GM and Fiat Chrysler Unmasked as Tesla's Source of Cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-03/tesla-s-secret-source-of-cash-unmasked-as-gm-and-fiat-chrysler <comment><USER2> > they reached agreements to buy federal greenhouse gas credits from Tesla.

In other words it's not much of a statement about Tesla, it's just a credit system working as intended. Tesla has credits left over because they don't sell ICE cars, GM predicts that if the next president is Democrat they might need more credits so they buy now while they are cheap.

<comment><USER3> If Tesla were serious about advancing sustainable transport, they wouldn't sell credits to polluters. By enabling others to pollute that much more, it undoes much of the benefit from buying a Tesla.

<comment><USER4> "We can go bankrupt, or we can let our polluting competitors fund our R&D. Which should we choose?"

"Oh, definitely the bankruptcy."

<comment><USER5> It's amazing how many here are so disconnected from reality....

(ps. the id of the person you are replying to :D )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _GM's credit purchases illustrate how challenging the U.S. fuel efficiency > requirements are getting, even for automakers that are adding more zero- > emission vehicles to their lineup._

Hardly. It mostly illustrates how many trucks and SUVs they sell.

<comment> village-idiot It's not hard to make those fuel efficient, it's hard to make them fuel efficient cheaply all while maintaining the performance that customers expect.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to convince customers that they don't need huge SUV or pickup truck to drive solo to work in the office. On top of that there is clear, design trend especially in pickup truck world to have biggest, most vertical grill that is possible. Moving such wall trough the air at highway speed is far from efficient. No matter how badly Fiat wants to sell cars like small and efficient Fiat 500, Tipo, Alfa Romeo Giulia etc. that can be sleek and good for environment, in USA they will mostly sell huge RAMs, Jeeps and muscle cars.

<comment><USER8> Some of these trucks are being driven solo by people who live on an onion farm just FYI. Also, my truck gets better mileage than a Giulia. I live in the midwest and sure there are guys who don't need a truck but most of us do.

<comment><USER9> I can pretty much guarantee a beat up old FWD car will tackle pretty much all towing and farm driving (having lived and worked on a farm). For the really gritty stuff on the farm you have your tractors and earth movers and whatnot.

What makes the biggest difference is the tyres you have on a vehicle are suitable for the terrain you are using them in.

In the US, Australia, Canada etc - pick up trucks or utes are just a symbol of working class just as much as Tesla and Prius's are for the green-friendly crowd.

<comment><USER10> Eh, there are applications. A pickup truck mostly becomes necessary when you need to do both "heavy" and "far", when your alternatives are a car and a tractor. There are some loads, eg, towing a livestock trailer to market, where it is too heavy for a car (or even too small of a truck) to tow, and a tractor would be infeasible from a "speed" perspective.

(But yeah, you definitely don't need to be using your 4x4 pickup as a people- mover most of the time, and even most hauling applications a truck performs can be handled by a car with a rather modest trailer.)

<comment><USER11> Correct. But if you already have a truck that seats 4 or 6, there's not a whole lot of incentive to buy a car for commuting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ~$200M/year, and it isn't a strategic cash infusion, they have to.

"Tesla has generated almost $2 billion in revenue from selling regulatory credits since 2010"

"If [other car-] manufacturers don't sell enough non-polluting vehicles, they have to purchase credits from competitors like Tesla to make up the difference."

How much is that relatively?

TLSA 2018 revenue: $21B net income: -$1B

<comment><USER13> > _~$200M /year, and it isn't a strategic cash infusion, they have to._

$420m last year and rising steadily.

<comment><USER12> I wonder who brokers these things.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I can imagine a marketplace driven by demand/supply logistics. Short of saying Uber for ZEV/carbon credits :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wasn't this reported two months ago? [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat- chrysl...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat-chrysler- credits-european-union-emissions-fines)

<comment><USER16> That was EU credit, this is US credit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something is not working with this carbon credit market, the article says demand for electric cars is not there so the auto makers can't generate their own credits. Yet people who are into EV cars view the big three as well as the German marques as not even trying.

I bet that selling the credits was never in the Tesla business plan. But it is now!

<comment><USER18> warning, I ramble quickly

Because the market isn't there. I know we like to believe otherwise but the majority do not care. They will reply to a survey with what the expect the person asking wants but at the end of the day they have no reason to change their buying habits.

I really enjoy my Tesla 3 but I am a fan of sedans and coupes. The Y will make it more useful to some but even then it won't solve the immediate issue. That for all their supposed warts petrol powered cars don't require you to change anything you are currently doing. The habits we have established over generations are so ingrained that the time spent fueling and maintenance is not an issue. Now of course they could just plug in at home but people see the costs for charging station installs and say screw it. Infrastructure won't fix this. EV's just don't match petrol cars in common capability in the eyes of shoppers.

Finally, there just isn't enough coverage of the type of vehicles people are buying let alone at any reasonable price. Don't get fixated on the average selling price of cars to determine where an EV should be priced. Vehicles not clean sheet designed to be EV show their failings right up front and cause people to price compare to the petrol version; this includes the Chevrolet Bolt, the Hyundai and Kia cars, and even the Audi and Jaguar cars. Those last two are both incredibly disappointing on range.

Range also is only considered valid for fair weather or better. Get into the 40F/4C ranges and watch your range go goodbye. I can travel anywhere in the US easily with the 3 without concern but not in winter, I do damn well better than any other maker's EV in that regard. Range needs to be much higher to offset any concern owners have, to let them be lazy in charging. Charging speeds aren't too much of an issue but will be once range comes up.

Another option in the range category is, get mid one hundred mile range models out but get them as close to 20k without tax incentives. that might get some of the local only crowd to jump but that is a very price sensitive area.

<comment><USER19> Infrastructure is absolutely the deciding factor for those of us who are not suburban home owners. I live in a building which has 1 EV space for 200-something units. I work in an office building which has 2 EV spaces installed, but they're reserved for the Tesla-driving building owners. There are no public charging stations remotely convenient to either location.

My next car will absolutely be a Prius/Insight/Ioniq, but a full EV is not a reasonable consideration, and not because of range or habits but 100% because of infrastructure. Despite a majority-freeway commute I still pass 5 or 6 gas stations going to and from work every day. I ought to be passing at least one charging station.

<comment><USER20> I daily drive an electric for the last 4.5 years. I can't see what possible good _passing_ a charging station on my highway commute would do me. If the car isn't going to naturally rest there, that charging station is only useful for emergencies, IMO.

(I bought the LEAF with the intent to mostly charge at home. Since then, our company moved and we have chargepoints at work, but I agree with your overall point that no charging at home or work is a deal-breaker. I disagree that that is meaningfully ameliorated if there was an intra-commute charging station.)

<comment><USER21> > I can't see what possible good passing a charging station on my highway > commute would do me.

Helping people not driving an electric understand that charging stations exist and are in abundance, thereby alleviating concerns that an electric will leave them stranded. I know where at least ten gas stations are in my normal driving radius, and where some are in adjacent towns. I have no clue where the nearest charging station is, even though I'm aware that some exist. To the average person, it appears as though charging stations don't exist at all and gas stations are in abundance. It's a mindshare thing.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure that "here's a place where you could park and charge for 2 hours in the middle of your commute home" is a positive influence for adoption.

<comment><USER22> well to be fair, with a Tesla Model 3 it's not "park and charge for 2 hours", it's "park and charge for <20 minutes" in most cases. (assuming it's at a tesla supercharger)

I feel like throwing out exact numbers is disingenuous at best since a lot of things vary charge rate (state of charge, temperature, type of charger, etc...), but 20 minutes will almost always get you to the next charger or a destination in the Model 3.

And while I agree it's not quite "charge on your way home from work", it is something that at least Tesla is working on. Their "Supercharger v3" stalls cuts the stop times roughly in half in the ideal situations. And IMO "stop for 10 minutes on the way home" is absolutely acceptable.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but the Tesla Model 3 already has enough range for most to charge 2x per week at most. It's the $20K 80 mile electrics that have legitimate range anxiety issues, not the $40K 200 mile electrics.

My LEAF has a fast charger (CHAdeMO) and a 6.6kW Level 2 charger. My car has seen a CHAdeMO charger exactly once in its lifetime and that was before delivery. Most non-Teslas are charging at 3.3 or 6.6 kW (~12 or ~24 miles per hour of charge).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not the first time an established car manufacturer prevents Tesla from dying. Ten years ago, in 2009, Daimler Benz invested about 50 million USD into Tesla for a 9% stake. This saved them. Not my words, but Elon's: [https://www2.greencarreports.com/news/1074375_elon-musk- daim...](https://www2.greencarreports.com/news/1074375_elon-musk-daimler- saved-tesla-doe-loans-a-bad-idea)

<comment><USER24> Daimler-Benz itself was created to prevent imminent death of two automobile makers

<comment><USER25> did not prevent death,,US took over retirement plans of two automakers..that is death right there no matter what the remains become as it means you have more retirees than workers..ie firm decline

<comment><USER26> The poster was referring to a different time:

 _Because of the post World War One German economic crisis, DMG merged in 1926 with Benz & Cie., becoming Daimler-Benz and adopting Mercedes-Benz as its automobile trademark._

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

<comment><USER24> Indeed I was

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So does this mean all those zero emission Tesla's are actually generating lots of emissions but just via another manufacturer?

<comment><USER28> I'd assume it's an "offset" right? So not making things "better" - just not as "bad"

<comment><USER29> It's making things better by directly funding the killing of the ICE vehicle industry. That money is coming out of the pockets of the ICE automakers and being injected into Tesla, which is actively trying to replace the ICE approach.

It's helping to enable the build-up of EVs and replacement of the ICE auto industry. It has a rather considerable roll-on effect when you consider the sprawling consequences, such as helping to fund Tesla's ability to build a global charging network which can then enable it to more easily appeal to consumers to sell more EVs and on it goes in dozens of other ways.

<comment><USER28> Maybe, I haven't reviewed the numbers in detail - but the need for GM/others to purchase the credits at the rate they do, enables them to continue pushing the ICE autos - possibly increasing the overall market supply, which in turn is just as bad / worse? Something to watch, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Environmental Credits seem more like a scheme than anything else. It sounds like politicians giving lip service to the people while keeping lobbyists happy.

Regardless, it's nice to see GM and FCA are benefiting Tesla is some ways. It would be really interested to see a powered by Tesla GM/FCA car. Tesla provides engines and battery and the other carmaker makes a car around it. A partnership with a huge car company could help Tesla with production issues and provide a cash boost.

<comment><USER31> I would say that cap and trade is a fairly popular solution to curbing externalities in the field of economics.

<comment><USER32> If the caps would be reduced by meaningful amounts every year so that we reach carbon neutrality in fifteen years or so that would be true. But nobody is doing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Bloomberg revealing another Big Secret without citing sources? Why should I believe them?

<comment><USER34> I also have difficulty believing anything bloomberg puts out after what had happened.

With all the independent investigations and the lack evidence found, I'm baffled that they still haven't admitted their mistake and issued a redaction.

<comment><USER35> What would they issue a retraction for?

Their Huawei article has been borne out by subsequent developments.

<comment><USER36> SuperMicro, not Huawei. A story for which I've not seen one single shred of not-flacid evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Tesla sells invisible objects. Elon Musk is truly brilliant.

<comment><USER38> I'm continually baffled by wide-spread inability of the software(!)/tech crowd here and elsewhere to grasp the idea of non-physical concepts having meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> being able to buy yourself out of regulations... priceless.

<comment><USER40> That's the system working as intended - it forces companies to internalize the costs that previously were externalized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Probably gets them some leverage for cheap takeover when Tesla collapses.

<comment><USER42> That might not be their main motivation, but still it is a conceivable outcome were Tesla to collapse. Not sure that leverage is quite the right word though - there'd be others that would want it (or rather the capability) to survive</comment></comment>


Sharing my offer numbers from big companies for your reference - <AUTHOR> https://us.teamblind.com/article/sharing-my-offer-numbers-from-big-companies-for-your-reference-yNgqUPQR? <comment><USER2> Dupe. Discussion from five days ago (279 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15841738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15841738)

</comment><comment><USER3> Google gave me the exact same offer last year (assuming OP got offered 400 shares vested over 4 years, they were worth less at the time), and I have a very similar background. So it seems credible to me. The fact that I already had a lot of notionally valuable stock from a unicorn startup already vesting seemed to help a lot in negotiations. Then Google's offer helped me negotiate with everyone else (though I mostly applied to a different set of companies).

<comment><USER4> It was astonishing that people doubted the veracity of these #'s the last time this was posted a few days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For how long is it considered ok to sit on an offer?

<comment><USER6> Your offer expires in 2 days.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Evernote meets Aha for a product management wiki - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aha.io/index.php/new-aha-notes-for-better-product-team-collaboration/

<comment><USER2> I expected a clever Evernote integration, but the article doesn't even mention Evernote.</comment>


Windows 10 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows

<comment><USER2> This feels good.

Microsoft has released a new version of windows and it's nothing really special. Just another vendor releasing a product. A bigger vendor and product than most, but at this point, just another vendor. Quite some market share on desktops, less on laptops ([http://i44.tinypic.com/313isup.jpg](http://i44.tinypic.com/313isup.jpg)), some on servers, some on officeware. But not all-powerful any more.

</comment><comment><USER3> been released for a couple of hours now, I'm still busy updating a few machines that needed a few updates and reboots before it would show the upgrade</comment>


Mega Man 2's Soundtrack Played Live, To a Live Speed Run [Video] - <AUTHOR> http://wii.ign.com/articles/121/1216683p1.html

<comment><USER2> Joshua Morse did a wonderful Mega Man album on OC Remix, I recommend it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqaiuA776Mo>

That said, I wouldn't consider this HN worthy, but thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> To me, what makes it HN worthy is the band playing synchronously with a live speed run through the game, shown on the screen in the background. Not sure that I've seen that done before, which makes it pretty epic IMO.</comment></comment>


3D printer builds 'Magic Arms' for two-year-old girl with joint disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/3d-printer-builds-magic-arms-for-two-year-old-girl-with-joint-disease/

<comment><USER2> See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4333592>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337212></comment>


Tech Salaries Stagnant Despite Low Unemployment: Survey - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/01/29/tech-salaries-stagnant-low-unemployment-dice-salary-survey/?CMPID=EM_RE_UP_JS_AD_DA_CP_A_&utm_source=Responsys&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Advisory_DiceAdvisor_A <comment><USER2> A trend I've seen is using salary consultation services that peg the company compensation to rest of market. When enough of an industry does this it has the same result as price fixing but without collusion.

<comment><USER3> I don't buy it. FAANG pays X, so other companies know they need to pay 1.3X to hire FAANG level engineers. So the info sharing may help FAANG collude, but it won't suppress wages for those who can be poached from FAANG. That's assuming there aren't any behind the scenes no-poaching agreements.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti- po...](https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching- lawsuit-for-415-million/)

<comment><USER4> Are there many companies that can pay 1.3x of FAANG compensation? One of the big reasons people go work at the big 5 is the pay.

<comment><USER5> Just SV unicorns usually, and even then a lot of it is speculated value.

But the unicorns definitely pay if you're above a certain experience level - and if you build the correct professional network you can basically demand it.

<comment><USER6> Decacorns more accurately. Lots of mediocre paying startups out there with 1-2 billion valuations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Job market is sort of similar to the real estate market. If you're shopping for a house (or looking for a job), it's pointless to look at the "market as a whole", because that's not the segment you're in: you're shopping for something narrow and specific.

A much better statistic would be to break things down by specialization, seniority, and whether or not a person had a stint at FAANG (which, and this will be deliberately misinterpreted, is a proxy for not completely sucking as an engineer). It's plausible that things have stagnated or gone down in the lower-skill segments with over-saturated labor supply. But anecdotally, on the higher end and in the segment where the talent is relatively scarce, I've never seen it better than it is now.

<comment><USER8> You can apply the same reasoning, perhaps in an even simpler way, to the "low unemployment" part of the statement. "unemployment" is a stat defined at general population level, reaching well beyond the engineering space. Low unemployment means it is probably harder to hire someone out there, but it does not contain any information about how is now harder/easier to hire engineers, let alone tech engineers.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. Talking averages is pointless on most topics where stats are presented. I always want to see both the distributions conditioned on several important variables, as well as marginalized versions thereof for each variable, but such nuance is not commonly available in public discourse. And when it is, people are shocked that it contradicts the simplistic world view they've been sold earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article doesn't say, but I'm curious about the effect of the changing population has on this. I don't know the exact numbers, but if tech unemployment is low and salaries have remained on average the same, that could also be due to adding a lot of entry-level engineers. If that's the case then saying that tech salaries are "stagnant" could be misleading, because individuals in the population are not generally stagnating.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow. In this thread, I am seeing a lot of people severely overestimating the percentage that FAANG employees comprise of the total market.

Just as the Bay Area and New York have real estate markets that are outliers of the rest of the country, so are the salaries outliers for the rest of our industry.

The report covers the industry as a whole, and demand for developers is growing just about _everywhere_. The questions the report raises can't be answered solely through the lens of Silicon Valley.

There is a lot of evidence that wages aren't rising across the entire economy, even with a tight labor market. I don't know of anyone that has proposed a solid economic theory for why that is, but it looks like our industry is only part of a larger trend.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd be curious to see what job descriptions made up the survey. There's easily more than $100k difference between the something like a junior help desk analyst vs a senior sw engineer, and that's not even getting into FAANG compensation levels.

If you mix all of those roles into the same bucket for this survey, it makes the average salary number somewhat useless. Not to mention that geography plays a big role.

</comment><comment><USER12> This link has a pretty good explanation of why the supply-demand model for the job market doesn't work: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-05/supply...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-05/supply- and-demand-does-a-poor-job-of-explaining-depressed-wages)

</comment><comment><USER13> In tech sales at startups there has been a significant uptick in base salaries and total compensation packages. The most lucrative companies two years ago are fighting to remain relevant (when they haven't updated their compensation packages). It's not all good as it does mean that there's much less margin than there was a few years ago, but as other commentators have pointed out, this data is less than worthless.

I have a pretty good pulse on B2B software sales comp data (because that's my job), but I know nothing about how marketers or engineers or FAANG pay. It's like trying to make a generalization about "Finance" but then putting together a compensation survey that takes in the M&A rainmakers at Goldman Sachs in with retail tellers at Bank of America and gives you an average. Pointless.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's all with a fairly strong USD. It means that outsourcing buys you more developers abroad than with cheap USD.

</comment><comment><USER15> The barriers to switch jobs (tech interviews) are so high that people who are willing to switch may not be able to. This reduces their negotiating power in asking for raises.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much of this is because students don't count in unemployment statistics. Most new grads from non-elite schools have trouble finding their first job, but do manage to line one up while they graduate. However, during the time they're trying to line up a job, they're effectively behaving as unemployed job seekers, rather desperate and willing to accept low wages for example.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd bet it's just a function of what people are willing to do the job for. $93k gives you a very comfortable lifestyle, and tech workers tend to be much more motivated by the work itself than their peers. Those who really care about getting rich will go to SV and do a startup. So there's not as much pressure for increase.

<comment><USER17> $93k supporting a family (stay at home partner, two kids) is most definitely not comfortable, whether in the Midwest or the coasts. Insurance premiums alone would be ~$15k/year (pretax, but still). Throw in a mortgage or rent @ $1500/month, that's another $18k/year, you've already consumed a third of your wages.

<comment><USER18> Im at a $100k, my wife stays at home with our two school age kids, we live quite comfortably.

<comment><USER17> I assume you live somewhere rural, with low cost of living, and not a suburb of a major metro. Is my assumption accurate? You might even be remote, in which case you've traded higher wages for lower employment mobility (which is a reasonable compromise to make, but not common).

<comment><USER18> I am in the process of moving to live 30 minutes from New Orleans and yes I work remote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Most of the salary surveys on sites like dice show numbers that are lower than what people who know what they are doing actually end up getting. Sites like Blind etc. tell a better story.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone go from engineering to sales? Everyone talks about high programmer salaries but from what I have seen enterprise sales is where the real money is.</comment>


How a Misquotation Is Born (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html <comment><USER2> I don't think Twain has anything like the same 'mind share' outside of America (speaking from the UK) - or else I'm just making excuses for being much worse read than I'd like - so for a long time I honestly thought 'Mark Twain' was a fictional character to whom a quotation could be jokingly attributed, sort of like 'Acme Ltd', etc.

Of course it is sometimes done for comic effect, and that probably didn't help, but I was quite surprised when I, relatively recently, realised that he was actually a real author, and probably some of the attributions I've come across were real and correct!

<comment><USER3> I think this is mostly a personal quirk of yours - Mark Twain is world-famous. The bad Twain quotes are, I think you're right, more of a US thing.

<comment><USER4> We'd have to do a study to know for sure, but as a North American having lived in Western Europe for several years now, I think you are massively overestimating the importance of the US in Europe or the world. Most people here know next to nothing about the US or the anglosphere, except for some stereotypes and exported cultural artefacts.

They know about as much about the US as the average American does about Germany or how to speak German, which is basically nothing.

One has to remember, English is a business tool here, the majority cannot speak English fluently, and they do not use it in their free time, or if they do it is to watch US TV shows or movies, not read American literature. Add to that, that more recently, a lot of the people I meet openly hate the US.

Most Americans who visit only interact with the segment of population which can speak English, not with the majority of locals who can't.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. It's quite possible that this disagreement is particular to The Netherlands, but we're /steeped/ in US culture. We also 'hate' the US. It's complicated.

If you listen to a conversation any thirty- and probably twenty-something (and possibly teen?) has, it's steeped in references to US media. Friends, Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, etc.

We had Obama election parties back when we thought he was an actual change candidate. Among the more reading- or academically-inclined, we reference Twain, Poe, Wallace (D.F.), and so on.

Personally I'm not very Dutch, and so my alignment with US culture in the broadest sense is greater than most, but I'm constantly surprised by how much of my culture here is defined by the US. It properly eclipses anything home- made, anyways, at least when it comes to entertainment, which is what we spend most idle time on anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Extreme irony in seeing this title changed from the original "That Wasn't Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born"

</comment><comment><USER7> "It ain't what you don't know that gets you. It's what you think you know that just ain't so."

Not Mark Twain. Josh Billings is credited with something similar, if less pithy. If Donald Rumsfeld had understood it (he famously didn't: "known unknowns"), the US might have stayed out of Iraq.

<comment><USER8> It certainly doesn't sound like Twain. That first sentence is awful.

As far as Rumsfeld, known unknowns means knowing what you don't know the answer to, his problem was more with "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.", because obviously he needed another category there as well, the incorrect known knowns.

<comment><USER7> Exactly: he listed known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, but completely neglected the one that got him, even after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quotes found on the internet do not have genuine sources.

\- Abraham Lincoln</comment>


Against Set Theory (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ontology.buffalo.edu/04/AgainstSetTheory.pdf <comment><USER2> A mathematician's (or, at least, _this_ mathematician's) instinctive response to a paper titled "Against set theory" is to think that it must be the work of a crank (not to disparage the work of reputable mathematicians exploring alternative foundations—but I think that most of them know that, to earn their ideas a receptive foundation, they had better focus at least on what they are for rather than what they are against), but it should probably be noted that this is against set theory from a _philosopher_ 's point of view, not a _mathematician_ 's. (With which I can't quibble, though neither can I agree; I am no philosopher, and the fact that mathematics _can_ be used fruitfully in philosophy doesn't mean that it always _should_.) Indeed, at a skim, the complaint seems to be much more about the mathematisation of philosophy broadly speaking, rather than about the encroachment of set theory in particular.

(I also take issue with the claim on p. 3 that Cauchy was doing only unconscious set theory. It is true that he came before what we might call Cantor's formalisation of the subject, but I think he probably thought in something much closer to a modern "naïvely set theoretic" way about mathematics than almost all o his predecessors.)

<comment><USER3> Introducing mathematical notation into philosophy gives, not _the_ firm foundation, but _some_ firm foundation, upon which to argue. Otherwise a whole lot of shite is spewed and no progress is made.

In its are sentences of long words that serve to emote, cajole and frankly baffle rather than enlighten. There's some of it here but it's not the worst. What I can't accept is stuff like

" has been to persuade many philosophers that the rich panoply of entities the world throws at us can be reduced to individuals and sets of various sorts, for example sets as properties, sets of ordered tuples as relations, sets of possible worlds as propositions, and so on and so forth. It is hard to know where to start in revealing the scope of the damage caused to ontology by the thoughtless or supposedly scientifically economic reduction of various entities to sets"

To model something you need to simplify it. What's he suggesting instead?

Other oddities " Richmond Thomason notes that Montague saw grammar as a branch of mathematics and not (as in Chomsky) of psychology". Pretty sure Chomsky's hierarchy of grammars, types 3 to 0, are considered by him as mathematical, not psychological.

Not my area but I'm not convinced it's worth digging into this paper.

(edit)

Further down we get to the bullshit. The emotive crap: "tiresome to continue citing further absurdities in philosophy resulting from the over-zealous application" so instead we replace defined set theoretic terms with english, delights such as, replacing _< x,y>_ with _x followed by y; x and y in that order_. Ha ha ha now explain what logical implication means without being formal. (edit: and then show me some symbol manipulation using it, without the symbols) Not happening.

I do understand the terminology is intimidating, and there's much to be said for annotating the set-theoretic with plain english _as he suggests_ but to replace it... that would be a massive step backwards.

<comment><USER4> > To model something you need to simplify it. What's he suggesting instead?

But is set theory "simple"? The author mentions several ways in which it is the opposite of simple.

Also - if you need to model _something_, that doesn't mean you should try to model _everything_ with the same kind of model.

<comment><USER3> Could you point to those ways? I guess I missed them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fortunately, this is about the (mis)use of set theory in philosophy and not mathematics. Why set theory, though? Since it is being gradually replaced by category theory as a more modern, practically better, and a more powerful foundation of mathematics, I expected that philosophers would be more interested in (mis)using category theory these days.

<comment><USER6> Ever heard of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the guy who popularized truth tables? Check out his little known work "on the foundations of mathematics." beautiful stuff.

\-- an analytic philosopher

<comment><USER7> Yes, I believe undergrads(!) cover this in Honors Advanced Truth Tables at UChicago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Sign up to download"? No. Just no.

<comment><USER2> See the link posted by ivan_ah ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207024) ): [http://ontology.buffalo.edu/04/AgainstSetTheory.pdf](http://ontology.buffalo.edu/04/AgainstSetTheory.pdf) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've only made it partway through this so far, but footnotes 4 through 7 make me think I already don't understand the author, since he seems to be presenting these as self-evidently absurd sentences.

<comment><USER10> Well, I think the idea that one can buy a set from a fruiterer is somewhat absurd. Suppose a fruiterer has only three apples left in stock – let us name them Apple1, Apple2, Apple3. Could I buy the set {Apple1, Apple2, Apple3} from the fruiterer? Could I instead buy the set {{Apple1, Apple2}, {Apple1, Apple3}}? How would these two purchases differ?

Part of the motivation of mereology is that, overall, it maps better than set theory to everyday life. One can come up with some really simple examples where set theory matches "common sense" well, but for more complex examples that breaks down. Many set theory texts try to justify set theory based on those simple examples while ignoring the more complex ones, and ignoring the alternative of mereology which claims to handle those more complex cases in a way which better respects common sense.

<comment><USER11> > Well, I think the idea that one can buy a set from a fruitier is somewhat > absurd. Suppose a fruitier has only three apples left in stock – let us name > them Apple1, Apple2, Apple3. Could I buy the set {Apple1, Apple2, Apple3} > from the fruitier? Could I instead buy the set {{Apple1, Apple2}, {Apple1, > Apple3}}? How would these two purchases differ?

Is it possible to buy two apples or you can only buy "this" apple and "that" apple? How would these two purchases differ?

I would say depends on how you define the structure and operationalize the problem. In your case the straightforward way would be to allow only for the first variant to make sense.

> Many set theory texts try to justify set theory based on those simple > examples while ignoring the more complex ones, and ignoring the alternative > of mereology which claims to handle those more complex cases in a way which > better respects common sense.

I am not sure what you mean by "the more complex ones", but the advancements in the set theory allowed to develop the measure theory, which is the basis of rigorous probability theory and statistics.

<comment><USER10> > I am not sure what you mean by "the more complex ones"

What I mean is that when you introduce nested sets (sets of sets, sets of sets of sets), and then allow repetition of elements in nested sets, it isn't clear what that means (if anything) if you think of sets as groups of physical objects. Mereology avoids this particular issue.

> the advancements in the set theory allowed to develop the measure theory, > which is the basis of rigorous probability theory and statistics.

Well, there are two different questions about set theory (1) is it an accurate model of everyday human thinking about grouping objects? (2) is it useful as a foundation for developing various useful mathematical theories? A lot of defenders of set theory assume the answer to both questions is "Yes", or even fail to clearly keep the two questions clearly distinguished. The correct answers could well be "No" and "Yes".

<comment><USER11> >What I mean is that when you introduce nested sets (sets of sets, sets of sets of sets), and then allow repetition of elements in nested sets, it isn't clear what that means (if anything) if you think of sets as groups of physical objects. Mereology avoids this particular issue.

It avoids it by cost of being useless for any serious mathematical endeavor (mereology is essentially a complete Boolean algebra without a zero element). Yes, probably compactness and differentiability is not something clear and easy to grasp, especially when you have groups of physical objects in mind, but they are very useful constructs grounded in modern set theory.

I can't comment on how useful set theory or mereology is in reagrds to classical Western ontology, but I have no reason to doubt that many people in humanities may abuse and misuse mathematical and scientific apparatus.

>(1) is it an accurate model of everyday human thinking about grouping objects? (2) is it useful as a foundation for developing various useful mathematical theories? A lot of defenders of set theory assume the answer to both questions is "Yes", or even fail to clearly keep the two questions clearly distinguished. The correct answers could well be "No" and "Yes".

I think what you perceive as "failing to clearly keep the two questions clearly distinguished" may simply be a misinterpration of deep disinterest in the question, I think most mathematicians wouldn't perceive the question of "how everyday human thinking works" to be in the realm of math. Trying to tie in math with metaphysics fell out of favor since times of Gödel.

<comment><USER10> > I think what you perceive as "failing to clearly keep the two questions > clearly distinguished" may simply be a misinterpration of deep disinterest > in the question, I think most mathematicians wouldn't perceive the question > of "how everyday human thinking works" to be in the realm of math.

Well, how "everyday thinking works" is very much related to the realm of math in my mind. Most commonly classical logic is selected as a foundation for mathematics, although there has been some work done on alternative foundations (most significantly constructivism/intuitionism, although there are less notable projects trying to build out mathematics on yet other foundations.) But, classical logic is commonly criticised by philosophers as being a poor model of everyday human thought, as represented by issues such as the paradoxes of material implication. So, alternative logics get proposed which attempt to answer those criticisms – for example, relevant/relevance logic. The study of these alternative logical formalisms is itself part of mathematics (mathematical logic, proof theory, etc), and the question of whether any of those alternative logical formalisms can be used as a foundation to develop other parts of mathematics (such as analysis) is an interesting mathematical question. And, added to all that, studying alternative logics is also interesting from the viewpoint of their possible practical applications in computer science (in fields such as automated reasoning.)

On the topic of set theory, while most mathematics assumes ZFC, there has been a lot of work on alternative set theories [1]. For each of these alternatives, we can ask (a) the philosophical question of whether it does a better job of modelling naïve human thought than ZFC does; (b) the metamathematical question of how easy it is to build out the rest of mathematics on that foundation; (c) the question of whether the theory has any useful applications in other fields such as computer science. All three questions are interesting, and they are all interconnected.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The real issue is not any set theory, but another one: do sets exist? If they exist, they can function as causal antecedents. However, it is unintuitive to think of sets as causal antecedents. This is why great mathematicians postulate another world for numbers, sets, abstract objects, etc: Platonic world. That way, you can get rid of unintuitive-ness in the world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER13> You'd think he'd rail against Alian Badiou but he doesn't.

Myself I refuse to accept the axiom of choice and I think Steve Wolfram should grow some balls and reject it too.

<comment><USER14> If you reject the axiom of choice, what are your thoughts on Zorn's lemma and the well ordering theorem (other than the observation of "they too are false" via equivalency)?

<comment><USER13> The ultrafilter attempt to bypass Arrow's Impossibility Theorem demonstrates how Zorn sends you up the creek without a paddle.

You can postulate such an object exists but you cannot realize it, so it doesn't translate to praxis. (e.g. you can't use the ultrafilter to decide an election)

That which can be constructed or described in a finite number of bits is more real than the phony numbers that Cantor justified. (e.g. Feigenbaum's constant is more real than any one of those real numbers that classical analysts try to bracket but never catch)

I got my honorable discharge from grad school and part of the climb in mathematical physics is reading some paper from 1957 that looked promising but after a close read you learn they got it wrong at page 47 and you have to figure it out yourself because you can't find the answers in the literature. You find out that the median scientific paper is wrong the hard way.

Wolfram wants to use computation (e.g. simulation, construction) as a praxis for all intellectual activity so he should privilege that map out of the Borges story over the territory of that deteriorating Empire which it mirrors.

Scientists in 2020 don't calculate in Cantor's phony numbers, but instead with those IEEE floats which never work quite right when you decimalize them.

<comment><USER15> > Feigenbaum's constant is more real than any one of those real numbers that > classical analysts try to bracket but never catch

What do you mean?

<comment><USER13> Feigenbaum's constant is a number like Pi or e. It is transcendental. Even though you can't write it down with a finite number of digits, you can write down a formula to compute as many digits as you want (if you are ready to boil the oceans, build a Dyson sphere, harness a Quasar) You can give it a name and refer to it directly.

Any formula like that provides a set of brackets, "real" numbers with a finite number of digits (e.g. names) that we can say that the "phony" number is between. We can make the brackets finer and finer, but you can't pick out one in particular.

Thus 3, pi, pi/e + 6, sqrt(pi-e) are more "real" than the the continuum we imagine between them. Being able to name things, for instance, makes it possible to talk about them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > what distinguishes a from {a}?

Heavens. Stopped there.

<comment><USER17> the sentence you quoted is prefixed by " _set theory has no natural interpretation._ ". that's the problem.

if you're trying to talk about herds of sheep, you might decide to represent them with sets – that sounds like what sets are for! but then is a single- sheep-set meaningfully different from an "unwrapped" sheep? how?

in general the article seems to be talking about the issues with using set theory to talk about real-world stuff; it's not questioning the math.

<comment><USER18> Mathematics is about theories, philosophy is about describing reality. Theories that have little to do with reality are philosophically irrelevant, confusing and to be avoided despite being mathematically interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Better link: [http://ontology.buffalo.edu/04/AgainstSetTheory.pdf](http://ontology.buffalo.edu/04/AgainstSetTheory.pdf)

<comment><USER20> Changed from [https://www.academia.edu/7590816/Against_Set_Theory?email_wo...](https://www.academia.edu/7590816/Against_Set_Theory?email_work_card=view- paper). Thanks!</comment></comment>


Software developers should avoid traumatic changes - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/11/26/Avoid-traumatic-changes.html <comment><USER2> Its the most annoying thing. Also, APIs having previous versions deprecated.</comment>


Country banned tobacco sales to fight Covid-19. The result was a crime wave - <AUTHOR> https://fortune.com/2020/08/16/covid-south-africa-tobacco-ban-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> Country = South Africa</comment>


Mars One - First Private Mars Mission in 2018 - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mars-one-first-private-mars-mission-in-2018

<comment><USER2> This still looks like a giant scam to me. Not because their goal is set high, but because they have yet to release viable technical information. Just take a look at the founders ama on reddit[1] from a year ago.

1: [http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ufb42/ama_i_am_fo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ufb42/ama_i_am_founder_of_mars_one_sending_four_people/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait Lockheed Martin is working with them? I had the impression the project was not being taken seriously by professionals. Did that change lately?

<comment><USER4> This exactly what I was wondering. I'm guessing that if Mars One brings them a pile of cash to their door, Lockheed will be happy to do some design work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How could a mission like this cost just $400K? I'm no rocket scientist, but that amount looks WAY too little.</comment>


How I made my own RFID tag [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWzyPZAPbt0 <comment><USER2> Speaking of homemade RFID tags, a couple impressive hacks.

1\. Micah Elizabeth Scott built a working RFID tag using just two parts: an ATTiny85 micro controller and a small inductor. The two leads of the inductor are soldered directly to two I/O pins of the processor.

That is the _only_ connection to the processor. The power and ground pins are not connected. The processor gets power via leakage current from the I/O pins. It gets clocked from one of those I/O pins, too.

[https://scanlime.org/2008/09/using-an-avr-as-an-rfid- tag/](https://scanlime.org/2008/09/using-an-avr-as-an-rfid-tag/)

2\. Here's another one of hers, this time with a coil made from magnet wire, and with fancier mounting. The coil, processor, and this time a couple of tuning capacitors, is squished onto duct tape and sealed with clear packing tape.

[https://scanlime.org/2011/05/duct-tape-rfid- tag-1/](https://scanlime.org/2011/05/duct-tape-rfid-tag-1/)

3\. Trammell Hudson made use of her antenna and processor only design for a project of his, which has a pretty good write up.

[https://trmm.net/AVR_RFID](https://trmm.net/AVR_RFID)

<comment><USER3> The homebrew RFID tags in the articles you link to are LF (125-134 kHz) RFID tags.

The ones described in the video are UHF (860-960 MHz) RFID tags, which differ considerably in design and protocol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great video, and great channel. Been a fan for a while. I love how in-depth he goes on everything and how passionate he is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Someone did purchase some ACF and can recommend a seller?

</comment><comment><USER6> love the idea that simple curiosity leads on such a fascinating path. glad he mentioned that a few times during the video.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also interesting is his video on the process of using YouTube Premiers with this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz8UpKEhMQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz8UpKEhMQo)

<comment><USER8> Sounds like he's connected with youtube now. I'm sure the team is checking out that feedback. So, hopefully it'll get fixed as it's bad for both content creators and viewers. The video was pretty cool. Really liked the all access "how it's made" type content. Pretty cool.

<comment><USER9> It won't revert the damage it's done already, though. Youtube, being the main source of income for so many creators, plays a dangerous game with those 'beta-tests', offering apparently not-well-tested features to the creators, playing with their revenue as a result.

<comment><USER10> no one apart from "game the system" type channels like those kid toy unboxing channels are using youtube as a primary source of revenue anymore.

merchandise,patreon and ad sponsorships are the only way to make an actual living with youtube

<comment><USER9> Literally in the video on which you're commenting, the creator states: "Right now, the main source of income that pays for this, is Youtube ads"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> why has this been flagged?

<comment><USER12> Possibly because of some issues with the URL and the title that have since been fixed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Software for making control model diagrams? - <AUTHOR> Looking for software for making professional looking control model schematics and similar kinds of block-arrow diagrams. On MacOS but not a dealbreaker. Thanks! <comment><USER2> [https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/](https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I found this as well. It's perfect for my needs.</comment></comment>


China's Hunger for Commodities Wanes, and Pain Spreads Among Producers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/business/international/chinas-hunger-for-commodities-wanes-and-pain-spreads-among-producers.html?smid=tw-share <comment><USER3> China's economy is transitioning from being manufacturing-based to consumer- based. We all knew it would happen, it's just happening quicker than most assumed. The sky is not going to fall.

China will keep on rolling, maybe not growing by 7% each year, but certainly by 3-4%. They've already developed at an astonishing rate, perhaps quicker than any other large nation in world history.

I wouldn't count them out...

<comment><USER4> > They've already developed at an astonishing rate, perhaps quicker than any > other large nation in world history.

Although I think that says more about the incompetence of the Mao government. China had a long history of education, commerce, technology, and relative peace. It had no business being that poor.

<comment><USER3> Immediately prior to Mao however they had colonialism, the Opium Wars, the Boxer rebellion, civil war, invasion by the Japanese and WWII. They were a poor, war ravaged agrarian state. And in ~65 years the world's largest economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When China consume too many ressources she is draining the world, but if consumption weakens she is "rattling" the world.

<comment><USER6> Haters gonna hate. Given the West's history with China, they're not in a position to preach about anything.

<comment><USER7> Haters gonna hate, wumaos gonna wumao. There is plenty of bias all around, but right now I want economic news on China that isn't propaganda, what other choices do we have?

<comment><USER6> That accusation is uncalled for. I'm not a Chinese person, I've never set foot on China, and the most contact I've ever had with Chinese people other than my grandparents was on IRC and other online avenues of discussion, but I happen to have, um, a little bit of historical awareness.

<comment><USER7> I didn't accuse you have being a wumao, I just said "haters gonna hate" like "wumaos gonna wumao".

These are interesting times, we need the critical articles to get us through it, not the wumao or chinadaily "all is sunshine" variety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's incredible that planners have fallen into the cobweb [1]. For enterprises with long lag from set-up should be aware that you are not the only one thinking "I'll have me a bit of that" and that you'll all be on-stream together and then there will be too much.

It was first noted in the pig breeding in 1925 [2]. Breeders saw today's prices, bred pigs based on it and then too many pigs were all born at the same time depressing prices, so nobody breeds and then prices go up - <USER2>

> Companies that took advantage of the cheap debt to increase production are > now stuck with a big bill that will be difficult to cover.

And they will be blamed, like householders that borrowed to buy McMansions.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER9> You can't expect China to keep growing at double digit rates. Everyone's GDP normalizes over time ( see Japan, South Korea etc) and China is no exception.

Add to that a debt bubble because of cheap lending. Also, weren't most companies taking out bonds or loans to do stock buybacks to drive share prices up.

The slowdown is going to hurt most of the developing world while the dollar gets stronger as folks flee their markets.</comment>


On Hiring Developers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rziehl/from_the_terminal/blob/master/posts/005_on_hiring_developers.md

<comment><USER3> Reading these comments, you'd think that everyone on GitHub was only there to beef up his or her resume.

Personally, I've made far more open source contributions at my current (awesome) job than I ever did while on the job market. I use GitHub because it makes coding more fun, and because I get a huge thrill every time someone tells me they used one of my projects.

I also don't understand the OP's hostility to the open source movement. If you don't want to share your code, then don't share it! That's totally fine. But I'm very conscious of the fact that almost all the tools I use every day -- Linux, tmux, vim, Ruby, Python, etc, not to mention hundreds of libraries and plugins -- were all developed by people in the open source community. Often these people were working for free or for far below-market wages. Whether or not OP likes the OSS movement, modern software development is built on open source tools. Personally, I feel an obligation to try to give something back, even if it's something as small as a REST API wrapper.

<comment><USER4> I think you're misconstruing what the author has said, as he does not appear to have "hostility to the open source movement", as he has several open sourced projects on his github.

Did he express discontent with a specific type of advocate? Yes. But he explained why, so it should be something you could understand by reading what he expressed.

He basically shares the same view as you: if you don't want to share your code, then it should be totally fine. There are people who do not agree with this, and this is where he draws a distinction.

<comment><USER3> I agree with the OP's statement that if you didn't contribute to the code (and you didn't pay for it, etc), you shouldn't have a say in whether or not the software is open-sourced.

However, I think that unless the programmer has a good reason not to open source something, they should default to releasing it. I have a couple reasons for this.

One, it's impossible to predict what other programmers will or will not find useful. I have lots of code on GitHub that is not in any sense production ready. I don't care -- maybe someone will find it helpful.

Two, as I said in my previous comment, whether we want to admit it or not, we're all using and benefiting from open source software all the time. GitHub -- the site we're arguing over -- would never have been possible without Git. I feel indebted to the people who came before me and made all this possible, and I don't understand people who react to the subtle pressures to contribute with hostility.

The person at the bottom of this comment list said "I have about 6-7 repos in GitHub...all private. I will never give that out in a link. I don't mind you looking at it in front of me, but I'm not giving anyone access to it." I just totally don't understand this attitude. Code isn't money. I'm not diminishing you by reading your code. And, as the last 30 years of blazing success in open source software has shown, the benefits of the open-source ecosystem are far from abstract. They're the foundation of everything we do.

<comment><USER5> >I just totally don't understand this attitude. Code isn't money. I'm not diminishing you by reading your code.

I think the argument goes:

Then why is any code proprietary? If I'm interviewing at a company, I should be able to see that company's code prior to working there.

I also think a general issue is that practices such as this and employment agreements where the company owns any work you do off hours make it harder for people to jump from being employees to working for themselves (both in mindset and in practical ways).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally I hear "someday it will turn into a project" all the time. More times than not it never does.

Nonetheless,

I'm actually ok if someone doesn't have an extensive github (or any for that matter) on an interview, because I will spend the time and talk with them. I totally understand however that more or less many firms try to filter out some of the mass piles of resumes by using github. But most people aren't like me who want to dig in and _work_ with `you`.

Having said that I very much still like to see a github link. Here is why (and they are biased toward synergy in a coop manner, which is how I culturally work; you may be different):

\- You spent the time to do something you thought was cool (dedication) \- You did the above regardless of how it looked which amongst many things to me means you have thick skin and are willing to learn (it's a two way street mind you). \- you've learned to communicate with other developers => _on their terms_ \- you are not living in a cave and open source doesn't come to you from only one foss org or your one fav info site. \- you are willing to dive into code (forking) and making the changes necessary even if it means doing it yourself \- good ole adding to the knowledge of society (you just don't do it for the money, you have more than one dimension which drives you)

At least these are my opinions and I hope that at least you might be able to see one take of many on why some might want to see a github link.

Btw, If anyone else feels the same way, feel free to ping me! Always nice to meet other devs that share some of my views!

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, a GitHub profile is not perfect. It's way better than nothing - you get to see the developer's coding style, commenting approach and overall code organization. You say it's not your best work? then put something you're proud of on there before you send your resume. If you don't have one project that you think is representative of your current skill, you have to understand that is problematic for potential employers. Don't want to share it on GitHub? that's fine, send code examples instead of a GitHub link. But you can't hire a developer without reviewing some of his/her code first.

Personally, I find a Stack Overflow profile to be the best indicator of a developers skill, if he has a somewhat active profile (over 2-3k points). Being able to explain technical solutions, I think, is the best way to see if someone is both capable and can work in a team

Regarding resumes - another touchy matter. When I freelanced I haven't sent a resume as such as I had a portfolio site, but now that I'm on the other side of the table, going over resumes - most of them are completely terrible. Some people are completely clueless on what to put on a resume and others try to game it - putting stuff like "raised x metric by y% on project z" \- giving me zero clue to what they actually did there. It's very rare I can get an actual glimpse to what the person was doing at his previous work. That's why you'll need to tell them your story when you interview... it's too easy to assume the interviewer was just lazy going over your resume because you think you "nailed" it, but in truth your resume probably sucks as an indicator of your actual experience and ability.

<comment><USER8> I have seen more than one great developer with SO score < 1000\. Some people like to code rather than browsing SO.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, StackOverflow scores and even upvotes on Hacker News or Reddit is a neat metric, but in the same sense that commits pushed or lines of code written are. They hold some value but they are by no means determine quality or the value of a person's contributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At least when recruiting offshore, github has been a great filter. People who have github usually end up sharing a bunch of characteristics: they enjoy coding, they know more api integrations, they are continuously improving.

I'll add the general caveat that it obviously doesn't apply to every GitHub member but to many. And that is just fine when you have a huge pool of candidates and you need a decent filter for the upstream.

</comment><comment><USER11> The fundamental problem with Github profiles is that they are easily gamed. Once it becomes common practice, everyone will have a Github account with lots of code -- and I suspect a lot they didn't write.

As much as Fizzbuzz (or equivalents) are despised, I think it is still probably a more useful first-level filters. But not much more.

<comment><USER12> The problem with that, is that the depth of github is pretty hard to fake. Sure, you can have repos with code in them, but the time of day you commit, what your commits look like, how you work, is well documented.

<comment><USER13> I think that is the author's point though: he has a lots of private repos on bitbucket that he doesn't want to share. The work history and depth of his code and such is not publicized.

Note also that this is the same for private repos hosted on github. When you are logged in, you can see the activity and commits of yourself (and your teammates) in all of the public+private repos that you have access to, but your public profile only shows public commits. This is by design.

Here is my example image, when I was doing a bunch of work at the start of the year in some private repos: [http://imgur.com/4Tr3LQz](http://imgur.com/4Tr3LQz) The top is my public activity and the bottom one is my public+private activity. So if you're used to working out of private repos, then nothing is publicly documented and your actual github profile is not very 'deep'.

<comment><USER12> My point was, you can't just fake it because development history looks very different than 'copy and pasted code in' history.

All of that is true, but my point is that you can't just gin up fake repositories to look good on a resume.

<comment><USER14> You've just given me an idea for a project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't read this as the author opposing any use of github in hiring. I read it as a warning to keep companies from over-emphasizing something that has flaws and can be gamed.

People should think about why exactly they are requiring applicants have a github and make sure they aren't getting lazy about who they let through their hiring filters and who they exclude. It can be especially problematic when you have less technically savvy people involved with hiring process.

Anyone reading HN over the years can probably agree that there have been many bad ideas that have caught on over the years, such as throwing gotcha brainteasers at applicants. There are also good ideas that have been misapplied.

<comment><USER9> You sir understood my point of view perfectly. I am not opposed to Github or any tool for that matter, only the misuse of that tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I'm hiring, I want to see some code. I will need time to browse and read a candidate's code - which is where Github comes in. Also GH gives us their comments, pull requests & community interactions, which as others have said is invaluable.

Github, Bitbucket, Google code, Sourceforge (even Stackoverflow!) - it doesn't really matter where. It just needs to be public.

The OP's comments about Stallman and "Free software fanatics" are way off the mark; technical hiring staff just want to see your code. Fizz Buzz be damned! The code cannot lie!

And if your precious projects are too secret and awesome to be seen, then I very much doubt I'll hire :)

<comment><USER16> This is basically what I wanted to write.

In addition, I'm not a huge fan of linkedin either. There are no guarantees to it. One is that most of what's on there is hard to check and linkedin endorsements are just unreal to start with.

I know people who just endorse each other for random things. I have endorsements from people who I have never worked with for technologies I have never worked with.

So in the end — Github or similar wins. Allows me to see their code (and contributions), and that's what matters. For the rest (compatibility on a social level), there are interviews and probation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Occasionally, I put some code on Github that I consider to be more useful when open than closed. Other times, I create a small project just to share useful programming information along with a few coding examples that someone can clone if they wish.

There's a lot of code I could put up, but I don't consider it to be as useful to anyone else in the current form that it is in (tailored more for specific projects with dependencies that may not be useful to everyone). Other times, certain clients I work for may not like it because it's code I also wrote for them with the understanding it was proprietary for their own use (websites). Sometimes I may also write code for other developers or (indirectly) for their employer and posting it without their consent would make things complicated.

<comment><USER9> This is one topic I didn't touch on that I would have liked to but my post would have been even longer and it's already a fairly long read. I have another post planned that addresses this. Over the last year or so I gave a lot to employers and stopped coding things I enjoyed coding for fun. My Github profile probably makes it seem that I don't work hard because of this. For some weird reason though, I have worked on some open source projects on Github yet it doesn't say I contributed to them but you'll find my commits in the history on master.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What companies actually require people to have a GitHub and LinkedIn to apply? I've been doing recruiting for about a year and a half, and I've never seen this be a hard and fast prerequisite.

I guess I could see a situation where the HR machine makes you fill out some stupid form when you apply to a company (in the same way that this HR machine makes you upload your resume in a certain format), but I'd be very surprised if those rules and requirements come from hiring managers.

It makes sense to want 1) a concise way to see where you've been working, what you've been doing, and what you write like (presumably this is the LinkedIn portion) and 2) code samples, but it doesn't make sense to require that this info comes to you in a specific medium.

</comment><comment><USER19> Actual author here. Wrote this post last night to express my thoughts on hiring trends I've noticed but mostly to thank a friend of mine, went to bed, woke up to a bunch of tweets and one of my other friends said my post was on Hacker News. I have read everyone's comments and will try to answer as many of them as possible. Thanks for all the feedback everyone, no matter how positive or negative. It's interesting reading all of your perspectives. This made my day!

</comment><comment><USER20> I have about 6-7 repos in GitHub...all private. I will never give that out in a link. I don't mind you looking at it in front of me, but I'm not giving anyone access to it. And since all that code is sitting on my laptop, it's easier to let me plug my laptop to your widescreen and let's talk code.

<comment><USER19> For my first developer position, I actually went into the interview with my own laptop and showed the two developers some of my projects written in DarkBasic. They could see the code if they wanted to but I haven't released that code anywhere. The demos were very visual which was a great hook in an interview, I highly recommend that people take their closed source projects to interviews just to demonstrate what they are capable of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Github - <USER2>

LinkedIn - never. Circle jerking recommendations and filling your profile up with buzzwords.

</comment><comment><USER22> Regarding LinkedIn, I am seeing selective-career-history-wiping happening more everyday: [http://mobocube.com/post/5312332640/did-your-prospective- hir...](http://mobocube.com/post/5312332640/did-your-prospective-hires-wipe- their-job-history)

<comment><USER19> Interesting, I don't think I would ever tamper with my employment history. If I got asked why I am not at a company anymore I would be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there free software armies forcing people to put everything in GPL? Is Stallman something like Hitler? From first few paragraphs I thought he's trying to draw that picture.

<comment><USER19> Not saying Stallman is like Hitler but I honestly find his views such as "everything should be free (as in speech)" very hypocritical. At a conference I attended he also stated "artists and musicians should not expect money for their work" which I find is again very arrogant. Those pursuits also require effort and those people can determine how much they value what they create. I still think Stallman has provided a ton of value to the community, I just disagree with some of his views. He is still a good person.

<comment><USER23> You started it as "On hiring developers" and quickly went on to a discussion about Stallman's views. Also from what I've understood you are not just criticizing Stallman's "request" to give back to the community but whole idea of sharing code.

You are free to criticize anyone or anything but the Stallman part really did look like going off on a tangent.

It's really easy to be an ass on the internet but I'm not attacking you or anything (Like one commenter probably thought I am). Just pointing out what I noticed.

<comment><USER19> No worries, no offence taken at all. I welcome all constructive criticism, more so than positive feedback so thanks!

I know it was a tangent from the initial impression readers got from the title but it served as an analogy that people can blindly misuse beliefs just like they can blindly misuse tools. I am not a fan of name dropping and in that given example I admit I could have avoided mentioning Stallman looking back at the post and generalized it to free software advocates who try force their beliefs on others. Also want to add that I do not think all free software advocates force their beliefs on other developers.

Criticism appreciated, like I said, no offence taken, I did not think you were attacking me.

<comment><USER24> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them (see comment guidelines). Discussing Stallman and his opinion regarding culture is just treading the same old ground that has been done before.

<comment><USER19> As mentioned already in this thread, in my initial comment on this thread in fact, I had no idea this post was even going to end up on HackerNews. I write independently without Hacker News in mind. I write for myself. Why would I have read the comment guidelines on Hacker News before writing a blog post that I had no intention of putting up on Hacker News in the first place?

@chanux asked a question with regards to my blog post and I answered it with my justified opinion. It was hardly a mindless flamewar, in fact both of us ended up agreeing with each other as you can see by the comments and this tweet if you want further proof: [https://twitter.com/chanux/status/366211657241862145](https://twitter.com/chanux/status/366211657241862145). I was not going to ignore a user who had a question about my blog post.

I appreciate the Hacker News community's feedback and contributions but I do not feel that in this specific example I created an unhealthy discussion by mentioning Stallman. I have a lot of respect for his work as already stated and I accepted @chanux's constructive criticism wholeheartedly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It seems all developer positions these days require the following:

1) A link to your Github account 2) A link to your LinkedIn profile"

1) No 2) No

<comment><USER8> "I know why companies have bought into the idea of Github profiles." \- is it some sort of SF-cisco thing? It's not common in UK/Europe at all.

<comment><USER25> It's getting more so. Last time I was looking for a job (UK) a recruiter not only mentioned my github, but asked me to pass on another job offer to someone he'd noticed I was collaborating with.

<comment><USER19> Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. Was the recruiter from a small company just trying to aggressively go after candidates or were they legitimately interested in you project? Not to undermine your work at all but it's the first time I have heard of an experience like this. Congrats!

<comment><USER25> Big recruitment agency. I think he'd heard the name of that specific guy rather than caring about what we'd actually been working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pushing utility code and nice succinct tools would be a good use of GitHub if you're afraid of people stealing your precious million dollar ideas.

<comment><USER19> I fully support this. If it's not your secret sauce then why not give it to the community? The common rebuttal I hear for this is "but we have to then maintain it". Granted, maintenance is time consuming but even if you do not do anything after open sourcing it, someone could still fork it and tailor it to suit their needs. I don't open source something if I am on the fence about whether what I have coded is a tool or a potential product. I also don't open source something if it's really untidy, I try to do a bit for the community before putting it out there like making sure it runs on Heroku for example (if it's a web app let's say) and that it is somewhat readable. Not saying my current work on my Github is perfect but I am always learning.</comment></comment>


We're shutting down Tiiny - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kevinrose/we-re-shutting-down-tiiny-14254524f9b6 <comment><USER2> If this is the strategy, why would anybody invest any amount of content into their company's ecosystem of apps?</comment>


Lunar property rights: Hard cheese - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/02/lunar-property-rights?fsrc=rss <comment><USER2> Property rights only exist if you can enforce them with the point of a gun (or you can rely on agents of your government to do it for you). So until someone actually installs some guns to defend their lunar mining operation all claims are theoretical and worthless.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you take on eBay? - <AUTHOR>

Imagine you (or, I) were creating a product designed to take on eBay and improve the peer-to-peer shopping experience.
What would you like to see changed?
Think of this as p2p shopping, not auctions. <comment><USER2> Focus. Simplicity. Service. Price.

Swappa is taking on eBay for re-selling Android devices... <http://swappa.com>

Focus. Only fully functional, ready to activate Android devices are allowed. Anything else is blatant fraud.

Simplicity. Only have one form to fill out to sell a device. No auctions. One price. A device is sold only when the buyer pays.

Service. An actual person checks in and helps on almost every transaction.

Price. Flat fee ($10), paid by buyer, only when a device sells. Sell a $300 device and save about $20 in fees.

</comment><comment><USER3> eBay has extraordinarily strong network effects. To beat them, make something designed very well for a particular vertical and build a strong following there. Like StubHub did in event tickets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have any thoughts on how to make shipping more efficient for the seller? I feel like we can encourage more listings by making shipping dead simple.

</comment><comment><USER4> Embrace and extend. Wrap ebay with a more usable wrapper, then start to give people who are using your wrapper better usability and more features.

</comment><comment><USER5> For p2p shopping: Craigslist > eBay

What I would like to fix: Less Spam. Less Scam.

</comment><comment><USER6> Focus on people (sellers), not products or categories.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. How can I make selling easier? I can think of many ways to make listings, payment, categorizing easier.

But how to make shipping easier?

<comment><USER7> 10-20 years down the road-3D printing will start to make shipping look like a lost artform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd fix the scammer issue.

<comment><USER6> The marketplace (like any) is based on trust, there are always untrustworthy people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> think etsy.

To me etsy was a nichified idea of ebay:

-remove the auctions since these people want just want to sell whenever the item gets sold

-make it super easy for crafts to sell their stuff; make it easier than ebay.

-make the fees more reasonable

-make the first time use - dead easy; unlike the ebay experience - so many options and too confusing. People scared of making a mistake.

What were these crafts people using before etsy: ebay.

</comment><comment><USER10> We rarely actually say this out loud, but we do intend to take on eBay.

I've got this sling and five stones, you see...</comment>


RightHand robotics has automated a new type of warehouse work - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/952240/righthand-robotics-has-automated-a-new-type-of-warehouse-work-that-could-help-amazon-amzn/ <comment><USER2> This is a very big deal. Amazon has been looking for this technology for years. They've held competitions for it. That video is one of the best unstructured bin-picking demos ever seen. The combination of a four-fingered semi-rigid gripper and a suction cup seems to work well. It's fast; many vision-guided systems are still painfully slow. Amazon should be able to pick everything in their inventory that weighs less than a kilogram, is reasonably rigid, and has a surface that can be grabbed with vacuum. Everything lightweight which comes in a box, can, or jar qualifies. That's probably at least 75% of the inventory.

This should destroy about 50,000 to 100,000 jobs a year for the next few years. That's more than the entire coal mining industry.

<comment><USER3> This type of picker could be used in so many more applications outside of warehouses. Help disabled shoppers, pick fruit, litter picking, sorting recycling, etc etc

<comment><USER4> It will mean loss of jobs (however low paying and not fulfilling it may be) for people who can least afford to. People that cannot hope to retrain for a better job or have some kind of retirement plan in place.

I have mixed feelings about this...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have more of a sense of dread/worry than feeling hopeful for the future. I don't think this will contribute to improvement of mankind...

I hope I'm proven wrong.

<comment><USER5> In the short run, (next half a century) this will be a disaster for the least privileged. In the long run though it will mean liberation from demeaning hard labor in the same way that tractors and industrialization did the same for our ancestors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where can you get the parts for building one yourself ? Thinking about switching from web dev to making robots.

<comment><USER7> Back in my MechE days, I'd buy everything from McMaster-Carr. Probably overkill for little desktop robots but if you want to build things that are the size/power of an industrial arm it should have what you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another robotic warehouse picker to watch is IAM Robotics in Pittsburgh (down the road from me, as it happens.)

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

They seem to rely on a stereo vision that perhaps is a CMU spin-off?</comment>


U.S. spy network's successes, failures and objectives detailed in 'black budget' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html

<comment><USER2> I like the first comment in the info graph...

->>> 1) Chester PA has a homicide rate of 62 per 100,000. Camden NJ is almost as bad. US male suicide rate has soared to 19.9 per 100,000. Black unemployment has averaged 15% for the past 5 years and the real median income for black households has collapsed to barely above what it was in 1970.

The most deadly threat to many Americans is not foreign terrorists -- it is the corruption of our ruling elites in Washington DC. They have long shown that they serve the agendas of the billionaires --not the national interest of the American People.

<comment><USER3> The most deadly threat to many Americans is car crashes.

<comment><USER4> That's the number one cause of "accidental" death (and hoo boy does it outweigh "the corruption of our ruling elites").

If you want to look at "preventable" deaths instead then lack of exercise and smoking are far more existential threats still: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_death)

Basically: all the huffing being done on both sides of the argument is (if you really care about keeping people out of graves) just statistical noise.

Which of course brings up the much deeper point: people don't so much care about the "death" thing, really. It's just a convenient hat hanger for whatever agenda they want to push. The anarchists do it just as badly as the authoritarians.

Eat your veggies, people.

<comment><USER5> Given that the automobile industry was a major source of wealth for most of the past century; it's safe to say that it's cultural primacy is part and parcel of the corruption of our elites. Automobile deaths in this country are predictably higher than in Germany an equally wealthy country. And they are so because we have a number of entrenched interests (construction, auto sales and manufacturing, lawyers, trauma surgeons; etc. ) that get and stay rich because the status quo is car oriented.

You want bikes, light rail and walkable cities? You adorable little euro- commie wannabe!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In words, deeds and dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism > as the gravest threat to national security, which is listed first among five > "mission objectives."

Why?

I understand the tragedy of 9/11\. With that in mind, it is a mistake is to treat terrorism as an existential threat to the state. Perhaps someone with a more formal background in history can speak to this, but I do not think there is an example of a nation falling because of terrorism.

Point: there is a widespread purported belief in western democracies, particularly the United States and Great Britain, that one or more terrorist attacks could cause institutional collapse. This is ridiculous, however well- intentioned it might have started out as being.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, the current threat from terrorism has no significant differences from that of 19th century violent anarchism. Those who argue that "9/11 changed everything" play upon an ignorance of history to achieve their own purposes.

<comment><USER8> It changed everything in US people minds. Hollywood and TV shows were presenting the US victorious always. 9/11 showed that the homeland isn't safe from everything. That was the second shock wave that is still propagating more than one decade after.

Compare and contrast with European countries (France, GB, Spain) that experienced throughout the end of the 20th century terrorist attacks, including bombings, on their own ground.

Truth is, we don't know what would happen if they strike again. And maybe, perhaps, that's what the US government and its agencies want to avoid at any cost. Does the end justify the means?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This leak may be the most significant from Snowden yet. As the article notes, until 2007 even the total amount of the budget was considered a secret. There's no precedent for American journalists having access to all this detail on our intelligence spending.

I wish the article had more detail on "offensive cyber operations". AFAIK there's very little known in public about US active cyberwarfare.

<comment><USER10> We do know a lot about stuxnet - I would guess that's one of the major ones.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama- ord...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave- of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

<comment><USER11> And Flame [1] and Duqu [2]. There is of course a lot of technical discussion, but not much about the organizational side of things. So we do not know for example, how the NSA obtains 0days.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29)

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

<comment><USER12> Endgame Systems

[https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Hanif-Binarypig- Scala...](https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Hanif-Binarypig-Scalable- Malware-Analytics-in-Hadoop-Slides.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during > that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main > objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United > States.

We hadn't had a catastrophic terrorist attack even approaching 9/11 prior to that date. And I'm guessing we've spent more in the past 12 on "preventing terrorism" than we had in the 225 years prior to 9/11.

My point: we may have overreacted.

<comment><USER14> In my lifetime there have been plenty of plane hijackings and bombings that killed hundreds of Americans. They just mostly weren't on continental US soil.

<comment><USER13> "hundreds of Americans" Key point here. Hundreds of Americans over the course of decades.

Meanwhile millions died from heart disease, auto accidents, kidney disease, pneumonia, diabetes, Alzheimer's, lung disease, and cancer, just last year.

More people died of heart disease in this country alone last year than have died by airline hijacking since the invention of manned flight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats"

So you don't want anyone to look at your metadata?

<comment><USER14> They're just business records after all, often with nongovernmental corporations. No expectation of privacy there, nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All of this points directly to the US Government's continued rivalry with the Chinese Government, especially the emphasis on secrecy and authoritarianism.

One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended.

<comment><USER17> _One has to wonder if this is the same strategy used to bring down the Soviets, namely a war of attrition where one tries to out-spend an opponent through consistent escalation -- until the opponent runs out of resources to maintain the escalation. We know how that ended._

Your sentence right at the end of the quoted paragraph from your comment prompts me to check whether you are writing ironically or at face value. Do you think the United States succeeded in bringing down the Soviet Union by outcompeting it?

<comment><USER18> Yes. As I understand it from my readings, the US developed a deliberate strategy of investing in things (like submarines, or the "star wars" defence system, etc) which would cause disproportionate investment on the other side to match them - ideally investment that would not help the offensive capability of the USSR. It switched to this model from the previous model which was to match USSR expenses (e.g. they buy more nukes, we buy more nukes too). This was deliberately designed to leverage the fact that the US economy was stronger and more flexible, and amplify that.

According to "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" (great book) this was the result of a paper written in the 1970s where this strategy was conceived, which was then adopted by the US military as its main strategy against the Soviet.

<comment><USER19> In a more modern context, this sounds very much like the spending associated with countering IEDs by western governments.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't agree more. The entire middle eastern military venture is an exercise in spending billions to try and counter a threat that costs thousands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't imagine this is the kind of thing that shows up in a System Administrators inbox every Tuesday. Origionally I was just assuming that Snowden was publishing the information he himself received.

He would have had to surf deeper into the system for this kind of information I assume. I can't even imagine what else is on those hard drives.

<comment><USER21> Looks like he actually impersonated officials with higher access: [http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-...](http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-snowden- impersonated-nsa-officials-sources-say)

Snowden appears to be have acted brilliantly. We couldn't have asked for a better protagonist here. Personally, I think that, since he knew what he was going to do, he took _everything_ within his grasp. Especially since he knew he had nothing to lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "The NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own"

Assuming that each insider threat corresponds to one employee, and that the total number of employees in the intelligence community is 107,035, this would suggest that at least 1 out of every 27 employees has been considered a possible insider threat. And if you were to only consider the employee count of the NSA itself (which we don't know), it would be considerably higher.

This is... pretty staggering.

<comment><USER5> The side effect of that level of paranoia is that office politics becomes an extreme sport. If you can make it look like the guy angling for the same promotion as you has a secret; or is actively selling out the country...

It may also explain some of the institutional rigidity we see in the IC's response to events. If questioning certain assumptions may get you not just fired, but jailed; and you value your career and your freedom, those assumptions become very hard to question. (e.g. the same assumptions that Mr. Snowden started questioning )

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Enterprise IT" and "Enterprise Management" are broken out as two separate categories for both the CIA and the NSA. Is one of those the asset spend ( software, hardware etc. ) for non-mission-tasked items and the other the personnel spend for people who keep the place going?

And it would interesting to see a breakdown by category of how much is spent on outside contractors ( like Booz Allen Hamilton ) vs. how much is spent in direct personnel costs ( federal employees with benefits and pensions etc. ).

<comment><USER23> It was reported that Booz revenue is ~$5.5 BILLION, most of which is direct defense contracting.

> __ _As of 2013, 99% of the company 's revenue comes from the Federal > government._ __

\---

>Key Facts Founded 1914 Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA NYSE: BAH Employees: More than 24,000 Revenue: $5.76 billion in fiscal year 2013 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Ralph W. Shrader, Ph.D. Web site: www.boozallen.com

\---

[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=boo...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=booz+allen+5+billion&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

\---

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

<comment><USER5> I wonder how much of a picture of the outsourced parts of the black budget could be assembled by going through EDGAR filings.

[http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse- edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&...](http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse- edgar?CIK=BAH&Find=Search&owner=exclude&action=getcompany)

I'm not that familiar with deciphering EDGAR filings, but if you correlated it to [http://www.usaspending.gov/](http://www.usaspending.gov/) and other sources...

Who knows what you might find out.

It would make a neat data-journalism project for someone; would that I had the time.

<comment><USER23> The black budget is far far higher than 52B... I recall previous exposures on the black budget - and they were much higher... let me see if I can dig anything up..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So combining this with Wikipedia, it seems that Clapper and his 1749 underlings at ODNI cost us an _average_ of $971,000 a year _EACH_.

Ostensibly their mission is to advise the President, head some panels, oversee some stuff, and some stuff about whistleblowers.

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

</comment><comment><USER24> there is sooo much information in this one... i skimmed it three times... the article itself is long, then there's the infographics. geez. makes you wonder what other information he had.

I also want to thank the post for turning the data into nice interactive infographics instead of posting "crayola quality" powerpoints, that the gov is known for using.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why is this information useful? I get the whistleblowing about the NSA spying on US citizens. I don't understand the purpose of exposing the US's intelligence budget. What is Snowden whistleblowing on by publishing this information? What does it add to the discussion about the government abusing its power or infringing upon civil liberties?

</comment><comment><USER26> >The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as "offensive cyber operations."

Not just "enemy" systems. But "targets'" systems, which include a lot more _allies_ than "enemies". Then again, US seems to have a very Cold War-like mentality these days (even though Obama accused Russia of that), and sees everyone as a potential "enemy".

As Bruce Schneier said a couple of years ago, if you think "cyber-war" is imminent, then you must think _war_ against US is imminent (which seems pretty unlikely right now, but they keep pushing the fear of cyber-war anyway, to increase their budgets).</comment>


Equifax says 400,000 U.K. customers were affected by hack - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/15/news/equifax-hack-uk/index.html <comment><USER2> var equifaxTellsUs = 'A small number of UK and Canadian consumers';

function waitAFewDays() { equifaxTellsUs = '400,000 UK customers'; }

waitAFewDays();</comment>


My thoughts on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://sauravtom.com/facebook/

<comment><USER2> I'm having the same experience right away. In particular I hate seeing lots of posts in the news feed that come from pages I don't like, but as some of my friend comment and like them they just appear in the feed. In these days here in Italy there's a very high level of stupid and uninformed discussions on politics, a lot of people post things that make me sick and they appear in my news feed (just take a look at this, to understand the level of discussion.. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11354...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11354061/Italian- senate-vice-president-says-kidnapped-aid-workers-had-sex-with-their- captors.html)) So I decided to stop checking FB very often</comment>