Due Diligence Report on Otto and Anthony Levandowski - <AUTHOR> https://www.scribd.com/document/360525542/Due-Diligence-Report-on-Otto-and-Anthony-Levandowski <comment><USER2> Lior Ron:

1/12/2016 Internet search on "how to securely delete files mac"

1/13/2016 Ron leaves Google

1/19/2016 Internet search on "can a MacBook be recovered after formatting the OS"

3/22/2016 A file labelled Chauffer win plan.docx is deleted, shortly before Ron's interview with Stroz Friedberg

"Chauffer win plan.docx" is this guy serious? Did he name his other incriminating file "if they find this im fucked.pdf"

<comment><USER3> Is opsec really as hard as all these people make it seem? If I were planning something shady there's probably a lot of stupid questions I'd need to Google for, but I'd at least do it on public library wifi and download a Tor browser or something. I dunno if that would protect me, but it's more than seems to have been done here.

<comment><USER4> Once you start using Tor and public Wifi, you admit that what you're doing is illegal. I think in these cases, many people tell themselves that they operate in some kind of gray area.

<comment><USER5> > Once you start using Tor and public Wifi, you admit that what you're doing > is illegal.

Thankfully that's not how law works. Also, I use Tor everyday, for totally legal things I want to keep private.

<comment><USER6> It's not how law works -- currently, in some countries. But it is how suspicion works, and governments in the US and UK, for example, seem highly suspicious of their populous.

<comment><USER5> In the US at least the law cannot devolve into suspicion being adequate burden of proof. This is a constitutional protection that has been strengthened, not weakened by the courts over time, with only infrequent temporary setbacks. It's unfortunate that's not how things operate on the other side of the pond, but that's connected to why the US is the way it is.

<comment><USER7> Salina v. Texas changed that. It's a horrendous decision. [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/supreme...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/supreme- court-salinas-v-texas-ruling-explained/314145/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Our forensic examination of Levandowski's devices and accounts corroborates > his assertion that he stored and accessed Google files on his personal > laptop in folders labeled Chauffeur and Google. However, contrary to his > belief that there were no or few Google e-mails on his laptop, Stroz > discovered approximately 50,000 Google work e-mail messages that were > downloaded onto Levandowski's computer on September 20, 2014. Ten of those > e-mails were last accessed between September 1, 2015 and January 28, 2016. > It is difficult to believe that Levandowski was not, prior to his interview, > fully aware of the extent of the data that he had retained.

50K Project Chauffeur emails stored on his personal laptop. People have gone to jail for less.

> Levandowski also attempted to empty the Trash bin on his MacBook Pro while > he was at Stroz Friedberg's office on March 22, 2016 at approximately 12:12 > p.m., but our examination found no files were contained in his Trash at the > time he attempted to empty it.

What kind of company does business with a shady character like this?

<comment><USER9> > What kind of company does business with a shady character like this?

A company that was already doing shady things?

<comment><USER10> What rules? Rules are for suckers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Scribd post (by Gawker, Gawker lives!) calls it a _Due Diligence Report_ but that's not a phrase used anywhere in the document. Due diligence is something you'd do before making a decision. Investigation is what you do afterwards. Indeed _Project Unicorn Investigation_ is what the document calls itself.

Mods: you might want to overrule the post and retitle the post as _Project Unicorn Investigation_.

In fact, I'd love to see the due diligence report for Uber buying Otto.

<comment><USER12> > Due diligence is something you'd do before making a decision.

There is such a thing as 'vendor due diligence' where a party that will sell something does their own DD in preparation to the DD by others to ensure they haven't missed anything obvious.

Other than that you are right though, this is an investigative report, but it would have been a lot smarter of Uber to have this stuff checked _before_ making a deal, the optics are not pretty and the fact that they tried to hide this report makes it even less so.

I have seen a couple of these in the last few years that were 'exciting', this one is off the scale for me on a professional interest level, there are only three that I'd like to read more, the actual due diligence reports - if they exist - on this deal, Ubeam and Theranos.

<comment><USER9> Report says it was requested by Uber and Otto in March 2016, and it is dated Aug 5, 2016. Uber announced Otto acquisition on Aug 18. So this looks like an investigation that was part of the due diligence for the acquisition, and Uber would have had it well before the acquisition was announced.

Could be that when you're hustlin', making bold bets and being optimistic leaders[1], you don't get too concerned about (or read) a report like this.

1\. [https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural- values](https://www.quora.com/What-are-Ubers-14-core-cultural-values)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A thing I hadn't really thought of was that perhaps the main goal from Uber wasn't to explicitly gain access to Waymo secrets (as in documents etc) but simply how to recruit the whole self-driving cars team from Waymo. Uber trying to one-by-one recruit them from Waymo would probably have been much more difficult compared with what happened - Levandowski creating a start-up, whose whole aim was to get acquired by Uber.

> At one point, Levandowski said that he asked Brian McClendon, who left > Google to join Uber, how much Uber would be willing to pay for the Chauffeur > team, claiming he wanted to have a market value for the team

Ie it's more "I'll make it so you can buy the Chaffeur team" rather than "I'll let you buy these design docs that are Waymo confidential".

</comment><comment><USER14> Just wondering - How is Uber claiming to be non-complicit in this? The report is damning on Levandowski's behavior. But Uber to hire him in spite of all this is surprising at best.

At this point, it doesn't matter if they took Waymo's files or not, just the appearance of something like this to happen reflects poorly on them.

<comment><USER15> It's actually pretty amazing how much of Uber's policies seems to be around "plausible deniability"

let's get [this] done! but, it is legal? no, it's mostly borderline towards full blown illegal. ok, make sure you empty the trash on your Mac before we get started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kind of impressive how _much_ historical record they were able to glean from all those devices! Amazing how much digital residue was left behind, even persisting against pointed efforts to destroy them -- _bits lingered_.

But also, yikes! My next phone will have 256GB of storage, how much stuff is going to accumulate in there, and really we have to hand this over for inspection by the company? I think the one part about the drives filled with porn they didn't want to inspect, by then it was really creepy.

The fact this document is in the public record. Just wow.

</comment><comment><USER17> "He [Lewandowski] also said it was common practice to share work files via Dropbox"

Always interesting seeing company employees not using their company's products. Shows that what some view as a monolith is a bunch of smaller bands of people.

<comment><USER18> Given the bugs/missing features in the google docs lineup, I've never believed they are dogfeeding. It's been out for 10 years and it still has formatting issues. Change the zoom level of your browser and tab-aligned things will suddenly unalign. Made a report with pictures/figures? Good luck printing that, everything will move around as soon as you go to print it.

The only thing I know google uses google docs for is coding interviews. Which is just sad.

<comment><USER19> google docs is not for typesetting; if you care what things will look like on a printed page it's not the right tool.

re tab-aligned things, are you using explicit tab stops or not?

<comment><USER20> A competitor to Microsoft Word isn't "if you care what things will look like on a printed page"?

That seems fishy to me.

<comment><USER21> Google Docs is not marketed as a complete replacement for Microsoft Word. It's marketed as "the 50% of Word's feature set that 99% of people need."

<comment><USER18> I would have guessed more than 1% of people need to print and/or turn a document into a pdf without having it change the page a picture is on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe im being naive but if you had an inkling something like this was going to happen, and given the 'worth' of the guys in questions.. would you not just burn all the personal devices you had when you left? it seems amazingly careless with little thought beyond 'oh sh*t maybe i just trash some of these, that'll sort it'

<comment><USER23> Most people aren't really all that devious and evil. In order to do shady stuff, most of us have to first convince ourselves that we're not really doing anything wrong, or that the legal fine print will give us a way out if it ever comes down to a fight.

If Lewandowski had an inkling of the trouble he was getting himself into, he would have done a lot of things differently. But he didn't. He was going to go start something awesome, damn the lawyers, full speed ahead. Many of the greatest founders in the Valley got their start by either backstabbing or frontrunning their employers. If you're hoping to follow in their footsteps, it's easy for survivorship bias to take hold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In other news, deleting iMessage chats is completely useless?

<comment><USER24> Seriously. wut the fuq?????? I'm so curious how they recovered them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone explain the context for this?

<comment><USER26> Waymo (Google's self-driving car venture) has a big lawsuit against Uber alledging patent violations (since dismissed), trade secret infringement, and assorted other claims. This is all revolving around their hiring of a senior Google manger (Anthony Levandowski) who quit google to form a bunch of companies that were then acquired by Uber.

Waymo/Google have claimed that Levandowski was negotiating with Uber to steal their secret stuff well in advance of leaving Google, met Uber executives during this time, and following his meeting with them, stole a bunch of files (a big SVN checkout of their hardware repo). He also did a bunch of other bad stuff that I'm not going to get into. They've also claimed to have evidence that Uber was using their IP through some stolen boards.

The pre-trial case has been really, really bad looking for Levandowski, but Waymo's been having trouble finding a smoking gun to implicate Uber as a whole.

However, one of the key pieces of evidence here was a due-diligence report prepared by Stroz Friedberg that went into exactly what info Levandowski still had from Waymo/Google. Uber and Levandowski, ESPECIALLY Levandowski have been fighting really hard to prevent Waymo from getting it's hands on the report - going all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals court. They lost all of these, and the report was handed over a few weeks ago.

This is that report. As to how big of a smoking gun it is... I'm still reading. Waymo's been claiming it is in their filings up through last week, but I haven't been able to see anything past that - something's up with either PACER or RECAP and there aren't any updates/filings on the case in over a week on RECAP for some reason. (If anyone's got a pacer account...)

<comment><USER27> > all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals ...

I'd be curious to know what's the most procedurally complex trial out there. I.e. One where the distance between the original suit, and the issue at hand has the most steps. I.e original suit spawned a separate suit on the admissibility of evidence which got escalated and then spawned another suit on the procedural ... etc

<comment><USER28> SCO v. IBM, which spawned SCO v. Novell, SCO v. Red Hat, and a couple others that I forget. Started in March 2003, and currently in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain this to me - It seems Uber met most of them while they were working with Google. Why did Levandowski form a company? Why couldn't Uber simply hire them off Google?

<comment><USER29> Buy a team for $680M? You serious? :)

From my understanding they bought a functioning truck prototype, corresponding IP's AND the team.

<comment><USER30> The document shows in great detail that Kalanick and Levandowski were already working together closely before work on the truck even began.

2016-01-26 - Levandowski's last day at Google

2016-02-22 - iMessage chatter directly between Levandowski and Kalanick about poaching more Google employees

That certainly paints the "acquisition" of Ottomotto in August 2016 in a different light, no? It's also shown in the document that Levandowski was meeting with Kalanick and other Uber execs as early as June 2015, though it's harder to divine what was happening at that time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The abridged timeline has an amusing series of trips to the hard drive shredder and deleting texts daily.

<comment><USER23> Reminds me of Carmack's involvement in the Oculus fiasco. When people with four-digit IQs start Googling things like "how to destroy a hard drive," you can bet that numerous lawyers are going to enjoy elevated job security in the near future.

<comment><USER32> How did that fiasco end? I lost track of the events after the initial accusations.

<comment><USER23> I never heard, actually. I believe Palmer Luckey ended up in somewhat more legal and/or financial trouble than John Carmack, but the magnitudes involved are probably under appeal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For a genius, Levandowski "did not recall" a lot of important details :)

<comment><USER34> And that's genius. No one really knows if you _really_ recall it or not, but they know whether it happened or not, based on other people's testimony. "I do not recall" is brilliant.

<comment><USER35> It's not genius. It's the standard instruction from a lawyer defending such a person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tangential, but looks like this report was prepared using forensics software from Relativity [0]. It looks like an interesting product in a growing market segment. Seems like there are some startup opportunities in forensics/eDiscovery, might be worth exploring if you're into this sort of thing.

[0] [https://www.relativity.com/](https://www.relativity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> > While employed at Google, Levandowski had a number of one-on-one meetings > and four group meetings with several Google/Chauffeur employees about > joining his start-up company.

sounds like various code of conduct, policies, etc. is for small, rank-and- file, guys only :)

</comment><comment><USER38> interesting read. One thing I'm surprised about is that they didn't assess the Slack chat that's mentioned throughout the document, to assess what information might have been uploaded/shared there.

From what I've seen of slack it retains a lot of history (even if you're on the free plan where you can only see a limited amount, the archives are still there), so you'd think would be an interesting source of data for this kind of investigation.

</comment><comment><USER39> There's little doubt that Levandowski and Lior Ron are in deep shit if this goes to criminal court, but I'm still waiting for Waymo's slam dunk against Uber. If they have one, it hasn't been presented yet.</comment>


Tactics for Designing Games While Depressed - <AUTHOR> http://www.choiceofgames.com/blog/2011/03/five-tactics-for-designing-games-while-depressed/

<comment><USER2> This is great advice for people who are not depressed also. When you work on something for a long time without releasing, you start to scrutinize everything you've made and lose faith in it. Releasing in shorter cycles/getting user feedback keeps you motivated better.</comment>


Ask HN: How you ever quit because the engineering culture is too messed up? - <AUTHOR> I work with nice people but my technical ideas are constantly shot down because either 1) "that's not how we do things there", 2) "there are more important things to worry about", or 3) "I'm not sure I like it".
I realize different organizations need different people/experiences but I see some obvious errors in management infrastructure and I'm trying to be not-pushy as much as possible while fully realizing there are good reasons for everything.
To my eyes, the things I'm proposing are simple and work almost everywhere else but they are still controversial, it seems.
How much should you be swimming against the current before calling it quits because we can't change anything? It's a general question, thus why I haven't given concrete examples for my situation. <comment><USER2> This can be frustrating for sure. Your question / post is a little light on details, so I am reading between the lines a bit here, but to some extent you'll find this everywhere, and dealing with it can be a useful skill.

Can you provide a few more details on what you mean by "management infrastructure"? Are we talking source control / build systems / JIRA workflow stuff here?

I would suggest trying to find ways to be productive _yourself_ that don't involve changing what other people do.

Don't try to sell "ideas" and "proposals", lead by example, and if it works out people will follow.

For example, if people want to use subversion and do their development on trunk, but you want to use git with feature branches... then just do that for your local development, create and switch branches locally all you want, and then push to subversion when you're done.

If there's some dumb JIRA workflow, copy and paste the details to a text file, work on the thing, take your notes in the text file, paste it back to JIRA when you're done. You will probably find you can isolate yourself from most kinds of silliness quite well, and if you're productive doing so then others will follow.

As for your specific question, I think it's worth trying to improve things for at least a year, or maybe two, before you consider leaving. In that time, you'll probably find there are things you _can_ change, learn that other things are actually not as easy to change as you might think, and generally build some useful experience in turning around a challenging situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a certain disdain for metrics so we're not tracking a lot of things proactively (think latency/rate, for example). That means every new change is based on a feeling of how it'll impact the systems. We also don't have a dev/test environment so changes to production are what I'd call, "faith based". There's a lot of apply to production, revert cycles. Or worse: no changes at all for fear of breaking things.

But there are more mundane things like not using a code linter because $linter enforces some rule that someone doesn't like, so discussions stall. There are literally hundreds of JIRA tickets about some proposed idea that fails to reach consensus.

I think isolating myself from the craziness is a good idea but I'm having trouble with how it would be received. Say I push a code change that fixes a bunch of things that $linter complained about, including stylistic changes. Now that has to be reviewed by someone and...? Should I just keep pushing the envelope like that? Someone will probably contribute some piece of code full of violations and then... I fix it and cause an incident with teammates?

One possible outcome is to just accept things and let go. I see this a lot in people that have been here for many years. They are also not people I would aspire to be so... I kind of have to accept defeat but that's demoralizing. I'm coming to a point where I'm asking myself where I could be and I don't have a good answer. Should I stick around and keep trying to change things? Back to the swimming against the current question.

Thanks for all the feedback.

<comment><USER2> If you think it's valuable to track latency, that seems like something you could just do. Grab the logfiles process them in your home directory, produce some graphs, keep the data over time and track changes. Ideally it would be done centrally, but as a starting point just do it yourself.

Not having a dev / test / qa environment is inexcusable, why do you not have that? Why can't you just set one up yourself? Possibly on your own workstation or some VMs, just find a way to do it.

Linter warnings are of highly variable quality. Don't bother about anything stylistic - tabs vs spaces, camel case vs underscores - those things never caused anyone's software to not work. Ask yourself "could this break something in production?".

If the answer is yes, then create a code change to fix one instance of the problem and submit it for review (not every instance of every problem, just one instance of one specific problem that _could affect production_ ). People will ask why it's a problem, you can explain it, and if you've selected a good example of a non-trivial problem, they'll accept it and merge it. Then, go and find the _other_ instances of the _same problem_ after you have set the precedent, and there will be less resistance. Then, start working on _other problems_ , rinse and repeat.

Doing this will educate people along the way, and will work better than some big shock-and-awe change that touches a lot of things at once. Go easy on criticizing other people's work during code review, they're often emotionally attached to their code at that point since it's the last step in something they've been working on for weeks and want to move on from. Again, only raise things in other peoples code that could break things in production.

As for accepting things and letting go, I'd say it's more a question of picking your battles. Don't accept _everything_ and let go. Try to improve things to the extent you can while you are there, even if that isn't forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Life's too short to work for bad companies. Cultures rarely change though, so if you can't change some of their habits it never will. And generally bad cultures will scare away top talent.

But generally, first thing is to check whether your ideas would actually help.

Some ideas sound great and are supported by great people, but they kill flow, e.g. scheduling, stand ups, TDD, and other project management practices.

Some ideas have a lot of overhead, and every project has a balance between how much should be hacked, vs time saved in the long term.

And sometimes it's just that it's challenging someone's authority. Or because they feel they are already the best and doing things the best way. If this is the case, then you could consider leaving.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, I have done this. Mostly because my work depended on certain technical architecture being setup but there was an unwillingness by management to do so. This was primarily because other people at the company refused to admit they didn't have the expertise to set it up and instead did their best to cause my project to drag for months. I eventually left and completed a project that dragged for over 2 years in less than 3 months for another company.

It was overall a very frustrating and stressful part of my life that I would have done everything in my power to not be involved in if I could have predicted the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly one of the problems that I have. Somehow people are okay with things taking 2 years rather than 3 months though so there isn't a lot of pressure to change.

I'm at a point where I don't know if sticking around can have a positive influence on my career, maybe I'll learn to be more zen? How will that help if I change jobs? Or, will I become used to bad engineering and sabotage myself in the future? These are the kind of questions I'm having.

Assuming I have a good set of skills and enough experience, when faced with a challenging situation like this, I should try to be a positive force and bring improvements. However, I'm failing at that constantly and I just think it could have a negative impact on myself (burnout is a fact at this point).

Really trying to find the silver lining in all of this.

<comment><USER5> I think being zen is important for dealing with interpersonal situations however I think it is a mistake to be too accepting of the status quo when it comes to getting things done. Your time is valuable.

What has worked for me in the past is to find people that are able to force changes to the product (typically project or product managers, or someone else that represents the client) and find out what they need, then focus on producing something for them that gets them further down the path they are taking the product or company. These can be small things or big things, if you can help them create progress then you have a valuable advocate moving forward.

If there is no way to do that within the current engineering processes at your company then consider working outside those processes, and if that is not possible then you should look for opportunities at other organizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (I answered this in the other thread, but thought I'd crosspost here too)

It can be a tricky one, but fundamentally the _reason_ why change isn't happening needs to be understood. A company full of smart people is unlikely to _never_ want change for any reason - especially if that change would clearly make everyone's life easier. But maybe everyone is overloaded with work and a bit burnt out, so 'big' change is scary to them? Or perhaps the 'important change' really isn't that important? I've worked with devs before who have spoken for hours a day on the need to change x, y and z, when in reality it wasn't fully needed (and/or their suggestions stemmed from misunderstandings).

I guess my latter point there relates to the fact that there's not always a single "right way" of doing something.

Now I know that this might sound like I'm the same as the people shooting down your suggestions in your linked 'Ask HN' thread. Trust me, I'm not like that: I left my previous job a few months ago for the exact same reasons that you have outlined (i.e. there was clear change that was needed, but the 'powers that be' weren't willing to make those changes).

But to circle back to your question: assuming there aren't massive organizational problems at a company, change usually needs to be made slowly- but-surely with the buy-in of any previous 'change blockers' (where possible). Anyone trying to force through lots of change in a short period of time will usually struggle.

If even minor change is not possible, there's two main possibilities:

1) You're wrong about the change, and you might be the problem.

2) You're right about the change, the company is dysfunctional, and moving to a new job is the answer.

From your linked thread, (2) does sound like the situation in your case (fortunately/unfortunately).

</comment><comment><USER7> Throwaway for obvious reasons...

I worked at a YC startup a couple of years ago. The day after I started, the guy who hired me (eng manager) quit. All engineers reported to the CEO (former dev). That was the first red flag.

The second red flag occurred a week or two later, when two of the other three engineers cornered me in a room and tried to convince me that I should do what they say instead of what the CEO wanted. Second red flag.

Third red flag was when any tough decisions were made, the CEO would leave it up to us to work out amongst ourselves. Majority ruled. He was so afraid of pissing off any of his engineers that he just wouldn't do anything at all. Total clusterfuck.

They would play games once a week to try and team build, but it was a joke. Nobody trusted anybody else, and everyone was trying to undermine the CEO. Technically, they were doing things fairly OK. They wanted 100% unit test coverage, they had a proper CI/CD pipeline, they expected 2 people to approve every PR, they versioned their APIs appropriately. But none of that works if the people culture blows. And this one blew hard.

I stuck around as long as I could while I tried to find something else, but I couldn't have been more glad to leave a place. It was hell working there.

</comment><comment><USER8> I quit one job in 1995 when they decided to abandon SunOS/Solaris work in favor of Windows NT. Someone at Microsoft had sold this company on the idea that if their developers used Windows NT (3.5? 3.11? can't remember) they'd be 5 times more productive. This was obviously untrue, and I didn't want to get caught between the hammer of management and the anvil of Windows NT.

</comment><comment><USER9> I once worked at a place where everyone working there was recruited straight out of school. They were nurturing a mentality of "I don't have to learn things ever again". Mind you, they were using Delphi 2010 at the time but were stuck in their old ways, using DataSets like it was 1998.

I was hired and had about 3 years of experience back then. It seemed like they tought they knew everything about software development at that point and swore to themselves to would never learn something new again. They were perfectly happy with their "misc" file, containing somewhere near 45K lines of code, hundreds of functions that were totally unrelated. Nothing wrong with that, according to them.

So yeah, I spent 8 months there. One wednesday afternoon, I had enough and went to my boss, handed my resignation, and never stepped in that office ever again.

</comment><comment><USER10> How long have you been there?

If you're brand new, then just be quiet and listen for 6 months. Find out why they do things the way they do. They often have, if not totally valid reasons, at least reasons that are more valid than they seem at first glance. If you don't know their reasons, and you're telling them that they should do it differently, then of course the aren't listening to you.

But if you've been there for a while, you know which are the bad ideas, and you can't get them to listen to better ones, _and that frustrates you_ , then it may well be time to leave.

<comment><USER11> Worst advice ever. The time will pass regardless of your waiting, so everything you could see in 6 months you'll see. But while the time passes you can do something. As you stay quiet and watch you accumulate negative momentum and estabilish the narrative of a passive teammate. It is difficult to start anew in the environment you've been in for a while. Difficult to challenge solidifed perceptions.

Wreak havoc from the very beginning but with tact. Never insulting anybody, always carrying positive energy. This way you'll get the reputation of a go getter, an executioner, and will become the proactive force.

> If you don't know their reasons, and you're telling them that they should do > it differently, then of course the aren't listening to you.

Do not accept this. Just because they have valid reasons doesn't mean your way is wrong, worse, and not worth it. They have valid excuses for everything, that's the way of the world. In any case there is always something to improve from day 0.

That's my way of thinking. My experience is limited though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the wrong thread title. I meant "Have you ever". Sometimes I read stuff over and over and over and still reads fine but is wrong. Oh well, sorry.

</comment><comment><USER12> I did, multiple times. I have lots of savings so my tolerance for frustration is lower than people who are living paycheck to paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, I have done this. I joined a small start-up as a developer, and they admitted they needed to increase their professionalism and they would stand behind me as I did so. This was around 2005 or so when standards weren't as good as they are now.

Management consisted of designers and a self-taught programmer. While extremely intelligent, his ego could get in the way of making a good design decision - he didn't take kindly to constructive criticism or alternative ideas and would sometimes invent articles he had supposedly read that supported his biases. This was effectively the number one problem and in retrospect after identifying this, I should have left much sooner.

They failed every single question in the Joel Test and by the end the only points I had managed to change were to introduce source control and to introduce a bug database.

I look back on those days and I did enjoy the working environment to an extent and I enjoyed working with the people and even the technical co-founder was a really good guy out of work (and as I said, next-level intelligent) but the engineering culture was preventing me from doing my best work so I quit.

The final straw was when I was being shouted at in front of a client for introducing a bug in production that I could have sworn I had fixed weeks ago. After investigating it I discovered the co-founder had made a change, encountered a failing unit test and just deleted the test instead of fixing the underlying problem. The commit message was just "z" and came along with a few dozen unrelated changes.

The company is still around and I understand doing well. Every now and again though I encounter their product and I'm able to replicate a bug I first added to the bug tracker in around 2006. I feel they are doing well because they had a genuinely good idea and brought it to market sooner than anyone.

I won't say who they are because I don't wish to publicly shame them. I hope they have a better engineering culture now.

The next company I worked for had all the same problems except for the co- founder with an ego problem and I was able to get them to an extremely high level of professionalism and left behind an extremely high functioning software team after I moved on to the next level in my career.

To conclude: If your company has a poor engineering culture and it is getting in the way of you doing your best work then you should resign and find another job. You can still see the people you like at that company socially if you want but staying there won't help your career.

</comment><comment><USER14> I haven't, but I was working as the lead developer for an agency on a big-name client in the financial industry.

My point of contact was their head of marketing, who said that all development had to go through the IT team. Despite having a large web presence, their VP of IT was adament that IT would handle all web-related work. Their developers were all employed and trained as IT technicians, even though they came from development backgrounds. Obviously, finance is a protected industry, so working IT in a place like that is no joke, but having IT handle all software development AND the maintnenace of IT systems meant that nothing got done, and when outside work was brought in they had to confirm to crazy standards.

Anyway, I was brought in to fix some build systems, built by a previous company. I spent three days there and got it working in the end. I actually spent most of my time chatting to the marketing lady, who was constantly asking me hypotheticals about how things work with other clients, how long it takes to get changes made/approved on a website, etc. Her questions were quite in-depth around clients we already had, and I said roughly how things worked. A week later, the VP of IT kicked off about unapproved work on the website build server (which was approved by one of the IT/dev guys), and she resigned. A week after that, she was a marketing director at the client she had questioned about.

I ended up chatting to her face-to-face a few weeks later, and she said there was a huge split in the company on how the engineering team should be run, causing nearly a dozen developers to join her at this new company. They all handed in their notice within the week, and the VP was so pissed off he put them all on paid gardening leave and told them to never come back.

Fast forward around a year, and I was at a conference taking a workshop on BDD with a new employer. A few of us were chatting to the guy running the workshop, when one guy chimes in about why he was on the course. He said some idiots at [Company Name] had built an awful website with a crazy build server setup, and that their IT team were looking to learn enough to perform a complete rebuild. The company name was my old employer, but the cringe doesn't end there. The person running the workshop was employed at the company that initially built the website and the build server, and I remembered his name in the commit logs as the one that lead the entire build. Their IT guys were literally bitching about incompetent developers to the guy that had built their systems, and his face dropped when he figured out they were bitching about his project. Despite trying to skirt around the subject or justify why some things are built the way they are, we sat there for twenty minutes as they tore apart what I'd consider a valid setup (onsite TeamCity, generated build scripts and artifacts running on a separate secure box to ensure that the site could be deployed if the build server went down, and a test suite to switch a blue/green type setup).

I pryed about their team, and they said that their IT team was trimmed to run a lean senior-level team. In the space of 18 months they had lost at least 20-25 people, and their IT/engineering team were going to rebuild a large- scale website with very little web development expeirence, all while maintaining the IT systems for a fairly large company. To pry further, I pretended to know a developer that had worked there previously, and the guy smugly said "well, if he's not there any more he was cut - not everyone can handle what we do".

It's been a few years since then, and from what I can tell they're still running the same website. I wish I could remember this guys name or the VP's name, just to see if they are still there.</comment>


Show HN: 2016 Olympic Medal Count API - <AUTHOR> http://www.medalbot.com/ <comment><USER2> Just want to share with you what I've done with your API. Thanks Ed! ([http://charleshuang.ca/riomedals.php](http://charleshuang.ca/riomedals.php)) ([https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1143778124](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1143778124))

</comment><comment><USER2> This is an awesome API! Was looking for something simple like this for a small side project. Thanks Ed, and of course, I will give you a shoutout and link to your API.</comment>


We are Mt. Gox: AMA - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7ahh/we_are_mt_gox_ama/

<comment><USER2> Talk about putting up a shingle and calling yourself an exchange.

The clamor from the crowd that they need to do better PR gets me chuckling the most. They are fairly transparent about their lack of technical expertise, hinting at major issues in their understanding or seriousness of what they are doing.

When one noisy person tells you how to do your job and you know they're wrong, whatever. Brush it off.

When a fistful of redditors are telling you 15 different ways that you should be doing your job and it's pretty easy to show that they understand the problem domain and issues better than the team... that's a big problem.

I guess people hope MtGoxs new trading platform scales better, but that is not the sort of thought/wonder to be having when you are about to press submit on thousands in trades.

Bitcoin. Currency like kids and potato cannons. What could go wrong? Fire it up!

<comment><USER3> "Bitcoin. Currency like kids and potato cannons. What could go wrong? Fire it up!"

You highlight the weakness in MtGox and then by analogy suggest the whole platform is similary amateuristic.

the bitcoin protocol itself is solid, tested and has some very smart people working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't the idea of a central exchange (which "Magic the Gathering online exchange" is), where most of the trading occurs, a little antithetical to notion of a distributed currency?

<comment><USER5> The problem is moving the counter currency around. I can zap you some bitcoins without any problems, but it's much harder for you to zap me back some USD (or EUR, JPY, whatever).

<comment><USER4> Fair, the ForEx role will never go away, but it seems that MtGox has also become a trading platform for the Bitcoins themselves, with the obvious downside that it is susceptible to DDoS' like any centralized service. It makes more sense for a P2P currency that this simply be done at the protocol level with at most a custom client, but one that is still a full peer. The problem I, and others, are seeing is that the blockchain is becoming huge and will only get bigger, meaning only those with the resources to maintain it will participate as full peers - hardly ideal for a distributed system since it will inevitably require a certain amount of centralization to scale.

<comment><USER6> _Fair, the ForEx role will never go away, but it seems that MtGox has also become a trading platform for the Bitcoins themselves_

Wait, whats the difference between those two things? Converting bitcoins into anything else _is_ ForEx.

<comment><USER4> MtGox has become something of a speculative trading platform. While direct exchange (cash in, cash out) will always be necessary (unless you are paid in Bitcoins and live off of Bitcoins), I don't think MtGox is mostly being used that way. Rather, MtGox is becoming synonymous with Bitcoins for traders, and people want to use it like a bank (with all the problems that entails, and Bitcoin was partially hoped to relieve). As such, Bitcoin is only as reliable as MtGox. If People's main interaction with MtGox was buying Bitcoins for use on real goods and services, then I would agree that it is just another exchange, but people aren't using it like that. People buy BTC with USD one day, and buy CAD with BTC the next, with every intention of going back through the exchange and the Bitcoin currency again in order to cash out. MtGox has an API, and in fact, you are right, that is precisely what a ForEx is used for... I'm not knocking it, only pointing out that many of the problems people want Bitcoin to solve are being recreated by re-imposing conventional institutional roles. As long as there is more than one currency, people will need to exchange them. Who am I to say Bitcoin "shouldn't" have a trading platform other than to note that, IMHO, anyone who uses MtGox speculatively is relying on it's centralization, with all that that entails. I think it's ultimately just a matter of scale.

<comment><USER6> _People buy BTC with USD one day, and buy CAD with BTC the next, with every intention of going back through the exchange and the Bitcoin currency again in order to cash out._

Are you sure they're doing that?? Bitcoins volatility would render it pointless for Forex trading. (edit: by which I mean trading between two old school currencies via bitcoin)

<comment><USER4> I am taking it for granted that speculative trading is a pretty common, if not the main activity on MtGox:

\- "Bitcoin day trading": <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57169.0>

\- "Mt. Gox Temporarily Halts Bitcoin Trading to Allow the Market to Calm the Hell Down": [http://betabeat.com/2013/04/mt-gox-halts-trading- temporarily...](http://betabeat.com/2013/04/mt-gox-halts-trading-temporarily/)

But I could be wrong.

<comment><USER6> Oh yeah, people are swapping BitCoin for (old school) currency Y and then back again like crazy.

I thought you meant people using Bitcoin to do arbitage between (old school) currencies X and Y

I agree that speculation is harming bitcoin. It needs less volatility to be truely useful. But then when a genuinely innovative currency/technology suddenly gets a ton of press, I don't see how a spike could be avoided.

<comment><USER4> _"I thought you meant people using Bitcoin to do arbitage between (old school) currencies X and Y"_

That's precisely what I suspect (and can only guess at this point) that it is being used for:

[http://bitcoinmagazine.com/btc-trader-bitcoin-arbitrage- made...](http://bitcoinmagazine.com/btc-trader-bitcoin-arbitrage-made-easy/)

<http://lichtman.ca/is-bitcoin-arbitrage-feasible/>

<https://github.com/michaelcdillon/BitCoin-Arbitrage>

At the same time, MtGox also serves as an entrypoint for non-speculating users and has effectively become the "Bitcoin bank." It's voluntary - people are choosing to use MtGox, but in this regard MtGox's success seems to be a Bitcoiner's weakness: a DDoS against MtGox can cut the value of a BTC (and their lunch money) in half.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems they were not _aware_ that AWS exists. They should really consider hiring engineers specialized in scaling.

<comment><USER8> The more fundamental problem is the lack of separation between their trading engine and their website. While a website would be perfectly fine on AWS (and likely the more significant part of their scaling problems), the trading engine belongs on a very tightly controlled platform.

I don't have any confidence in their platform. It shouldn't take more than a few domain experts to build a better platform...but for some reason its not happening.

<comment><USER7> > I don't have any confidence in their platform.

Neither should anyone, as evidenced by their track record. It's just sad that it is this platform driving the price of the Bitcoin at the moment, and I'm not sure how it speaks about the future of the currency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> wow. After looking at all of the issues and the lack of answers from MtGox..I don't think I'm going to be investing any money in this exchange any time soon.

<comment><USER10> No kidding - they appear to be focusing on answering question #1 and completely avoiding #2 & #3. Does not instill confidence.

<comment><USER11> You guys need to understand that these guys are super Japanese, complete with the culture of never wanting to show dishonor. If they were American I would be much more suspicious, but they have consistently fixed the problems that they have had and are desperate to hire western developers to move to Japan to help the not only build the exchange, but expand the community's trust in them.

<comment><USER12> "You guys need to understand that these guys are super Japanese, complete with the culture of never wanting to show dishonor."

Then why have a Reddit Q&A about their failures?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Huge opportunity here for a proper exchange / trading platform to be built. There is obviously a demand for it.

<comment><USER5> 1) Regulatory issues are a big question mark.

2) There isn't actually that much volume compared real electronic exchanges. Just looking at the Mt Gox page from today it looks like $30MM USD worth of bitcoins have been traded. Hard to make any real money off of that.

<comment><USER14> > 2) There isn't actually that much volume compared real electronic exchanges. > Just looking at the Mt Gox page from today it looks like $30MM USD worth of > bitcoins have been traded. Hard to make any real money off of that.

While it might have much less volume compared to a "real" exchange, MtGox fees are 0.6% of each transaction. $180k daily revenue is certainly "real money" for a startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best piece of all comes from their answer about new servers.

> Upgrading computer systems means ordering more servers (2 weeks timeframe), > setting up (1 day), load testing (2 weeks) and deployment (1 day). It's a > process that can take up to one month in total.

<comment><USER6> You've got to bear in mind that they're talking to reddit. I think thats a fair description of why they can't upgrade at the drop of a hat. As they say elsewhere in the AMA:

 _We are big in the bitcoin world, but compared to a Facebook or a Google or even a bank we are too small and don't have access to their technology_

What would you have them do?

<comment><USER16> > Cloud solutions are not meant for large scale operations such as trading > systems

Arguably, _hosted_ cloud solutions aren't ideal for large scalable operations, if you define "large scale" as in "someone with the scale of Amazon, Google, etc. that can afford to run a private cloud."

But MtGox makes it pretty clear that they aren't on that scale. Their argument seems to be simultaneously that they are both too "large scale" for hosted cloud solutions and too small scale to be able to effectively address the challenges they face in-house, which, if we accept it, seems to indicate that they are at a scale that _cannot effectively operate_.

<comment><USER6> Right. They couldn't effectively operate in the face of a huge trading spike and a DDOS. Hence they're upgrading. But then they get stick for taking too long to upgrade.

Conversely, if they spent $$$ on a bulletproof platform, they'd probably go bust (as seems to have happened to other more technically proficient exchanges)

The underlying problem is: people have too high expectations of what the bitcoin world can cobble together at this point. Its being built by hackers, not bankers.

<comment><USER16> > Conversely, if they spent $$$ on a bulletproof platform, they'd probably go > bust (as seems to have happened to other more technically proficient > exchanges)

If that's true, it would seem to indicate that no one with the resources to eat the cost of operating a reliable exchange through the expected growth period of bitcoin has sufficient long-term confidence in bitcoin to underwrite the growth-phase costs in order to reap the rewards once bitcoin is all grown up.

> The underlying problem is: people have too high expectations of what the > bitcoin world can cobble together at this point. Its being built by hackers, > not bankers.

Expecting the main exchange for something that is promoted as a currency to meet the reliability expectations of a currency exchange is not unreasonable.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming that access to investment (VC funding or whatever) is a perfectly efficient system. It clearly isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It always bothered me to know that there is no other solution to DDos attacks other than shutting down the systems and wait till it gets back to normal load.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it socially advantageous to be a female founder? - <AUTHOR> Outdated gender roles place heavy responsibility on men to get a job that pays a lot of money, has prestige, and prepares one to support a family. Since women don't have that societal pressure, they'd be less affected by the social stigma of being a failed founder in a worst case scenario. Hence, they may face less social risk. Thoughts?<p>(Needless to say, there's TONS of other obstacles female founders will face that men don't even have to think about). <comment><USER2> Outdated gender roles also discourage women from taking risky decisions, and punish them when they do.

The data suggest that being a woman is not an advantage when e.g. fundraising for a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right on - there's tons of other issues that give men an unfair advantage overall.

Just thought it was interesting that there might be an upside to this specific case of misogyny. If they succeed, they blow all expectations; if they fail, weren't expected to be Steve Jobs anyway.</comment></comment>


The Lesson Americans Never Learn - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/gofundme-economy-was-never-going-work/615457/ <comment><USER2> heres a lesson that Americans learned a long time ago:

a government powerful enough to give you everything is a government powerful enough to take everything from you.

<comment><USER3> _Any_ useful government must be powerful enough to take everything away from you. How else could it, for example, punish murderers?

Like it or not, this is true for literally every government in the world. So that's not a sensible counterargument to giving it the ability to help as well.

<comment><USER4> This sounds like a Ben Shapiro "but akshually" argument.

American government was founded with the clear intention and understanding that power was derived from the consent of the governed.

What you said is meaningless - of course they have firepower that makes resistance futile. But US government is fundamentally based in the protection of individual rights.

<comment><USER3> But that's a different argument. You haven't shown any fault in my reasoning other than calling it meaningless. There may be arguments for why government shouldn't be able to give you everything (for example, the ones in your post), but "because then they can take everything away" isn't it, since every government in the world can already do that, both in theory and in practice.

<comment><USER4> The American tradition is fundamentally skeptical towards governmental power.

This is a disposition and ideal.

Clearly we can violate that ideal at any point.

But it's like saying that dieting is useless cause you can gorge on food whenever you want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It [the government] should provide child care and public education for > families.

I worry that once childcare becomes taxpayer-paid, salaries will eventually reach an equilibrium where use of this public benefit plus dual incomes is the expectation. Then the decision to raise your children (and thus revert to single income) will become an even more premium experience that only the very wealthy can afford. Which is kind of depressing to me, that even more couples than today would be priced out of raising their children by themselves if they desired to do so.

IMO a better way to lift up the poor who can't afford childcare even on dual incomes is for these dual incomes to become larger through wages increasing, such that they can afford said childcare.</comment>


Analysing the Star Trek: TNG episode Tapestry - <AUTHOR> http://frogsbull.com/broken-down-tapestry/

<comment><USER2> I always thought TNG was really first-rate television, and episodes like this still choke me up a bit. This is probably because I was just an impressionable kid when these aired live (I was born in the early '80's), but TNG did a tremendous amount to shape what I wanted to be when I grew up and the sort of world I wanted to live in. The Inner Life was another great episode, and I tried really hard to write a research paper on Darmok for a linguistics course in college (professor wouldn't go for it). This may very well have been Patrick Stewart's finest work, and I wish there were TV shows that dealt with ideas today in the same way TNG did 20 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> >TNG did a tremendous amount to shape what I wanted to be when I grew up and the sort of world I wanted to live in.

Same here. I still watch TNG episodes nearly every single day. You can learn a lot from them and I try to expose others to the "teachings" that can be gleaned from the show. Always like to see another huge fan who feels the same way I do. By the way, it's The Inner Light. Sorry, huge TNG fan that just couldn't resist. :)

<comment><USER2> You're right - sorry. Been up for two days taking care of a sick puppy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A friend recently introduced me to Star Trek: TNG, after decades of it being mysterious pop-culture in the periphery of my experience. Rather than watch the whole seven seasons, he picked out about one season's worth of episodes from across the entire run:

        http://wiki.thorx.net/wiki/TNG:Condensed

I haven't watched them all yet, but Tapestry is very definitely one of the highlights.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to watch them with convenience check out: <http://www.youtube.com/user/bluesmoon#p/p>

Seasons 1-3 got deleted but 4-7 are still there. Happy watching.

<comment><USER4> I believe <http://www.allstepisodes.com/> is pretty comprehensive, and has all episodes.</comment></comment></comment>


When London's Dragons Ruled Before Skyscrapers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2018/12/27/dragon-boundary-markers <comment><USER2> This is a very strangely written article, like something churned out by an SEO mill.

It half-way alludes to - and then shies away from - a bunch of potentially interesting things, then wildly changes direction in the last paragraph and ends abruptly. I wonder if the person who wrote it has ever even visited London? Most of it seems to be a near-direct lift form the Wikipedia article on the City of London.

<comment><USER3> I also thought so. No pictures and it was not clear from the article if thus sculptures were still standing.

A quick search turned up an article with pictures: [https://www.aperturetours.com/blog/dragons](https://www.aperturetours.com/blog/dragons)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The American Conservative

> We want a federal government that restrains itself from intrusive forays > into the lives and businesses

> Unfortunately, these well-intentioned dragons at the thresholds of the City > of London have been unable to guard against the onslaught of hubristic > architects and developers

Wow, that's hard to conciliate! A limited-government conservative who is also a NIMBY and in favor a strong-government urban planning.

<comment><USER5> There is no contradiction in wanting a small federal government and being in favor of local governments making rules to better the daily life of citizens, or accomplish any other goal. It's well in line with the concept of subsidiarity, a hallmark of most strands of conservatism.

<comment><USER4> Not when you want this:

> authentically free markets

Heavily regulating land markets is as far away from a free market as you can be.

<comment><USER6> It's not quite the same, but Georgists consider land, in general, and not entirely without reason, as a special case: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are boundary markers really completely deprecated in much of the world? Here in Finland, private properties still commonly feature them, and it's illegal to move them.

<comment><USER8> Not sure. I know one corner of my parent's land in Montana has a physical marker. Maybe because it's a joint boundary between state, federal and private land. It is also really hard to find, as it's in the bottom of a ravine in heavy brush and it's a ground level bronze (I think) spike like an oversized nail hammered into the ground. You really have to know where the boundary is within a few feet already to have even the slightest hope of finding it.

I found it once as a teen, but 2 decades later, I'd be hard pressed to find it.

<comment><USER4> That might also be a USGS reference marker, used for topographic surveys.

<comment><USER9> Did it look like one of these? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_marker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_marker)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> URL for the original article source: [https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2018/12/27/dragon- boundary-...](https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2018/12/27/dragon-boundary- markers)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Changed to that from [https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/when-londons- dr...](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/when-londons-dragons- ruled-before-skyscrapers/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really one of the worst articles I've ever read, ever.

Not only because it baits you with an interesting introduction suggesting that we'll get a really neat history lesson, but because it ends abruptly with wildly irrelevant, unsubstantiated opinions.

Why are big glass towers bad? Who have they harmed? Why is new development bad? Is there any evidence to show that these buildings are not as energy efficient as they claim to be? Which landmarks have been destroyed? In what way are buildings designed to make money bad? None of these questions are answered and we're expected to assume that the author's opinion comes from some position of authority.

It truly is conservative in the most primal sense: I don't want things to change, I don't know why, and I'm upset about it.

<comment><USER13> I can't prove to you that Venice is more beautiful than Manhattan.</comment></comment>


Top Strategies for Surviving Airports and Airplanes - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5561002/top-10-strategies-for-surviving-airports-and-airplanes

<comment><USER2> 1) Bring a short extension cord with multiple outlets, so you don't have to fight with people in boarding lounges to charge your gear. This will also make you a hero at conferences too...

2) If you're going to begin a long term run of traveling look into the possibility of doing airline status challenges. I had started a job that had me flying 5K miles a week -- while I still would have earned it later, getting elite status in a month using the challenge meant better seats, better treatment, and more miles earned on all those subsequent trips.

</comment><comment><USER3> a few of mine:

eat a bag of peanut m&m's as soon as you sit in your seat, then use an eyemask and drift off as the announcements are made. The sugar coma from the candy will send you off to dreamland for at least the first hour of the flight. Use earplugs and snag a window seat if you want to increase your odds of sleeping longer. Or, buy a big meal in the terminal and eat it as soon as you are seated for an even bigger food-coma-induced slumber.

If the person in front of you leans their chair back when your'e trying to work, it's convenient to have a fake sneeze ready to unleash. I prefer to let my lips smack a bit and let a few droplets of saliva spray out (while making a sneeze sound). They will bring the chair back up for the rest of the flight. If they start to look ready to lean back again, start sniffling.

If you're wearing a coat or blazer, be sure to ask to have it hung at the front of the plane in the special closet reserved for this purpose. There may not be seats in first class, but there is usually room for your jacket.

If you want to avoid an armrest hog, the best way is to allow your body to touch theirs a bit too much at first with a subtle lean-in and leg adjustment, so they decide to withdraw to obtain more personal space. When they do, the armrest is yours. Don't relinquish it. A few sniffles sometimes help here as well.

Wear a warmup suit, flip flops and socks when traveling. This is the optimal outfit, particularly a hoodie, because you can use it to get extra darkness/privacy if you need it.

</comment><comment><USER4> My favourite trick: If you have a "print your own" check-in card, print it with low DPI so the barcode on it can't be read with the scanner. On some airports they will send you back to get another one from the check-in desks and let you come back into a priority queue. On one airport I often use this is MUCH faster than the standard queue. (<5 min. -vs- 10+ depending on the queue)

Of course it doesn't work everywhere and don't try it if you're almost-late.

<comment><USER5> In what region does this work? My home-printed boarding passes only seem to be scanned at the last moment, at the gate while boarding, so there's no more lines to optimize at that point. (Or is TSA very subtly scanning it at ID check before security? If so they've got a scanner-inside-a-penlight I've not noticed in many trips...)

<comment><USER4> That's what I do at 2 UK airports, where the flow is:

        check-in/luggage -> pass check -> security queue -> security check -> boarding lounge -> boarding gate check

If you have the online checkin, you go straight to the pass check (where they only scan the checkin to see if they should allow you in at all - no documents check or anything else). So I'm skipping the security queue and go straight into the security check basically (after reprinting). It doesn't work in London for example, where the first pass check is done automatically on machines and there's no queue before them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _So go ahead and find an aisle seat near the back._

It might get you good legroom, but it might also get you proximity to a smelly lavatory with a broken door.

It also puts you behind the engines of most commercial airliners which means more noise.

</comment><comment><USER7> My advice for getting over jetlag: put yourself on the local clock immediately. If you fly a red-eye, get as much sleep as you can on the plane - then when you land in the morning stay awake the whole day and don't go to sleep until after 10pm! If flying west, do the same - put yourself on the new clock and go to sleep no later than 11pm or midnight. Also in both situations - get some good exercise the first day at a hotel gym or pool. Also if you have access to one, use a sauna!

</comment><comment><USER8> Take your own pillow, and not one of those wussy airline pillows either, but a real, large, proper pillow. Works for me :)

<comment><USER9> And, you don't have to pay extra for the pillow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> drive</comment>


Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2013/04/who-cares-if-its-been-tried-before.html <comment><USER2> If it's been tried before, you should absolutely care. The successes or failures of those that have tried or done it before should be your first lessons and they should inform your decisions (probably not define, but definitely inform).

No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about _why_ it didn't work is your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.

<comment><USER3> Its not just about working or not. E.g. yahoo vs google. They both work, just google works better. Myspace worked too, just facebook worked better. Even in the cases where things have failed in the past, it can be difficult to figure out why. Do you think that the iPhone was the first smartphone?

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of Youtube. On-demand video was the "flying car" of Silicon Valley before them.

And what about Skype? The notion of a usable video-phone was pure fantasy for years prior to them.

And now, Tesla is doing this again.

I can walk into my grocery store, use their smart-phone app to get discounts on things I want to buy and then wave my phone at the self-checkout station to pay for it all. What a nice future.

Reminds me of these commercials: <http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will> . They seem so quaint now.

<comment><USER3> I dont understand what point you are trying to make and how that may relate to what I said. Are you trying to state that new things are invented? If so, I think you missed my point which was that determining why things work now _can_ also be a difficult question.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples.

There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in that are now ubiquitous.

It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid.

For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said would never come.

Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g., [http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...](http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_recall)). And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty impressive.

<comment><USER5> This is a meta request: could you post the direct YouTube link instead of, or in addition to, the link through your descriptive URL redirector? Despite the descriptive nature of the URL, I still trust a direct link to YouTube a lot more.

<comment><USER4> interesting. I just wrote that earlier that day. I was trying it for the first time in that comment. Failure already! That was fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only important factor in 'it's been tried before' is the 'before' bit, the timing. If the timing was off and that's why the venture failed then re-doing it makes sense. If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. But 'tried before and failed' will stick for everything where timing wasn't a factor.

During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means do a re-run.

<comment><USER3> >The only important factor

I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but rather execution.

<comment><USER7> Using a term like execution to describe why someone is successful is tautological and IMO meaningless.

What's more important is to figure out what the actual execution consisted of.

For instance it's speculated that one of the reasons why Dropbox got a lot of cover was that they where Mac based rather than Windows based.

Since a lot of tech-journalists have Macs it was easier for them to try out and write about it:

"My earlier version of this post was about how Syncplicity and Dropbox competed for mindshare back in 2008 when both companies launched. My initial Quora post was about some of the reasons why, around our respective launches, Dropbox was able to get more attention. 3 years ago, the press and early tech adopters were starting to fall in love with Mac products. The average consumer didn't have a Mac, but they were hot amongst influencers. Having a Windows- only product dramatically limited the attention Syncplicity received from the press. Today, I can't imagine launching a desktop app without Mac support. When we started developing Syncplicity, it wasn't obvious that Mac support was critical for press attention. Today both companies have Mac clients."

[http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular- tha...](http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other- programs-with-similar-functionality)

<comment><USER8> It is meaningless, but I think saying "it was that one thing" is also probably being too specific, and there is a requirement for a happy medium.

If the answer was obvious (in hindsight even) usually it is imo, an oversimplification of success.

Many times success isnt doing one thing right, its doing the right things right enough, and the wrong things not often enough to piss everyone off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A market with a successful competitor can be a good sign of consumer demand. However, a market with dozens or hundreds of failed/stagnant startups and no standout winners is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad.

<comment><USER10> _cough_ Smartphone-based loyalty cards _cough_

<comment><USER9> I had four or five examples ready to go, but I didn't say them because I know people working on each of them :)

The startup fad that caught me was a phone app that helps you meet strangers near you. I thought I was being unique and clever, but then a hundred other startups came out in the space and failed spectacularly. The only one that survived was grindr.

<comment><USER11> Hardly. Highlight is pretty active still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Saying that it's possible to nail a business that has been tried and failed before is fine, but you had better understand why things are different now.

What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing, and an opportunity has opened up now?

</comment><comment><USER13> In his title, he needs to use "It's" as a contraction of "It Has". "its" is the possessive for "belonging to it" -- always.

<comment><USER14> Its not that important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are two kinds of founders-inventors:

1\. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with semi-successes

2\. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with truly new ideas that _create markets for themselves_ , that bring solutions that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and "poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before" market

If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why they failed, you know...).

</comment><comment><USER16> An important way to evaluate others, especially prospective colleagues, is to observe how much information they use to come to a decision, and note what they do with it.

Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know? Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.)

However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wish I could find this blog post now, but it seems to have disappeared... but there's one by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that I found very influential some time ago. It goes something like (paraphrased) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else".

Now, this may not _always_ be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products, better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys and you at least have a shot.

<comment><USER5> _"Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else."_

I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes.

His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> " In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS)."

Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows.

I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.

</comment><comment><USER19> It matters greatly if you're entering a thriving market, or a graveyard market (one littered with tons of failed attempts and no reasonable success stories).

If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's probably a reason they all failed too.

The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.

</comment><comment><USER20> +1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of times before. :)

I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small.

And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.

</comment><comment><USER21> yep, HN'ers especially are very well aware of this.. the only critiques I usually see on "Show HN" is how does your X product differentiate from already existing Y product, not oh this was done before don't bother etc...

</comment><comment><USER22> This post has already been done before under the title "On the value of a better mouse trap".

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm going to start posting this to all the HN bozos who comment to the affect "hasn't this already been done" (after downvoting them, of course).

</comment><comment><USER24> Smart people care if it's been tried before. The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from someone else's mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER25> In the early part of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon said (in essence) "Man cannot do what has never been done, except by means not yet tried."

There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily be the key to new varieties of failure.

What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.

</comment><comment><USER26> anyone who cares about base rates.</comment>


Stanford – The Get Rich University (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/get-rich-u <comment><USER2> I always wonder if they really think they are "changing the world" it seems like a very well optimised system that bonds rich investors with already affluent students to generate money for themselves and other already rich people in rich countries.

However the social impact and real innovation ( the one that improves drastically people lifes ) is lacking.

<comment><USER3> _it seems like a very well optimised system that bonds rich investors with already affluent students to generate money for themselves and other already rich people in rich countries._

This is a good first-order approximation. One generally admirable thing about American culture is that it's not acceptable to just inherit wealth and try to rule society. Where this backfires is that it means that rich kids get dumped into the mainstream labor market and, with their superior social resources, take most of the top jobs. VC-funded startups are mostly a mechanism for taking parental wealth and influence (a socially unacceptable thing for the child to live off of) and laundering it into shares of newly-created businesses, so that the sponsee looks like a genuine tech entrepreneur rather than the beneficiary of a managed outcome (acqui-hire!) put together by his parents' friends.

There is a lot of technology work, even right now, that improves peoples' lives in immensely meaningful ways. Perhaps the people doing such work are a "silent majority" of technology. The problem is that you never hear about it on Hacker News or TechCrunch, and the contemporary crowd of Valley king-makers runs away from it.

If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to control. If several of the constraints are socioeconomic arrangements (e.g. Joffrey _must_ get at least $10M and a VP-level position in the inevitable acqui-hire; and we _must_ let Squabbling Hen Capital in on this deal, with a board seat, because we owe them a favor) then it becomes a lot harder to actually do anything useful. Instead, it becomes "tech is hard, let's go Snapchat".

<comment><USER4> Can you provide a list of successful or long-term viable startups that you feel were the products of parental wealth transfer?

Can you provide a single example of an acqui-hire that you believe --- with any evidence at all --- to have been the result of a favor to the parents of the founders of that company?

I feel like I talk to a lot of people at VC-backed startups managing boards --- in addition to having founded such a company many moons ago --- and while I've heard a lot of horror stories, one story I've never heard is the one where a board seat was given away as quid-pro-quo. Can you help me understand your claim more clearly, for instance with an example?

<comment><USER5> Chelsea Clinton, d'Alosio, Oscar Health, AppDirect, Microsoft.

<comment><USER6> In what way was Microsoft a result of parental wealth transfer?

<comment><USER5> Bill Gates received a large trust fund when he was born. Microsoft's first major deal, with IBM, was facilitated by his mother's connection to the IBM board.

<comment><USER6> But as I recall, the company had to pull its own weight financially, and was effectively bootstrapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stanford doesn't sound like a "university" in the traditional sense of the world. Perhaps a vocational centre, where the pursuit of knowledge comes secondary to application?

It is interesting to note that Stanford is a "true" American university (unlike east coast universities which were meant to be copies of oxford and cambridge), and that may explain its readiness to embrace the juggernaut of the capitalism.

<comment><USER8> Stanford is absolutely a research university in the truest sense of the world. There have been 31 Nobel laureates on the staff as well as 19 winners of the Turing award. It's also worth pointing out that the CS department, though important, comprises a small minority of faculty and students on campus. There are lots of professors and grad students doing research in archaeology, physics, medicine, classics, materials science, etc. who most people hear little of.

<comment><USER9> Actually CS comprises of around 15% of undergrads and commands a dominating influence over the rest of the school. [http://stanfordvisualized.soraven.com/](http://stanfordvisualized.soraven.com/)

<comment><USER8> I would describe 15% as a small minority. I agree that the department is important to the school (possibly the most important single department), but I think your characterization of its influence as dominating is totally incorrect. I'm guessing that you have a lot of CS major friends, live with many CS majors, and probably study it yourself. However, there are plenty of places on campus which have almost no influence from the department. Examples which immediately come to mind are the co-op I lived in last year which had 2 CS majors out of 56 residents, the several-billion-dollar medical school, and the school of humanities (which in aggregate dwarfs the CS department in terms of enrollment). Even the rest of the School of Engineering isn't really influenced by departmental decisions. I think that most members of these communities would strongly disagree about being dominated by the department; your perspective likely stems from sampling bias in some regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Financial gain as the primary motivator for the majority of students to pursue a university education and subsequent career is hardly new.

30 years ago, s/startup/Wall Street/.

</comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat complimentary read:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/frank- bruni...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-best- brightest-and-saddest.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER12> In my experience talking with Stanford alums and just walking around the Stanford campus most people there appear to be already rich. It is not Berkeley, where regular people go.

<comment><USER13> I remember my cousin who went to UMIST Top 3 Uk uni) how adjusting to being around lot of students who where far wealthier was quite hard.

I suspect going to Oxford and Bumping into students who are members of the bullingdon club is the same but far more so

<comment><USER14> UMIST is top 3 in what rankings? It's not even Russell Group!

<comment><USER15> UMIST was subsumed by the University of Manchester in 2004 which together brought them to a distant 5th in the UK rankings by research income. (Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL are the only UK institutions that can really claim to be world class, though all those lists tend to be rather anglo-centric.)

Engineering tends to attract a slightly more economically diverse intake than the arts, but UMIST's was still very skewed towards the offspring of the professional middle classes. I'm not surprised to hear that someone who did not share that background might have felt a little socially alienated.

<comment><USER13> Actually he was from the well off side of the family - he was talking about wealth beyond upper middle class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Stanford is at a crossroads right now, because it could take its immense wealth and influence to clean up the Valley and, if it did so, that would be a great thing for everyone. What other institution would be capable of bringing the moral leadership that the Valley needs? (You can't say, "you, Michael O. Church". While technically correct, you'd need to get people to listen to me. In 3000 years there may be a NoSQL database named after me, just as there is one for Cassandra now.) Stanford has clout and wealth and immense power. It also has (despite the bad ones who get lots of press) a lot of really good people in its student body and professoriate. Unfortunately, these resources aren't being used right, because the culture of the Valley is anti- intellectual, status-driven, clubby, and run through with every dark aspect of human nature that universities were supposed to educate and elevate humans out of. It needs to show moral leadership rather than caving in to crass commercialism.

It could start by de-degreeing some bad actors, and making it public. Evan Spiegel's earned it with his frat-boy era behavior, and Lucas Duplan with that stupid fucking name (Clinkle) and that picture of him with the fat stacks. I'd go further. Caught red-handed in age discrimination? Degree's gone, and professors will be disciplined if they refer students to you or invest in you. Put stack-ranking in your company? Congratulations, you're no longer an alumnus, and the reason why will be made public.

Stanford isn't a bad institution at all, but it needs to show some leadership if it wants to gain the respect of the East and the North. It very much can. Plenty of the professors and classes are top-notch already.

<comment><USER16> Why does Stanford need to "gain the respect of the East and the North"?

<comment><USER17> Because recently its graduates implemented stack-ranking.</comment></comment></comment>


EU looks into blocking of Internet calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/11/business/mobile.php <comment><USER2> Misleading title, I thought it meant that the EU is thinking about blocking Internet calls but they're just investigating whether companies do it.

<comment><USER3> You misreading it doesn't make it a misleading title. They are looking into "blocking of calls", not "blocking calls".

Just because American-English has conditioned the world that "Off of" is the same as "Off" doesn't mean that "of" has no meaning.

I don't know whether it's anticompetetive to block such calls, but it probably hinges on whether we take telephone to mean "a telephone (traditional)", "any device that looks and acts like a traditional telephone (e.g. USB skypephone)" or "any system that carries speech between some number of particular persons over some distance".

Depending on which you choose, you get a different answer and interpretation. There was a local case recently where a ferry-bridge was classed as a bridge, because it's on a chain fixed between two points, and the local authority wanted it reclassified as a boat because it floats, so they could up the harbour taxes 40x. The counter argument was that it only floats between two points winching itself along a chain, what kind of useless "boat" is that?

As I see it, it's clearly not a good fit for either definition, and thus the argument is completely pointless. This is similar - it's not at all a classic phonecall, so don't treat it like that. They're providing a data service and limiting the types of data that can be sent, that's what should be under investigation. It's a nontechnical restriction designed to bump up profits. Either limit the data rate or latency or max transfer allowance, or adjust your charges to be profitable with increased use, but stay out of what it's used for (legal concerns excepted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As much as I hate carriers who block services, they have a point here. Wireless calls typically use 8kbps. Next-generation codecs cut that to 4-5kbps. Skype, well, is wasteful. With most people's internet connections, this doesn't matter. What's 20-60kbps? However, if everyone decided to use Skype on their wireless, we'd hit capacity problems fast.

We'd also see the end of unlimited data. It would be metered in an official manner and it would come out to a rate more expensive than voice because it uses more network resources than voice. If a minute voice call uses 480kb and a minute Skype call uses 1200kb, you can bet that the Skype call will cost you double (or more).

The fact is that wireless networks are able to optimize their voice services when it's voice. When it's data, it's just wasteful of bandwidth. That doesn't matter over your cable modem. It matters on a shared wireless link that works because it pushes the max on efficiency.</comment>


Free Software network services and web apps that can be hosted locally - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/duyetdev/awesome-selfhosted <comment><USER2> Original repo: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted)</comment>