Let Children Get Bored Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/children-bored.html <comment><USER2> There are two separate issues:

A. 1,000 ft view: drugs are bad. Both chemical drugs and electronic entertainment that is engineered to be addictive. Light weight drugs in small doses are less bad: 90s vs now.

B. 50,000 ft view: the real problem. When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. Most of our research on addiction is based on this. In a study where the rats were placed in a healthy environment they chose food and water over drugs.

We live and raise our children in the former. Humans evolved to be raised in an environment much closer to what is happening over in Germany with Forests kindergartens [https://youtu.be/31eBV6ZTNDQ](https://youtu.be/31eBV6ZTNDQ)

<comment><USER3> Personally I think the issue is, and I struggled for a long time to articulate this... escape.

I have always struggled with a cluster of issues... too much tv, too much internet, for a period in college binge drinking, overeating... the big "aha!" was that I was engaging in these behaviors to escape reality.

We live in a unique time where if you don't like the reality you're in, you can step into another. Society has rightfully developed stigmas against other harmful behaviors. But the issue is a level deeper.

For the first time in history, we can "escape" or "drop out" or whatever you wish to call it without chemicals. It's a powerful urge... after all, if you have a limited time on earth, and the world's information at your fingertips, it becomes extremely tempting to just tune out... everything.

<comment><USER4> Books were an escape vehicle before TV, movies, and games.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but doesn't it work pretty differently? With books, you're just given words and your brain has to fill in the gaps and actually do some work. With video games and movies, your brain is directly stimulated; shown what to see and hear.

<comment><USER6> I know this is the common argument, but I'm not entirely convinced. when I was a kid, the graphics were quite primitive by today's standards, but playing the games at that age felt like stepping into a vivid other world. playing as an adult, I just see a bunch of geometry with shitty lighting while I run around clicking on HP sponges.

I wouldn't say that video games are quite as stimulating as reading a good book, but I think we underestimate how much our imagination works to "fill in the gaps" to make games feel real and rewarding.

<comment><USER7> And how we used to think whatever the latest in graphics was, was oh so realistic and amazing!

I played MUD's for a few years when I was younger and in hindsight it was amazing: while the writing wasn't typically as good as a book, you still filled in the world and characters with your imagination and it was both interactive and social. I still have some vivid memories of it that are as clear as if it had been a modern game or movie, despite that in reality I was reading text.

<comment><USER8> Some MUDs back in the day had combat and skill systems as complex as any modern MMOs. They were the precursor to MMORPG.

<comment><USER9> We're off topic here, but there are still plenty of MUDs around, and they're still as good or better.

Check out [https://www.mudconnect.com/index.html](https://www.mudconnect.com/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This subject is prone to so many reasoning traps.

\- The "problem" is with the current generation of children, so their future character is pure speculation.

\- The media consumed is seen as new. This means people believe (rightly or wrongly) it affects children very differently. Paradoxically, these same people claim to know how it affects them, despite it being new.

\- People are tempted to argue using childhood memories, despite being a child with limited understanding, the mutation of memories over time, and the limited sample size of other kids you knew. Those other kids were also only kids who knew you, meaning they weren't asocial and likely went outside.

This isn't to say we can never know. Just that disciplined experiments are necessary to avoid all these subjective pits.

<comment><USER11> _> Just that disciplined experiments are necessary to avoid all these subjective pits._

Disciplined experiments would require decades to learn how new media influence development of a child. Disciplined experiments require people subjects and a big moral no-no in the most cases. It is easier (maybe it is the only way for our society) to just watch what happens and to setup a small scale experiments to distinguish causes from effects.

While we are designing experiments children grow and become adults. When we finish with experiments the world would be the different place and the only our scientific result would be an ability to explain what happened in the past. (It would be a limited ability, because no one would be able to replicate our experiments and to confirm our findings.)

So I agree that speculations about future character of a child of current generation is a pure speculation, but it is the only way to apply brains to a current educational tasks. Alternatively we can say that a pure speculation is not good enough and do nothing, let things flow by the stream. I, personally, believe that the former way is better than the latter, even if it is unscientific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When my family went through hard times in High School our internet was cut. Basically every interest I had was pulled out from under me (gaming). I ended up going to the local library during this time after months of crushing boredom and reading a lot of books like the CompTIA Linux, CEH, random programming books.

I always wonder what I would be like if I didn't go through this phase at such a crucial time. It refocused me right before college and let me explore things that would otherwise have been boring.

Now that I'm doing well I can't find the same focus for things I want to learn because of all the other luxuries I have.

I can't imagine how kids that don't struggle like I did will gain that sort of clarity. Of course there are those who will just want to do those things, but I would argue that is the minority.

<comment><USER13> > I ended up going to the local library during this time after months of > crushing boredom and reading a lot of books like the CompTIA Linux, CEH, > random programming books

It's only happened because you were that type of person, I know a lot more high school students who went robbing cars and drinking because of their boredom, not going to libraries to read programming books.

<comment><USER14> If young people are robbing cars and underage drinking when they are bored, I would think the problem there is more about peer-pressure, upbringing and lack of purpose/belonging rather than boredom.

If someone is only stopped from making poor decisions due to escapism, there is an underlying issue that needs to be fixed with something deeper than not letting them get bored.

<comment><USER13> You can say the same about kids who end up as "bad examples" of media/tv influence

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article is extremely thin on actual evidence, and that's a problem, because I could take any aspect the world which has changed since my own childhood, write a similar article, and have just as much of a point as this one.

I could, for example, write about the easy availability of music, and the fact that you don't have to go to a store to buy CDs. I could take every tiny facet of CD purchasing, anticipation, and delayed gratification that I think was in some way good, and lament that kids no longer have that experience. I could completely fail to point out any possible _beneficial_ aspects to modern music availability, and by the end of it, the uncareful reader might think that I have a legitimate point.

It seems obvious that something simply being different about how children grow up does not imply that it's worse, so there needs to be some way to distinguish legitimate causes for worry from simple alarmism. If you can't find a way to do that for your piece, I think it's fair to say that your position should simply be ignored.

Now sometimes, the scientific community does need a nudge to investigate whether something is a problem. But if you can find _no_ hints within the current body of scientific knowledge that what you're talking about actually matters, you probably haven't found one of those cases.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can't fully understand what something is without experiencing its absence. Boredom is the absence of interest, and it's important because it teaches you about interest.

In the same way that you can't judge how loud an always-present humming sound from an air conditioner is -- because it disappears into the background -- you can't assess _how_ interested you are in something if interest is always present.

You don't want to do something just because it's _somewhat_ interesting. Watching YouTube is somewhat interesting, but you clearly don't want to do that all the time. You want to do what's _most_ interesting. And if you're unwilling to experience the absence of interest, you'll never know what that is.

</comment><comment><USER17> My dad grew up without a TV. He hardly had any books. He and his brothers ran around town finding adventures. This is exactly the kind of childhood the author advocates for.

And yet, today, in his retirement, my dad sits in front of the TV or computer 24/7\. He doesn't produce anything, he just consumes.

It's just one anecdote. But I think articles like these always receive many upvotes and clicks, only because they match many people's gut feeling. It _seems right_ that letting kids get bored would spark creativity.

But _feeling right_ is not the same thing as being right. Give me some argument for why I should believe these claims. Read the article again -- there's not an ounce of proof behind any of the many claims.

For every Lin Manuel Miranda there are a thousand my dads, who didn't turn their boredom into some kind of admirable creative passion. So which one is the outlier?

</comment><comment><USER18> This article primes my confirmation bias. I used to think it was up to me to keep my son entertained or otherwise 'engaged'. One day it hit me that letting him experience boredom is probably a net positive since I won't always be around to keep things interesting and the boredom might force him to explore pursuits he otherwise wouldn't have.

As he's grown older I've restricted screen time for the same reasons (although I could probably do more in that department).

Having just read the other HN topic regarding the hikikomori, I wonder if a/the root cause isn't their use of technology to treat boredom. Perhaps not a blanket condemnation of technology - if I discover a new hobby online and can parlay that into a job/career that's a net positive - but there's certainly some aspects of tech that are going to keep someone isolated and socially atrophied.

<comment><USER19> When I was a kid I remember being bored all the time, but interestingly as an adult I am never bored. In retrospect I think a lot of it has to do with the opportunities available to me. Now if I have an idea of something I want to do or a project I want to work on I can just start doing it. When I was a kid I was limited since many of my ideas required some disposable income or a car to accomplish. Given this perspective perhaps it is somewhat your responsibility to keep your son "engaged".

<comment><USER20> As an adult, I see my "boredom" more clearly as a psychological imperative "Do Something!" combined with an existential reply "Nothing Is Worth Doing!"

The result is inaction, the fix is either identifying something, anything worthwhile (the state often points to some unresolved need), or acting anyway despite the meaninglessness (only tenable for short periods, better to rearrange one's environment to avoid such situations altogether).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Boredom breeds creativity not just in kids, but adults too.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm incredibly wary about opinion pieces about the current generation of kids by previous generations. Nostalgia is an incredibly powerful influence.

<comment><USER15> Especially ones that make fundamentally scientific claims, but can't support their central thesis even with indirect evidence, so they decorate their article with noncentral mini-tangents just so they can link to some studies.

There's a pretense of rigor here sitting on top of the same "kids are growing up different" FUD we've seen a million times. The mere ability to make such an observation seems to be pretty uncorrelated with there actually being a reason for concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm only reading this because I refused to get bored for even 10 seconds in an elevator. And I practiced boredom for decades before the attention economy. I have almost given up on my children.

</comment><comment><USER24> Makes sense. Many of my best memories as a child started off with me being bored. My mother only let me have 30 minutes of screen time per day, computer and television combined, so the rest of the time I was forced to run around bored looking for things to do.

<comment><USER25> Not only that, but screen-based entertainment wasn't available on-demand. Remember having to wait until a certain time to watch a show you wanted to watch and figuring out something else to do while waiting? Or having to wait until someone was off the phone to use the internet? I feel like another big problem related to boredom is the general lack of patience in our society today. If I can't have it -right now- then it's not worthwhile. Which is unfortunate, because a lot of things worth doing require both boredom and patience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The most important mission in a dad's life is make sure his kids are bored out of their minds often enough and need to come up with something to do on their own.

<comment><USER27> Our kids get limited screen time, like an hour a day on weekends and 20 min during weekdays. A lot of the rest of the time it's "play with your sibling" although we do board games sometimes. I've really been impressed how my kids use their screen time. My son builds projects inspired by what he sees and our daughter sings and pretend plays. They come up with games on their own. It's really been awesome to see how they've integrated it.

<comment><USER28> How old are your kids? We've been struggling with ours wrt to screen time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Life isn't meant to be an endless parade of amusements. "That's right," a > mother says to her daughter in Maria Semple's 2012 novel, "Where'd You Go, > Bernadette." "You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret > about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The > sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll > be."

Interesting quote, and sadly might be out of context.

Still I couldn't disagree more. Everyone told me school time was the best part of my life, and oh the dreadful work after that. Bullshit. As soon as I was old enough to choose my own life and do what I want to do everything kinda improved and I'm exactly not really bored anymore (well, of course not 100%, but it's not worth mentioning). If you have the means and authority to choose your actions, boredom is much less of a problem than under constraints (can't go outside, can't go to a different place, can't stay up late playing games, don't have money to buy something you want to interact with...)

</comment><comment><USER30> God damn it, another thread about boredom (one thing is that Boredom isn't boring): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303091)

I just guess its part of the human experience, very trivial. The problem is if I am teen and I am content with life (Movies, Meditation, Gratitude) I won't put a fight to build anything, or even do anything at all. I could live in my parents basement for years.

Something I learnt lately is that even the Buddhist didn't liked it: dullness is a hindrance. Try breathing meditation to alievate it, and it works. So what would be the difference between breathing until you die (with no stress) versus indulging in entertainment, projects, video games etc?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a very valuable article. I have the following problem with it:

I think this age has its own tragedy: On the one end one is expected to process information that comes in in at a frantic pace; on the other hand one is required to do so with the depth and thoroughness that comes from a much slower age, when the skills were acquired while processing two dimensional texts/books.

These are two modes stand in contradiction to each other.

Now this contradiction hits hardest on kids and parents: you have to prepare and train your kids for both of these modes so that they stay competitive (that is able to fulfill the requirements and challenges they will later face at work).

Lots of problems...

</comment><comment><USER32> The parade of concerned parents writing these kinds of articles have conveniently forgotten how much TV and video games many of us consumed in 1980s and 1990s.

This stuff reads like satire:

"Rather than teach them to absorb material that is slower, duller and decidedly two-dimensional, like a lot of worthwhile information is, schools cave in to what they say children expect: fun. "

The kids are going to be alright.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, it is also interesting how they categorize the activities... apparently reading a book doesn't count as "avoiding boredom", but playing a video game does... why? Both are using something to entertain yourself, and it seems pretty arbitrary to distinguish between them. In fact, I am pretty sure there has been times on our history where reading fiction was treated the same way we treat watching YouTube videos today... as bad for your brain.

<comment><USER34> I think there's some truth to that, though.

As a former video game addict, I look back on my time spent gaming as largely a waste. Most of it was a compulsion, like staying up until 4am re-queuing in Dota. Or grinding some armor piece.

But I don't look back with regret on any of my time spent reading. I think most people here know what I'm talking about. Why is that?

I can think of a few guesses. Books aren't in the same category of quick dopamine releases as most (not all) games. There's an element of imagination and mental world construction in the book with even the cheapest entertainment. You're exposed to different interpretations of the world, possibly integrating the thoughts of others against your own. It also helped me write and spell.

I'd certainly categorically rank books higher than games if I had to. Though I know if you told this to my 14-year-old self, I would've made you think I only played MathBlaster and games from The Learning Company all day. "What, you think learning is bad?!"

I'm reminded of when I was at my friend's house when he kicked his son off Youtube to go outside. He thought it was the most unfair thing in the world, happy to let you know how many good educational videos there were on Youtube even though he'd just done a four hour binge of screaming Minecraft vids.

I chuckled and thought of myself at about that age. At one point I spited my mother by bringing paper and pencils outside to draw instead of playing in the street. That'll show her! Well, I now have a drawing hobby that I still practice weekly in my 30s. :)

<comment><USER17> _I don 't look back with regret on any of my time spent reading. I think most people here know what I'm talking about. Why is that?_

Easy one. It's because this is how society teaches you to feel.

You grew up in a world where schools tell you read anything you can get your hands on. They have book fairs, summer reading contests, entire libraries full of both nonfiction and fiction. It's drilled into your from an early age how valuable reading is.

If society indoctrinated you to feel that way about video games, that's how you'd feel.

There was a time when they only books considered worthwhile were nonfiction (and maybe the Bible). If a teacher caught you with a mystery or romance book, you'd be spanked in front of the class. In those days you'd feel guilty for spending an entire day reading Jane Eyre.

<comment><USER35> Haven't books dripping with philosophy also always been considered appropriate?

But I agree. Just look at an airport book shop's best sellers: is anyone really getting anything enlightening out of a trite mystery book that they don't get from TV? We (or at least I) feel some guilt for not having read classics and then attribute the same feeling to any sort of reading. Provided it's on a dead tree.

I've spent ages reading A Song of Ice and Fire, ultimately that is just the same as time wasted on the internet or TV if what I'm valuing is time spent on self improvement. Even reading a manpage is more valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I disagree with the premise of the article and its conclusions to let kids get bored. Boredom is plain evil. It is not something that should be sought out. Rather, it is a symptom of unpreparedness or parents not stoking inherent creativity in their kids.

As a kid, I rarely left home without a book. That habit still exists today. If I was "bored" or had some idle time, I had something to keep me entertained. On long car rides I'd engage with my siblings in numerous games - many of which we made up

<comment><USER37> Don't you think the kid should be learning to cure boredom themselves? If you always tie your kids shoes, how will they learn to tie their own shoes? Likewise, if you always provide entertainment, how will they learn to entertain themselves?

<comment><USER38> That is why you need to teach them how to do something. If kids are expected to know something teach them it.

<comment><USER37> Of course. Part of teaching is allowing them to struggle with the problem. Show them how, do it together, let them do it and help, let them do it with encouragement, finally let them do it alone. In the last two steps you must allow them to struggle and make their own mistakes.

By the time a kid knows the meaning of the word boredom, they know plenty of methods to cure it. They just need to be allowed to struggle with the problem and solve it themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have given my 5 year old enough guidance that she keeps busy when ever she is home.

Yes we still do activities, but she is never bored and she never asks for much screen time. We have tons of books, things to draw, puppets to make performances with.

I think exposing kids to lots of different activities and letting them have the free time, helps them to fill the the time.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nowadays children find themselves in a software-defined life. Boredom is a good option of gettin outside of this environment.

</comment><comment><USER41> Relevant Seth MacFarlane joke - [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IXOsCi_F7w8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IXOsCi_F7w8)

The kids are fine. The parents have too much free time.

</comment><comment><USER42> This goes for adults too.</comment>


A Primer on Database Replication (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.brianstorti.com/replication/ <comment><USER2> I highly recommended reading "Designing data intensive applications " by Martin Kleppmann to get a thorough overview with lots of references. Reading this book is a timesaver compared to finding all these information across blog posts.

[https://www.amazon.de/dp/1449373321/](https://www.amazon.de/dp/1449373321/)

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more. What DDIA gives you, most of all, is _context_ \- why does replication (or partitioning, or horizontal scaling, or ACID) matter? A must read for any working programmer today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pretty much complete introduction to database replication techniques.

If you're more interested in the quorum-ing tech that's come about (algorithms like paxos and raft) and the underlying distributed systems research I've recently tried to compile all the paxos family of algorithms in a blog post[0]. There has been a lot of work recently (notably EPaxos, WPaxos, SDPaxos) on tuning and improving the algorithms, including consideration for long distance WAN connections (that's what the W in WPaxos stands for).

[0]: [https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon-gotta-concensus-them- all](https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon-gotta-concensus-them-all)

<comment><USER5> > [https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon-gotta-concensus-them- > all](https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon-gotta-concensus-them-all)

This is pretty good non-FUD post about distributed systems (unlike many posts related to consistency and consensus coming from distributed database startups and megacorps).

Although missing some important real world considerations in reasoning, namely latency in WAN setups (reducing number of RTTs isn't really about that).

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I agree -- reducing the number of round trips is definitely important in reducing latency for the system in the WAN context, a quote from the SDPaxos paper:

> In the wide area, latency is dominated by network communication,which is > decided by the number of round trips, and the distance tothe replica to > contact. The test for Multi-Paxos is omitted becauseits disadvantage is > obvious: client has to communicate with theremote leader, as long as it is > not co-located with the leader.The replicas and clients for wide-area > experiments are deployedin California (CA), Oregon (OR), Ohio (OH), Ireland > (IRE) and Seoul(SEL). The sequencer of SDPaxos locates in CA. The round- > triptimes (ping latencies) between these regions are shown in Table 1.

I think this case is even worse than most real world cases people are dealing with today. Google/Facebook might have data centers this spread out, but I feel like 90% of the people who read that post will be worried about multiple regions _in America_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is pretty thurough on the subject of replication. It goes through pretty much all the options and trade-offs I've learned over my career in database operations.

The takeaways, I hope people will get from this article is that there is no one solution which will work best in all situations. It is a design decision about what advantages your application needs to have and what sacrifices you are able to make. The more limited and strict you can be about how your application reads and writes data, the more options you have to make your database backend more robust. Applications that "try to have it all" usually just end up doing everything poorly.

The other takeaway is the the physical limits of the universe are the greatest barrier database systems are working against. You simply cannot get around them. When you end up working with a team who is unwilling to acknowledge this, run as fast as you can.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very tiny nit: _DynamoDB is not Dynamo._ Leaderless replication was popularized by Amazon's original Dynamo paper, true, but DynamoDB is not the same system [1].

[1] [https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon- dynamodb...](https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon- dynamodb.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> There are solutions to this now:

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

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

Of course, there are still tradeoffs, but for many applications, a distributed database with strong consistency guarantees is likely to be a good choice for many projects.

<comment><USER8> Also of interest... The Raft consensus algorithm is used as an alternative to Paxos to decide who is in charge of a particular piece of data in a distributed system:

[https://raft.github.io](https://raft.github.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a really great article and overview. It is a tad light on the most important subjects of CRDTs (Conflict free Replicated Data Types).

After having worked on these types of problems for a decade, and successfully running an Open Source database startup for nearly a half decade, they are certainly and only the right way to go.

They seem to suggest they aren't well adopted, and suggest there are severe limitations that are withholding their adoption.

This was true with append-only or log-based CRDTs.

But now, state-based graph CRDTs (like we've implemented in [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ) have solved that. The only thing you can't do with them is Global Strong Consistency (think banking), but their Strong Eventual Consistency guarantees make them the best solution for literally everything else.

They are also run in production at large large sites, like the Internet Archive (top 300 site globally), D.Tube (1M monthly uniques), notabug.io (P2P reddit), etc. with GUN.

The article kind of makes this joke:

> (otherwise our lives would be too easy, right?)

But here is the kicker, both Internet Archive and NAB integrated/built in 1 week. Literally yes it makes people's lives easier.

And you should too! Next time you build a non-banking app, you should consider using state-based graph CRDT to cover 99.99% of your use cases!

<comment><USER10> You are getting downvoted because of your attitude. Even if your GUN database is really that awesome, here are some points for you to reflect on:

\- What is "easy" for you might not be for others.

\- Banking systems don't use strong consistency. They can just rollback/swallow the costs of invalid transactions after the fact. Online mom- and-pop shop... maybe they can, maybe its better for the site to just have some downtime sporadically and avoid such hassles entirely.

\- P2P is a nightmare for anything that requires audit trails (and there are legal requirements about that in many industries).

\- There exists a whole ecosystem of databases dedicated to analytical processing workloads (OLAP). Graph databases are typically not the best at it.

\- Conflicts happen. Your "conflict-free" datatypes embed the conflict resolution rules in the data structure. This is fine for some conflict resolution rulesets, but it cannot be done for some other sets (e.g.: in these weird circumstances, the user decides what the resolution is by clicking a button).</comment></comment>


Tsuru - An open source PaaS platform - <AUTHOR> http://tsuru.io

<comment><USER2> A promissing project by a multi-billion dollar TV & media group from Brazil. They're huge on using and developing open-source projects.</comment>


Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too - <AUTHOR> http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/taylor/2008/05/wy_zappos_pays_new_employees_t.html <comment><USER3> It's a very interesting company to say the least. I saw a SXSW presentation by their CEO and how much he emphasized on their culture. You can email him and ask for Zappos Culture book, it has nuggets from a lot of their employees; it's a good way to understand the company.

[http://www.slideshare.net/zappos/zappos-sxsw-presentation- to...](http://www.slideshare.net/zappos/zappos-sxsw-presentation- top-10-lessons-learned-in-ecommerce-03-08-08)

</comment><comment><USER4> Quite a smart strategy. I wouild love to impliment this and infact, I think I could come up with a very good business case for it. As with most of you I suspect, I at first thought about the angle of "it's a quick $1k, I'll just quit in a week and be better off for it". But of course - Zappos has already weeded out unsuitable candidates in interview/tests. That 10% figure is highly realistic because Zappos have a good idea that the vast majority of their new hires ARE right for the job, before they even start their training.

<comment><USER5> Plus they're probably running Bayesian statistics on all the data they have on the interview/test results of the candidates, so they can get better on hiring those that are less likely to quit. (And if they're not, they should be.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In addition to the filtering element, this strategy probably has a long term benefit. Those who reject the offer and join are likely to stay committed and enthusiastic in order to be consistent with their original decision. The desire to be consistent is a hugely powerful force - read Influence by Robert Cialdini if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder is Zappos backs up all this "enthusiasm" for the company with actual money paid. Typically these "fun" organizations expect total commitment from their employees but shy away from actually giving them a tangible 'interest' in the org.

<comment><USER8> You'd be surprised though at how much cash people are willing to sacrifice just to be able to enjoy coming to work each day.

As long as they're ballpark, they'll always have people beating down their door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Think its a great idea it separates the employees that have already thought about quitting. It also gives an easy exit without any anxiety...

</comment><comment><USER10> I seriously question the economics of Zappos. I mean, I've ordered shoes there 4 times, and I've probably got a record of something like 6 returns total and 2 shoes purchased. They had to eat a ton on that.

I don't really see their ratio being high enough. I'm rooting for them, but I really feel like any day their prices are going to go up to MSRP and they're going straight out of business.

And I'd love to know what % of people take them up on the $1k.

<comment><USER11> They probably did eat a bit on that, however:

1) Most customer's don't return stuff anywhere close to the rate you do (they usually get it right the first time. It's also a hassle to return stuff, even if it's free).

2) I can imagine with your atrocious rate ratio of returns, you'd be far more inclined to pay a few more dollars to make that experience better via Zappos then stinge out and deal with paying for the return shipping and poor customer service issues elsewhere. (i.e. if they raise their prices, who cares? Everyone knows Zappos was built on their excellent customer service and selection, not their prices)

(Note: I personally haven't used Zappos myself, but I've heard Tony talk about his customer service oriented culture in person and they sure seem to be doing just fine with it).

<comment><USER10> Well, I bet they return shoes a lot. Not as much as I did (and that was only due to 2 different brands having odd sizes) but I'd not be surprised if half of their orders end up returned.

It's not a hassle at all with Zappos, it's trivial. I'm the kind of guy who would just eat the $50-$100 if it required more than 10 minutes of my time. I've got boxes full of crap to prove that.

<comment><USER12> You value your free time at a rate of 300-600 dollars an hour? Wow.

<comment><USER13> Post-tax! Must be a patent attorney. Yet somehow he's posting on Hacker News...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of an innovation by another company known for its excellent customer service, Southwest Airlines.

They would put all of the current applicants in a room and have each one present themselves to the others. The recruiters never observed the presenter. Instead, they observed the audience. Those paying attention would be more likely to care about their customers, and were invited to interview.

<comment><USER15> If I were a people person, Southwest would be the company I would work for. I love their reality show because it shows you how people can remain calm in a storm.

Nordstrom's is a department store known around here for extraordinary customer service. I walked into a Nordstrom's the other day. I felt out of place because the marble floors reflected the well-heeled patrons. I went in just to see if it was true that they never ask "Can I help you?". Because if you are asked that - you'll probably say "No, thank you." At Nordstrom's, they asked me "Have you shopped here before?" It's a tricky question - because it's not really a closed-ended question. "No" "No? How can I.."

<comment><USER14> You _are_ a people person. And you can hack. May be better to stay right where you're at. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you didn't follow the link inside the story: <http://www.zazlamarr.com/blog/?p=240>. That's how you make raving fans - <USER2> a corporate environment where your employee is free to do something like that is just going to out-service everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER17> A bunch of the Twitter employees inexplicably began following me on Twitter last week, at first I was like "huh"? but then I just chalked it up to Zappos having a corporate culture that creates a lot of really savvy web people.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can see this being more efficient if it's a surprise.

Now that the tactic is public, some may apply and go through the training just for the buyout, making the filter much more expensive.

<comment><USER19> I think they think about this the same way they think about their returns policy: They just assume that most people will be reasonable, and not go out of their way to abuse the system.

On a tangential note, I seem to notice more and more how this pattern of just trusting people seems to win out in all kinds of fields, even though it seems non-intuitive. Wikipedia is another example and in a sense the whole open source phenomenon is based on this. Both of these would have been considered preposterous until they succeeded and completely changed the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What will prevent someone who knows about the deal from trying to get a job at Zappos with no intention of staying, grabbing the $1000 after a week, and leaving?

<comment><USER21> Hopefully those kind of people will be caught by the interview process, but I'm sure they slip through the cracks every once in awhile. In that case, they eat $1000. Oh well... it would appear that most people are honest enough that it doesn't happen very often, and doesn't make much of a difference to their overall business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How about bribing employees to quit so they don't vest?

</comment><comment><USER23> you get the boot even before you start :-)</comment>


Show HN: rgb – like Threes/2048 but with colors - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rgb!/id847590400

<comment><AUTHOR> Loved the idea of sliding and matching tiles but wanted something without numbers. Dumb it down even more they said. So I made a quick iOS version where you need to combine matching colors which then shatter for points.

I tried actually having different colors combine but there was no limit on which tiles could match without confusing players as to why something like red and cyan couldn't mix.</comment>


Native iOS Torrent Management - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/app/conttrol/id552714331?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> And why is this news? It's only a remote management for torrent downloaders that are running elsewhere

</comment><comment><USER3> Seriously, WTF, Apple. They pass this but rejected another Torrent control program (for the more popular Transmission) [http://www.iphonefreak.com/2009/05/apple-rejects- transmissio...](http://www.iphonefreak.com/2009/05/apple-rejects-transmission- bittorrent-app-for-the-iphone.html)

<comment><USER4> I'm in the same sore spot with a Put.IO (<http://put.io> ) iOS client I've been writing. I think it could be luck of the draw based on who is reviewing at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pass. Doesn't handle Transmission.

<comment><USER6> Tried to find the guy's email to ask if transmission is planned, but with no success.

<comment><USER7> You didn't try very hard!:-) Yes, support for Transmission is planned as well as an iPad version.</comment></comment></comment>


Automating breast cancer detection with deep learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.insightdatascience.com/automating-breast-cancer-detection-with-deep-learning-d8b49da17950 <comment><USER2> So basically they took a simpler version of software used in hundreds of medical imaging labs around the world and put it in an app?

I've worked in labs that do this exact same thing. It's cool that they're putting this in a consumer-facing format but the technology (re: accuracy in ML models) still isn't there yet, and there are a lot more performant and sophisticated models than the relatively simple network architectures the authors describe. At risk of being overly critical of the author, to me this just seems like a first, rather naive implementation of ML to be shown as a proof of being able to do ML related things, with the actual performance or usefulness of the model being secondary to that.

In short, putting this into practice at a consumer level: good. Actual modelling: maybe not so good.

<comment><USER3> > So basically they took a simpler version of software used in hundreds of > medical imaging labs around the world and put it in an app?

> I've worked in labs that do this exact same thing. It's cool that they're > putting this in a consumer-facing format but the technology (re: accuracy in > ML models) still isn't there yet

Don't these observations explain each other? The whole point of have a consumer product is to reduce office visits and/or increase the monitoring frequency. So reduced accuracy is acceptable since any positive results would be followed up by the standard, more sophisticated tests.

They aren't trying to mimic the state of the art in a phone.

<comment><USER4> Medical diagnostics have to be held to a high standard. False negatives (the app says you're fine when you have cancer) and false positives (the app says you have cancer when you're fine) both have significant consequences.

False negative (24%) means you are not getting the treatment you need as soon as you could. Imagine people delaying a real mammogram for a few years because they have an app that says "all good!".

False positive (35%) means unneeded tests and doctors visits. This is less concerning as a bad outcome, but it does mean more stress , more expense and longer wait times to schedule a doctor visit.

This is an interesting exercise in ML, but there is little chance this app would get approval as a diagnostic tool.

<comment><USER3> I'm not making any claims about the absolute accuracy of the test or whether it's useful as is. I'm responding to the criticism that (1) the test is less accurate than a lab test and (2) who cares about putting it in a smart phone.

Also, FTA:

> The code will be the deliverable to iSono Health as a baseline model for > further algorithm development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Getting image recognition to work to "replace" radiologists is both a game- changer and a HUGE money-saver and thus a GIGANTIC opportunity. Radiology is the most common specialty and one of the highest-paid in just the US -- 40,000+ radiologists earning $350k/year (so maybe $15 bn in salaries). Radiologists and thus some of the smartest & most capable people in the country and they spend the whole day just looking at images...computers should be doing this!! Not only that, computers will soon better...for many skin tumors and others, even the leading human experts differ in their opinion, so humans today out-perform computers but I don't foresee that being the case for long.

A game-changer in cancer treatment would be "early detection". Once it gets to be inexpensive to analyze images, then we can have vastly earlier cancer detection...you could work into a scanning machine in a local pharmacy, get scanned & get the analysis right there...you could go in for monthly scans. Theranos had something of that vision with a drop of blood in pharmacies which could also provide very early detection of cancer...but they didn't execute technically among other issues.

<comment><USER6> I've been looking at this space for a few years. I've come to the conclusion that one of the biggest obstacles to ML replacing/supplementing radiologists is the malpractice ambiguity. If a doctor misses a lesion on a chest Xray, the lawyers know who to sue. What if a ML algorithm that no human understands misses this. Who is liable? It's another sad example of technological progress in healthcare being stifled by bureaucracy / liability concerns.

<comment><USER7> Liability is of a radiologist is ultimately offset by malpractice insurance. Similarly, the lawyers would go for ML algorithm developers. Now I can see ML insurance business with premiums tied to ML clinical performance ... Obviously there has to be a legislation in place for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Holy data leakage Batman!

Because the data augmentation is performed prior to the random train/val/test split, nearly identical instances may be found in each set. In other words, a 1 degree rotation of training image X may be found in the validation or test set which would artificially inflate performance.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sensitivity/Specificity of 0.65/0.76 are laughably horrible for a diagnostic.

I note they didn't give a ROC curve or d'.

<comment><USER10> There is a reason mammography is the standard for screening, not ultrasound.

Honestly the more interesting case is probably this + mammo, as there is research suggesting sensitivity increases with US + mammo, over mammo alone.

<comment><USER9> I don't see why a screen you cannot trust should be a precursor to a mammogram. It just makes things worse.

<comment><USER10> Who said anything about a precursor?

<comment><USER9> "untrustworthy adjunct", then.

<comment><USER10> Well, like I said there is some research suggesting classsification on mammo + US can perform better than mammo alone. Hardly an unusual result in ML work.

So it's worth looking at.

<comment><USER9> ah, i think i composed your meaning incorrectly. If training their NN on mammogram data and ultrasound data gets them a better ROC, that's good.

What they have now is worse than useless, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The data should have been split into train, validation, and test sets before augmentation was applied. As it is now, there are likely examples in the validation and test sets that are highly similar to examples in the training set. The goal of validation should be to measure performance on previously unseen patients, not previously unseen scans of patients you've already trained on.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pigeons are good for this problem too.

[https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtm...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking- of-science/wp/2015/11/18/can-mammogram-reading-pigeons-help-train-human- radiologists-an-animal-behaviorist-weighs-in/)

</comment><comment><USER13> hey I'm the author, sorry for any confusion, I did separate the hold out sets prior to the image augmentation. Sorry for not making that clear in the post.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a public dataset available somewhere?</comment>


Stressed at work and trouble sleeping? It's more serious than you think - <AUTHOR> https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases/Stressed-at-work-and-trouble-sleeping-It-s-more-serious-than-you-think <comment><USER2> "They wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning to go to the toilet and come back to bed ruminating about how to deal with work issues."

Especially a problem for men dealing with prostate issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> "poor sleep had a 1.8-times higher risk"

Yikes.</comment>


Google (PageRank) based ranking of CS schools - <AUTHOR> http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/rank.html

<comment><USER2> Another pseudo-scientific source of CS school rankings is best paper awards at academic conferences. The list tightly matches the U.S. news rankings but not the Google rankings in the article.

1) Carnegie Mellon University

2) University of Washington

2) Stanford University

4) Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5) University of California Berkeley

6) Cornell University

7) University of Toronto

8) University of Texas at Austin

8) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10) University of British Columbia

source: <http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html>

PS: The linked article is misleading, as "PageRank" is only one of hundreds of signals Google uses for ranking. I originally thought the article's ranking uses the links between schools, but it doesn't. It would be more accurate to simply call it a Google search result ranking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google no longer uses pagerank for thir rankings. They take into account many factors including your IP address, your location, etc so the ranking that the author sees is likely different from the ranking anyone else sees.

<comment><USER4> I agree, this is absolutely silly. I have been to the University of Cape Town's Computer Science page dozens of times. My alma mater is the best CS University in the world!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How exactly does PageRank correlate to any measure of quality for a school? I see no description of methodology other than "we typed it into Google." Why is a Google search ranking relevant?

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the phrase "Computing Science" only in use outside of the US, then?

It seems to be in common usage in Canada (it's what my alma mater called the department) and seemingly at least parts of the UK (as at the University of Glasgow), and is definitely used to mean what is meant by Computer Science in the US, as distinct from Computational Science.

<comment><USER7> I quickly typed Computing Science in Google, and got the following list:

University of Auckland

Victoria University of Wellington

University of Waikato

University of Alberta

Simon Fraser University

Toronto

CMU

University of Glasgow

Oxford

Stanford

Georgia Tech

Berkeley

Newcastle University

UT Austin

UCLA

University of Canterbury

University of Cambridge

Harvard

Caltech

Auckland University of Technology

Stony Brook

My location is probably pretty clear (New Zealand).While on some level it is useful to get a ranking weighted by places that are geographically relevant, it does mean that we will probably all have different lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well that's interesting. I got a CS degree from U Mass. Cool to see it at the top of the list (3rd and 4th) :)

(Any other UMass Amherst CS Alums here?)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a ranking of SEOs of CS schools rather than overall quality of the institutions that 'US News' ranking is trying to capture.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure this is for amusement only. Remzi (a well known researcher in file systems) is also quite humorous.</comment>


Calling stats experts ofr a question regarding z table and normal distribution - <AUTHOR> A beginner question but I would like to understand this. I'm studying normal distribution and probability and would like to know where the values in the [z table](https://www.ztable.net) come from and how they are calculated. All sites I see just link to the table but none show how the values originate.<p>P.S. Also forgot how to add a link properly. Can someone show me how it's done <comment><USER2> For a definition of what the tables are about see the example on that site, it's worded casually but actually formal and precise. The values are obtained by computing integrals to find the area under a portion of the Gaussian curve (negative infinity to z or z to positive infinity). These particular integrals are traditionally called error functions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Umm..can you ELI5 this a bit for me?

<comment><USER2> Given a random variable x with a Gaussian probability distribution function of mean µ and standard deviation σ, we can normalize it by considering a transformed, and also Gaussian, random variable z=(x-µ)/σ with mean 0 and standard deviation 1.

The table gives the probability that z is lower than the given number; as you can see, values lower than -4 or greater than +4 aren't interesting.

Regarding the values, study calculus and you will be enlightened. Sorry, there is no shortcut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So links in text posts don't get parsed..if I am correct? But they do in comments? Let me try this [https://www.ztable.net](https://www.ztable.net)

Edit: It works.</comment>


Sitzfleisch: The German concept to get more work done - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180903-to-have-sitzfleisch---its-a-professional-compliment <comment><USER2> As a German I spent an abroad term in Canada, so here as a grain of salt the difference between German and the work ethic across the pond.

9am: I arrive in the lab at around, sit at my desk and set up my stuff. Unfortunately there was is one around to start the day with a coffee break. 10am: Canadian lab mates arrive, sit at their desks and go on facebook. noon: After spending three hours reading papers, fitting curves to data, etc. I get hungry. I go to lunch with a Dutch person I met in the building a couple of weeks ago. 1.30pm: Back at my desks. Through the towers of take away junk on my lab mates desks, I can see they made some progress on facebook. 3pm: I try to convince some of my labmates to go for the coffee place within the building to have a short communal coffee break. Of course everyone is too busy and cannot socialize, except for the post-doc from india (who does not facebook) 3:45pm: Back at the desk, wrapping up the results of my day, my lab mates are still "working". Next morning, they will tell me they stayed till 8pm in the lab and how increadibly busy they are.

Granted, in between visiting facebook and skipping communal lunch- and coffee breaks, they got some work done and I don't claim I delivered more results in terms of research and learning "output".

Yet I think it summarizes my and the experience of other Germans quite well. In Germany there is much more focus on not working long-hours but spending the hours you work productively. A German workday of an office worker is limited to max. 10h per day by law and my employer follows that rule religiously. Many colleagues contractually have 35 h work weeks and working 40 h requires a permit from the worker's council. If you are sick, you stay at home on sick leave, you join your colleagues again when you are better. American colleagues working here for a year or so as part of their assignment quite often start out to send an email that they are sick and will work from home. If you are sick, why do you work? Your job now is to get better. Quite often, breaks for lunch or coffee are started and ended together. Only few people come into the office with half-liter coffee mugs to consume on their desks.

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, and office cultures of individual companies may differ. My current company's culture is very German if you arrive before 8am, you might be welcomed with handshakes by your colleagues.

<comment><USER3> I would say, foreigners always do more than locals. They feel, they have prove something, maybe less social contacts too. I observe the same behavior like your Canadian lab mates with my young German colleagues. All day long sitting in mobile Facebook or drinking coffee for 30 minutes every 2 hours. Germans aren't majority among department's top performing people.

Edit: it's IG Metall company and you can't fire people easily. So low performers accumulate over the time. Talents come and go.

<comment><USER4> > So low performers accumulate over the time.

This is an incredibly offensive statement against unions and I want to see some proof from you for this. All large corporations in Germany have unions and Germany is still one of the world's economic powerhouses.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes statements of facts may seem incredibly offensive. Others should be able to mention those in a related discussion, even if offensive, because otherwise the discussion is biased.

I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that if firing is hard, low performers accumulate. I'm happy to elaborate if you wish.

<comment><USER6> So where do low performers come from and where do they go to when you fire them? What is their flow through the economy? A fired low performer will still look for, and likely find, another job. The assumption there might be that they will learn and try harder, but whether that is the actual effect is much less obvious than you might think.

It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great headline, terrible article. It mostly talks about German words and almost nothing of German work ethics. The only interesting bit is around the end where it quickly skirts over the fact that you need to make employees realize they are unproductive before you can work on their behavior.

All the other stuff is just meh. I mean, the language analysis isn't even very good, or in depth, with terrible half-assed English translations.

Basically, don't waste you time reading this.

<comment><USER3> Never heard about this "Sitzfleisch" thing living in Germany many many years. Young people don't use it. Maybe it's some old people thing?

<comment><USER8> I never use it but know the word and usually when I hear it it's more negative, e.g. when you have guests who won't leave you might say that they have Sitzfleisch.

<comment><USER9> This is the only meaning of Sitzfleisch I have ever encountered. It's not a compliment at least in our house.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I think I only ever heard the term in context with politicians that that were elected "too many times" by someone's standard. There, it _certainly_ isn't meant positively -- the funny thing is that this goes rather well with the phrase mentioning Angela Merkel at the beginning of the article. There are more and more voices now that would prefer someone new taking her post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Experienced the same thing in Austria: I'm from the most western part, which mostly has alemannic and rhaeto-romance influence and the work ethic is "german". You have Sitzfleisch, I go to work/university at 7am and after maybe 5-10mins of relaxing, I get start working/studying. I take a break at midday and a short one in the afternoon and leave around 5.30/6pm

People at the very eastern end of Austria, like Vienna, are far less "German". Their work ethic is much more relaxed, and like user _wirrbel_ pointed out, they stay late to work, simply because they start later and get less work done in the same amount of time.

<comment><USER12> Very eastern end Austrian here:

Working from 7:30am to 5pm. Cannot understand the German work ethic and the often seen German workaholics.

You work to live, you do not live to work!

<comment><USER13> I've been working in Germany for a decade and I've unfortunately never witnessed this so called German work ethic.

I do hear about it a lot specially when talking about my home country and ironically during coffee breaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love German words.

Disappointingly this article skirts around the obvious English translation: "ass-in-seat."

<comment><USER15> English has a slightly more general word. It is "grit". The ability to work continuously and without being distracted. Perseverance of effort. Ability to execute on a long term goal efficiently.

<comment><USER16> I would also consider "grit" to be a very appreciative term. "Sitzfleisch" I would consider more neutral, a person's property rather than a virtue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Related, the book "Dreams of Earth and Sky" by Freeman Dyson:

"Why did [Oppenheimer] not succeed in scientific research as brilliantly as he succeeded in soldiering and administration? I believe the main reason why he failed was a lack of Sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word with no equivalent in English. The literal translation is "Sitflesh."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/comments/1k5ihx/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/comments/1k5ihx/why_did_he_not_succeed_in_scientific_research_as/)

[https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=5nZoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA256&lp...](https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=5nZoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=+reason+why+he+failed+was+a+lack+sitzfleisch&source=bl&ots=Zm95CRp9Ev&sig=ZzCpKbJSJAENfEVDd_Ld199eXIE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwibppLBpqPdAhWBKnwKHXikDYYQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=reason%20why%20he%20failed%20was%20a%20lack%20sitzfleisch&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER18> 2 Comments:

\- It's common Chess vocabulary. Sometimes you need to work for hours to be able to win a technical position. Sitzfleisch is what it takes to do this.

\- The same word (with the same meaning) exists in Dutch: zitvlees.

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently encountered an English equivalent 'ass glue'.

</comment><comment><USER20> " _Before employees can work on increasing their productivity, they need to realise that they are underproductive_ "

This is seriously flawed (and over-generalizing). This basically assumes that the cause of underproductivity lies with the employee. Where are the arguments which are supporting this??

<comment><USER21> If an employee is unproductive because they are unmotivated, they do have the self-empowerment to say "this project isn't motivating for me, let's reassign me/plan for a more motivating project next/go over what the stakeholders need from this". If they are lacking the skills required to succeed at the project, they can go for training/get more experience from completing a similar, smaller project. And if they are apathetic and feel like they can avoid redundancy by putting in the minimal effort, they can look for a new job.

Sometimes the cause is external, like poor & changing requirements or wishful planning, or a bad personal relationship with coworkers, but even then the employee can feed that back to management. If they choose not to act on this feedback, see the 'apathy' option above.

Source is self-management on solo projects.</comment></comment>


Magic Tools – A list of game development resources - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ellisonleao/magictools

<comment><USER2> Some more engines:

\- LÖVE: [http://love2d.org](http://love2d.org) (Lua)

\- Polycode: [http://polycode.org](http://polycode.org) (Lua / C++)

\- SpriteKit (Obj-C / Swift)

(almost engines)

\- Cinder: [http://libcinder.org](http://libcinder.org) (C++)

\- Processing: [http://www.processing.org](http://www.processing.org) and [http://www.processingjs.org](http://www.processingjs.org) (Java/JS)

\- NodeBox: [http://www.nodebox.net](http://www.nodebox.net) (Python)

\- PyGame: [http://pygame.org](http://pygame.org) (Python)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey trueduke, can you open a pull request with that entries? Would be great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice collection!

I was recently starting to do a similar collection: [https://github.com/albertz/Coding-Game- Intro](https://github.com/albertz/Coding-Game-Intro)

Although mine is more headed to become some game coding tutorials, probably C++ with SDL, Lua, or so. But that hasn't even started yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice albert! There is some links on this list that isn't on the magictools one. Would you mind to contribute with us?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also: [http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rs1s1/what_are_som...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rs1s1/what_are_some_awesome_game_dev_tools_weve_never/)

Which I find to be more streamlined and focused on game development.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh _pmf_ , not everybody uses reddit.

<comment><USER5> I assume that's why he said "Also" rather than "Instead".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple more:

Particle Designer - [http://particledesigner.71squared.com/](http://particledesigner.71squared.com/)

Bitmap Font Generator - [http://www.bmglyph.com/](http://www.bmglyph.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great list! If you're interested in rapid-prototyping a platform game, check out a game that I'm working on called Beta.

There's a free trial download at www.betathegame.com

</comment><comment><USER8> Could use a mention of jpct [http://www.jpct.net/](http://www.jpct.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> hey lawlessone, you can fork and contribute :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are these all free or open source? Including the license for each tool would be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of they are free and some not. I will think a way of adding their licenses.

<comment><USER10> licensing is a must, especially for the game engines themselves

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It should have continue with the tradition and call it Awesome Games</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever been called slow? How did you react? - <AUTHOR> I've started in a company ~5 months ago and I'm sensing a growing impatience from our manager and team/tech leads.
The company adopts an agile methodology (on paper) and seems to expect things will just magically become faster. There are adhoc requests all the time and no filtering.
I'm a new hire trying to master the software stack (a lot of pieces are new to me even with 10+ years in the industry).
This combined with my usual desire to understand what I'm doing, seems to give an impression that I'm slow. In reality, I think my team members have only a shallow understanding of what they do, can't plan long term and, not of their fault, are used to a follow-the-tutorial-and-get-it-done approach. I can't really fault them but this has created a lot of technical debt (which makes my job even harder).
Any tips? I'd like to stay longer and make a lasting impact here but, of course, I could just quit... that wouldn't be ideal. <comment><USER2> It will be very difficult to fight company culture. You will either need to go with the flow or management and team leads will find a way to replace you.

Sometimes being the best programmer isn't what's wanted at a company.

I'm in the same boat: I'm working with legacy code and some new technology and I don't have much time during the day to learn anything in depth (and management just wants me to get things done).

Especially as a new hire, it's better just to figure out how to get your job done and worry about the details later.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel that I'm slow sometimes, and people ask what they can do to help.

Sometimes I feel like I want to respond with "just shoot me?"

But then I always remember that I live in Austin, and this is a place that still vividly remembers being the home of the first major school shooting incident, back on August 1st, 1966 (see [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_sh...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting)).

I don't know that I have any answers for you, but if you feel that the people at your place of employment are actively seeking to destroy you because they perceive you as slow, then I would say that is not a place I would want to waste a single additional nanosecond at.</comment>


The Next Great Digital Extinction - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-joi-ito-great-digitization-event/ <comment><USER2> IMO "digital" world is a good mirror of society: we lost diversity, freedom, experimentation abilities in our society and IT reflect, maybe anticipate, that really well.

So a nice analogy far more "dark & real" can be about an imaginary corporatocracy like Continuum TV series, only without "game changing heroes" that are not much realistic. The realistic part can be "many little heroes" that protect themselves using free software as much as they can and thanks to their knowledge and propaganda they may change something not as single individual but as a "specie" :-)

<comment><USER3> "anticipate" is right. The computer security community is a good example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's basically copying Kurzweil's idea about the concept you get when you extend Moore's law into the past. But then he throws in something about being a bridge between the Japanese techno scene and the San Francisco rave scene, lol. I'm not sure if there's a point to the article. Maybe the point is that as technology advances we build more advanced things. Maybe the point is how the internet has been corporatized. But the whole article is kind of baseless. It's a story analogous to the reality we live in, at best.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this analogy is useful. However:

"the early cohort that set off the digital explosion is giving way to a new, more robust form of life"

At this point in time whatever creations mankind has brought to being can hardly be said to be robust. Everything digital is reliant on us to press the buttons, build devices and make decisions. And we rely on the old ecology. If we can no longer live in this world neither can anything digital.

</comment><comment><USER6> _In addition to being a massive extinction event, the oxygenation of the planet kicked off the evolution of multi-cellular organisms (620 million to 550 million years ago), the Cambrian explosion of new species (550 million years ago), and an ice-age that triggered the end of the dinosaurs and many cold-blooded species, leading to the emergence of mammals as the apex group (66 million years ago) and eventually resulting in the appearance of Homo Sapiens with all of their social sophistication and complexity (315,000 years ago)._

Okay, so first of all, the oxygenation of the planet can't be held responsible for all of those things. The evolution of multi-cellular life? Sure. The Cambrian explosion? Probably. But oxygenation can't even be held responsible for the start of the dinosaurs, much less their end. The mass-extinction that set the stage for the dinosaurs was the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which killed off 96% of ocean organisms and 70% of land organisms. The current hypothesis for the P-Tr extinction is volcanism, or perhaps the spread of anoxic water throughout the ocean.

The dinosaurs, as we all know, were killed off by the asteroid that resulted in the Chixclub impact crater off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. An alternative explanation is that they were killed off by effects of climate change from the Deccan Flats supervolcano. Neither has anything to do with the Great Oxygenation Event.

This isn't nitpicking, because it demonstrates that the author of the article is essentially muddled on what they're comparing the digital transformation of our lives to. Is it like the Great Oxygenation Event, causing pain in the near term in exchange for opening up new modes of production in the future? Is it like the P-Tr mass extinction -- poorly understood phenomenon that will wipe out most businesses today, replacing them with forms of life that could not be imagined beforehand? Is it like the K-T exinction? A massive hit from an "alien" technology that wipes out old, slow-moving companies are replaces them with smaller, faster ones?

Instead of treating all of these mass extinctions as separate, the author tries to treat them all as a single thing, leading back to the great oxygenation event. Similarly, they try to treat all the waves of digital technology as a single phenomenon, ignoring the fact that social networks today are substantially different from the way they were imagined when The Well was in operation. Yes, there are similarities, just as both we and dinosaurs were oxygen breathing creatures. But the difference between Facebook and BBS's are just as, if not more, relevant than their similarities.

As a result of this forced analogy, the entire piece reads like a muddled mish-mash of various events in the history computing, science fiction, and Silicon Valley culture all forced to map to various events in geological history. It's tiresome, and it does more to obscure the author's point than it does to illuminate it.

<comment><USER7> > The dinosaurs, as we all know, were killed off by [...]

> An alternative explanation is that they were killed off by [...]

Sounds like we don't 'all know' after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's great to have a first-hand account of how this mess started.

Large parts of the tech community seem to not just be blind to the consequences of their work, but to openly embrace and nurture the destruction of the fabric of society.

This used to find voice in utopian visions of a sort of libertarian, meritocratic revival of democracy: bloggers replacing journalists, "makers", liquid democracy, etc. There are two successful examples of this spirit I can think of: Wikipedia, and OSS.

Unfortunately, this movement also had/has a destructive streak. Partly because these new ideas had existing competitors that needed to be cut down to make room, and partly because they experienced opposition from existing players (sometimes only tangentially related) that quickly became branded as enemies.

Two sides of the same philosophy. Guess which one had more staying power? Just look at the fate of The Pirate Bay vs The Pirate Party to get an idea. Or take this quiz: (a) Name a website distributing scientific papers with no concern for copyright. (b) Name an Open Access journal.

With regard to the specific topic of the paper, namely information (and political news specifically) those ideas of the citizen-blogger have actually disappeared so thoroughly, you are likely to have no idea what I'm referencing if you are under 30 years of age. And while those ideas were initially coupled with a disdain for established institutions and the press because it was a storyline in need of a villain, the ideas died yet the rot feasting on our sources of shared truth survived.

The target of all this destructive energy is, as a first approximation, the very concept of trust. Trust cannot be trusted is a sort-of mantra, that not only gives sense to what would otherwise just be existential dread aimlessly seeking escape in vandalism (4chan). It also makes you appear cool & in the know: "I wonder who paid for this article", "everybody knows a study with n=20000 is underpowered", "<X> wouldn't do <Y> unless <convoluted way to reduce all human activity to a profit motive>".

On rare occasions, this destructive mindset still has the spark of creativity: Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is (was?) somewhat impressive. Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc. In the realm of politics, the destruction is just about total. Nothing of value was created. Meanwhile, the community gleefully watches the destruction of the free press, fine-tuning their adblockers because "information wants to be free", or because that newspaper whose articles they desperately want to read nonetheless made the fateful error of using the wrong JS framework, or something, but in any case, it's their fault if they can't survive. Plus they are just part of Soros' campaign anyway. Everybody knows that.

<comment><USER9> What pay-walled news source of the "free" press would you say is valuable to read? How would you define its value?

What is positive impact?

You dismiss people who see value in gold. You then lament over a lack in value creation. You must have quite an idea as to what value is. Can you explain?</comment></comment>


Don't use Seagate - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/hard-disk-reliability-examined-once-more-hgst-rules-seagate-is-alarming/

<comment><USER2> The title of the article is "Hard disk reliability examined once more: HGST rules, Seagate is alarming"</comment>


Show HN: ParrotSnoop – Android TCP/UDP Packet Capture for IPv4/IPv6 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DivestTrump/ParrotSnoop <comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the traction this received. I'd like to note that I am not a developer by trade and I'm certainly not a designer. Java isn't even my primary language. I am just somebody interested in privacy and security and this was a fun project that should be useful. Any contributions to the code or design are very welcome. I hope this helps others and thank you.

</comment><comment><USER2> Would this let me see the full path of an https requests that an app is making? I've got a testing need for that, and am currently hampered because our secops team won't let us enable a feature flag to disable cert pinning so that Charles proxy will work.

WOuld this be a viable alternative because it runs on the actual phone itself?

<comment><USER3> No, this won't bypass certificate pinning, to do that you need to tamper the app or hook runtime calls using something like Xposed. There are modules [0] [1] that do this, support depends on the version of Android you're using.

[0]. [https://github.com/ac-pm/SSLUnpinning_Xposed](https://github.com/ac- pm/SSLUnpinning_Xposed)

[0]. [https://github.com/Fuzion24/JustTrustMe](https://github.com/Fuzion24/JustTrustMe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there an apk to download and install? I looked for it and failed but I'm using my phone and I could have missed it.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, just the source code.</comment></comment>


Movie bot that creates custom lists - <AUTHOR> http://imse.co <comment><AUTHOR> Example lists:

\- show me english scifi movies on netflix

\- english movies about aliens released after 2000

\- english movies about lawyers on netflix or hulu

\- best hindi movies on netflix

\- hindi drama movies on netflix released after 2000

\- clint eastwood movies on amazon prime or hbo released between 1960 and 1980

\- movies based on true stories on netflix

\- johnny depp fantasy movies on netflix

\- the pursuit of happyness

\- movies similar to the pursuit of happyness

\- movies on jfk released after 2000

\- english movies currently playing in theatres</comment>


Using Meltdown to steal passwords in real-time - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/misc0110/status/948706387491786752 <comment><USER2> dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16067758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16067758)

<comment><USER3> It's not really a dupe, yours was 12 hours ago and didn't gain much traction. HN allows for a limited number of resubmissions in this case, so that interesting content that was missed due to timing has a chance.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin as a Game - <AUTHOR> http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/11/bitcoin-11-years-in.html <comment><USER2> > The premise behind bitcoin-the-game is that the current wave of buyers must > guess when (or if) a subsequent wave of buyers will emerge, this second next > wave's participation being contingent on when (or if) they believe a third > wave of buyers to emerge. If they guess right, the early birds win at the > expense of the late ones. ...

This is a truly tired analysis. It goes by various names, including "greater fool theory." Notice how it applies to almost every asset being traded today?

Stocks? Remember dividends? Not so much these days. Poster child is Amazon, but there's a slew of others that offer virtually nothing to investors other than price appreciation.

Government bonds? Do do negative interest rates sound? You buy one of these because either you have to or you think others will have to.

Real estate? Please. Take away price appreciation driven by easy money and few would bother "owning."

What this piece ignores is the world's ever-encroaching governments and the ongoing assault on privacy - with money as the fulcrum.

<comment><USER3> Stocks represent actual ownership in the company, potentially voting control of the boards decisions.

Government bonds are backed by the full force and trust of the government they represent, and repay the face value plus yield promised _at the time they were bought_. They represent the most reliable yield you can get.

Real estate? You mean that thing you live in?

This is all a bunch of a false equivocation with one goal: "please buy my Bitcoins and give me USD for them"

<comment><USER4> > Stocks represent actual ownership in the company, potentially voting control > of the boards decisions.

A company is an abstract concept around a group of people, framed inside a legal entity. But yes, if you own many stocks you can sit at the table with some big boys. Most companies come with less risk than Bitcoin. But I rather buy Bitcoin than WeWork shares (assuming they list).

> Government bonds are backed by the full force and trust of the government > they represent, and repay the face value plus yield promised at the time > they were bought. They represent the most reliable yield you can get.

Until a government defaults. This doesn't happy every week, but ruling out that it doesn't is not the best investment strategy.

\---

I'm not denying Bitcoin is speculation, but so is everything else. Sure Bitcoin might be more speculative under your frame of reference. But it's not black and white.

<comment><USER5> > But I rather buy Bitcoin than WeWork shares (assuming they list).

Depends on the price. Thanks to limited liability, WeWork share can never be worth less than zero. And just liquidating their existing office supplis is probably worth at least a few thousand dollars. But, of course, you'd have to pay off creditors first.

If WeWork lists and doesn't go under, and assuming even a weak version of the efficient market hypothesis, the price their shares trade on will be about 'right'.

> Until a government defaults. This doesn't happy every week, but ruling out > that it doesn't is not the best investment strategy.

Agreed. Though in the developed world, inflation is usually the bigger worry. (Unless you buy inflation indexed bonds.)

<comment><USER6> I find people's lack of knowledge about what makes Bitcoin valuable interesting.

The reason Bitcoin is valuable is because the work required to create one is significantly harder than Fiat currencies and it is one of the only truly scarce assets in human history (hard cap).

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit any fiat currency? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $10k?

Yes, easy.

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit Bitcoin? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $1 billion?

No, not easy.

You may think this is a trivial distinction but it has tremendous value knowing you have hard uncounterfeitable money with a hard cap.

The US treasury spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year fighting fake bills, that's only 1 of the dozen or so problems bitcoin solves. The second is that all the verification and security is done by the most powerful supercomputer in human history.

These things gives it its value.

Garbage company stocks, you can throw those in the trash if the central banks aren't busy helping pump them.

Hard money wins, soft money gets snuffed in the night.

<comment><USER5> What are some falsifiable predictions of that theory?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, you could apply this to almost any of the highly abstracted financial instruments currently traded. Derivatives, options, etc. People claim they're "investing in real companies" (which at a very low level they are), but most of the time what is actually happening, is you are betting on whether _other people_ will invest in the company, or what investor sentiment will be x months down the track. You aren't directly investing in the success of the company, you're investing in the investor confidence in the company. Buying stocks directly is of course, at least a bit different.

I see Bitcoin as much the same. Sure, it _could_ be used as a real currency, in the same way that I could use options or bonds as real currency. I could ask you if you'd be willing to sell your car to me for x number of options I currently hold. But I haven't created a new currency, and the value behind that "currency" is just the investor opinion of it at any given time.

</comment><comment><USER8> Somebody probably made the same arguments when the first paper money was printed and when the first government fiat came about. This is the next money and it's important because corrupt governments can not steal it or devalue it by printing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Then I would say gold is exactly the same. In fact, gold would be a riskier betting game as information is less transparent (estimating supply, how fast It's mined etc) compared to bitcoin.

<comment><USER10> Gold has a actual use as a commodity, eg in electronics and other equipment, and derives a minimum value as such. So whilst how gold is used in trading circles might have similarities to BTC, this difference IMO makes them nothing alike.

<comment><USER11> Bitcoin has a just as relevant, or more so, actual use in buying drugs and frowned upon things on the internet, escaping government restrictions on money, etc.

<comment><USER12> Gold has those same uses but at an international level and is generally approved of. The gold may never actually move, but ownership will transfer between countries.

<comment><USER11> But you have to use a middleman or intermediary. The genius of bitcoin was when Satoshi removed that and solved the double-spending problem in a decentralized way.

>Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

<comment><USER13> Except that bitcoin relies on a whole network of middlemen to prove the validity of that transaction. Without miners you have no transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So many articles about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies today! I've devoted a lot of my career to blockchain, and here is my brief summary:

\- Blockchain typically means a tamper-proof, distributed database.

\- Smart contracts are like stored database procedures.

\- Blockchains allow you to transact valuable assets - even billions! - without needing to trust your counter-party.

\- However, you _must_ trust the underlying software! This is a fundamentally different risk from usual financial transactions where you trust the institutions servicing the exchange, but not necessarily the counter-party. This turns finance upside-down!

\- People can create financial products and services - even extremely complex ones - without any governmental permission, or if they need a real-world presence, permission from a regulatory body that is very amenable. And once granted, it's very easily to transact globally!

\- If your curiosity is piqued, check out my blog post I wrote a while ago on MakerDAO and their decentalized stablecoin. It's fascinating! [https://medium.com/@james_3093/the-dai-stablecoin-is-a- game-...](https://medium.com/@james_3093/the-dai-stablecoin-is-a-game-changer- for-ethereum-and-the-entire-cryptocurrency-ecosystem-13fb412d1e75)

\- Cryptocurrency and blockchain are some of the most debated, and IMO misunderstood technologies of 2019. They are interesting from not just a pure computer science perspective but also economics, philosophy, and psychology.

<comment><USER15> > However, you must trust the underlying software! This is a fundamentally > different risk from usual financial transactions where you trust the > institutions servicing the exchange, but not necessarily the counter-party. > This turns finance upside-down!

No, this is just normal finance: most of the financial service industry is providing exactly what blockchain provides—a way to have a trusted set of institutions and processes in places of trusting counterparties.

It's different that the crypto world likes to pretend it's just the automated processes embedded in software that need to be trusted—until those processes produce unacceptable results which requires social intervention, revealing that, yes, ultimately it's still trusting people—whereas traditional finance is overt about social constraints backstopping blind process.

<comment><USER14> It's not the same. If the bank messes up a multi-million dollar wire transfer, you have recourse. If you mess up your multi-million dollar Bitcoin transfer, you have no recourse! Period!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author just described how bitcoin has property of money (being a speculative bet that a given asset will carry value in the future), and deduced that bitcoin is not money.

<comment><USER17> That's not what money is.

You're describing futures.

<comment><USER18> Bernard Lietar identified one of the modern properties of money as indeed speculation. 99% of forex is just that.

<comment><USER17> In banking and finance everything is speculation. Pork bellies are speculation. Gold is speculation. That they consider money to be speculation as well is just a matter of perspective.

Outside of that world it's not speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The problem with the Bitcoin game is there is no longer the 'millionaire overnight' scenario as a possibility. Sure, you could buy 1 coin and it could go up 10x, yet you'd still only be (at this time) $90k richer. Which isn't bad but the big climb from decimal places up to full dollars is where there was more possibility. Common folks can take a gamble on 100 coins for $1 a piece, they really can't take a gamble at $3k+ per coin. Thus, that's why we sit in the $3k to $9k range. Too few people to join, too many people holding on because they bought at a higher price.

I also don't think psychologically people want to own a decimal place of something but that's a different issue. If people could still buy 100 bitcoins, they'd probably do so.

<comment><USER11> A 10x is actually fine by me.

<comment><USER19> Like I implied, yeah, it would be fine with a lot of people. But that's not the same as buying 100 coins for $100 and then those coins are worth $10k each and you're a millionaire. That big multiplier is what got people interested in the first place, but it's gone. The equivalent of that now (with coins at $9.3k) is 100 coins at $933k. Sure, to make a million you just need to just over double the bitcoin price but you need almost a million dollars to make that happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He's looking at Bitcoin in terms of dollars, but dollars also have zero utility, so they have to be traded for something, and there are an awful lot of them created every day. We're way overcaptilalized, so most of this is going into speculative investment rather than consumable utility. In that regard, it hardly matters what form that speculation takes, the prices are mostly determined by capital flows rather than internal returns.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fantasy Baseball : MLB :: Cryptocurrencies : Wall Street

</comment><comment><USER22> To me it's like any other stock, except more volatile. When you use it for payments it's like selling some of your shares in a stock.

</comment><comment><USER23> Bitcoin is gambling but the entire economy is also gambling. Luck is the only significant differentiator between winners and losers.

The reason why capitalism kind of works is not because it rewards productive people but because most people believe that it rewards productive people.

The economic incentive to work or invest is rooted in deception. Not so different from Bitcoin or anything else.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this article is kind of missing the point. Literally any tradeable thing can be used for speculation like this. The problem with bitcoin is that it seems to be _primarily_ used for speculation.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is one of the worst anti-bitcoin articles I've ever read.

Bitcoin is no game; over $7 _trillion_ has been transferred since 2009: [https://blog.coinbase.com/charting-the-course-of- bitcoin-11-...](https://blog.coinbase.com/charting-the-course-of- bitcoin-11-years-and-counting-b4e17969d4e1).

We're seeing the beginning of a new economic good being created right in front of our eyes and many of us won't realize this until many years later.</comment>


Longtime VW-Audi Chairman Ferdinand Piech Has Died - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/complicated-legacy-ferdinand-piech-194200366.html <comment><AUTHOR> Significant, for the HN audience, because the deceased was a very influential engineer, a controversial manager, and both of those qualities came to the fore in instigating the VW diesel emissions scandal.

<comment><USER2> Controversial, indeed. [https://www.ft.com/content/b5334860-c83d-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba...](https://www.ft.com/content/b5334860-c83d-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f):

 _"The German weekly Der Spiegel once described worklife at VW as "North Korea without the labour camps".

[…]

Mr Lutz recalled once complimenting Piëch on the finish of the new VW Golf, particularly how small the gaps were between the doors and the frame.

Piëch's response stunned Lutz. He said he had cobbled together all his body engineers and manufacturing team in one room and said: "In six weeks I want 3-4mm gaps on everything. If I don't have it, everyone in this room will be fired.""_</comment></comment>


Monkey typing ABRACADABRA - <AUTHOR> http://martingalemeasure.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/monkey-typing-abracadabra-14/

<comment><USER2> I find it quite ironic that there's a typo in the title on HN but not on the original article.</comment>