How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal - <AUTHOR> http://danluu.com/wat/ <comment><USER3> I immediately thought of the "5 monkeys and a ladder" psychology study, in which the first monkey attempts to climb the ladder to get a banana and all of the monkeys are sprayed with water. Then one of the monkeys is replaced with a newcomer, who then tries to climb the ladder, but this time, the remaining original monkeys attack it. And so the replacing of the monkeys continues, until none of the monkeys knows what the deal with the ladder is and yet none attempt to climb it.

This is a popular story in dev/product culture but after a little more Googling, apparently it's apocryphal: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates- play/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates- play/201203/what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-human-behavior-facts-fiction)

<comment><USER4> It's a bit like when there's two cash machines, with a long queue at the first but no-one at the second.

You can see people looking at it, wondering whether it's worth the humiliation of finding it's broken and having to go to the back of the queue, or the joy of finding it is working and getting one over everyone else.

Often nobody cracks.

<comment><USER5> I actually come across this scenario quite often in retail outlets with poorly designed queue layouts (e.g. an H&M with with 2-4 registers behind a long counter and a single ad-hoc queue lined up in front of one of them).

My reasoning is a little different (and a little more charitable I suppose in its generalization about human nature): I don't want to go step in front of the register with no one waiting in it because I don't want to look like a sociopathic jerk. I also assume that is why most people haven't done so.

At the same time, I know as soon as someone does step up and do it, people will grumble but the single ad hoc queue will redistribute itself into 3 more balanced queues. I'm usually waiting for someone else to be that sociopathic jerk.

What I wish is that the manager of the store gave a little more thought to this issue in the first place.

<comment><USER6> Actually, scientifically, one queue for all registers is the superior solution. It reduces wait times for customers in general vs. one queue for each register (where one of the lines might get stuck for a long time). That's why you find banks and other places are all setup to have one queue used by all the clerks. The only real problem with H&M is that they haven't put stuff in the way of people forming multiple lines when keeping them in one line is the best practice.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't reduce average wait time, but the variance in wait times.

<comment><USER8> Well, it might bring down the average, but not as much as the variance, because the work is now load-balanced across multiple counters, more or less, evenly; and so, the productivity might be a bit on the higher side?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most of what the author is complaining about boils down to business needs being more important than the needs of the engineering team. To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. That's what they pay the leadership for. You want to be part of the leadership, work your way through the ranks or start your own business.

My life got much, much easier once I learned to stop straining so hard to fix things that are bigger than me. If you don't like your managers, or the culture, or the business, find another place to work, it's that simple. If you can't do that, you're simply going to have to learn how to compromise.

<comment><USER10> This is exactly a perfect example of WTF worthy behavior being treated as totally normal; that it's encoded that there's "leadership" and "not leadership" as binary job distinctions with distinct responsibilities.

I've been in both types of cultures and, by far the healthier culture was the one in which "making the organization better" was treated as everyone's responsibility. I've seen very junior engineers drive quite significant culture changes, simply by leading by example. They did it, not by whining or complaining, but by taking baby steps of trying out small experiments with their immediate team and then broadcasting their success to incrementally greater circles within the company until it became the new normal.

If you seriously believe that all (or most) companies disallow anyone not in leadership to improve things, I'd consider getting out of your current situation and seeing things again with clear eyes.

<comment><USER9> > If you seriously believe that all (or most) companies disallow anyone not in > leadership to improve things, I'd consider getting out of your current > situation and seeing things again with clear eyes.

I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope do so at risk of offending other stakeholders. They may tolerate you and even give some limited help, but they're not going to shout your name from the rooftops just because you want to be a boy scout.

Not saying you can't buck the system and get away with it, one of my favorite books was about one of my heroes, John Boyd, but if you want to be a hero, you need to go into it with a clear-eyed assessment of what you're up against and so you can tailor your objectives appropriately.

<comment><USER11> The DoD (!) is hardly representative of the cultures being discussed in the linked article, which is about tech startups (with a bunch of examples from medicine too). Yes, there are worse examples, but those may be beyond help.

<comment><USER12> Tech start ups are a rather small part of the overall IT industry. I dont really have the numbers to back it up, so i am not going to speculate as far as the actual numbers, but any discussiona bout workplace IT that ignores everything that isnt a tech start up is virtually useless.

<comment><USER13> And the IT industry is a rather small part of the overall job market. So therefore any discussion about the workplace that ignores everything that isn't IT is virtually useless?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There seems to be a bit of a false dichotomy underpinning this article that companies value feature growth above all else and this directly results in poor operational performance. However, you can get terrible availability without delivering any features whatsoever for months and months.

Two 9s of availability? Half the customers I've had would be ecstatic to have even ONE 9 of availability. And those guys hardly ever ship any code due to how encumbered developers typically are in those places and release maybe once every 6 months to a year perhaps. In fact, this is basically my typical experience with most enterprise customers I've worked with as a consultant - they're unable to execute almost anything materially important and customers put up with them because nobody else is in that niche enterprise market that's keeping people employed by lack of choice / market consolidation (healthcare.gov is just a visible example - plenty more projects are even worse with perhaps even larger budgets with zero media attention).

<comment><USER15> > And those guys hardly ever ship any code due to how encumbered developers > typically are in those places and release maybe once every 6 months to a > year perhaps.

I've worked in places where some teams ship with this three or six month frequency. They consider it completely normal and find ideas like continuously delivery or even weekly deployments as not just abnormal but risky and irresponsible! This is the very point OP is trying to make, the _normalization of deviance_.

<comment><USER14> I agree with you plenty that this shouldn't be acceptable, but most of the people I've seen that are against modern practices of decent software teams are not so much examples of the points in this article as much as stereotypical examples of one's grandparents or parents trying to tell you how your job doesn't matter because software isn't "real work" and that their principles work just fine today as it did in the 70s. Or they expect that continuous delivery / CI is a _product_ or feature of something else they bought for 9+ figures and that it's something that you bundle in with services and a license cost because that's literally all they know as how to make anything happen. Doing software projects with people that have more experience in medieval architecture would be probably more pleasant and productive than dealing with leadership that have decades of experience doing nothing but big company projects with more resources spent on planning software than on engineering talent.

If a company is hell-bent on focusing for development and new features over stability / security, that's something that can be fixed by leadership - I've worked with plenty of companies that turned themselves around and have wise leaders that know that it's time to spend the resources to do spring cleaning while trying to keep existing employees excited by feature development happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This post's style and "quality" of writing is really aggravating. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall after reading so many run on sentences or paragraphs that start with the same contraction. Other times the writing is so poorly executed I cannot tell what the author is trying to convey. For example what is going on in this paragraph:

"There's the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked, for reasons that are entirely predictable from their engineering practices. This is the second thing in a row that's basically anonymous because multiple companies find it to be normal. Multiple companies find practices that lead to 2 9s of reliability to be completely and totally normal."

<comment><USER17> It's a little bit awkward. Still, I find it oddly fascinating that you're confused, because I can't figure out what's confusing.

There is a company Dan Luu knows about.

This company has a reputation for great engineering practices.

This company had 2 9s of reliability when Dan last checked.

The reason it has 2 9s of reliability is a predictable result of its engineering practices.

Although this example is about a specific company, you can't identify the company from the description.

You can't identify the company from the description because it is a description that applies to many companies.

You also can't identify the example from the previous paragraph [of Dan Luu's post] because that paragraph's description also applies to many companies.

Multiple companies have engineering practices that cause such reliability problems and find these engineering practices to be completely and totally normal.

<comment><USER18> The unspoken implication here is that 99% reliability is considered bad. This may not be clear if coming from a different field where 99% sounds pretty good.

<comment><USER16> When you say 99% is bad, are you making a normative or positive statement?

<comment><USER18> I'm saying that the author believes 99% reliability to be "Bad (TM)". Further evidence in the second paragraph of this post: [http://danluu.com/broken- builds/](http://danluu.com/broken-builds/)

I didn't say that this is a normative viewpoint in engineering or whether I personally agree with it. As you can see from other commenters, many do hold this view. A sometimes opposing philosophy, however, is "release early, release often" which many open source projects adhere to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The author detailed precisely why I left a former Y-Combinator company, Return Path.

"As far as I can tell, what happens at these companies is that they started by concentrating almost totally on product growth. That's completely and totally reasonable, because companies are worth approximately zero when they're founded; they don't bother with things that protect them from losses, like good ops practices or actually having security, because there's nothing to lose.

The result is a culture where people are hyper-focused on growth and ignore risk. That culture tends to stick even after company has grown to be worth well over a billion dollars, and the companies have something to lose. Anyone who comes into one of these companies from Google, Amazon, or another place with solid ops practices is shocked. Often, they try to fix things, and then leave when they can't make a dent."

<comment><USER20> Did you give them a ton of advance warning when you left?

[http://www.onlyonceblog.com/2013/09/how-to-quit-your- job](http://www.onlyonceblog.com/2013/09/how-to-quit-your-job)

<comment><USER19> I left it open-ended, actually. I talked to the CDO and explained why I was leaving. He agreed with the decision and thanked me for being brave enough to stand up and say it.

It ended up being three weeks before we agreed that I'd successfully handed off everything.

No bad feelings either way -- I'd joined the company because they had said that they wanted to 'grow up,' but that was a feeling percolating up from below. The lower levels of the company wanted to grow up and stop firefighting all the time. The top levels of the company would fight you every last way.

<comment><USER21> Wow have I ever been there, done that at a startup you've heard of. Line level employees hated the endless firefighting; the ceo/cto didn't give a shit and stymied any change. My solution was to forfeit any ops duty at all. I told my boss she had two choices: I didn't work on ops or I didn't work there at all.

<comment><USER22> So what did your boss say to that? Guessing the latter, because it sounds like you don't work there anymore...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > It's sort of funny that this ends up being a problem about incentives. As an > industry, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize consumers > into doing what we want. But then we set up incentive systems that are > generally agreed upon as incentivizing us to do the wrong things

The longer I live, the more I realize that _everything_ is a market, and incentives control it all. The reason you follow company policy most the time? You're incentivized to follow the rules so you get the raise, or at lease don't get fired. When there are competing incentives for different responses to the same subject, that's when you need to take extra care to realign the incentives. Trying to institute new behavior? You have to fight momentum, familiarity, and sometimes easiness. That often requires more than a few dictates.

<comment><USER24> Everything is a system—and some systems are markets. A market is also a system.

This is why it's important to know how to think in systems, and about psychology, statistics, variation, knowledge and everything else that influences systems—if you want to work in one.

There's more to most systems than just incentives. They are a small part of what goes on.

<comment><USER25> Can you recommend some books on this? I have been trying to learn to think in systems, and find that to be the most useful skill to have.

<comment><USER26> If you want something more academic I recommend Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert Austin [1]. There is a sample that is a pretty good introduction as well [2].

This was the only book worth reading when I was researching metrics for our team at work.

TL;DR: Don't use performance metrics for human beings. You almost certainly won't get what you want, and you'll probably get nasty side effects instead.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Performance- Organiz...](http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-Managing-Performance- Organizations-Robert/dp/0932633366) [2] [http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780133492071/samplepa...](http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780133492071/samplepages/0133492079.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> nor·mal - adjective 1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. "it's quite normal for puppies to bolt their food"

All the things that he writes about are normal - they happen. People (myself included) with an engineering background are surprised when things don't "make sense" or people don't do things the "right way." The trick is to get to the point where these things are not surprising, where you see them as part of the systems you are trying to understand and consequences of forces that aren't mysterious, they are just part of human social dynamics. From that vantage point you can get a better sense of what you can change to influence outcomes and whether you can or can't in a particular context.

</comment><comment><USER28> This post seems so good and so self-evidently true that I'm surprised at the amount of pushback it's getting here. Not sure what else to say about it.

Well, I'll say this- the "@flaky" thing is pretty mind-blowing. In my own company I have noticed many engineers have a disturbing level of comfort with deciding something is a "mystery". There are no mysteries in what we do. The test fails because something is fucked up. Flappy tests are annoying, but the right thing to do is to address the situation.

<comment><USER3> Yeah...I mostly have experience only running test suites for popular libraries and for my own software...but the existence of this library is a massive WTF...such that had I read its official introductory post, I would have thought it to be really good satire:

[https://www.box.com/blog/introducing-flaky-a-nose-test- plugi...](https://www.box.com/blog/introducing-flaky-a-nose-test-plugin-for- automatically-rerunning-flaky-tests/)

Can someone describe a real life production scenario in which this flaky behavior is desirable? That is, preferable to these other generally accepted practices:

\- flag the test and mark the bug as an issue and at some point, attempt to fix it

\- delete the test, if it happens to relate to dead code or was poorly conceived in the first place

\- use fixtures and other libraries to mock dependencies, e.g. Webmock and/or vcr to intercept http request and respond with a pre-recorded fixture.

I understand that there are scenarios in which production most go on even when a test fails. But to throw on another testing layer that tells you, "hey, it kind of works, for some unknown reason", instead of just marking the test as a failure to be investigated...what possible value or insight could outweigh the additional noise generated? I guess one possibility is that it lets you know that something is _truly_ fucked up...but that is not at all the tone of the Box blog announcement:

> _When testing Sync 4, Box 's desktop sync application, we also ran into this > issue, but we also didn't want to simply remove our flaky tests. When we > noticed that most flaky tests would pass when rerun, we realized we could > make doing so automatic. Flaky is a nose plugin that can rerun flaky tests > without interrupting your test run. Using it is as easy as decorating your > test methods with @flaky_

<comment><USER29> "Can someone describe a real life production scenario in which this flaky behavior is desirable?"

I think so? My company develops a processor that is meant to be compatible with processors from other vendors. To try to ensure compatibility, we have a test suite that compares our "golden model" of intended behavior against the observed behavior of competitors' chips.

We sometimes have run into cases where a competitor's product "randomly" gets wrong results, but when we run the instruction again, it gets the right answer. This happens frequently enough that we've arranged the test suite to automatically try again to see if a failure is reproducible before bothering a human with it.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I figured these kind of errors fall into the system interoperability/integration category...but I also figured they would fall into their own kind of test suite, one that is much more geared toward the measurements of thresholds and probabilities. Adding a "flaky" plugin to the standard test framework to do this kind of non-standard testing...feels like designing the workflow in a slightly backwards way, like monkeypatching a basic data object for very specific behavior needed in a few niche libraries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The paper on "normalization of deviance" that this post links to is also really good. It's written from a medicine perspective, but its observations and conclusions are pretty generalizable.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821100/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821100/)

<comment><USER31> Sidney Dekker's _The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'_ has a bit about this (which he calls drift). One thing I liked in that section is a sort of anti-Murphy's Law: What can go wrong will usually go right, and then we'll assume that it will go right again and again, even if we borrow more from our safety margin.

That said, it's a trade-off, and if you're a startup, it's usually far better to do it dirty today than perfect next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I went in agreeing with the headline, and the article just didn't follow through on it (also, thank god for readability view. 2560 pixels wide lines with no margin are not any more readable than blogs full of ads).

So it posits that there's messed up practices considered normal, then it talks about companies that are clearly _abnormal_? Even in one of the very first paragraphs, "the company whose culture is so odd that ...". And since when is marking flaky tests is "completely messed up practice"?

Ok so a lot of this is about coding practices and such but... like the guy said, those problems _sort themselves out_. Bad security gets broken into, the companies eventually get hit and either die out or fix themselves. Etc...

There's a lot of completely messed up practices in tech. Oh lord, _especially_ as a european looking in to the SV world. Some of those messed up practices I can't even mention on HN because people think they are so normal, I get mass downvoted and have to engage 5 people telling me how normal this is (in fact I might even have to engage in it by just mentioning this).

1\. The issues highlighted tend to be problems specific to people. Programmers that don't know how to do some aspect of security properly, that's a problem specific to those guys. You put me next to them, I'll do that bit properly but will be clueless about a different bit. It's all fixable.

2\. The actual programming & design is the least problematic, mostly because it's the one that's most easily changed. Trying to change culture gets you fired. Fixing a pipeline with noticeable improvements gets you promoted. The one bit I did agree with was that it is hard to _show_ improvement when you prevent a fire. I also think that's fixable and I also think that's a people problem, except at the manager level.

You want messed up practices? Look at the game dev industry and its mandated crunched and burnouts. "Everybody's crunching for the next 6 months because we _really_ want to see the game released on time".

<comment><USER33> Curious, as a European, what do you find wrong with some of the practices in SV? Genuinely interested in hearing your perspective (perhaps if you elaborate and keep it objective as possible you'll avoid some of the mass downvotes).

<comment><USER32> If you're really curious, you can take a look at my post history - if you go far back enough you might find a few rants on it.

But it has a lot to do with culture. Adopted traits that are only there to serve themselves. And since culture is by definition subjective, I can't really say anything bad about it now, can I?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Sometimes a new person comes in saying "WTF WTF WTF Wtf wtf..." because you _don 't_ have the messed up practices that they expect.

<comment><USER35> Ah yes, writing tests, code reviews, and version control can be such a pain, why would you put up with these productivity killers?

<comment><USER36> It really depends. When I emerged out of the DoD contracting industry, it was a total WTF that we weren't obsessing over charge codes and timekeeping. Even if we're not billing a customer, how do we even know what we're spending our time on if we're not documenting it with constant timesheets?

It's possible for process to serve a purpose, but still not be worth it. (Not going to argue with your specific examples though)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> An anecdotal observation is that the worst offenders in terms of institutionalized bad practices also have a culture of failing upwards. ie incentive structures are setup in a way where you create your mess so fast that you get promoted and someone else has to deal with the aftermath of what you did. In such an environment slowing down to do the right thing invariably means that you are setting yourself up to inherit a mess created by someone else.

<comment><USER38> Ooh, that's insidious and has the ring of truth to it. I've never thought about that before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "There's the office where I asked one day about the fact that I almost never saw two particular people in the same room together. I was told that they had a feud going back a decade, and that things had actually improved – for years, they literally couldn't be in the same room because one of the two would get too angry and do something regrettable, but things had now cooled to the point where the two could, occasionally, be found in the same wing of the office or even the same room. These weren't just random people, either. They were the two managers of the only two teams in the office. Normal!"

I'm 99% certain that I know about whom the author refers here, having worked at an office with somebody of the same name where a drama matching this description took place. It was one profoundly weird situation that should never have been allowed to fester.

<comment><USER40> Thanks for stoking the fire of my curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This reminds me that I've acclimatised to one specific test in the PHP interpreter test suite always failing on OS X. I should go and make it either not run on OS X, or modify it so it will actually pass.

That way, when someone eventually actually breaks that function, they'll notice.

<comment><USER42> A nice thought, but pointless. Failing tests do not matter to the PHP release managers, they ship it anyway.

[http://redd.it/qeq7k#c3z0vva](http://redd.it/qeq7k#c3z0vva)

<comment><USER41> That's nonsense, PHP releases ship with no failing tests. That's from three years ago, and anyway gcov.php.net is not used for CI these days (IIRC it's an abandoned old box, its results are inaccurate), Travis is. The PHP-7.0 and PHP-5.6 branches are currently green on Travis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This line perplexed and disturbed me: "...This is the same company where someone recently explained to me how great it is that, instead of using data to make decisions, we use political connections, and that the idea of making decisions based on data is a myth anyway; no one does that...."

One, that is depressing and implies the company seems to have a corrupting influence on society at large.

Two. The girl is right and it is called insider information. Another corrupting aspect of our society.

In other words, corruption is a new viable normal and workers have no problem with it because most workers are all desperate and happy to have a passport to middle or upper middle class.

<comment><USER44> From the context, I think the author was probably referring to office politics, not corrupt politicians.

<comment><USER43> I hope so for that is less corrupt. I can be somewhat obtuse. I am going to write the author and ask. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> so many of these problems have the same root cause:

we don't have an effective data driven reputation system. we use gameable heuristics to track social capial.

when metrics for evaluation are flawed, people behave in ways that exploit the flaws even if they increase the likelihood of failure.

"we are not rewarded for necessary grunt work as much as shiny advances", for example. That's a failure of the reputation system to account for the value of that work.

My solution to this problem is a mathematical reputation system based on the same concept as page rank. The system is available here:

github.com/neyer/respect

I'd love your feedback.

<comment><USER46> In the past few years I have been building up good reputation at various stores both online and offline. It bothers me I cannot use that reputation. For example a major supermarket chain here in The Netherlands rolled out self scanning from 2006[1]. They do random checks at the checkout, and for many years now they know I never forget to scan something. This resulted in the amount of random checks going down for me. That should mean something, and I should be able to use this trust/karma elsewhere. All these companies building data on me, and I can't use it myself.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orjo0uNZFsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orjo0uNZFsk)

<comment><USER47> The challenge is getting the companies to (from their perspective) "share" the trust information with the world, which includes their competitors.

I suspect we might need a "taxonomy of trust" so to speak, that allows the trust data to be anonymized and aggregated into commonly-accepted meanings of trust contexts, trust roles, trust relationships, etc. That might let these companies to release the trust data into such a format through a blockchain perhaps, and be able to participate in consuming the aggregated data. I'd need someone well-versed in game theory to figure out if an advantage is conferred to "leeches"; a company in such a scenario who only consumes the aggregated data but never send into the blockchain what they accumulate on their own customers. I think that's a real danger with such a scheme, but am not sure how to strongly dissuade that behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Speaking of completely messaged up...

I had to add max-width, margin, and font-size styles before I could even attempt to read that page. For all that markup, there sure wasn't any attention payed to readability.

<comment><USER49> It's just plain HTML. That your browser doesn't display it readably is a good example of a completely messed up practice that people have come to believe is normal.

<comment><USER50> Please don't write off somebody's lack of attention to typography as a virtue and clever design. It's not. Browsers display it how they are told to display it. Maybe your system could use better fonts or line spacing by default, it's arguable, but it definitely would be stupid and unreasonable for browser to enforce less than maximal width for _some_ of your div's if not told otherwise. If anything, they already enforce more than they should (that's why normalize.css exists).

And, by the way, it's not like there's no css at all in the source. It's just UX-ignorant, so to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > This is a problem even when cultures discourage meanness and encourage > feedback: cultures of niceness seem to have as many issues around speaking > up as cultures of meanness, if not more. In some places, people are afraid > to speak up because they'll get attacked by someone mean. In others, they're > afraid because they'll be branded as mean. It's a hard problem.

That's a really good insight, and it's something to keep in mind with all the recent controversy about development cultures.

</comment><comment><USER52> _Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt_ , Joel Spolsky, 2001:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html)

<comment><USER53> This is a much better version of the original article. Here's solutions to situations that arise when you have access to information that you feel should be acted upon that doesn't have broad organizational support already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Good article. I could think of reasons why people kept leaving in their first year at the company where they had freedom. The author says the company had the beat parts of Netflix and valve. What is the author referring to?

</comment><comment><USER55> > well, we have some tweaks that didn't make it into the paper.

Every single time I've tried to implement a newish, reasonably complicated algorithm from a paper and contacted the authors when I've run into trouble, this is the reply I've gotten. How is it not normal? It's research after all, and if you've worked in research you should have a good idea how the paper mill works.

<comment><USER56> I think your response here is a perfect example of what the article rants about.

It may seem normal to you and people with a "good idea how the paper mill works", but it is absolutely insane from the point of view of a lot (hopefully most...) people outside of that bubble, who would likely mostly expect the results in a paper to at least be possible to replicate with the information in the paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> > There's the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices > that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked, for reasons that are > entirely predictable from their engineering practices. This is the second > thing in a row that's basically anonymous because multiple companies find it > to be normal. Multiple companies find practices that lead to 2 9s of > reliability to be completely and totally normal.

I'd like to know more about these practices that lead to 2 9s of reliability. Can you give specific examples of such practices, albeit not the companies themselves?

<comment><USER14> Is the implication that 2 9s are _really_ bad, mediocre, or some other negative judgment in this context? I'm familiar with a lot of places that have trouble with even 1 9 of reliability with lots of capital but terrible culture despite employing lots of operational controls and some best practices that have trouble with _one_ 9, so even 2 9s sounds like a dream sometimes and the way that Dan Luu worded this article makes it hard for me to understand the different cultural failure modes that he's trying to express.

<comment><USER58> How does a place survive being down 37 days per year (one nine)? Cripes!

<comment><USER14> SLA that defines unplanned maintenance very, very conservatively. For example, a place I was at did maintenance for about 8 hours weekly where users wouldn't be able to manage any of their stuff, but there was network access outbound possible from their resources, so it was considered "available." Somehow with hardly anyone actually doing anything with the service, it was a major part of an $800M+ acquisition and mostly for being "enterprise" ready. I will not understand how you can get away with things that demonstrably fail to work beyond the most trivial of canned demo cases and be sold like it's completely done to even more gullible companies with zero technical vetting.

There's a lot of completely inconcistent definitions about what a service is sold as and what is actually delivered, and lawyers half the time only care about regulatory requirements rather than functional ones. Someone will use the ITIL definitions of service and say "it's available!" meaning that it exists in a CMDB or something and another person defines availability as "I can ping it" and doesn't care if there's an HTTP 500 error being thrown repeatedly. But gosh, if something used an insecure MongoDB server _that_ is the reason they immediately cancel a contract (not hyperbole, saw something very similar happen).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Somehow tangential

"These hidden problems are the true gold standard of entrepreneurism and it's amazing how little discussion there actually is about how to find them. It's hardly a surprise though since they; as we can see, can be hard to find and I think there are a couple of reasons why.

Hidden problems aren't obvious even to those who experience them every single day.

Most people have enough human problems. They are often hired to do a specific job and don't necessarily think about these problems as something that could be solved. Many just see them as part of the actual process. So to even understand they are problems, require a certain kind of attention, most people simply don't have. (I have later learned that this is called functional fixedness and is a cognitive bias. Which explain why people sometimes say "Why didn't anyone think of this before?" — most people simply don't think like that.)

Hidden problems often only reveal themselves over time.

Not all problems are even instantly recognizable. Instead they only reveal themselves over time or through years of experience. This also means that many of these problems require a certain age and experience to even notice let alone understand. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the average age of a founder is 38 and with 16 years of working experience behind him."

[http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems](http://000fff.org/the-problem- with-problems)

</comment><comment><USER60> I want to speak to one aspect of the wonderful article:

Listening to weak signals.

I'm about to do a shameless promotion for a book I have nothing to do with, but a book that has been a guiding light for me: Michael Lopp's _Managing Humans_

When I was reading the article I couldn't help but think of Lopp's advice about regular one-on-one meetings with each of the people on your team.

I think this is one of the points that Lopp intends for managers to be listening to during those meetings.

They aren't so much for feedback from the manager (as they are often treated), but more as opportunities for the manager to listen.

If I understand the book correctly, those one-on-one meetings are exactly the place where the managers are supposed to be listening for the "weak signals."

I am not an expert in every area of development, and yet I have somehow been inserted into a management role.

As Lopp explains very clearly, this happens often, and the single biggest thing you can do when that happens is care about being a manager. It's a different skill set than being an IC.

Recognize that, but don't get totally caught up in that. I don't think Lopp would disagree with anything in this article. I think, in fact, that following Lopp's ideas would lead to far fewer cases of WTF than what we see in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER61> I read the title and immediately thought of circumcision. The article was not about that, and I enjoyed the insight. Same concept though. Normalization of deviance.

</comment><comment><USER24> The funny part about the recent obsession with "normalization of deviance" is that it's just one of hundreds of psychological biases that people exhibit and that directly impact work.

This is why it's important to learn about psychology if you intend to work with humans—or even just with yourself.

</comment><comment><USER62> Way back in WWII soldiers coined the acronym (SNAFU), "Situation Normal All Fucked Up".

</comment><comment><USER63> I think there is another thing to take away from some of the case studies - <USER2> you design and implement operating procedures and alarms, do so in a way that is simple, effective, and does not draw an undue amount of time and attention to itself. I have dealt with too many systems that sound the "everything's OK alarm" constantly and procedures that have good intentions but no effort to streamline the gratuitous amount of time and effort needed to be followed.

It is not constructive to blame employees for failure to heed poor alerts and protocols.

</comment><comment><USER64> > And I can think of more than one well-regarded unicorn where _everyone still > has access to basically everything_ , even after their first or second bad > security breach.

Which companies? That's pretty scary.

<comment><USER65> I used to work for a major financial exchange like this. When I joined, the root password was known by /everyone/. They also used telnet instead of ssh.

Another company I worked for used rot13 for their back end risk management system's password storage. Found it completely by accident when trying to add the platform I was supporting at the time. I had a setting to the effect of 'resolve data from defined functions' enabled, so every password stored would be resolved to plaintext instead of showing their 'hashes'. It was batshit scary - scariest being the production r/w credentials for the credit card and mortgage databases.

When I reported that one to the devs, they responded with, "We know. We needed to push the code out as quickly as possible, so we got lazy". Fuck. That.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Key point: "The simplest option is to just do the right thing yourself and ignore what's going on around you."

This is so, so, so easy to do and generally has no negative repurcussions.

</comment><comment><USER67> Then There is the story of the Emperor's new clothes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes)

Sometime older works or those in exit interview, just don't GAF and call "group think" what it is.

You want to fix these problems. Don't hose your monkeys and hire some old deep thinkers and empower them.

</comment><comment><USER68> The most unsettling thing is how much I love reading anecdotes like that - they make you feel so much better about "messed up" things you do yourself.

</comment><comment><USER69> My personal hottake is that, as Einstein proved, everything really is relative.

What may seem dysfunctional and WTF from your vantage point may be perfectly logical from someone elses.

If you are going thru your work-life with the idea that social relationships and business practices are always going to follow the same strict rules as your software or hardware does, well good luck with that.

Normal is as normal does.

<comment><USER70> Einstein proved nothing like this.

<comment><USER69> Einstein proved that everything is truly relative, and depending on your particular velocity and place in the universe, fundamental things you perceive, and that others perceive about you, are totally and completely different.

Perhaps I was being a bit too abstract, but I stand by my assertion.

<comment><USER70> You brought completely irrelevant point.

<comment><USER69> No I didn't...it's only irrelevant to you because you are not trying to understand what I'm saying.

<comment><USER22> If you just dropped the Einstein part, it would be a perfectly fine comment.

<comment><USER71> No it wouldn't. The statement "everything is relative" is in itself a contradiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I can't read this because my ISP's (I assume) scheme of MITMing all http traffic is buggy, and now I can only load things over https.

Start using encryption, people. There's no reason not to.

<comment><USER73> As someone trying to get a free SSL cert from LetsEncrypt right now, I'd say that it still has some way to go before it becomes frictionless :) (getting there quite fast though)

Otherwise, the reason becomes $$$ .

<comment><USER74> Well, nowadays it's just $, as you can get one for $9/y ($5/y if you buy 3 years). For one subdomain, mind you.</comment></comment></comment>


PLOS ONE Update on Peer Review Process - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2015/05/01/plos-one-update-peer-review-investigation/

<comment><USER2> That editor and reviewer should be fired, hard. Most inappropriate thing I've ever read in a review.</comment>


What are your thoughts about 'homework' during the hiring process? - <AUTHOR> IMO, if I'm to do any work (including solving problems that are of no use to the company) then I need to be compensated.
In sales the idea is to give the 'what' but sell the 'how'. Why is it accepted that giving away the how to potentially get value in return is standard in engineering?
I'm baffled by the disconnect between the competitive battlefield of the talent environment and the entitlement to time in the hiring process.
What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> I walk away if they won't compensate me. Not worth my time or the time of any engineer.

Usually the tasks are remedial like "visualize this api using x tech with y library". Things that you have 10+ github projects posted that could easily be used as a reference.

The interview process has not once proceeded when I refused a task on the basis of already having an example of the requested posted. If that isn't a sign of things to come to you, I don't know what would be.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you do to find organizations that won't waste professional time in the hiring process?

I 100% agree with you. The writing is on the wall.</comment></comment>


Programming Languages, lambda calculus, calculus of constructions  - <AUTHOR> http://northhorizon.net/2010/interview-with-kalani-thielen-trends-in-programming-languages/

<comment><USER2> "Languages like F#, Scala and Haskell each fall somewhere in between these two extremes. None of them are precise enough to accept only halting programs (although Haskell is inching more and more toward a dependently-typed language every year). Yet all of them are more precise than (say) Scheme, where fallible human convention alone determines whether or not the "+" function returns an integer or a chicken."

There's some material for xkcd.com

Reading the rest of the article, one thing I don't get is why the focus on the idea that "programs and proofs are equivalent". You can do math in isolation, but your programs have to run on something which runs on something which runs on something all the way down to the hardware level where at any step along the way you lose control of the "precision" of the code being run or some anomaly environmental/hardware factor affects the overall outcome and the proof is out the window.</comment>


Zebrain by bC and TPOLM – Matlab 4k demo - <AUTHOR> https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=83691 <comment><USER2> A render of Zebrain is also on YouTube, at [https://youtu.be/gI6j0lZlytM](https://youtu.be/gI6j0lZlytM)

The source-code is on GitHub at [https://github.com/vsariola/zebrain](https://github.com/vsariola/zebrain)</comment>


Ask HN: Which tech stack to pick for web development in 2020? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER5> It would help if you clarify what exactly you're trying to develop. Is it a simple blog? Do you really need code in the backend? Do you need to integrate with other systems in the back end?

Basically what are your requirements? Is this a personal project or something at your job? What languages or frameworks is your organization already using and people are familiar with?

More of a meta point - these comments are something else. I see everything from React to using some solution that gives you containers out of the box.

This focus on languages, frameworks, and infrastructure tooling, instead of working off your requirements is generally guaranteed tech debt in my experience. If all your doing is building a simple website, who exactly benefits from all the added complexity?

</comment><comment><USER6> Nuxt, which is SSR using Vue. Also has the ability to be statically generated in case your frontend isn't particularly dynamic.

Elixir for an API if you need something extremely fault tolerant. Use Go if you need speed but don't want to learn Rust or C.

Unless you're doing something way out there stick with PostgreSQL for the database. Maybe an Apollo/GraphQL query setup in front of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I were to start a new project right now would be

React

      - <USER2>
      - redux for caching requests and serializing in ssr
      - express as webserver
      - styled-system for ui

Go for api

      - <USER3>
      - <USER4>

</comment><comment><USER8> I would go for API-Platform ([https://api-platform.com/](https://api- platform.com/)) without doubt, because it's the needed boilerplate to get started with OpenAPI, Containers and K8S. It comes with React, but it supports also VueJS and uses DoctrineORM for mapping objects in databases (by default, PostgreSQL)

</comment><comment><USER9> rails still works great in 2019.

</comment><comment><USER10> Moonscript and Lapis

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011356)

</comment><comment><USER11> Django Framework (Python)</comment>


The default Python version on Heroku will go from 2.7.13 to 3.6.1 on June 20th - <AUTHOR> https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/1169 <comment><USER2> I find it amazing that Python 3 is almost 10 years old and it's still not been able to replace Python 2 everywhere. I mean, legacy is one thing, but from what I see lots of people still start new projects with python 2.

<comment><USER3> Mainly because everyone treats it as a different language from python 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A better headline would be that the default _for newly-created applications_ will switch.

Existing applications on Heroku will not have their Python version changed.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if you'll still be able to set the Python version explicitly in the runtime.txt file

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Existing applications will not be affected by this change.

I was freaked about breakage for a moment there.</comment>


Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan - <AUTHOR> https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-research-to-wuhan/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually going to flag this, since basically it seems to be working quite hard to pretend that the US was funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan, when that doesn't seem to actually be the case. There has been joint research about outbreaks in the wild - which is where the funding link seems to come from, and also the claim that there was a moratorium on GOF research is horribly misrepresented.

I spent some time looking at where the factual claims come from and I've sort of come to the conclusion that what we have here is an eco-system of sites that are publishing more and more articles, citing each other slowly moving further and further away from the core facts each time. Until you're entirely removed the facts and the whole thing is just a web of speculation. The closest I could get to any real claims about the lab was this Daily Mail article[1], but again, it's things like

>The news that COVID-19 bats were under research there means that a leak from the Wuhan laboratory can no longer be completely ruled out.

and

> According to one unverified claim, scientists at the institute could have > become infected

You see, its this reporting of completely unverified speculation, that gets laundered through site after site until you end up with

>The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Well, yeah, it's the center of scrutiny because you and your buddies decided to make it the centre of scrutiny with no evidence. Here's a wild thought: Maybe it's necessary to do research on diseases near to the source of the disease. It's not a conspiracy when the lab studying mad cow disease is located in the UK either.

[1]:[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8211291/U-S- governm...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8211291/U-S-government- gave-3-7million-grant-Wuhan-lab-experimented-coronavirus-source-bats.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> > It is understandable that the Chinese lab likely struggled with safety > issues given the fact US labs share similar problems

This line is what makes me think I am reading propoganda. It starts as a news story but continues as a opinion piece.

It is never understandable that a lab of this nature, regardless of country, has safety issues. I don't think Chinese authorities nor US authorities would agree it is understandable. Or at least I hope they wouldn't.

<comment><USER4> The part of it that stuck out to me wasn't the "understandable" part in itself, but the fact that it said the US labs "share similar problems", since these "problems" appeared to be just cases of people mishandling these viruses (i.e. negligence?), rather than cases of the viruses being too difficult to handle even when protocols are properly followed. A problem arising due to negligence doesn't seem like something I'd characterize as "struggling" with safety.

<comment><USER5> >A problem arising due to negligence doesn't seem like something I'd characterize as "struggling" with safety.

Why not?

If safety relies on negligence not occuring then negligence compromises safety. If safety is regularly comprised that would be considered "struggling with safety".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The virus is created in a lab" is a conspiracy theory that is being kept alive because of the way American politics work.

People asume that all this writing is "organic". It is not. It is orchestrated and coordinated. Basically the current US administration gains politically by keeping war rhetorics; the "maybe the virus is created in lab, maybe released by accident, maybe on purpose, we don't know, China is not being transparent" is a key part.

Accepting the virus as a natural phenomenon puts the focus on the actual policy response and that is much less of a winner.

<comment><USER7> "The virus is created in a lab" is not a conspiracy theory, it is just a plausible possibility that we should study.

There is no "conspiracy" in the theory in fact. The most probable cause is an accident. Nobody is going to create it as a weapon without creating the vaccine first.

We should not be "accepting" any prejudice, the one that "favors" US administration, or the opposite one, but we should be studding and working around evidence.

By the way, if it actually was an accident, accepting that it was a natural phenomenon favors the interest of China administration too.

It can't be natural, even accepting China's side's theory of the market, it would be made by human intervention mixing in the market bats with Armadillos.

<comment><USER6> But it has been examined and the virus traces back to animals and earlier strains which were not as contagious.

This is one of the many papers on the subject:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9)

So why are we still discussing this? Because we are being manipulated.

<comment><USER8> You don't just publish a study and have it cemented as fact to end all other studies.

<comment><USER6> It is no just one paper. There are plenty of peer reviewed papers out there, published in reputable outlets, that analyzes the origin of the virus and none of them indicate that it is artificially made.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't have to be artificially "made". It could still be "fostered" in a lab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the following two paragraphs appearing exactly in this order in the text:

"If evidence is found that Covid-19 is a biological weapon, some pundits such as Fox News host Lou Dobbs have called for the US to declare war on China.

Nonetheless, it is unclear what the legal ramifications would be if the virus was indeed leaked from a Chinese lab, but as a result of a research project that was outsourced and funded by the US government."

<comment><USER11> It is people being silly. COVID-19 is a terrible biological weapon. As in ineffective. And prone to misfiring.

<comment><USER12> It's very effective at causing massive economical damage...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the point of doing actual GOF research? We already know viruses can gain function. We already know that bat viruses can infect humans. Is this backdoor bioweapon research framed to avoid breaking the letter of treaties banning it? But if that's the case, outsourcing it seems totally insane.

<comment><USER2> Well one way to put it is: We already know these viruses can gain function. If we can simulate that in the lab and then study the results we can plan how to deal with the situation if it arises in the wild. It's worth noting that this article isn't being completely transparent about the moratorium, it wasn't just a decision by the US to no longer do that sort of reseach, they were just pausing whilst they reconsidered how they evaluate whether to allow & fund that research. There was no real question of completely banning GOF research. They released that report in 2016[1].

Secondly, they cite a weird website called nationalfile.com for the claim Fauci funded the Chinese lab (in an article written now, not at the time the funding was claimed to be made) - I don't believe that. If you actually look at the NIH website what they're passing off as Fauci fundign the Chinese lab, is a _2018_ article about collaboration with the lab in studying an outbreak of a disease in pig farms in Guangdong. Which is not exactly the shooting up bats with SARS is it, and it's certainly not the type of research that was effected by the GOF moratorium.

>The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.

This is entirely speculation. There's _no_ evidence of this being the case.

Basically what I'm saying is that this website is a fake news site. It's citing other fake news sites, spreading misinformation and mis-representing government reports.

The controversial claims are baseless - and often uncited, and the citations that are there are either to other misinformation sites- literally, waht is the nationalfile.com?

[1]:[https://osp.od.nih.gov/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/NSABB_Fina...](https://osp.od.nih.gov/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/NSABB_Final_Report_Recommendations_Evaluation_Oversight_Proposed_Gain_of_Function_Research.pdf)

<comment><USER13> I can see that, but it still seems risky and of dubious value. I am not convinced any vaccine research is going to transfer from a synthetic virus to humans, and animal studies also have issues transferring. Good high risk research is high risk high payoff. This seems very high risk low payoff to me.

Then there is smallpox. The idea of doing anything with smallpox samples other than placing them in an ultra high temperature autoclave is horrifying. That stuff is extinct in the wild. It should be extinct from the timeline entirely.

I am suspicious of Asia Times, but also of the drive to blame this on China. I raised my question in the abstract since so far I see no concrete evidence that COVID-19 originated in anyone's lab whether Chinese or American.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely true, it's risky, and that's why we have strong government regulations about what research to do and how to do it. I think we can reasonably argue about whether those regulations are strong enough, but I actually think the process (in the US atleast) is working. They were allowing this research under strict conditions, they found out that actually mistakes were more likely to happen after some incidents, so they took a full 2 years to completely re-evaulate, produce a full report and a new regime designed by experts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Republican lawmakers such as Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan > Crenshaw have also introduced legislation that would allow Americans to sue > China in federal court over the deaths and economic damage wrought by the > virus.

Does the notion of ex-post-facto not apply to foreigners? (Although the concept of a domestic lawsuit against foreigners is itself weird to me.)

<comment><USER14> Has happened before — if the court finds that it has jurisdiction then it won't mind that one party is absent. If you sign a contract in country X, the courts in country X will hold you to it.

But that legislation sounds weird. I wonder whether those republicans have any idea what Westphalia is or what was agreed there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The first time this article was posted, it was flagged (I might dispute its content and sourcing, but not the free-speech aspect to discussing it.) My earlier comment:

So what is the source of this info? Turns out it is the Daily Mail, a right- wing UK rag of highly questionable quality and history of economy with the truth. In the referenced DM article, the only attribution we hear about are "documents obtained by the Mail"... Fake FB news are also documents obtainable by the Mail. Post originals or it didn't happen.

<comment><USER16> It was the The Mail on Sunday, actually.</comment></comment>


TypeFace: Make A Font Using Your Face - <AUTHOR> http://crenk.com/typeface-make-a-font-using-your-face/

<comment><USER2> Direct link: [http://www.rhymeandreasoncreative.com/portfolio/index.php?pr...](http://www.rhymeandreasoncreative.com/portfolio/index.php?project=typeface)

</comment><comment><USER3> How do you download it?</comment>


Preparing Your Site for the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/preparing-your-site-ipad <comment><AUTHOR> This article started out as a set of notes for myself, but I ended up finding so many resources, I thought other people might find it useful, so I wrote it up. There details and resources on ads, navigation, layout, and user interaction, and testing.</comment>


PayPal will hold money until I prove I shipped. I didn't sell anything. - <AUTHOR> Man, how far PayPal has fallen.
I created a new PayPal account. It's linked to a Bank account, and a Credit card of mine.
My sister "PayPalled" me some money (to buy something for her).
PayPal held it and told me I needed to provide evidence of shipping before they'd release it.
I emailed them to tell them I wasn't a "seller", this was a private transaction.
Received an auto-generated email telling me what "sellers" had to do.
Responded, telling them I wasn't a seller.
I got a reply from an apparent human referring to me as a "seller" and telling me what "sellers" had to do.
I finally gave up when I discovered there was no phone number I could call to resolve this.
Refunded the money to my sister (PayPal lost the 5% they were charging -- this was an international transaction), and am looking for alternatives.
Man, has PayPal fallen. <comment><USER2> My opinion of PayPal was suffered a lot from that subscribestar thing. They are essentially turning away paying customers for dumb reasons; and it seems they are big enough that they can just do it without problems. This could mean that, when an alternative shows up, it will replace paypal instead of actually breaking the monopoly.

<comment><USER3> I have no idea what your response has to do with the current post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Was it sent as a family/friend transaction? If so this should not happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it wasn't.

I'll tell my sister about this to see if it helps. I did just now find an FAQ about "family and friends" transactions on PayPal, and it should be relatively easy for her to find.

Odd thing is that she's sent money to my previous PayPal account before without a hitch.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who has sold an algorithm and how? - daniel-cussen Can anyone point me to a person that has successfully sold an algorithm, a general algorithm, for an appropriate amount of money?  How did the transaction take place?  What would an algorithm writer need to do before the transaction?  Take PageRank.  Larry and Sergey were unable to sell it as an algorithm or even as a website.  What should they have done, short of starting Google, to get a fraction of the proceeds for a (surely different) fraction of the work? <comment><AUTHOR> In some cases, you can patent a major application for that algorithm and then license that patent. From what I know Larry and Sergey patented PageRank for Web Search. My advisor has patent on a Graph Cuts algorithm for image segmentation, which is licensed by Cornell. If you have a fast matrix multiplication algorithm e.g. for use in Fully Connected layers for Neural Nets. You can patent that application. When FB hired people from NYU to work on deep learning, the acquisition involved getting a fast fourier transform optimized version of convolutional layers. Not sure how big of a component it was.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen OP here. So one algo I have is fast matrix multiplication algorithm, especially for sparse matrices. Faster asymptotically and in real-time than what's out there, and with better accuracy.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean by "with better accuracy"? How can one matrix multiplication algorithm be more accurate than another?

<comment> daniel-cussen Strassen makes your rounding errors bigger the more levels of recursion you do. We're talking ~7 bits of error due to rounding (in a paper I read).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hedge fund algorithm developer here. I've sold a few of these but it's mainly been based on taking 20% of the net profit and largely confined to the financial industry.

<comment><USER4> I'm interested in some financial programming. Does everyone use Haskell or other functional languages? Where can I learn some basics?

<comment><USER5> How about this?

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/computational- investing](https://www.coursera.org/learn/computational-investing)</comment></comment></comment>


The arms race for anti-drone weaponry - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9631208/drone-defender-regulation-iacp <comment><USER2> As an American (or 'Murican, if you prefer), the ham-handed attempt by multiple hierarchical levels of government to rein in and control the hobbyists flying cheap, miniaturized, computer-stabilized, remote-piloted aircraft only makes me want to get one and fly it as an act of protest. If the gummint banned them outright, I'd want two.

Knowing that the federals are themselves creating partially self-piloted full- sized aircraft armed with lethal area-effect weaponry (Predator/Reaper/Avenger/Grey Eagle) or surveillance arrays capable of observing entire cities at once (Gorgon Stare/Constant Hawk/Angel Fire) makes me angry at the hypocrisy and nervous about the potential consequences.

If nothing else, it undermines my enjoyment of modern and sci-fi subgenres of the Western, and any War-genre movie with an underdog guerilla group. For instance, when Hunger Games 3a showed me a fighter-bomber going down to a bow and arrow, it was Sid Meier's Civilization modern jet fighter vs. archers- stack all over again. It just can't happen, people; you can't fight war machine X on the traditional battlefield without anti-X weaponry. And you can't fight a nation that deploys hunter-killer drones with just AR-15s and AK-47s. Your tactics have to change dramatically.

I think all this drone/anti-drone arms-racing is just going to push Americans into inventing 5th-generation warfare sooner, and it's going to be really, really ugly. Prison drug deliveries are just the tip of the iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a 12 gauge with birdshot would do a pretty decent job of taking down any drone I've ever seen.

Seems like that might be a little cheaper than developing ECM to target drones. Although if it is really just a pork-barrel, then a $200 shotgun with $25 worth of shells is much less efficient than a multi-thousand dollar radar jammer rifle.

<comment><USER4> Max range for birdshot is ~120 feet so a drone can just increase its altitude and be safe. Also you have to be aware of what is beyond your target which might not be possible in an urban environment.

<comment><USER5> _> Max range for birdshot is ~120 feet _

Effective range for taking out a drone is "as far as the bird shot will shoot" which is much further than ~120ft. We aren't talking about effective range (e.g "breaking a clay plate").

That being said - your point about increasing altitude still stands. I'm not sure how birdshot will go when shot near vertically - but it can travel well over 200 yards horizontally depending on if you're using 04 or 08, etc. At a certain point its harmless to humans unless it hits in the eye but as long as it hits a blade of a drone it could still damage the drone and bring it down. It doesn't need to completely destroy the drone like a point blank blast of a double barrel with buckshot would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Makes sense, don't work on building a drone company, you're too late, build a drone defense company and convince every police station they need your product.

<comment><USER7> Or build a drone that takes down other drones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Was this article paid astroturfing for the Drone Defender?

It made some vague allusions to that product's market and then suggested that federal regulations would prevent the sale of it to local law enforcement, but I didn't see any real argument for why local law enforcement should be able to buy jammers other than some isolated incidents in prisons. There also wasn't any explanation for why the FCC and FAA have the rules about jamming. I suspect devices like the Drone Defender are banned for good reason.

<comment><USER9> I would think jamming signals on anything flying is a bit on the dangerous side. Yeah some commercial drones will gently land but there's no guarantee. I'd also think it would not take the criminals they are trying to stop long to realize it and find ways around it. Such as preprogramming flight paths in and allowing them to fly without any need to have radio communication.

<comment><USER8> You might be able to bring a drone in using accelerometers only. Given an assumed measurement error and integration time for the sensor you could calculate how far you'd need to be from the prison before the error in position becomes a problem. So jamming doesn't really buy you anything if you can program a flight path.

<comment><USER10> I bet you could build a drone that flies off of a visual guidance system using IR beacons to locate itself. Something like a giant version of the Wii's sensor bar.

IR beacons have the downside of blatantly broadcasting their positions, but they might be less jammable than radio waves? OTOH, pointing an IR laser at your camera isn't that hard, so maybe not.

You could also take a page from the SR-71 and correct your inertial guidance system's error using star observations. Only needs to see up, so you can shield it against blinding attempts from below. Can a drone-weight camera pick up stars?

<comment><USER11> The difference here is that a drone will not be doing 2200mph over 3k miles so differences in the position of stars won't be particularly noticeable. You may be able to do some trickery with a few outward facing cameras and some software to map the horizon though.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I'd trust it more as a source of direction than a magnetometer though.

Horizon tracking would be super cool. You'd have to open your cameras to blinding attacks again to make that work, but still. Even as a project unrelated to getting around jamming, that would be a neat piece of tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How about a hunter drone that shoots/drops fishing line into the prey drone's propellers/rotors?

<comment><USER13> It gets hard to do that fast -- I just picked up this guy for flying around my house:

[http://reviews.costco.com/2070/100222794/syma-model- aircraft...](http://reviews.costco.com/2070/100222794/syma-model-aircraft- indus-syma-sky-thunder-rc-d63-drone-runner-reviews/reviews.htm)

The reason I chose it: there are enough dangling light pulls, and when I lose control, enough other stringy things around the edges of the room, that I've damaged props on other mini drones. The cage has effectively eliminated (or at least severely reduced) the problem. I presume a slightly lager drone can have better shielding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> er does anyone producing these not know the radiation patterns for a yaggi - held like a normal rifle you would have a nice high power lobe right through the operators brain.

CISCO all ready do some very tasty airnet kit that attacks rouge ap's and hosts.

<comment><USER15> The signal wouldn't have to be very strong, it should be relatively harmless for the operator. (Most rc rf transmitters send with <<1W PEP and a low-gain antenna.).

Also, at multiple GHz (most rc rf links used today are 2.4 GHz (no, I don't mean WLAN)), the waves don't penetrate the skin very well.

Also, Yagi antennas have (not perfectly, of course, but approximately) unidirectional beam patters; that's what the reflector elements at the end are for. The back lobe isn't very strong.

Also, the exposure would be for a very short amount of time.

Many radar operators are exposed to much, much stronger radiation on a continuous basis. Though admittedly, they do get cancer.

<comment><USER14> The actual emitted power is magnified by the antenna gain (say 14db) its not consumer 100 mw any more. And those sort of antennas have very pronounced side lobes.

And to get range they normally run these blue tooth/wifi sniper rifles much hotter than your consumer wifi AP

PTP you can run 4W

<comment><USER15> The antennas nominal gain applies only in the direction of the main lobe, ie. not towards your head. A typical Yagis _strongest_ sidelobe will be _well_ into the negative dB.

Also, both the consumer hardware 100mW limit and the 4W PTP limit are EIRP (in the US; apparently; I'm from Germany), so the gains don't matter. And you achieve them with very directional antennas (which are hard to aim by hand), not with a strong transmitter.

Radio range is not the problem at all when aiming by eye - because your target is small, it's line of sight, and the pilot is likely not using a very strong transmitter and a very directional antenna.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Dzd9iaXX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Dzd9iaXX4)

</comment><comment><USER17> Asking for a friend: Is there any portable, viable laser device that could be shoulder fired (backpack powered?) with enough energy to actually drill a hole in one of these from afar? If talking jamming frequencies (illegal) then why not just up the ante and go with a precision weapon? Zap N Crash!

<comment><USER18> I'm sure there's something like what you're describing in existence, probably in a lab somewhere, clamped in front of a metal plate with burn marks on it. I think you're out of luck on commercially available man-portable lasers for effectively shooting down a drone in a real-world scenario. There's a reason why people making videos of their lasers on Youtube are using them to pop balloons.

Even if that sort of laser for sale at a reasonable cost, you probably don't want or need one for killing drones. If you've escalated to actually blowing the drone out of the sky, you might as well use a gun. Guns are great at that and they're much cheaper. The bullets and shot you fire into the air do pose a safety risk on the way back down, but if reasonable steps are taken it's probably not a big enough deal to justify using a laser instead. (Caveat: in dense urban areas it's very difficult to even begin taking those "reasonable steps" and firing anything into the air is a recipe for tragedy. If you're seriously looking to take out a drone in a city, a laser makes a lot more sense.)

Another downside is that the laser needs to be held on its target to work, and that's a pain in the ass when the target is a drone. Even a relatively stable model flown by a skilled operator is still going to bob and weave, and the drone is presumably not hovering perfectly still while you're trying to break it. Today, hitting that target once with a shotgun is probably easier than holding a laser on it for the amount of time you'd need.

In the future, that will probably not remain true. Lasers (or really any devices that emit energy in a tight beam) are inherently better long-range direct-fire weapons than firearms because the laser moves in a straight line and you can get it to go farther. Travel time is pretty obviously another area where lasers win. As laser technology improves, we'll see more powerful lasers that can do damage in less time and automated platforms for doing the aiming. A future scenario where militaries use automated energy weapons against unmanned aircraft is very realistic, so a future scenario where a police officer shoots down a drone with a laser is certainly within the realm of possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm half hoping pumpkin canon drone hunter becomes a thing, this video[0] is beautiful.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC89KRV7l9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC89KRV7l9M)

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/52600/52611/52611_lozenge_net_lg....](http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/52600/52611/52611_lozenge_net_lg.gif)

</comment><comment><USER21> Not a radio guy but there isn't some way to listen for radio signals, figure out where they are comming from (to get the opperator) then duplicate them and land the drone

<comment><USER22> It depends. Older style controls yes, but it wouldn't be hard to use encrypted digital control signals and make that impossible.</comment></comment>


The Politicization of the FBI (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-politicization-of-the-fbi/ <comment><USER2> Warning to sensitive individuals: Hillsdale college is a politically conservative institution.</comment>


Display Advertising Works, But It Works Differently Than Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/display-adverti.html <comment><USER2> This may be true, but it misses a general point that relates to the first paragraph. Separate the world into two types of good ads: the ones you can see working & the ones a PHD can see working.

A pretty girl soliciting people outside your restaurant vs an ad in the paper; Search vs banners.

That's not new. That's always been the case. But online, the latter had massive failings & the former had a lot of success. This is in contrast to the experience of the other big media's experiences.

For most advertisers the nespaper ad/banner is voodoo. If the average ROI is outstanding, then they might punt. But the other type, the search ad/tourist tout is measurable & reliable & understandable.

So in bad times you lose confidence in the things you can't see. The voodoo looses out. But you probably don't fire the tourist tout until things get really bad. Theoretically, for mega brands with mega budgets to do focus groups & hire PHDs to test the effects of their ads over years, there is no difference qualitative between a tourist tout & sponsoring a tennis player. I don't really know, but I think that the theory doesn't pan out. Even campaigns in the 10 of $Ms are really reading these kinds of studies, following 'best practices' & guessing. My evidence for this is that their ad budgets go down in bad times & up in good times.

BTW, it runs both ways. Good times make companies spend more on 'brand' advertising. Most Search campaigns are always linked to returns somehow & those don't change that as much as group psychology.

So 'brand' advertising is susceptible to bubbles & crashes.

</comment><comment><USER3> The study backs the type of impact we have seen on many of our campaigns.

What's missing, however, is the technology for accurately measuring the various data over a long timespan.

</comment><comment><USER4> For once a nugget or real research amidst marketing voodoo. Good stuff.

<comment><USER5> yeah, but they could really do a lot more with this work, like look at how targeting impacts lift, or how frequency and duration impact it. there's still so much to be learned about online advertising. a lot of the comments to the post are great.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Clojure-based on-demand delivery routing system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Purple-Services <comment><AUTHOR> Backstory:

We did our last delivery back in late Spring of 2017, though we had experienced a decent amount of traction. The economics of on-demand gas delivery are difficult. B2B (e.g., delivery to car dealerships) seems to be profitable, but it is tough to achieve a price point high enough to warrant B2C sales (though perhaps in some ZIP codes it is possible (e.g., 90210)).

It was a fun ride, especially getting to use Clojure. I was the founding engineer (converted from an independent contract), so had plenty of room to make tech decisions.

Besides Clojure, there's a mobile app at that link as well, using Sencha Touch Framework. At the time we closed up shop, I had been experimenting with React Native + CLJS.

You'll also find an repo called opt that contains some interesting routing optimization algorithms that I did not write (warning, it's one long Java file).

 _On a related note, I 'm currently looking for Clojure job opportunities._

<comment><USER2> Hi elwell, Kira Systems is a Clojure shop and we are always looking for individuals with a desire to try new things and build something great. We're based in Canada but have people working remotely. If you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find more information here: [https://www.kirasystems.com/careers/?gh_jid=4122223002](https://www.kirasystems.com/careers/?gh_jid=4122223002)

<comment><USER3> So you'll consider applicants who live in the USA (not Canadian citizen) and would need to be 100% remote?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worked on this as well, mainly on the dashboard-* and portal-* repos. I actually found this position on the Who's Hiring thread here on HN. Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


U.S. carried out secret cyber strike on Iran after Saudi oil attack: officials - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-military-cyber-exclusive-idUSKBN1WV0EK <comment><USER2> For the people commenting about leakers and things being secret in the past, I'll bet money the government leaked this themselves.

<comment><USER3> The more important problem is that we don't even know if this attack: 1) ever occurred 2) if it did occur, was it even the US 3) if it was even an attack, was it in fact a cyberattack at all (you would want to protect actual human assets who do physical damage in say industrial control systems as an insider job by saying it was a remote attack using some sort of zero day attack)

Anonymous government sources, especially in cyber security, have a track record of persistent lying

Remember the China chip hacking story by Bloomberg built on anonymous government sources. The alleged fake news was never retracted - even though it was technically not a possible attack if you know how chips are made. (There are chips that had arguably deliberately installed flaws - the Intel chip with the OTP generator that was trivially crackable and the RSA keyfob with the default NSA backdoor).

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the- big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how- china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies)

[https://siliconangle.com/2018/10/22/apple-amazon-super- micro...](https://siliconangle.com/2018/10/22/apple-amazon-super-micro-call- bloomberg-retract-china-spy-chip-story/)

[https://www.wired.com/2013/09/rsa-advisory-nsa- algorithm/](https://www.wired.com/2013/09/rsa-advisory-nsa-algorithm/)

<comment><USER4> The China chip hacking story was an invented story by Bloomberg. Everyone else denied it including Apple as the customer, US government, the supplier of the chip etc. Bloomberg fabricated the story. Ever since, I do not trust Bloomberg as a reliable source of information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apropos to the Noam Chomsky 'Manufacturing Consent' thread, the USG and Corporate Media have enshrined the false narrative that this was an Iranian attack. While Iran is supporting the Yemenis, independent military analysts agree that Yemen had the capabilities to carry out the attack, and it came from Yemen. Furthermore, no real evidence has been provided to tie Iran to the attack.

Also carefully glossed over is that the Saudis started a war of aggression against Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, fully supported by US arms and military. The claims of Iranian support for Yemen are dwarfed by the overt support of Saudi Arabia by the USG.

<comment><USER6> What's the evidence it came from Yemen? Are they claiming the images released by SA are faked? What about the claim the attacks came from the North?

So far I haven't seen any evidence from either side.

<comment><USER5> The Houthi claimed responsibility, for starters. Also, as noted by Scott Ritter, 'there is the largest concentration of modern air defense radars in the Persian Gulf oriented toward Iran, and not one detected and tracked these launches?'

The Iran connection was immediately seized by both the USG and SA for their own purposes before the incident was even investigated. Both sides have motives that encourage fingering Iran. They promised to reveal the findings, but as of today, nothing further has been made public. This, despite the fact that the USG should have readily available sensor data that would show if the attack were to have originated in Iran, and if it were so, then that would be a causus belli for direct war on Iran, yet that dog never barked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's not much anyone not in the know can say. We know Cyber Command and the NSA work together to penetrate adversarial networks. They are also very reluctant to share anything about their activities. They apparently wiped out the Iranian computers that were used to target the drone they shot down in the summer. We don't know how deep Cyber Command has embedded itself in the Iranian government's digital infrastructure. They have probably gone very, very far.

<comment><USER8> Not likely at all. The Iranian defence structure is highly decentralized.

<comment><USER9> That does not follow. "Decentralized" is not a defense against "penetrated by the NSA". It just means that it's more work - one attack doesn't give you the keys to everything.

On the other side, from the Iranian perspective, it means that systems are secured by different people from different organizations with different degrees of training. That's a recipe for a number of attackable systems.

<comment><USER8> It means they are off the grid and are trained to act independently of the central command.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure that there are exactly zero units of the Iranian military that have independent authority to, for example, start shooting missiles at US Navy warships. They may be able to act independently once they understand that it's time to open fire. But to decide to start... that's a central command decision.

<comment><USER8> But they will start shooting when they learn that a conflict has started. You know, if a US attack in the strait begins it will become obvious pretty pretty soon. Also they don't need a sophisticated link from the top to start an attack, just a simple command.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Used to be that "secret" things stayed secret for 30 years or so.

<comment><USER11> Probably want Iran to not assume it's coming from Israel/Saudi etc...but then again these days people are crazy addicted to getting those like/click/view counts and I wouldn't be the least surprised if the Intel/Military community isn't immune. Can see two Generals competing for Likes somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To zoom out slightly, consider the famous phrase _war is politics with guns_.

Would it ever be the case that _war is politics with cyber strikes_?

As the article points out, the strikes were politically motivated (against Iran's regime), but were they an act of war?

Under what circumstances should the American people tolerate an act of war being carried out on their "behalf"?

In my view, the democratic process should be used to prevent the US from doing "warmaking" that is not broadly supported by the public.

In fact, as it is well known, the framers required congress to declare war.

So what is the purpose of the US conducting such a strike done without democratic consent?

My guess is that it was conducted to help nudge the American people into accepting acts of war by executive fiat against Iran, when the legal justification for them is at risk of being removed via the democratic process (1). The house passed a bill requiring congressional authorization, but the senate did not.

So we can view the cyber strike as the executive branch asserting its power to make war against Iran without the sort of missiles and bombs that make Americans easily think of it as war.

1\. [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2019/6/19/18691936/h...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2019/6/19/18691936/house-democrats-vote-repeal-9-11-aumf-war-iran)

<comment><USER13> > war is politics with guns

Never heard that phrase before, but I wouldn't agree with it. Politics is all about compromise: the art of the possible. It's negotiation. War often happens when politicians fail to negotiate.

<comment><USER12> I think the counterargument would be that politics is the orderly handling of coercive force and authority.

When this orderly approach isn't sufficient, additional coercive force is added to the mix. At some point it starts to look like war.

To people on the wrong side of the political hierarchy, every day looks like war as armed troops (police) occupy neighborhoods seeking to enforce an externally imposed code that criminalizes normal, consensual behavior, confiscates wealth and property, and destroys civil society.

> when politicians fail to negotiate

In a sense, yes. If one politician demands that a foreign leader step down or face a US invasion, one can interpret the foreign leader's failure to step down as a breakdown in negotiations, but I think that is quite a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Was there any measurable effect? I'm not convinced anything was accomplished here.

</comment><comment><USER15> The fact is, it's all complicated... Since (and before) stuxnet, cyber warfare has escalated and the number of (presumed) state actors is present pretty much everywhere. The attacks are constant and don't stop. Anyone doing cyber security in an international or government system experiences this daily.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it me or does it feel hypocritical of the US government when it constantly cry about cyber operation from China and Russia while conducting (probably a lot more than this certain case) and leaking cyber operation of US?

Like, if everyone including yourself is knee deep and slinging mud, don't accuse other people for being dirty.

<comment><USER17> Responding to a missile attack by screwing with the attacker's missile targeting systems is not really comparable to attacking an election to put one of your cronies at the top of another country's government.

<comment><USER18> You should really, really learn about the history of US involvement in the Iranian government before you state that. Like how we helped overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, to ensure we put in place a guy who was friendly to Great Brittan and the US. (Operation AJAX)

Can almost trace a line from that to the 1979 embassy hostage crisis, and the problems we have with Iran today.

<comment><USER17> Why do you think the CIA kept Operation Ajax a secret from the American public until 1992?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I could swear there was speculation about precisely this just after the strikes. Anyone remember it?

</comment><comment><USER20> Much better than the ill-advised military strike that so many foreign policy demons were lusting for.

It bothers me a lot that so many foreign policy experts can look at the unrelieved mess of things that they have made over the past generation, and think that this time, doing what has failed spectacularly so many times before is going to work out.

Time to invent some new wheels.

<comment><USER21> Micheal Hayden said during his Blackhat keynote that the US considers offensive cyber attacks from nation states to be acts of war, so probably not that much better.

<comment><USER22> They say that, but the if the reports of state-sponsored cyber attacks on the US or US companies over the past 10+ years is any indication, the "war" that's mentioned in the "acts of war" statement isn't tanks rolling through Beijing, Tehran, or Moscow.

If a cyber attack leads to war, it seems to lead to cyber war like this article. Not physical war.

<comment><USER21> He made it pretty clear that it was a real, dropping bombs, boots on the ground, cause for war.

I think it's more that the US applies these rules unequally. You execute a cyber attack on us, we'll overthrow your government and laugh as the rabble beheads you in the streets. If _we_ execute a cyber attack on you, what are you going to do? We have nukes.

The framework he laid out is actually pretty interesting because it made it very clear that espionage is totally on the table, which is as far as the countries that do have nukes are willing to go here.

<comment><USER22> Again, that may be what they said but it doesn't match reality. We've been attacked, the DNI named names, and there are no tanks rolling through Moscow, Tehran, or Beijing.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/china-russia-could- disrupt-u...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/china-russia-could-disrupt-us- infrastructure-with-cyber-attacks-odni.html)

<comment><USER21> That doesn't say that we've been attacked by China or Russia, only that they have the ability to.

The Iranian and North Korean "attacks" here are just laundered transfers on the swift network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> And it was kept secret until now? So I guess they haven't told trump about it?

<comment><USER24> Given their absurdly similar phrasings, I'm pretty certain both of the responses you got from this were bots. Or else two idiots with their own version of a copy pasta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This "anonymous source" who is disclosing classified information should be punished. This is not good for anyone.

<comment><USER26> This is half the newspaper nowadays. Every journalist just repeats what some official with an impressive job title says and nobody gets to question why the story is being pushed by this person because they are never identified. It's naive to call for prosecution, this story was almost surely leaked and approved by the US State Department before it was written.

Journalists should really dig their heels in and start resisting this, but that will never happen. It's just bad journalism and they keep letting themselves get manipulated.

I don't even care about the classified information aspect of this, the classification system in the US is a complete farce and will be reformed soon, clearly nobody respects it all anymore at any level of the intel community.

<comment><USER27> Journalists without a long history of connections and experience, typically facilitated by the name/history of the "paper" they're working for, don't get to dig their heels in because they would lose access. Access is paramount, as is on record/off record confidentiality, and they are dependent on it, else they be blacklisted by their subjects of interest. All interviews and information sharing is voluntary, they can't force someone to answer a question, and they can't force someone to be interviewed, and they definitely can't force someone to tell the truth.

It is not their fault that they parrot whatever talking points politicians and their staff members. It's only on those rare occasions where sources are cultivated through long periods of time and building trust through publishing meticulously what information has been shared with them via interviews and documents, most of them being talking points of course, that they can get to the meat of the subjects. Lifting the veil of the real news stories requires years and years of trudging through just simply formatting interview transcripts into something readable and of interest.

I don't blame them one bit. It's a tough job and you're at the mercy of everyone you attempt to gather information from. It doesn't help that you're viewed as de-facto suspicious due to journalistic freedoms.</comment></comment></comment>


[Show HN] iPad2 Availability Checker At Target Stores - <AUTHOR>

I was bored and inspired by a post I read somewhere to check iPad Availability For Target Stores. So I took today and made this..I learned some good stuff.<p>http://www.6colors.net/ipad_check/ <comment><USER2> So does the default say "out of stock"? I checked every model at every store in town and that what I got back.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does work, check out this screen shot. If you are near Rancho Cordova they have the 16gb Wifi Black

<http://6colors.net/ipad_check/instock.png>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> well have you called your target to verify? No joke. THey seem to severely be out of stock as is everywhere

11am is the key it seems. Yesterday I noticed all my stores had them in town. I went to buy one and there was a line!</comment>


Google's Next Venture: Universal Translator - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/188777/googles_next_venture_universal_translator.html

<comment><USER2> While this certainly looks very cool (almost like a real Babel Fish out of Douglas Adams books) Google would have to come up with some amazing breakthroughs to both translation and voice recognition technology for this to work acceptably.

Their own service (Google Translate) is really poor and is only useful to give you a very rough idea of what a foreign language text actually says.</comment>