productive. It really can become a waste of company resources.

Are they capable of learning version control on the job? In most cases, absolutely, given enough time and buffer for mistakes. However, I believe, as part of professional development in the field they chose, it should be something they learn outside of work and preferably before getting the job. University seems like a very valid place to at least introduce and encourage use of version control systems early on, if not at the very least in a higher level course.

<comment><USER2> _"To turn this around, why should businesses pay former students to learn about this on the job instead of paying them to be productive?"_

Because it's expected that entry-level employees don't have a lot of experience. It's even possible that these young people have taught themselves all sorts of useful things on their own already, but haven't gotten around to teaching themselves version control or the particular database system or development environment that your company uses. I think it's a better investment to hire someone who is smart and a fast learner than it is to hire someone who happens to know the particular tools you currently use.

In the software field, we've somehow decided that it's normal for entry-level employees to have lots of practical experience. But in most other jobs, that's not the case: they learn at their employers' expense. How many new hires on Wall Street have ever used a bond trader's workstation? How many newly-hired railroad employees have ever driven a train? How many newly-hired lawyers have ever represented a client in court?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One way or another, I feel they should come out of college knowing something about version control, but not in the first class. I can easily believe greenyoda that trying to learn programming and, say, git at the same time would be a disaster. I'm tempted to say you should just warn them that at some point it's going to be part of their class workflow, but I don't think that would fly bureaucratically. At the same time, it would be weird to just have a class in "version control"; it only makes sense in the context of another project. So maybe make it part of a lab-style class, with a focus on individual instruction, and RTFMing.

Then I get to my internship and have to learn Team Foundation Server... Sheesh.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the case in the classes I teach. We use Git as the primary vehicle for submitting assignments and tracking work. I usually spend the first week introducing students to the Linux shell and interacting with Git and Github.

<comment><USER5> Why not assign something like <http://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1> as homework instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I strongly agree. I met new graduates and some developers, 60% who don't understand about version control system.

<comment><USER7> I also agree. I've met university lecturers who didn't know version control more recent than RCS existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I blogged a response: [http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2013/05/why-programmers-should- learn...](http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2013/05/why-programmers-should-learn-git/)

Basically, I think it's important to teach Git (or other Version Control) to students because what you are really teaching them is good development practices. These take time to learn and get used to and Uni's absolutely should be teaching them.

The whole issue of "students should be able to teach themselves git" is a bit of a red herring, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER9> One of the classes I teach is at the senior undergrad level, and they have been thrilled that I have them use version control. Many have commented that they wish that they had known about git in earlier classes, as it would have saved them when they screwed up their programs.

<comment><USER8> This comment is so good I quoted it with citation, hope you don't mind. [http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2013/05/why-programmers-should- learn...](http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2013/05/why-programmers-should-learn-git/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> At the University of Montreal, one teacher introduced Subversion in a Software Engineering class and another Git in a compiler class. Version control _is_ taught at university, it just depends which university.

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh, I thought that was going to be about code written by education people. Actually, it's a larger problem - I'm constantly shocked that _anybody_ who writes documents for a living (code or otherwise) is relying on the filesystem. My wife's a teacher where her department pools their lesson plans and tests and whatnot and I'm constantly harassing her about the importance of setting up some kind of VC to keep track of all that crap.

</comment><comment><USER12> The git log could be a gold mine for researchers studying how CS students learn CS concepts and programming techniques. It could also be used to detect cheating.

<comment><USER13>
        commit d6abf62d1981a6c16029d10a5ecbe0c5c494322b
        Author: Biff Joe <firstname.lastname@example.com>
        Date:   Thu Mar 28 12:21:11 2013 +0000

        Change copyrights to my name (woo, dodged a bullet there!).

        commit 9c66001752f643e8f2a3453662352cf26402cee3
        Author: Biff Joe <firstname.lastname@example.com>
        Date:   Thu Mar 28 12:03:01 2013 +0000

        Change variable names.

        commit e9b9a740ca52e6fc2843d2d5aed2865c56ace45a
        Author: Biff Joe <email@example.com>
        Date:   Thu Mar 28 11:39:44 2013 +0000

        Import Nigel's code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is like those mandatory undergrad computing courses where they teach you to use word by typing into an open document. If you can't figure it out with a few minutes and access to the help files, maybe computers just aren't your thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> I feel many of my upper division projects would have benefitted from having the ability to branch and try a new approaches safe in the knowledge they could be easily abandoned if they failed to bear fruit.

</comment><comment><USER15> This page also doesn't scroll with chrome on my nexus 7

<comment><USER16> Same, I'm wondering what kind of bug makes that happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Who are these CS students who need their hands held to such a degree? A simple, _You should consider using version control for your projects. Try git or subversion. It will come in handy later in your career_ at the beginning of an introductory programming class should be all that's necessary. A CS curriculum doesn't teach students how to touch-type either, nor should it.

I'd suggest to people doing hiring that the candidates who haven't even heard of version control (which some other posters have mentioned interviewing) are ones that you don't want to hire. You should be glad to have the easy selection criterion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree completely, but I also teach non-CS students mostly in design. If version control is a foreign concept to some CS students, it's not even on the radar of most of my design group.</comment></comment>