What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/what-you-dont-get-about-the-job-search-voices-of-the-jobless/243942/ <comment><USER2> Having no money is viciously hard to deal with, especially when you don't have any connections or a portfolio of work. When I graduated with my B.S.C.S in '06...

\- I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation.

\- There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000.

\- I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X".

\- I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive.

\- I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho).

\- I had done academic summer research, not internships.

I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck.

I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition.

I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.

To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work.

Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.

<comment><USER3> _I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to._

We need to have a How The World Works discussion with college students so that they understand that resume spray-and-pray _is not actually how people get white collar jobs_. Honestly I think that a good deal of the persistent unemployment problem is that people are doing cargo cult job searching and this checks their mental box for "making a good effort", when they should instead be making directed efforts to meet people with the authority to hire them and convincing them to make it happen.

<comment><USER4> Fully agree. I have recommended "What Color Is Your Parachute" to job seekers several times, but they were so exhausted from sending out dozens of applications every day that they didn't even have time or interest to read it.

Not that I have personally tried the strategies in that book (admittedly), but it sounded very plausible to me :-/ At the very least, what is there to lose. If 100 job applications didn't work, does it really hurt to try something else for a week?

<comment><USER3> _they didn't even have time or interest to read it._

So one thing that counterindicates working alone at home is having poor discipline with regards to use of time. This sometimes bites me on the hindquarters: if you do a little work in the morning, goof off on the Internet for a while, and do a little work in the afternoon, it often "feels like" you worked that day. And if on a Tuesday you miss your morning, well, nobody yells at you. And why do the afternoon, when you've already missed the morning? And then that happens on Wednesday. etc, etc

Put it this way: let's say someone had voluntarily quit their day job as a result of, I don't know, achieving an exit. If they told me that, six months after quitting their day job, they were so busy with the three emails they wrote per week that they didn't have time to read a particular book, I would say that they merely have poor time accounting skills or that their revealed preference is that they have no intention of reading the book.

I hate saying "unemployed people are lying" in so many words, so I won't. But 6 months times 40 hours a week is _a thousand hours_. More if you previously had a commute or worked overtime. If you don't have 1,000 hours worth of progress on whatever your #1 priority is at the moment, you have to ask yourself why not.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, it is usually not just writing three emails. First you have to research the potential recipients, browsing job ads and the companies web site. You might even go so far as to taylor your CV towards the position.

Also, as you say, managing time efficiently at home is difficult. And they might just be tired of hearing yet another well meaning advice.

There might also be a factor of things taking more time if you don't have money. You have to go to the cheap supermarket that is far away rather than the expensive one around the corner. You have to go shopping and cook for yourself, rather than grabbing a quick lunch at your favorite Sushi joint. And so on.

But I don't really know - I actually offered to try to help some job seeker in my blog once, but nobody took me up on it. Of course my blog has no reach and I was also unsure of what I could really offer (except for computer skills, brushing up online representations and whatnot). I am actually very interested in that problem - figuring out ways to help job seekers could do a lot of good.

One thing I imagined was A/B testing for job application letters and CVs. If you are really sending out hundreds of applications, it might begin to make sense?

<comment><USER3> The A/B testing math for low numbers and low conversion rates is not attractive. You can work the numbers out, but my guesstimate at dinner is that if you get one interview per twenty and mail 100 per week, you'd need almost a year to get confidence on a 6th interview per week. I would A/B test your marketing site as a dev purely to communicate that that is how you think, but it would not provide value to the average unemployed person. (All devs with any desire to ever get a job should have a web prescence, by the way.)

The scenario is more interesting if you rep a lot of candidates. A LinkedIn oe what have you could test resummes or equivalent web views very efficiently indeed.

<comment><USER5> I wish a web presence worked. I have a web site, youtube channel, github, blog, linkedin, and twitter account. They all shows a track record of open source work I've shared.

I have no regrets on sharing my work online like this. However, the idea that it's likely to help land a job is just survivorship bias.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I think OSS is overrated for career impact. ("There, I said it.") I'd also probably do your site a wee bit differently if I wished to get job offers from it. For example, I'd put a prominent notice on it that you're actually hireable. I'd also make your version of those little hire-me mini sites. Don't make people work (across six different places which are largely not connected) to discover how wonderful of a precious snowflake you are.

That said: just because you touch the Internet doesn't guarantee you a nice safe job for life, but you're a darn sight better off if the decisionmaker you influence either a) has read you in the past or b) is reading you right now than you are if you're in the spray & pray slush pile.

<comment><USER5> like this?

<http://www.blenderaddons.com/aboutme.php>

<comment><USER6> "A Junior-to-Mid Level Developer" ... Which is it? Pick one.

Also, "I've been out of work and on the job hunt for a year." This may be true but is not a selling point. Say instead, "I'm available for work, contract or full time, right now. Hire me."

<comment><USER5> Okay, I made the changes you suggested.

As for the matter of picking "junior" or "mid", I was hedging my bets by including both. I have no point of reference as to how good I am or if I'm good at all. I haven't worked around other developers for 2 years now. It's all been solo "side project" stuff. Feel free to shoot my an email if you want to continue this discussion. I do appreciate your critique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This really hit home for me. All too often we view the unemployed as a statistic, but this article really put a human face on the issue. As pundits & politicians argue about various macroeconomics theories, levels of taxations etc. there are real life people out there trying to find a way to live, never mind advance in life. It's gut wrenching.

<comment><USER8> Bizarre to me to see this downvoted. Callous privilege of working in a booming industry while the rest of the economy is constipated, I suppose.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but I also feel that things are not going to get any better for most of the general population who got laid off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quote by Morgan Freeman from Shawshank Redemption.

"These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized."

I wonder if that's what's happening to people these days. They go through the institution of education through their youth, and then the institution of higher education. When they graduate they go through the institution of the job search and sending out resumes.

People are told this is how things work all their lives. They saw their parents doing it and now they are doing the same thing. When the process starts to break down, they don't know what to do. In some cases people are shackled by the institution of home ownership (unable to move to the jobs.)

As others are saying, contacts are highly important. My level is success is dependent on the size of my virtual rolodex. People need to get around the institution.

Personally, I'm a freelancer living in a foreign country. Currently I'm living in a cozy house costing me less than $200 per month (third world tropical paradise!) I can move anywhere and work from anywhere. I get jobs, salaries, contracts and one-off quickies in the same industry and they are all the same to me. The only difference is in the payment model. I think everyone needs to start thinking like this. Don't be an employee looking for a job, be a business making the same sorts of decisions the other businesses are. You are offering a service and you need to be mobile in offerings and locations to survive.

<comment><USER11> Completely off topic, but you brought it up so I'm going to ask: How did you manage an entire house in paradise for $200 per month? Do you have access to decent food, in relative safety, and have a good reliable internet connection?

<comment><USER10> I'm living in the Philippines. I feel very safe here.

It's Asia, so the market for food here isn't as wide as the market for food in the U.S. For example, there are Germans here who have setup their own shops for food which I have never seen and has little demand from the locals. You will never see that sort of food in the grocery stores. The Philippines isn't known for it's food like Thailand is. Certainly food is a big part of happiness in life, but I'm happy here for the most part. There are some things I miss but there are American resto's which do a pretty good job of bridging the gap. In the largest cities here, you can find pretty much anything.

My internet connection is reliable enough. I do have plans in place for problems which occasionally pop up, but my area is stable enough that it hosts a lot of BPO's (call centers.)

Housing is relatively cheap here. The standards are also lower, but if you have lived in Asia for a while then you get used to the differences. I could get a nicer house for a lot more money but I'm content where I'm at and the price is right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am willing to risk my karma by saying that people complaining about these things don't seem to get the following:

\- Going to college doesn't mean you deserve a job more than someone else. Got an ivy league degree? A PhD? Get over it.

\- America is still a country where one can post up signs on a telephone pole to help someone move boxes, clean a house, or drive a car. Not ideal right? Maybe, but these people can earn $200 a day paid in cash if they work hard. Putting up signs and actually doing the work is usually a psychological barrier to many people though.

\- Being poor sucks, sure. But guess what -- learning to withstand it is a good skill to have. Perhaps one of the most indispensable ones a serious independent risk taking entrepreneur can have. If one can learn to be poor and deal with the associated social and practical problems, you'll have a fearlessness and sense of freedom that few office workers know.

\- Having a job does not mean someone is successful. And not having a job does not mean someone is a failure. People often tie their self worth to their job title, and therefore every sales person is now a "vice-president", and data entry workers are "analysts" -- title inflation is easier than salary inflation. In many cases, having one's time to do nothing but reflect and self-improve is preferable to one of these jobs.

<comment><USER13> Don't worry, I don't have any sympathy for you, either.

And in an unrelated point, a good companion to this article is _Being Poor_ :

<http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/>

<comment><USER14> Scalzi's article describes a fairly atypical poverty experience. It's a very inaccurate description for most American poor people.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some of the schadenfreude is directed toward struggling MBAs and Ph.D.s in economics, whose patronizing platitudinous advice to the millions of unemployed to become more competitive in the new globalized economy has neither been forgotten, nor forgiven. They helped facilitate the collapse, and encouraged the upper one tenth of one percent to win asymmetric zero-sum games against the middle class. Now they have to become more competitive in minimum wage jobs.

<comment><USER16> I never get tired of quoting Mike Konczal:

 _And speaking as someone who has taken graduate coursework in "continental philosophy", and been walked through the big hits of structural anthropology, Hegelian marxism and Freudian feminism, that graduate macroeconomics class was by far the most ideologically indoctrinating class I've ever seen. By a mile. There was like two weeks where the class just copied equations that said, if you speak math, "unemployment insurance makes people weak and slothful" over and over again. Hijacking poor Richard Bellman, the defining metaphor was that observation that if something is on an optimal path any subsection is also an optimal path, so government just needs to get out of the way as the macroeconomy is optimal absent absurdly defined shocks and our 9.6% unemployment is clearly optimal._

\-- [http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/blogging-and- the-e...](http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/blogging-and-the- economics-profession/)

<comment><USER17> You may be interested in this book:

"Economyths: Ten Ways Economics Gets It Wrong"

[http://www.amazon.com/Economyths-Ways-Economics-Gets- Wrong/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Economyths-Ways-Economics-Gets- Wrong/dp/0470677937)

This book explores the idea that classical economics, despite its severe case of physics-envy, may be "flat-out wrong". The author has a PhD in non-linear systems from Oxford, so I don't think he is a complete crank! I certainly find his arguments to be pretty plausible.

<comment><USER18> _The author has a PhD in non-linear systems from Oxford, so I don't think he is a complete crank!_

This is an utterly wrong attitude, and the history of science proved it many, many times when scientists produced total bullshit when they were leaving their area of expertise. It's not always the case, but it happens too often to disregard it.

<comment><USER19> For example, Einstein was a famous supporter of socialism. <http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism>

Okay, and before I enrage anybody else, Einstein was one of my childhood heroes and inspirations, and still is. We can't say that, categorically, all scientists working outside of their realm of expertise produce bullshit, but it notably has happened.

<comment><USER20> Keep your tea party political nonsense off hacker news. Go somewhere like reddit if you want to spew ignorance.

<comment><USER21> Related: if you want to complain that the guy's argument is nonsense, just complain that it's nonsense. There's no need to bring a perceived political orientation into it. The only thing your "tea party" comment does is adds a level of emotional polarization, much like his "socialism" comment before. Please keep such emotional baggage off of hacker news.

<comment><USER20> >There's no need to bring a perceived political orientation into it.

People need to understand what they're saying. If this guy is going to come on here with an out-of-the-blue judgment on an abstract concept someone needs to point out that he's being simple minded. And in the group most likely to have _this particular_ ignorant behavior are, in fact, the tea party.

>Please keep such emotional baggage off of hacker news.

He brought the emotional baggage here so I stepped up to say it's not welcome in clear and unambiguous terms. If people want to vote us both into the gray I'm good with that. The OP is not getting away with silent contempt from me. Not on hacker news.

<comment><USER21> > _"He brought the emotional baggage here so I stepped up to say it's not > welcome in clear and unambiguous terms."_

Your post suggests that _his version_ of emotional baggage is simple-minded and unwelcome, but _your version_ of emotional baggage is OK.

In reality, _neither of your versions_ of emotional baggage belong on Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I dislike headlines like this. It's phrased as a challenge, or almost an accusation. Why are you accusing _me_ of not knowing what it's like to be jobless, Mister Theatlantic? You don't even know me!

And what does it turn out to be that I don't know about being jobless? Well here's what I learned:

1\. It sucks

2\. It's hard not having much money

3\. Getting a job is hard

4\. Don't do a degree in Women's Studies

I'm not sure any of this was a particularly new insight.

<comment><USER23> I think the real insight is sorely absent from the article.

It seems that most people who undergo higher education do so with the expectation that it will lead to a "higher" job, and that's magical thinking.

Sure, higher education is pretty much a requirement for certain classes of jobs, but it's not the only requirement, and it pales compared to the most important requirement: contacts.

This is a human world we live in, and humans by nature are friendlier to someone they know than to someone they don't know.

I, too, once believed in the entitlement that an education "should" bring, until I looked back at all of the jobs I landed (and the thousands I didn't), and realized that every single job I successfully interviewed for was a direct result of a contact in my network.

This is even more important in times of recession, because you're up against a whole army of faceless job seekers, all flooding potential employers with pieces of paper and lamenting the lack of response.

If an employer can't put a face to your name, you stand as much a chance of getting in as winning the lottery.

<comment><USER24> > It seems that most people who undergo higher education do so with the > expectation that it will lead to a "higher" job, and that's _magical > thinking_.

It's also false advertisement.

"Get a degree from us and you'll get a job" is how it's sold to us from the age of elementary school forwards.

Degrees are expensive and this industry earns 100s of billions every year. There is only 1 way they can market a degree to you, and that's to connect it directly with a job.

<comment><USER25> College loans is one of the crummiest industries in the US.

By manipulating legislature to gain recourse status (even after a personal bankruptcy), accepting government money to finance such futile aspirations, and pushing up the overall price of higher ed, they're in a unique position to be disliked by both liberals and conservatives.

With graduate degrees especially the loan applicant should be required to cover a good portion of their education from their current job. Which will make them at least test the waters (i.e. internship offices and recruiting departments) to see what market applicability their current/future degree has, instead of finding the truth a few years later with a six-digit debt.

<comment><USER26> 100% agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was a real shocker. As soon as I read that a PhD student from Purdue University couldn't find a job, it really shocked me. I too graduated from Purdue, but never had any trouble finding a job, but the truth is that we "computer scientists" are living in a bubble, while the rest of the people are having real trouble getting a job.

<comment><USER22> A PhD in education.

What is one _supposed_ to do with a PhD in education anyway? Surely not become a teacher?

<comment><USER17> Become an academic in that field - that is pretty much what a PhD is - credentialing for academic research.

<comment><USER22> So a PhD in education educates me about to educate others about education?

<comment><USER28> A PhD in Education certifies you to do research in education to potentially teach others about in the future. The intent is to generate new ideas and try new things, and the PhD is a qualification that you can approach that in (hopefully) a scientific manner, and that your results will be useful and relevant to your field.

tl;dr: No, to research about education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Having been through periods of feeling down and out before, one thing I've learned is that you're in a lot of trouble as soon as you start to feel like the system owes you something.

The writing is on the wall. If you're not working to automate other jobs out of existence then someone is working to automate yours. Minor exceptions given for occupations that exist primarily to offer a human connection.

<comment><USER30> When you were 8 years old, did you believe that, in the future, people in America would be frantically playing musical chairs with their lives, trying to put other people out of a livelihood before others can do it to them?

When did the future turn into a game of Survivor?

When did the economy become a game of musical chairs? If you don't have a seat when the music stops, just kiss your life goodbye.

<comment><USER31> > " _When did the future turn into a game of Survivor?"_

When we allowed 20% of the population to assume ownership of 80% of the wealth, forcing everyone else to scramble for scraps. When we've dismantled and made useless our social safety nets by a combination of poor policies and equally poor policing for abuse. When we've collectively moved to the right in economic and social policies, thereby not only disenfranchising the poor, but also make them hate themselves - the loudest complaints about "socialists" and "redistribution" seem to come from people who need it the most, but don't recognize it.

It happened when we started penalizing people for having anything less than perfect health. Have a chronic condition? Well, forget about entrepreneurialism and adding to the economy, pray for a worker-cog job for the rest of your days to keep the insurance flowing!

This may be a gross simplification of a complex issue - but it seems to me like the futured turned into a game of Survivor when we started treating everyone else like animals out to get us. The poor are lazy and out to game the system. The immigrants are out to steal our jobs. The unemployed are lazy and slovenly and want a free ride... etc etc.

The American public, IMO, needn't look much further than a mirror to see the cause of their woes.

<comment><USER13> What is possibly the only coherent comment in this entire discussion is already being down-voted. Sorry Hacker News, but your "cultivated community" demonstrably fails to perpetuate very little more than a disinterested, self- serving, center-right frame of reference with a strong undercurrent of elitism.

<comment><USER32> Not to pick on this too much, but elitism is a _good thing_.

Do you want 1000 random links from the internet or 10 ordered blue links on Google?

Do you want to send your child to a "mediocre" school or have them operated on by a "mediocre" surgeon, or do you want them to go to the best schools and have the best medical care?

If you are an investor, do you want to invest in mediocre companies? If you are searching for work, do you want to work at a middle of the road place? And if you are an employer/entrepreneur, do you want anything other than the best employees?

Everyone is an elitist when they are doing the selecting. Some people don't like it when they are on the other side of the selective filter. But let's not kid ourselves, elitism is not an "undercurrent" and it's not objectionable by any means. It's the whole ball of wax in any functioning society.

<comment><USER13> Every example you give is in terms of an _individualist_ view point, and yet understanding what makes a "functioning society" requires some conception of a _common good_. It is impossible for any significant portion of society to be treated by the _very best_ doctors, or to send their children to the _very best_ schools. To do what's best for society, the _majority_ merely need access to good and _decent_ services.

From the dictionary: Elitism is "the advocacy or existence of an _elite_ as a _dominating element_ in a system or society."

A society that favors the _elite individual_ above all else is by nature hierarchical, exclusionary, and anti-democratic. Elitist societies _by definition_ disempower the majority for the enrichment of a few. And _as per the definition of "society"_ — "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community" — elitism is an absolute failure.

Your attitude epitomizes this online community, and that's not a good thing. Frankly, it's pretty repugnant.

<comment><USER32> > It is impossible for any significant portion of society to be treated by the > very best doctors

Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, which was used to inoculate millions. Just about every medical procedure used in practice and documented in textbooks was developed by the best doctors, systematized, and then scaled out.

> or to send their children to the very best schools.

Take a look at ai-class.org, ml-class.org, db-class.org. Textbooks were version 1.0 of this concept, and also tend to be written by the best educators.

The point: different people in different areas have different talents. The key is to come up with models that allow the efforts of the talented in each area to scale out so that more can access them, and so that the less talented can benefit from the solutions even if they couldn't think them up in the first place[1]. This is a process of iteration.

But the iteration won't even get started if one rejects quality/elitism from the beginning.

[1] How many of the tens of millions of people operating browsers, iPhones, refrigerators, or automobiles can understand them, let alone improve them, let alone invent them? Civilization is based on finding the best, allowing them to amass resources, and rewarding them for distributing their discoveries to as many as possible. Denying that a technical elite exists is counterproductive.

<comment><USER33> _Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, which was used to inoculate millions. Just about every medical procedure used in practice and documented in textbooks was developed by the best doctors, systematized, and then scaled out._

You pretty much sunk your argument with the very first example. Salk gave the polio vaccine away for free so that kids wouldn't have to die anymore from it.

Elitism states that only the best should have it. Altruism states that everyone deserves to have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know it is a bit OT but another thing that depresses me that I suspect most people actually have pretty useless jobs. Like the one person wondering what she did wrong, living in a wealthy neighborhood. Yes, other people have nice cars and houses, but the reality is they are probably just doing some useless thing in their job. They just hacked themselves into the system somehow (the system is very ineffective). I don't think people do that out of a mean spirit, they just try to get by and work with the system. It just seems most of the world is fake at times, and it depresses me.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been briefly employed, underemployed, and unemployed for the last several years, supplementing it with freelance (writing) work.

It does take up all your time either searching for work, applying for work, or just worrying about work and the future. I know I can do good work, and I'm adaptable and humble, but the jobs just aren't out there for this 43-year- old....

<comment><USER28> If you can get freelance writing work, you're familiar with freelancing. Why not hustle that more, and look for freelance work, rather than a job? This is news.yc after all!

<comment><USER34> Fair enough - I can never quite seem to get up the momentum of contracts I need to make a go of it. I'm not a sales type...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> While reading this, This particular simpsons clip came to mind.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrENoTe3cE>

especially when i was reading about the PH.D from Purdue working as a janitor.

</comment><comment><USER32> Saw this in the article:

> "The most difficult part of the job search is waiting for permission to give > up"

What exactly does it mean for someone to "give up" on a job search? Unless you have a significant other, won't you eventually starve and/or be kicked out of your residence? Or does "giving up" mean collecting unemployment insurance/welfare/disability insurance ad infinitum?

Genuinely curious here, do not mean this to be a loaded question.

<comment><USER36> I was thinking that they might mean social pressures, waiting until they can give up without coming across as a complete failure or something like that.

<comment><USER32> Yes. But what do they do afterwards for food/rent?

<comment><USER37> If you live in the developed world you won't actually starve - that's what welfare is for.

<comment><USER38> It is actually pretty hard to get welfare and unemployment benefits in the US. I got laid off from a job in California a few years ago and it took weeks for the unemployment office to finally agree that I qualified for benefits. They make it extremely hard to collect benefits so that they can save money. There were times when I spent days calling only to have an automated voice tell me to try calling again later. I wasn't even allowed to be put on hold in a phone queue. It was very frustrating.

<comment><USER39> I've never had this problem. They've made it so easy that you only ever have to talk to someone once. The rest of the time it's all online and is automatically deposited into your bank account.

It may have been a problem because your ex-employer disputed it.

<comment><USER38> This was in California. You have to physically fill out forms every two weeks and get checks mailed to you. My employer was a huge tech firm that laid off 25% of the company. They were actually very helpful in the transition, but they can't work miracles on bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> However, being ok and having skills to deal with unemployment gives you an important skill: Being able to openly say "Fuck you" to your employer or a client.

The part about desperation is not exactly right. I think those who are employed, unhappy and scared of unemployment are in a worse position. Unemployed are actually free, they have very little to lose. They have gotten out of zoo cages and roam the world, which while scary is much more interesting than a job.

If you wanna have an absolute security that you'll have food and a roof, go to jail or something.

</comment><comment><USER41> I actually can feel this. I am looking for one myself in NYC/Nj area.

<comment><USER42> Are you a programmer?

If not, what do you do?

<comment><USER43> I can't imagine a world where a programmer in NYC can't find a job.

<comment><USER38> It depends on your specialty.

<comment><USER41> True. I am ready to work as a junior developer too. I have computer science background and have willingness to learn as well but that just does not cut it, in this market.

I am however working on my own apps and learning and trying to build a portfolio that way.

<comment><USER42> What open source work have you done?

<comment><USER41> I write Python scripts, write HTML and jQuery. I do not have anything concrete yet.

<comment><USER43> Let this be a lesson to anyone who happens to read this to have a public portfolio of projects rounded out before you graduate, or before you need your first programming job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The second comment...

 _I am over the bruises to my ego; I just ignore my mother-in-law completely now. The worst thing though is the impact on my kids. We were making $120K plus two years ago. Now, about $35K. Lost the house. Thankfully still in the same school. That said, the kids went from being respectably comfortable in their cohort to being comfortable if tattered (used clothes, battered rental, same old car, no summer trips, etc.). Thank God they are still young (just started third grade) but we're not having any sleepovers here no matter how much they ask. I am afraid for the social impact on them._

I have a very hard time sympathizing with this person. They ooze entitlement and crave validation in every sentence.

<comment><USER20> What on earth are you talking about? This sounds like projection to me because I didn't read anything like that in there.

It sounds to me like this person grew up poor and knows what it means. This stupid idea that poor = lazy/bad is so entrenched in the US society (and was when I was growing up too) that it can ruin your social life from very early on. If I were in his shape I would do anything I had to to make sure my children's peers thought of them as at least middle class so they would have better social connections later in life.

Failing that, I would just let my kids know that when they get college age we're moving somewhere so they can start a new life.

<comment><USER39> "This stupid idea that poor = lazy/bad is so entrenched in the US society (and was when I was growing up too) that it can ruin your social life from very early on"

If you aren't mentally or physically unable to do something (which is the case in a small percentage of the population), you shouldn't be poor. There are many opportunities in the US. I've been poor, had many poor friends, and now I'm doing much better.

Poor, many times, can be changed, but people aren't willing to change their lifestyles.

Many people have free time after work (if you aren't working, you have even more free time). I chose to learn a skill during that time. Many of my friends, who still aren't going anywhere in life, chose to drink, have fun, and party with their friends. I sacrificed that time (for awhile at least) for my career.

Many people also don't understand delayed gratification. They need to have everything now and as a result, suffer financially.

"least middle class so they would have better social connections later in life"

When you have more money, it becomes difficult to stay friends with people that are consistently poor. Many times because your problems, outlook on life, and hobbies change.

<comment><USER20> You, sir, don't have the slightest fucking clue what you're talking about.

<comment><USER39> okay, tell me why. I'm just telling you my experience of seeing this first- hand many many times.

<comment><USER20> Your post was so arrogant, offensive and ignorant I don't even know where to start. I suppose I'll just say: don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes.

Maybe you've know (of known of) people you thought were scumbags. Maybe they even were, but it's the height of ignorance to assume that all poor people are the same based on that. I can tell you there really are people for whom everything they try just seems to go wrong. And the US is a lot more brutal to failure than most first world countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> These quotes sound quite a bit like my dating life. Especially since I spend so much time working...

</comment><comment><USER46> It is a pretty one-sided negative article.

I always enjoyed being jobless, I finally get the time to catch up on things I want to do, and it is a good time to reflect and make life changes.

The general perception out there is that being jobless sucks, and this article reinforces that by focussing on negative reports. It would have been much more interesting to read a more balanced article.

<comment><USER47> Let me guess, you're probably young, single, male, already have money and excellent job prospects. Hey, I'm in the same boat. I know I can quit my job, backpack around the world for a year, come back and find a new job in a week. And I have done that before so I speak from experience. I love being unemployed.

But you know what? I'm thankful everyday for the fact that I have the option to do that. I'm privileged and I know it. I am not as naive as to think this is normal or good advice for the jobless. Tell that to someone with kids and a mortgage. Tell them to go use this time to party, pursue what they love, study, travel etc. That shit costs money and when you don't know when your next paycheck will come, that is a foolish waste of time and horrible advice.

<comment><USER46> 34, married, male, no money, one and a half kids, I rent.

However, the next best thing applies. I live in Germany. They pay me to be unemployed. In terms of total wealth, including time with kids, leisure, time to learn things, follow my interests and invest time in providing for my future, unemployment pays more than employment. (Financially it pays about 80% of employment, but apart from that employment basically puts personal growth, including preparing for a better future for my family, at a standstill.)

<comment><USER48> The article is written from an American viewpoint, about the USA. The imbalance you perceive is in the culture and politics of the USA, not just the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Chart.js beta version launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.chartjs.org/

<comment><USER3> It looks like this version includes a chart legend for pie/doughnut charts! Unless I am very mistaken, the old version, which I am using in my latest product, did not :(.

Hooray chartjs people, I love your product :) -- it is definitely my favorite charting library :).

BTW, does anybody know of a charting library that will make nice 1D scatter plots? (Like this: [http://i.stack.imgur.com/LGBAG.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/LGBAG.png)).

These are very useful visualizations for event frequency, but I can't find any libraries that make them.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any examples of how you'd like them to look in the browser? It shouldn't be hard to throw something together with d3 which simply takes an array.

edit: quick example. [http://jsfiddle.net/R532h/](http://jsfiddle.net/R532h/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would someone who's familiar with chart.js do a quick comparison between other popular charting libraries? I've mostly used rickshaw and d3.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget Highcharts...

[http://www.highcharts.com](http://www.highcharts.com)

<comment><USER7> Just from a cursory glance, it appears that Chartjs is entirely free and you can do what you want with it, while Highcharts is not.

<comment><USER8> It would be nice if this distinction was stated unambiguously on the front page

here's the license if you were looking for it like I was

[https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js/blob/master/LICENSE.md)

<comment><USER9> Took me ages to find the license, I ended up clicking documentation and still having to search for the word license to find it. I wish it was more prominent on the landing page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Flip-per I just gave it a try. It's nice and easy to use, but I need to draw a legend which it surprisingly doesn't seem to support, so I won't use it. Otherwise it'd have been a good match for my simple purposes (non-scaled, non-animated, non-interactive).

BTW, "options.pointDot = false" doesn't seem to have any effect. "options.pointDotRadius = 0" worked for me.

<comment><USER10> The "modular" section of the page appears to show a legend.

<comment> Flip-per True, but for line charts the labels are just used for the tooltips, not for any legend. For the old charts.js version there is a legend-extension on github ([https://github.com/bebraw/Chart.js.legend](https://github.com/bebraw/Chart.js.legend)) which I didn't try because I didn't think it'd be compatible with the current beta-release (I might be wrong).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At work, we use Google Charts to chart data, then send images of those charts to users via email, inline. We are told that this functionality will be deprecated in the API some time next year. Anyone have an idea of how to mitigate that? Emails dont support javascript so not sure how to get around this. Just for some clarity, if you happen to use Sendgrid, they do the same thing. Google chart images in an email.

<comment><USER12> Google Charts are rendered through SVG, and fortunately you have two options to reliably convert any SVG to PNG. One options is "Batik Rasterizer"[1] - <USER2> is a single .jar file, fast, and accurately renders 99% of our cases. The other options is Wkhtmltopdf[2] - it comes with a companion wkhtmltoimage binary which convert SVG to PNG through a customised webkit engine. It also is fast, and can handle our most complex visualisations.

All we do is grab the SVG source with JS, post it back to the server, and get the image back (after it is scaled/watermarked/optimised). This setup has worked well for us for some years now. Further we can easily interchange charting libraries with on concern about their native exporting options because we handle the rendering ourselves.

[1] [https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/tools/rasterizer.html](https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/tools/rasterizer.html)

[2] [http://wkhtmltopdf.org/](http://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently spent about 20 minutes setting up c3 ([http://c3js.org/](http://c3js.org/)) for a commercial product I'm developing. Great library, but its footprint is fairly hefty. Looking forward to giving this a try, if it is just as quick to implement.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hi Nick,

Is Chartjs related to Chartjs from DevExpress?

Edit: Link [http://js.devexpress.com/Documentation/Howto/Data_Visualizat...](http://js.devexpress.com/Documentation/Howto/Data_Visualization/Basics/Create_a_Widget?version=14_1)

<comment> LX-350 It is not. Currently using DevExpress at work. They've actually re-branded it as DevExtreme with their latest release (v14.1).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like Chart.js, I can't tell if I'm looking at the beta from my phone though. I'd hope they add a scatter plot then it'd be close to perfect. There might be a fork I haven't found yet, but I know anything I made wouldn't look as nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> New site is responsive for mobile, so you should be seeing the new version!

This new release allows for custom chart types, using the same core API, so hopefully we'll see some community led new chart type extensions soon!

<comment><USER15> Thanks! I'll see if I can give it a shot, I just went back after grabbing my laptop and noticed the section on writing new chart types. Maybe I can figure it out. I have a project in mind I could use this for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking foward to use the new beta through angles ([https://github.com/lgsilver/angles](https://github.com/lgsilver/angles)) the Angular wrapper for chartjs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Neat, I was looking over lots of different charting libraries the other day and this looks great. And it is free to use in commercial projects which, hopefully, will be relevant for me in the future!

<comment><USER18> Check out this one as well: [https://morrisjs.github.io/morris.js/](https://morrisjs.github.io/morris.js/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any free(for commercial use) candlestick charts available?

</comment><comment><USER20> I've used Chart.JS for quite a few big projects but I always found it lacking in some crucial features (hover/tap events & legends)

<comment><USER21> andyhmltn, try FusionCharts or HighCharts instead. I have had good experience with FusionCharts till now and it also has the features(hover/tap events & legends) that you are looking for. Feel free to mail me if you get stuck somewhere. Can't say much about HighCharts as I am yet to experiment with all its features. But everyone here seems to love them, so you can find good support for it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can the data in the charts be updated in realtime? I'm looking for graphs to display operations type data like cpu usage, etc over time.

<comment><USER23> Each one of the chart types has a prototype method .update() which will re- draw the chart with your updated values, so real-time updates are possible.

[1] [http://www.chartjs.org/docs/](http://www.chartjs.org/docs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nick this is awesome. Would love to feature your work on blockspring.com so non-engineers can use chart.js graphs directly.

<comment><USER25> Blockspring looks like a great resource. Free to use? Spits out code to paste into html? Nick, Charts looks awesome and might make its way into my next project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Finally hover tooltips for bar graphs! A pretty important feature Chart.js was lacking before in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've used rickshaw and nvd3 - chart.js seems pretty minimal compared to them.

<comment><USER28> We tried NVD3 when we built [http://www.chartblocks.com](http://www.chartblocks.com) as it would have saved us loads of time. It wasn't great though and had almost no flexibility.

<comment><USER29> If NVD3 didn't work out for you, what did charting library did you choose instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interactive mode for tooltips. That's great news, very excited about that!

</comment><comment><USER31> Awesome! We've been waiting for this for some time - nice release Nick!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers, sorry it took so long!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> You've made my day! Thx!

</comment><comment><USER33> Why canvas instead of svg?

<comment><AUTHOR> SVG is a good solution too, but it can really suffer performance-wise, especially on mobile, tablet and when animating svg node positions.

<comment><USER34> Canvas is bitmap-based, while SVG is vector. If you need to print the chart SVG is going to look a lot better. Also, if you pinch-zoom the chart, SVG is going to look better. Canvas doesn't support animation -- you have to code it yourself. SVG performance is quite good unless you have thousands of elements, which a chart isn't going to have.

<comment><USER35> > Canvas doesn't support animation -- you have to code it yourself.

What do you mean?

<comment><USER36> The obvious. That canvas is just a set of pixels with colors (a bitmap image). To get animation, you have to explicitly change them every X milliseconds.

Whereas SVG has actual objects, that you can apply items like animateTransform, animateMotion etc to them directly, in a declarative style.

<comment><USER35> Ok, thanks. I didn't know that. I thought you had to clear/redraw the SVG for animation as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Homepage grid breaks at 1440px wide for me (Chrome/osx).

Great update, love the tooltips.</comment>


The Coffee Revolution Begins - <AUTHOR> http://londoncoffeenetwork.com/

<comment><USER2> This interesting! Bad that I don't live in London</comment>


How Jefferson and other Founding Fathers defended Muslim rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/11/how-thomas-jefferson-and-other-founding-fathers-defended-muslim-rights/ <comment><USER2> He also became the first U.S. president to deal with "Islamic terrorism":

> Jefferson and John Adams ... went to call on Tripoli's envoy to London, > Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked him by what right he extorted > money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary > of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

> The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the > Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not > have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty > to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of > all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be > slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/01/jeffersons_quran.html)

It wouldn't be out of place for someone from ISIS to say the exact same thing today.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War)

Cool factoid: "The schooner _Enterprise_ (commanded by Lieutenant Andrew Sterret) defeated the 14-gun Tripolitan corsair _Tripoli_ after a one-sided battle on 1 August 1801."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a quote from George Washington sent to a Jewish congregation in Newport, RI while he and Thomas Jefferson were promoting what is now the 1st amendment. Although Rhode Island had ratified that amendment, "Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Georgia were still debating the amendments in August of 1790 when the President visited Newport."

"For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." [1]

[1] [http://www.tourosynagogue.org/history-learning/gw- letter](http://www.tourosynagogue.org/history-learning/gw-letter)

<comment><USER5> What if they support Sharia law in place of American law?

<comment><USER6> About the same as when Jewish people support Beth Din in place of American law - it's fine so long as American law is also respected.

(There are problems with religious legal systems of women not being able to get divorces; of abused women not getting help and support; and of abused children not getting help and support and the abusers not facing justice).

<comment><USER5> That's a lot of dancing to avoid condemning hateful, repressive beliefs. We condemn hateful, racist bigots all the time. Rightfully so. Just because said hate is derived from religion does not excuse it from condemnation.

<comment><USER7> > That's a lot of dancing to avoid condemning hateful, repressive beliefs.

I guess I missed the dance party. All I see is the statement:

"Any US citizen may maintain their own practices just so long as those practices are compatible with US law."

Seems pretty simple and clear to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article highlights the enlightened, thoughtful, respectful discourse which at the basis of the creation of the great nation that is the United States. Things were by no means perfect then. But certainly we can learn from the words and actions of many outstanding characters of the time.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Things are never perfect. The best we can hope for is that people work hard and are good to each other. The founding fathers had their fair share of flaws just like any leader today, and yet they managed to turn a rebellion into something great.

The real tragedy today is that there are many Americans who want a monopoly on American identity, instead of embracing the source of America's strength: our ability to assimilate people and ideas into something greater than the sum of its parts (and genocical imperialism and slave labor helped too)

<comment> vezzy-fnord _The real tragedy today is that there are many Americans who want a monopoly on American identity_

American identity is much more heterogeneous today than ever before, in no small part thanks to ecumenism.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Broadly, yes. But let's not mince words: the white and largely male-dominated subset of Americans see themselves as the vanguards of the true - and dying - standard of what it means to be American. Therefore, they would rather fight scorched-earth against alternative lifestyles and skin colors over the meaning of what makes up an American rather than work together to ensure national prosperity in a turbulent world order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the US, Muslims have already got more rights than non-Muslims, for example Christian. When you criticize Islam/Muhammad you will be called islamophobe, bigot, racist. When you criticize Christianity/Jesus you will be called progressive.</comment>


Konrad Zuse: Nearly the German Turing - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxvoice.com/konrad-zuse-nearly-the-german-turing-5/ <comment><USER3> Zuse is the nerd's nerd. Not only did he build the first programmable computer, he also was the first dude to grok digital physics and the idea that the universe may be a computer.

Zuse's book 'Calculating Space' was written in the 60s, years before Fredkin et al. People thought he was insane. Consequently, he thought his intellectual life was over and actually went into startups later in life.

Today, his ideas about the universe being computation are very trendy. Before his death, he was invited out to MIT and shown some love for his pioneering work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Zuse was way ahead. He had working programmability by 1938. Atanasoff in the US got close, but didn't have general programmability. None of the WWII cryptanalysis machines were general purpose computers. Their modern counterpart is a Bitcoin ASIC.

None of those machines put the program in main memory. Memory was a huge problem in the early days. Paper tape and punched cards were slow. Everything else was expensive per bit and hard to address. Atanasoff had a drum of capacitors, but it required a discrete capacitor for each bit and rotating electrical contacts. Tauschek in Austria invented the magnetic drum in 1932, but it wasn't used for computing until after WWII. The big bottleneck in computing for a long time was simply that there was nothing like RAM - <USER2> were no random access memory devices.

There were lots of special purpose machines before computers. Much early work went into electronic multiplication, which was really slow mechanically. IBM introduced the IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier in 1946, which was the first electronic digital computing device product. I/O was punched cards, but the multiplier was tubes. There's a long history of mechanical multipliers, going back to Leibniz and ending with the IBM 602A. My favorite is the McClure Multiplying Punch, which had a table-driven mechanical multiplier for pounds/shillings/pence amounts. The ENIAC was a lot of multipliers and adders programmed with huge plugboards, but didn't store programs in memory.

Von Neumann put all the pieces together in 1945 in the "Report on the EDVAC" \- general purpose, branching, program and data in main memory, binary, external I/O devices.[1]. He saw that memory was the limitation on general purpose computing, as did others. He wanted 250K bits of memory in the EDVAC. He only got 44K; the mercury tank delay line approach didn't offer much capacity. Von Neumann proposed a CRT memory, the first true random access memory device, which was made to work at the University of Manchester in 1946 as the Williams tube. That technology powered several early machines, including the IBM 701 and the UNIVAC 1103, and competed with delay lines until magnetic core memory started working. Both Williams tubes and mercury tanks were dead-end memory technologies, but they worked well enough to get something done.

Turing was involved with the ACE effort in the UK, but it was under-funded. Pilot ACE only had 4K bits of memory and wasn't running until 1950.

[1] [https://archive.org/stream/firstdraftofrepo00vonn](https://archive.org/stream/firstdraftofrepo00vonn)

<comment><USER5> We've come to talk about the Von Neumann architecture, but the information contained in his report on the EDVAC was largely lifted from the work of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. Von Neumann's contribution was the relatively pedestrian task of translating their findings into mathematical language. He inappropriately put it into the public domain without attribution simultaneously diminishing their place in history while unjustly cementing his. Not to mention, he destroyed their chances of earning a patent. It's a real shame that we tend to gloss over this nowadays for expedience's sake.

<comment><USER6> For more on this, I recommend "Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" by Scott McCartney. I read it a few years ago and found it fascinating. I don't remember how much it gets into Zuse, but it has a lot about the Eniac vs Atanasoff battle, and von Neumann and the Preliminary Report on EDVAC. These things are never black and white. All of these people did valuable work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember going to the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. They had an amazing exhibit on the development of mechanical computers from automated looms and the origin of punch cards which were used in automated stitching machines. They had a model of the Z1. I have never encounter another presentation of the development of technology that made progress seem so orderly and inevitable (obviously massive hindsight bias).

The Z1 was absolutely incredible and it really drove home the point that switches are switches, regardless of whether they are implemented as a transistor or a metal lever.

<comment><USER8> I visited that exhibit in Berlin too. There was two or three Zuse computers on display as well as a bunch of other early European computers. It was a very nice exhibit.

It was particularly enlightening to see the various technologies being used, today all computers are made of silicon chips, but the exhibit had electro- mechanical, electro magnetic (memory), vacuum tube and solid state computers on display.

I don't know if it is a touring exhibit or is it still in Berlin, but I recommend anyone to visit that.

<comment><USER9> It was in Berlin at the new year, and didn't look like it was going anywhere. :-) Konrad Zuse's son is a retired computer science professor who built one of the replicas in the exhibit, and still sometimes lectures on it and demonstrates it.

[http://www.horst-zuse.homepage.t-online.de/](http://www.horst- zuse.homepage.t-online.de/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw Konrad Zuse's son, Horst Zuse, give a presentation on the history of these computers at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. It was fascinating (this article covers the same information). He's currently building a Z3 out of modern parts, out on the museum floor. I took some pictures and video of the Z1 replica and the in-progress Z3:

[http://imgur.com/a/effAn](http://imgur.com/a/effAn)

[https://vid.me/FUQL](https://vid.me/FUQL)

</comment><comment><USER11> The article has only an image of the Z4 in Munich. I find the reconstruction of the Z1, which is in museum in Berlin, much more interesting.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article[1]:

        Construction of the Z1 was privately financed. Zuse got money from his
        parents, his sister Lieselotte, some students of the fraternity AV Motiv
        (cf. Helmut Schreyer) and Kurt Pannke (a calculating machines manufacturer
        in Berlin) to do so.

        Zuse constructed the Z1 in his parents' apartment; in fact, he was allowed
        to use the bathroom for his construction. In 1936, Zuse quit his job in
        airplane construction in order to build the Z1.

        Zuse used thin metal sheets to construct his machine. There were no relays
        in it. The only electrical unit was an electric motor to give the clock
        frequency of 1 Hz (cycle per second) to the machine.

        The machine was never very reliable in operation due to the precise
        synchronization required to avoid undue stresses on the mechanical parts.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29)

<comment><USER12> > The article has only an image of the Z4 in Munich. And it is an image of the > Z3 if one looks closer at the description on the left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some trivia from Wikipedia [0]:

      The movie Tron: Legacy, which revolves around a world inside a computer system,
      features a character named Zuse [1], presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#Zuse_Year_2010](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#Zuse_Year_2010)

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0209988/?ref_=tt_cl_t7](http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0209988/?ref_=tt_cl_t7)

<comment><USER13> Some years before his death, Konrad Zuse wrote a book about his long and interesting life called "Der Computer - Mein Lebenswerk", which was later translated to an English version titled as "The Computer - My Life".

<comment><USER14> Lebenswerk means life's work, not life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Zuse's independent development of ideas that paralleled other early computer scientists' makes me wonder how much of our modern computer science (Von Neumann, Lambdas, clocks, registers, and all) was inevitable discoveries and how much was shaped by our pioneers.

If we did it all over again, but with different people, would we end up with something similar, or something very different? Would we have digital, basically serial computer cores with layers of memory around them? Would our languages be like assembler and C and Lisp?

Or are there potentially very different but equally practical alternatives out there?

</comment><comment><USER16> If there ever it a tour of machines that moved worlds, I would recommend the following:

Z1 - DT museum

Difference Engine - British Science museum

Bombe - Bletchly Park

Harrison's H1 - Greenwich Observatory

<comment><USER17> There's also a Difference Engine at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. A block or two down from Google.

The interesting thing about the Difference Engine was that it was Babbage's unrealized design. It wasn't built until the early 2000s, funded by HN favourite Nathan Myhrvold. He funded one for the British Museum, another one for himself. The one at the Computer History Museum is Myhrvold's own, on loan.

<comment><USER6> Almost. Myhrvold provided funds for the British Museum to complete their copy, and build him a complete machine. From Wikipedia:

"After the Science Museum in London successfully built the computing section of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine #2 in 1991, Myhrvold funded the construction of the output section, which performs both printing and stereotyping of calculated results. He also commissioned the construction of a second complete Difference Engine #2 for himself, which has been on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, since May 10, 2008."

I've seen both machines and they are marvels. I was especially excited to finally see the second machine in operation last fall. It is mechanical poetry in motion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> florian-f Plankalkül [0] is cool. I was impressed when I learned it had lambdas.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl)

</comment><comment><USER18> I've visited the Technikmuseum in Berlin too, the Zuse exhibit is fascinating. A history I never knew. Honestly if I didn't see the things on display I'd doubt it a bit. But the mechanical computer parts are there.

The fine article linked here is down at the moment, so here's a few other links of interest.

Berlin museum: [http://www.sdtb.de/Mathematics-and-Computer- Science.1256.0.h...](http://www.sdtb.de/Mathematics-and-Computer- Science.1256.0.html)

Chess computers: [https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Konrad+Zuse](https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Konrad+Zuse)

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

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks like the site went down. Here's a cached link:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4wvG8zC...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4wvG8zCYB3MJ:www.linuxvoice.com/konrad- zuse-nearly-the-german-turing-5/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER20> In episode 60 [1] of the great (and sadly, ending soon) podcast Pragmatic, John Chidgey talks some about the history of programming and more specifically some about Turing, arguing that Turing is overrated. I largely agree, and since I send John feedback after every episode, I sent him a longish rant, reproduced as follows:

When talking about the history of programming, there's always a difficulty because of the difference between computing and programming. It's nearly undeniable, for example, that Vannevar Bush had a greater impact on computing than did John Von Neumann (I'll take the haters on with that). As We May Think is more important than Von Neumann's draft, because what Von Neumann was talking about had already been created and codified, whereas As We May Think was much more of a visionary work. Maybe put another way, I think Von Neumann was a brilliant synthesist, bringing together the ideas of many into the next step in the evolution of whatever he was working on at the time. Bush, on the other hand, was a management/strategic level thinker who saw the revolutionary step ahead of whatever he was working on. But, Bush was not a programmer in any way, and his impact on programming is limited. Similarly, I think that Turing is overly lionized for his programming contributions because of the Turing test and Eliza. He provided a lot of the theoretical underpinnings, but I would argue that C.A.R. Hoare's contributions have a greater reaching practical impact than did Turing's. I suspect that Turing and Von Neumann had political connections in the ACM and IEEE that led to their improved historical standing. But as always, historical/political credit is almost as much a function of who you know/where you are as what you've done. (I'm a huge fan of Shannon, Mauchly, Adm. Hopper, Hoare, and Dijkstra, over others like Turing and Von Neumann).

It's also very difficult, when just surveying computer history, to give proper credit to Zuse, Lebedev, Scherbius, Rejewski, etc, due to the lack of English Language resources on their accomplishments, and lingering bias against the governments some of them worked for. One could make a very compelling argument for Scherbius as having created _the_ most pivotal invention of the twentieth century, because Enigma drove the large investment into cryptanalysis, which led to the large investment in devices that eventually became the general purpose computing machines of today.

There's also a large, long discussion to be had about the impact of figures like Marvin Minsky, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Brendan Eich, Donald Knuth, Peter Norvig, or Alan Kay had on programming, and also on the impact figures like Jack Goldman, Doug Engelbart, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Watson, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, David Packard, Bill Hewlett, Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, or Jim Clark had on computing. Few of those guys cross over from programming to computing or vice versa, yet each have critical contributions to be discussed and looked at. I don't know of a lot of good books or resources, though, that really tackle this. Steven Levy's Hackers is the canonical example, but it is heavily biased toward the AI Lab crowds, Lisp hackers, and the early Unix pioneers, without touching on the big industry/engineer types more than tangentially or even scornfully, and almost completely ignored the military/NASA. I also really appreciated Peter Siebel's Coders at Work, which was more inclusive but not really a history, more of a set of conversations. I'm told Petzold's CODE is good, and of course deeper into history there's the Godel, Escher, Bach: the Eternal Golden Braid, which I have on my bookshelf and have to admit not getting to far into because I don't really like math. Either way, as I'm sure you know, there is a wide, wide history of programming and computing that could be explored more, and I find it a shame that no one has done so with the historical rigor that I would like. (Such a book would probably be $100+ because sales would be so small since few people would be interested, and it would discourage others from taking up future projects)

[1] [http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic/episode-60-or-w...](http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic/episode-60-or- was-that-doctor-sbaitso)

<comment><USER21> There's always a tendency to focus in on a few "pivotal creators" when the reality is much more diffuse. People like to know who the inventor of X was and the reality is that the enshrined inventor, at best, made a particular advance in commercialization or practicality--or simply got the good press.

Hackers is a good read but it arguably sacrifices historical completeness for narrative flow. You mention the focus on the AI lab but then it also makes the argument everything that happened on the east coast was eclipsed. But then, that's what good stories do. I watched The Imitation Game last night and it took enormous historical liberties--probably too many. Breaking the Code is better in that regard. On the other hand, I saw a historical play about the invention of ether last year that I felt was harmed by too literal attention to less important threads of the central story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about Rudolf Von Hacklheber?

</comment><comment><USER23> And what about John Atanasoff: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff)</comment>


Presentation for art project I did with mechanical turk - <AUTHOR> http://joshua.schachter.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a bad submission. Please ignore.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> boy, do i hate how i look/sound.

<comment><USER2> The talk was interesting, and I thought you sounded fine. Although Monica sounded slightly more polished, her contribution was also much more buzzwordy (and more vacuous) than yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> artspeak vs geekspeak?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Hotel Industry Lobbyists Want A Global Crackdown On Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Why-Hotel-Industry-Lobbyists-Want-A-Global-4551199.php

<comment><USER2> Lease terms that prohibit or limit subtenancy (especially without the express consent of the owner) are nothing new, and certainly not a reaction to AirBnB.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I know they just introduced a new verification policy and are aiming to collect info on hosts and renters so they enforce some accountability and what not. Maybe if they also forced hosts to prove that listing their place on the site does not violate their lease and/or local regulations in order to actually list it. It seems all the backlash articles I've seen talk a lot about violating your lease. This can vary from building to building and is a total non-issue for non-rentals. I own my house. If I wanted to list it on AirBnB I do not believe there is any legal issue for me. In theory, there isn't anything illegal about AirBnB any more than there is anything illegal about BitTorrent. Both of which are tools that serve a very legitimate and legal purpose. Some people use them illegally (by current laws, regardless of your opinion if that use _should_ be illegal).

</comment><comment><USER3> Sting operations are always an interesting topic. In many countries, law enforcement people prefer these operations because they're easier to do and elicit better media coverage, at the expense of fighting real crime. And of course, as a result of media coverage people in management get promotions, and the public presumably stops questioning the effectiveness of tax dollars spent.</comment>


Using iframes and document.write to improve navigation performance - <AUTHOR> https://jakearchibald.com/2016/fun-hacks-faster-content/ <comment><USER2> Isn't the problem that there's a performance 'enhancement' in wide usage that actually hurts performance?

Devil's Advocate: maybe the real answer is to go back to proper full-page loads and figure out why your javascript and CSS parsing is taking so long.

<comment><AUTHOR> In some cases, yeah. I touch on this at the end of the article. But if you can't avoid having that JavaScript on the page, avoiding a revaluation is beneficial.

One technique I didn't cover (as the article was getting long) is using a service worker to speed up server renders. The test & code can be found at [https://jakearchibald.github.io/streaming- html/](https://jakearchibald.github.io/streaming-html/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great, what a nifty hack!

Arguably a little bit clickbait-y, as the headline is accurate but doesn't mention the streaming JSON idea that's covered in the same article. That's a much more sensible approach than abusing iframes.

And as the article also says, you'll get the benefit of progressive rendering for free if you just don't make your site into a single page app in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> ND-JSON only works for aggregations of data where the chunks are small. If you're building a news site you can't really chunk a single article up into ND-JSON. If you want a transition between pages then you can't use full navigations, and if you want to keep streaming the iframe hack seems to be the only solution.

<comment><USER3> _If you 're building a news site you can't really chunk a single article up into ND-JSON._

One paragraph per chunk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, right. And if you've got something nested like a quote, a list, an aside etc etc, how do you represent that as a flat stream of chunks?

I suppose you could implement some kind of SAX-like thing expressed as ND- JSON…

…orrrrrr avoid all that by streaming HTML.

<comment><USER4> well, blockquote, ol, ul, aside, etc etc, are all flows, and as such are not permitted inside of p, which can only have phrasing content

right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but they can all have paragraphs (and many other elements) as a descendant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> transplanting a node into a different document while the document.write() merrily marches along.

It feels like open heart surgery with a rusty knife. But I can't find anything in the specs saying that it is verboten.

<comment><USER6> Technically you should be adopting the node, but I guess browsers don't care: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Document/ad...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Document/adoptNode)

<comment><USER5> That shouldn't affect the parser, because adoptNode "simply" (read: dark rituals involving goats) changes owner document and the prototype chain but not object identity, which means the node on the parser stack should still be valid.

The trick here is that the the invoked behavior is spread over the HTML5 and DOM specs and maybe a little Ecmascript too. In isolation they appear sane, combined together they are loose enough that this hack does not run afoul of any rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it standard practice to split large ajax responses into many smaller requests to allow parallel download+render? I've done this since the very early days of ajax. You always had to tweak the frame size though and find a balance of download speed + request handshake time vs render speed, so having a client side streaming solution for this would be really cool.

<comment><USER8> > Isn't it standard practice to split large ajax responses into many smaller > requests to allow parallel download+render?

It doesn't guarantee the payload will load faster, especially on mobile. Obviously, the solution is to avoid loading large ajax responses and only returning from the server what is absolutely needed.</comment></comment>


Yo To Invest - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@MattHartman/yo-to-invest-4794bfeea2d0

<comment><AUTHOR> "For example, while I go to Product Hunt almost every day, I get a lot of utility from the Yo account PRODUCTHUNTED, which push notifies me whenever there's a product that gets over 100 upvotes. When I get that notification, I know to make sure to check out what product everyone's getting so excited about."

Huh? That's what Twitter does and it includes a short summary so I know if I want to go to their site.

<comment><USER2> Clearly, Twitter is too complicated.</comment></comment>


Parallel N64 with RSP Dynarec – RetroArch – Fastest LLE N64 Emulator to Date - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g7ytpHVYuc <comment><AUTHOR> Read the blog article here - [https://www.libretro.com/index.php/parallel-n64-with- paralle...](https://www.libretro.com/index.php/parallel-n64-with-parallel-rsp- dynarec-release-fast-and-accurate-n64-emulation/)</comment>


The NSA is not made of magic (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/the_nsa_is_not_.html <comment><USER2> Part of the security of observation comes from the observed not knowing whether or not they are being watched. The Stasi (as well as every other secret police) never had the manpower to keep eyes on everyone. (Of course, that was before massive computational power, widespread cameras, voluntary personal trackers (cellphones), facial recognition AI, etc.). They had to rely a lot on reputation and fear to get their job done (securing the state). It's in the NSA's interests to make themselves seem spooky and magical.

The encryption algorithms themselves might be unbreakable, but there are so many other stages involved in communication. And all it takes is one weak link in the chain, one tiny mistake or opening, and humans make plenty of those.

No, the magician did not look at you picking your card, but he found a way (based on your inherent inability to be fully attentive to everything) to figure it out anyway.

Then again, maybe they do have magic and it's a massive triple bluff. Or maybe...

<comment><USER3> If Stasi had had todays technology, the wall would never have fallen.

<comment><USER4> Well, that I'm not sure of because the wall rested for a pretty big chunk on the iron fist of the Soviet Empire while it lasted but there definitely would have been far fewer successful escapes from Eastern Germany to the West.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think you can make an analogy to actual magic, in that a lot of magic tricks only work because the audience doesn't know the extent to which the magician will go to fool them. They'll use stooges, lie to you, glue magnets to playing cards, eavesdrop on the audience for mentalism tricks, etc.

Similarly, the NSA can accomplish what would seem like magic by doing brute force stuff like tapping an undeground cable with a submarine or getting you to hire moles into your organization, or just plain breaking and entering. 10 billion dollars may not buy you a lot of computers but it buys you more man hours than their targets can ever hope to expend on protecting themselves.

<comment><USER6> Quite so. You can say "there is no magical technology for bridging air gaps." Unless you include suitcases full of money to compromise the people traversing those air gaps. Beyond being reasonably certain the NSA can't break strong encryption to access data at rest in situations where the key can't be bought, this is some comfort, but not a lot of comfort.

<comment><USER7> I mean, there's quite a few ways to communicate between air gapped systems. The biggest difficulty is getting your code running on the internal air gapped system, so it can talk back to the first system. And transmission methods are typically pretty slow.

A recent public example, but there's lots of other techniques: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8CNxYe5dk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8CNxYe5dk)

Paying lots of money to access data at rest would really be more under the CIA, to be honest. The CIA is, theoretically, only supposed to go after data at rest, and leave all the sigint to the NSA.

<comment><USER8> Has anyone else noticed a small 'click' when scrubbing to a section of that video where data is being transferred. I'm assuming that's not co-incidental?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/06/flame...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/06/flame-crypto-breakthrough/)

Sounds like "super-secret cryptanalysis" to me. That was 2012 and Schneier was writing in 2014. I wonder what would qualify as magic to him?

<comment><USER10> SHA-0 is another good example. It was withdrawn and replaced with the tweaked SHA-1 for no apparent reason. Years later techniques were discovered that the tweak defended against.

DES also defended against a technique that wasn't developed in the public until two decades later. That technique was originally developed at IBM and NSA merely convinced them to keep it secret, so I'm not sure how that qualifies.

Edit: Schneier has written about these before, of course. I wonder if his point here is not that the NSA was always boring, but rather that its lead is way less impressive than it once was.

<comment><USER11> Also the Diffie-Hellman attack that we only knew about because of Snowden.

[https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy- ccs15.pdf](https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Did you have a link that somehow relates this to Snowden?

<comment><USER13> Section 4.2 of that selfsame link.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, nobody to blame for not seeing that but me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He's right, of course. I went through the docs when they came out and was seriously underwhelmed.

But with all the people (e.g. costs) NSA has, I don't think much of their budget goes to the kind of blue sky research you need to make their own magic.

<comment><USER15> If you read Michael Hayden's book, one gets the sense a lot of the NSA is farm work. He had to buck the system from above to find bands of "young Turks" in the organization and empower them. The problem of managers afraid of letting good people executeis everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Schneier likened NSA crypto to alien technology just a few days ago [0], which I guess is not technically magic.

[0]: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/two_nsa_algor...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/two_nsa_algorit.html)

<comment><USER16> What he probably means by this is that lot of NSA-designed crypto contains somewhat weird design choices and it is interesting to try to find out what is rationale behind such choices. One well-known example of this are DES S-boxes, while the somewhat complex key-schedule of Speck/Simon is also interesting (both algorithms use essentially same feistel network for both key schedule and main cipher). Another interesting thing is NSA's tendency to design cryptographic primitives with explicit key checksums byked into them (parity bits in DES, BATON with 320bit key out of which 160bits (!) apparently are checksum...).

<comment><USER17> What makes Simon/Speck more complex than something like Chacha20? They seem to be based on the same operations, just shifted around and with some slightly different bit shifts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Magic it is when a country with $20 Trillion GDP is behind you...and not just with money, but with everything.

Are you a US telecom and help the NSA? DOJ will not bother you for a lot of things

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio)

 _He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007[1] – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.[2] This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion,[3] which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Mr. DiNaccio 's case was likewise ruled inadmissible._

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [2014]

Otherwise the references are a bit confusing...

<comment><USER21> We've updated the headline. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They want to create magic with regulation like gdpr that removes the ability for other organizations to have as much data. NSA-types are trying to appoint themselves as the only people able to massively collect data with no opt out.

<comment><USER4> Legislation like the GDPR makes it harder for outsiders to get at the data that companies have _including_ NSA like entities. This is because companies will spend - for the first time ever - some serious $ on getting their stuff secured rather than to see security as some hard to avoid theater they need to take part in. You can already begin to see the difference and the law hasn't even come into effect yet.

<comment><USER23> Personally, I've seen companies holding back waiting to see how GDPR actually pans out in courts before investing in fixing things, albeit my view is pretty anecdotal. Where have you seen companies being proactive?

<comment><USER4> Well, if they like playing the lottery that's their problem. The companies that I see that are being pro-active are the companies that pass by - one per week, regular as clockwork - in my practice. So far all the companies I've looked at this year so far had a GDPR impact study or something closely resembling it done. Quite a few had engaged outside help but also plenty of them did their own homework and the vast majority had already made changes to their applications and processes to get closer to being compliant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Twisted' wireless OAM beams carry 2.5 terabits per second - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131640-infinite-capacity-wireless-vortex-beams-carry-2-5-terabits-per-second <comment><USER2> For my research, we looked at optical vortex modulation schemes for a while. With polarisation (spin angular momentum), there are only two orthogonal states. With orbital angular momentum you can have infinite integer "charge" states that are orthogonal (yes you can have negative charge as well). So in principal by encoding each stream with one of these states, a bunch can be transmitted at the same time in the same beam.

I might venture a guess that this was done over a short distance in a closed room. Problem arrises when these beams counter strong turbulence or scattering, then the vortices are either destroyed or coupled together. So the channel leakage and signal to noise becomes a problem.

Still neat though, bundling 8 channels is impressive.

<comment><USER3> In a previous discussion here, it was figured out that "twisting" is equivalent to MIMO. Is that your understanding? If so, it will be subject the same capacity limitations, meaning that capacity is approximately linear with degrees of freedom, then tapers off to a limit, the limit being related to the volume occupied by the receiver and transmitter.

Presumably the number of "integer charge" states is in some way related to the volume of space occupied?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > According to Thide, OAM should allow us to twist together an "infinite > number" of conventional transmission protocols without using any more > spectrum. In theory,

I don't know much about the science, but anyone who claims their new breakthrough has an infinite capacity immediately sets off my skepticism.

<comment><USER5> Take a 4TB harddrive back in time to 1979, and tell them it is infinite. They will not argue with your assessment, even if its not completely correct.

<comment><USER6> you are incredibly wrong. "More than I think you'll need" and "infinite" are not the same. Capped "unlimited" data plans are a good example. Company expense accounts are another example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This test showed 95 bps/hz of spectrum. For cpmparison LTE is 16 bps/hz. They allude to problems with turbulence, that may make long range terrestrial use problematic.

But I remember 1 bps/hz being a limit, we've come a long way.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this works as well as the hype, it'll still be highly directional, right? So it'll be great for things like backhaul networks, satellite linkups etc, but it won't solve the problem of mobile wireless access (WiFi/LTE/etc). Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER9> No, you're right. From everything I've read on this, it is essentially limited to line of sight as you need the "middle" reference for the other "orbits", or whatever the heck they're called. (Assuming this is the same technique as the experiment the Italians displayed in Venice a few months ago.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> bps/hz measurements in TFA are bullshit without noise figures. Per Shannon- Hartley theorem, spectral density depends on the Bandwidth of the channel (assume infinite for free air) and noise. So what is the noise? of course DVB-T (Digital TV) has low bps/hz, the antenna is tens of KM away and there is a lot of noise! the experiment used two antennas located 1 meter away, almost zero noise. EDIT: You might as well cite the spectral density of the voyager II spacecraft onboard antenna. Hint: It's very very low.

</comment><comment><USER11> Stuff like this is why current SETI efforts seem at best provincial.

We aren't even beginning to understand how intelligent extra-solar beings would communicate with each other. Current efforts are like a colony of ants all by themselves on an island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific building a giant super-pheromone nose on top of a 3-inch anthill.

<comment><USER12> SETI is not aimed at listening in on communications between aliens, which would be impractical for the reason you mention and more. SETI's goal is to listen for deliberate "anybody out there?" transmissions, which one can expect to be much simpler, since they would be deliberately designed to be universal and easily understood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really want to see a technical paper on this. the Nature article is pay walled... also, the image on the bottom right kinda looks like it's spinning when looked at out of the corner of your eye (ie, when reading the article)

</comment><comment><USER9> In a discussion on Slashdot, I was linked to an IEEE article that claims that all OAM type transmissions are subsets of MIMO. I haven't read this in detail yet, but so far it seems interesting:

[http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&rec...](http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120)

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems like turbulence is an issue when the beam is sent through the air, but could it be transmitted through a cable over longer distances? I certainly wouldn't mind upgrading my internet speed from 25 Mb/s to 2500000 Mb/s.

</comment><comment><USER15> Some day phone makers will subsidize carriers. All towers will have been built, bandwidth will be extreme (note I did not say "infinite" although I wouldn't object if that happened!), prices will collapse. Buy a phone, get included service free.

</comment><comment><USER16> So there's a nice opportunity: software for OAM.

Build something useful there and write your ticket in an acquisition.

<comment><USER17> Given that OAM is a modulation technique, which is a physical-layer tech, nothing above firmware will even know about it. At most software will be able to read/set a flag enabling use, similar to FX/DX on Ethernet.

<comment><USER18> I think its more than that. When you exceed by an order of magnitude the bitrate, different APIs will be needed to take advantage. Sure you can just send on a socket, but it will max out at the rate you can call that API (including kernel switch, copying data, waiting for a completion interrupt etc).

Some kind of virtual hardware or mapped memory will be desirable to achieve great leaps in bandwidth usage.</comment></comment></comment>


Things to Do as Soon as You Sign Up for AWS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rafgarcia/four-things-to-do-as-soon-as-you-sign-up-for-aws-5c095097679f <comment><USER2> Keeping track of your billing would also be advantageous:

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/free- tier-alarms.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course, there's other stuff that you should do, too, like get into the habit of checking Trusted Advisor. :) But nice writeup!

</comment><comment><USER4> Step 1: Complete the 5 steps under "Security Status"

I'm struggling to see how this "exercise" warrants a blog post when it simply rehashes AWS security practices.

</comment><comment><USER5> Turn on cloudtrail for all regions.

<comment><USER6> Create a base image with all essential packages and updates pre-installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Always audit your IAM polices using Access advisor.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just stay away from Amazon.

<comment><USER9> Any particular reason?

<comment><USER8> It's not a useful company. It's a lose-lose.</comment></comment></comment>


Postagram Captures Android And Facebook For More Mobile Photo Postcard Fun - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/postagram-android-facebook/

<comment><USER2> Since your probably checking here, might as well ask. Any plans for an API, so I can build a web app of some sort, send image data and user over to your site for payment, and have you send out their creation?

<comment><AUTHOR> hey @arfank - we haven't announced any plans around doing this, but we think it'd be cool. Drop me a note at email@example.com and let me know what you'd like to do.</comment></comment>


Patreon has banned the accounts of several controversial public figures - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqeev/crowdfunding-site-patreon-is-purging-far-right-figures <comment><USER2> He wasn't banned for being far right. He was banned for sending racist comments to another user. Send pretty straight forward violation. They are just enforcing he agreed to when he signed up. Why is this news?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Far right" is just an epithet these days for anyone the dominant leftian zeitgeist disagrees with.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why the title change? It was (and still is) accurate according to the vice.com headline.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how Sargon can be considered far-right. The only "far right" positions I can think of him holding are those relating to national sovereignty (Brexit) and being against the concept of hate speech and in favor of free speech.

What ideas has he promoted that makes him far right?

Otherwise sure, Alsup and Milo can be called far right.

<comment><USER4> > in favor of free speech

To a degree - he's only in favour of free speech for people he considers acceptable; cf his petition to get "Social Justice" courses banned in Universities.

(Then he supported a petition in favour of "Count Dankula", an avowed far- righter. Weird how that goes.)

<comment><USER5> > To a degree - he's only in favour of free speech for people he considers > acceptable; cf his petition to get "Social Justice" courses banned in > Universities.

I don't know the issue but would that have anything to do with government funded universities? Or is he arguing not even private universities should be legally permitted to teach "Social Justice" courses.

> he supported a petition in favour of "Count Dankula", an avowed far-righter.

Can i get a source on that? Ive not read anything from him claiming to be of the far right.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.change.org/p/universities-suspend-social- justice...](https://www.change.org/p/universities-suspend-social-justice-in- universities)

"To clarify, we are calling for the teaching of social justice courses in universities to be temporarily suspended."

There is no mention of Government funding.

> Ive not read anything from him claiming to be of the far right.

You're right, he's not stupid enough to come out and say it bluntly but his actions speak louder than, etc. (embracing Tommy Robinson, the pug incident, joining UKIP, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Digital book burning</comment>