Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/upshot/china-pollution-environment-longer-lives.html <comment><USER3> For some useless anecdata, I visited Beijing five times in the last year - compared to my visits in years prior, the air was definitely cleaner. In years past they've had entire months where the particulate level never dropped below "very high" - visiting in that month was like suffocating in an airport smoking room.

The authoritarian government has its pros - not having to worry about your regulations, laws and work rolled back every four years is nice. It makes it possible to have long-term plans and execute really aggressive, even economically harmful policies in pursuit of a goal.

Of course, the negatives of such a government - the corruption, the abuses, the drive to maintain power - are all too often the downfalls of such a system, and I'm rather afraid that Xi has started down a bad road by trying to cling to power there.

<comment><USER4> Then again if they had a democratic government it is very unlikely they would get in the present state of pollution to begin with.

<comment><USER5> I find it hard to believe that if you truly sat down and thought about it from first principles for an hour, that you would actually believe that

<comment><USER6> Or looking at historical pictures of a city with street lights on at mid-day because of industrial smog ... [https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/stunning- photos-of-pittsb...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/stunning-photos-of- pittsburghs-air-pollution-in-the-1940s)

<comment><USER3> I live in Pittsburgh. The air is clean now and the water is clear - <USER2> there's constant reminders that it wasn't always this way. Although most of the historic buildings were cleaned of soot, a few chose to keep some parts sooty and black as a reminder of what once was - a great example is the Mellon Institute just a few blocks from my work ([https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute- columns](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mellon-institute-columns)).

It did take Pittsburgh a long time to start fixing its environmental issues, and it took the total collapse of the steel industry to fully clear the air. Even back when I came here (~2011) people had an impression of Pittsburgh as a polluted, industrial hell-hole - I'm so glad that it wasn't the case when I came.

<comment><USER7> Good thing you elected Trump to rebuild that industry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It only took the US about 10 years to beat air pollution, and the technology had to be developed. Now, all the needed technology is known; it just has to be deployed.

The article writes of the US that "market-based regulations having proved the most cost-effective." No, that's not how the Clean Air Act did the first 90% of cleanup. It was done by mandating controls and fining polluters.

<comment><USER9> Which lead to the actual US solution: outsourcing production to China.

<comment><USER10> The USA had solved its pollution problem by the 80s, while the China outsource boom started in the mid-late 90s.

<comment><USER11> The USA had also lost lots of factories to Japan and Taiwan "by the 80s".

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what those two places have to do with China.

If you look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States), you'll see the steep drop off in manufacturing jobs started around 2000-ish. There was a peak in the 80s for sure, but its not like it came crashing down that much.

<comment><USER11> > _I 'm not sure what those two places have to do with China._

Who said they had? The comment is about how the US didn't just magically end pollution by better laws, filters and factories, but also by dropping factories.

<comment><USER10> Original comment:

> Which lead to the actual US solution: outsourcing production to China.

Reply:

> The USA had solved its pollution problem by the 80s, while the China > outsource boom started in the mid-late 90s. reply

Your reply:

> The USA had also lost lots of factories to Japan and Taiwan "by the 80s".

Connection to grand parent implied.

<comment><USER11> Connection to the parent though is explicit. Obviously I'm addressing the parent's objection -- that outsourcing to China couldn't be the US solution, since China outsource happened in mid-90s.

And I'm saying that, sure, it might not have been outsourced to China, but it was to Japan/Taiwan and co.

Or, as another commenter wrote about my comment: "it's clear that the other commenter is addressing your question of how the US could "outsource production" if not to China."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking at the linked PDFs, all the data comes from "China National Environmental Monitoring Center". Should we even trust this as much as we trust the Chinese government's macroeconomic data?

<comment><USER13> The US embassy in Beijing does their own monitoring of air quality and has a public feed for it (this was the source of the "crazy bad" description from a couple years ago). Presumably their numbers agree with these, or the author would've pointed it out.

<comment><USER14> That is a big assumption to make

<comment><USER15> Only if you didn't read the article since the author straight up says he checked against US embassy numbers.

"Using data from almost 250 government monitors throughout the country, which closely matches monitors maintained by the United States embassy in Beijing and consulates around the country, I found major improvements."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is a bit ironic that we were told in 2010 that the government could take as long as five years to the solve the pollution problem. I think its a bit disingenuous to say they declared war on pollution in 2014, they declared war on it much earlier than that; it would be more accurate to say that they really meant it this time. Still, I was curious, so I looked at Beijing's current AQI at the time of this comment:

[http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/](http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/)

260, in the purple zone (very unhealthy, vs. just unhealthy for the red zone), so still a long ways to go.

<comment><USER16> They have always been at war with Eurasia.

It's already great that the overall direction of what they say and what they do coincides. And cleaning one's air is always an achievement, let's not debase their work just because somebody else made it faster.

<comment><USER10> I think you misunderstood my comment: I was living in Beijing at the time (from 2007-2016) and was suffering from the pollution. So those promises and failures were more than just a pissing contest for me personally, it was a direct problem with my quality of life (to the point that my wife and I had arguments about staying/leaving). The baby finally forced us to leave, even 260 is way too high for a newborn's lungs, I hope that is obvious!

Many of my friends left similarly or were effected by the pollution in seriously adverse ways (one of my Chinese coworker's wife as particularly serverely negatively effected). Let's not debase their suffering just to play up China's achievements here. There were costs, and there will be continued costs until they can breathe fresh air reliably. Progress is great, but it came way too late for most of us!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is the electricity used by the ev produced?

Electricity is not clean or dirty per se, as it is only a method of energy transport (well, it is a bit dirty per se, since it has losses - which can obviously be discarded if it is used to connect clean production facilities and replace dirty energy production)

<comment><USER18> It doesn't matter. One big power plant is so much more efficient than a million little ICE cars that you typically end up with lower emissions and less pollution from EVs even if 100% of your electricity is from coal.

That said, China - and most of the world - is on an exponential growth curve for renewables right now. It will take a long time for the world to switch over to EVs, so we're better off starting now, regardless of the current emission profiles for electricity generation.

<comment><USER10> Beijing has a separate lottery for EVs also, so if you want a car now, you can wait for a few years for a typical ICE one, or you can get one tomorrow if you don't mind EV. Tesla S's are selling like hotcakes accordingly.

<comment><USER19> Out of curiousity, how high up in the party would I have to be to get an ICE tomorrow instead of in a few years?

<comment><USER10> Who knows. Since almost everyone has party connections in Beijing, it has become difficult to game the system that way (it would be useless otherwise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I travel quarterly to China and the air is disgusting. To say they are "winning" is fake news.

<comment><USER21> You better name the part of China you visited. Because China is too big to draw a broad conclusion.

When the gov announced their war on pollution, I was very much skeptical and wasn't expecting to see a big improvement in such a short time. Lots articles circulated in wechat were talking about moving to the south and immigrating to foreign countries two years ago, the high of the air pollution. Everyone was complaining. I think the Air pollution was on the verge of becoming a bigger problem that could harm the country stability and the party ruling.

Then, We see the pros of authoritarian government in play, to echo another poster.

From what I have heard, lot of factories got shutdown, or gone through mandated facility upgrades to meet the standard, cities are shamed by publishing the the worst polluted list in the national news. Air pollution became one of the local official KPIs.

Beijing's air quality has dramatically improved this year. There were way more blue sky days than I expected.

Granted, there are bad days like the passed few days in Beijing.

But If the Gov keeps at it, I am hopeful that clean air is coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Given the gains are mainly in cities - I wonder if the elecrification of the vehicle fleet and electric bike startups are having a big impact.

Really wish the article provided actual info on how China is beating pollution other than banning coal in certain regions.

<comment><USER23> They're still consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined. That's going to continue indefinitely with their current policies. The amount of other energy they're going to need to substantially dent their coal consumption, is truly enormous. It's going to take decades to bring their CO2 output down by a lot. Every time China so much as blinks about cleaning up their disastrous environmental policies, the NYTimes and others write a story about how they're winning. It's absurd.

<comment><USER10> China is much more worried about their pollution problem than their CO2 problem. The latter is more abstract in that it leads to eventual global warming, the former is a much more concrete and immediate QOL problem. Hopefully, solving the former will help with the latter, but not necessarily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing I could not find anywhere in the net - maybe someone here knows.

Does the Chinese government offer incentives for hybrids, EVs, and cleaner public transit? While it may not have a significant short-term effect, it should work in the long term.

<comment><USER10> Many Chinese cities offer a tax rebate for EVs, but only Chinese-made ones; the Tesla S doesn't qualify.

More importantly, they get a separate allocation in the "right to car" lottery in some cities (Beijing), or a reduced plate tax rate, or can even drive everyday instead of 2 out of 3 days.

Electric (battery, not overhead trolly-style) and natural gas buses are increasingly common, though I'm not aware what the current status is here. There was one that passed in front of our apartment building in Beijing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I always found it interesting that somehow the western world solved this problem by outsourcing manufacturing to countries like China. Wonder where China is this outsourcing to?

</comment><comment><USER26> China can fix the issue overnight if they were to mandate filters on coal fired heat and powerplants, yet that never happened on my memory.

CCP interest in fixing the smog issue is not than genuine. The smog, and efforts fighting it serve as a potent detractor of public opinion from real problems. I believe, CCP is happy to keep things as they are just for that.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just putting this into context, NYT has an article "How China Is Challenging American Dominance in Asia" on their front page. Not saying it's intentional on their part, but it may be useful to understand how the title "China is Winning" impacts the publication's larger narrative and how that can shape peoples' perspectives.

<comment><USER28> There's a radio program in my country featuring two country-famous (war|geopolitical)-strategists. They discuss worldnews every week. Lately, China's dominance was the topic, and the phrase "USA only has two things: a nice weapons industry and Silicon Valley" stuck with me. As I thought about it the days after, I could not really find anything to beat the quote with. Only the dollar can maybe come in as a third; but even that has significant competition from the euro and increasingly the yuan.

<comment><USER29> How about US

1.) having the biggest economy in the world, and growing 3% per year

2.) having the biggest worldly influential movie business

3.) having the biggest worldly influential video game business

4.) having 40% of assets in the world

5.) having most of the innovations in technology

6.) having most of the biggest corporations

7.) having the most brands

8.)......etcetcetc

<comment><USER30> Like many external observers I'm astonished at how many Americans take their position for granted.

This is a list of things that can go away in a heartbeat. Someone living in Victorian England couldn't possibly imagine a world where Britain wasn't at the absolute centre and on in charge of everything, yet within two generations that power had all but faded.

<comment><USER31> It took two wars for Britain to slink back. But Britain is also inherently limited by its size. The US has a rather stronger foundation and unlikely to really go anywhere even if no longer absolutely dominant at some future time.

<comment><USER30> The current political entity that is the "United States of America" is geographically larger, but it's not as assured in its dominance as you think.

What if Texas splits off and takes a few states with it? What if California decides to bail as well? That'd put a lot of pressure on New England, which might just call it quits, too, rather than be saddled with the South.

A single thing could lead to the complete erosion of the United States as we know it, and politically it would never recover.

If you think this is impossible, that it will never happen, the Austro- Hungarian empire was once like this, geographically and economically dominant, yet it fell apart surprisingly quickly.

Consider: The United States has only fought only a handful of wars on its own soil and a few of those went really badly. A large country is harder to defend, and if the entire might of the US military can't keep a lid on a place like Afghanistan or Iraq what hope does it have holding together half a continent?

<comment><USER31> Austria-Hungry was cobbled together in a "personal union," and ended when the notion of how states are built shifted to nationalities. Barring such a large shift in statecraft which would affect every country, I don't see the US breaking apart, and it wouldn't be because the military could/could not keep it so, but because there is no real secessionist movement in the US today.

There are good reasons for this, one is unity of culture compared to most other countries in the world, and another is federalism to tide over the differences. Things could change if say, cloning started happening and the South couldn't handle it, or Trump became a dictator-for-life and institutional means didn't stop him, but somebody would have to change their way of life for secession to be seriously on the table again. Why would California or Texas break away today? Internal economic dynamics are beneficial enough to keep them in. Things like language differences that might break apart other centralized countries simply aren't issues (some localities print their official stuff in Spanish, Vietnamese, whatever, others don't; ethnic radio stations and TV stations exist if you want to have them, nobody cares; you can incorporate your own cities if there are enough of "you" living together, whatever "you" are, and you can elect one of your own as mayor, it's a big country). During the Civil War there was still a strong notion of states' rights, today there is not and the country is a lot more similar than different.

Also Texas _was_ independent. It chose to _join_ and wasn't forced in. Texas seceding is just a joke. There is a lot to be said for a country built on strong institutional legitimacy (even the re-organized South after the Civil War was re-admitted state by state through local votes): people don't jump for the exits at the first sign of trouble.

<comment><USER30> The reason the US is a single country is because the Union fought a war to bring the South back into line. It has already split, and it could split again.

California could quit if a dictator arises, a threat that was unthinkable a decade ago but is now unnervingly probable. Other states like Vermont would likely cut loose as well, they don't have time for that.

> During the Civil War there was still a strong notion of states' rights, > today there is not and the country is a lot more similar than different.

I'd argue that people more strongly identify with their home state than with some vague concept of "America", especially when it comes to states like California, Texas and Florida that have their own identity. The more these states differentiate, the more likely they are to disagree, and from there, eventually split.

Europe's had a long time to end up in its current state, and it's still shifting wildly. Belgium might split in half. Spain might rip apart. England might lose Scotland. Ireland might get unified. Nothing stays static for long.

Consider the United States in its current form only really came about in 1912. That's basically yesterday in terms of history. To think that will remain static for another hundred years is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> China's killing it.

</comment><comment><USER33> \- Comrade, you must close your factory tonight at 12.01 am.

\- (a millisecond later) Yes sir.

It's that simple. No matter how much money you invested in it, or what contracts you have signed. Countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the likes have, let's just say, "efficient" systems. The government wants it done and so it is.

<comment><USER34> Every government is a democracy. Monarchies, fascist dictators, republicans, all of them are democracies. They function by the consent of the people. The people may be sheep, brainwashed, terrorized or whatever, but in every case there are more of them then there are government enforcers. If you push them too hard or ask them to do the impossible, it will not work. Dictatorship is not as easy as you seem to think - it still takes effective management to get anywhere.

<comment><USER35> In cases of brainwashing and terrorism, it's important to acknowledge that is no longer what we commonly mean by democracy, because free consent of the people is impaired. Majorities who do not give their consent can and are being subjugated.

Here's a simple thought experiment:

Me to a group of five people: "Everyone, give me a dollar." Group: "No."

Then, I pull out a gun. Let's repeat the conversation:

Me to a group of five people: "Everyone, give me a dollar." Group: "OK."

I'd call that coercion, not a reasonable use of the word democracy just because they all technically gave their consent.</comment></comment></comment>


Eric Raymond eats at the "Alan Turing" buffet - <AUTHOR> http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2012-06-25-132804_the-alan-turing-buffet.html

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure that identifying someone for their sexual preferences first and their career accomplishments second is a textbook example of bigotry...so I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with the author here. I'm not slapping a high five to ESR, but this author is profoundly misguided even if their heart is in the right place.

<comment><USER3> I think you seriously misread that post.</comment></comment>


HN Hiring mapped - <AUTHOR> http://gaganpreet.github.io/hn-hiring-mapped

<comment><USER2> Interesting, if honest mistake: railsmachine.com is hiring in "Remote, USA". If you look that up, it actually exists as an aptly named wide spot on the road in Oregon.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote,_Oregon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote,_Oregon)

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Remote,+firstname.lastname@example.com...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Remote,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-123.8925908,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x54c45f47714fdd5d:0x47d11f5d0df41dfa)

<comment><USER3> I've seen Remote, USA used on several occasions on popular job boards that didn't support the option for telecommute or working remotely. It's a great hack that seemed to gain in popularity with the tech sector specifically. Luckily for all of us, it's far more common that remote jobs are explicitly listed as such nowadays and this workaround is diminishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So as a weekend project to learn a certain framework, I thought i'll build a Whoishiring frontend -- to make things easy for someone seeking a job (filtering via location, role, etc, tracking etc).

So some market fit: Would you be interested as a user (is this better than looking at 100s of comments on the monthly posts? Easier than Ctrl-F and looking for terms?)? This will be to whoishiring posts, what ProductHunt is for Show HN.

<comment><USER5> they already did it :) [http://hnhiring.me/](http://hnhiring.me/)

<comment><USER4> This is too sparse, and not much more usable than the actual hackernews thread. I'm thinking: All metadata go through 2 steps -- machine learning (for best guess) + confirmation/correction via crowdsourcing. * Filtering by location. * Filtering by role * Filtering Remote/in location * Filtering by technology. * Some UI enhancements to pin roles, and save for later. And UI to share with someone. * Devs setup criteria and be notified monthly for matching openings.

So there's definitely space for improvement :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tesla Motors, Stationary Storage Group, Palo Alto \- shows up on the 'Intern' filter, but it explicitly says they're not looking for interns at this time.

<comment><USER7> Seems nobody is hiring interns for RoR or JavaScript backend/full-stack in Europe. Pity :(

<comment><USER8> Why restrict yourself to one/two stacks/languages?

<comment><USER7> What do you mean?

I am 20 years old and I can't have XP with 20 stacks/languages, although I am quite open to learning new stuff. Sadly, there are only so much technologies in demand where I am located.

<comment><USER9> I think what he means is you don't necessarily need to have experience with the particular stack before hand (and they probably don't expect interns to). You can pick it up on the job

<comment><USER7> True, but I don't want to do enterprise Java or PHP, so there isn't anything else left for me in my region :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very fun to cruise around the world and see what areas are boiling over with opportunities. Perhaps unsurprisingly San Fran, London and NYC were my winners.

<comment><USER11> I was surprised by the density of opportunities in the Gulf of Guinea.

<comment><USER12> Someday I want to visit (0,0), lots of interesting things happen at the center of euclidean earth.

<comment><USER13> The Republic of Null Island, "like no place on Earth":

      http://www.nullisland.com/
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like this library for clustering map pins:

[http://google-maps-utility- library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tru...](http://google-maps-utility- library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/markerclusterer/docs/examples.html)

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle multiple pins in the same location very well, you can sometimes zoom all the way in and still have a cluster circle - making it impossible to click on individual items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great work. I also really like the json files that it produces [https://github.com/gaganpreet/hn-hiring-mapped/blob/gh- pages...](https://github.com/gaganpreet/hn-hiring-mapped/blob/gh- pages/src/web/data/2014-07.json)

Makes it easier to play with data analysis on the hiring threads in R. [http://pastebin.com/TpLfSKjP](http://pastebin.com/TpLfSKjP)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome. It doesn't seem to deal well with jobs posted in multiple locations - mine from April only shows up in DC when it was for both DC and Boston.

</comment><comment><USER18> "None" looks like a cool location at the center of the map with many openings :) Joke aside, you did a great job, this looks nice.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure there's been at least one company in Loves Park, IL (by Rockford, west of Chicago) that I'm not seeing on there.

</comment><comment><USER20> Which month is it looking at when it first opens?

</comment><comment><USER21> How do I add to this map?

My employer is hiring as well, and we're not listed, but we would like to be!

<comment><USER22> On the 1st of every month there's a "Who's Hiring" thread, eg [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970366)

Just post there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting that only Toronto and Vancouver are present for Canada.

</comment><comment><USER24> cool</comment>


Why Amazon Isn't Ready for Prime Time in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-amazon-isnt-ready-for-prime-time-in-china-1503835204 <comment><USER2> Which Alibaba company are they talking about? Because alibaba.com targets international businesses, so that can't be it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywalled: [https://t.co/AHQ1BKHQvt](https://t.co/AHQ1BKHQvt)</comment>


Ask HN: Did Reddit Just Get Astroturfed? How Could Technology Tell Us? - <AUTHOR> In a surprisingly fortuitous turn of events, a profile of Julian Assange on OKCupid has been 'revealed' on Reddit, and breathlessly reported as true by Gawker, Business Week and others in very quick fashion. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ekgvz/behold_julian_assanges_profile_on_okcupid_last/
Each story frames the discovery as a grassroots effort at Reddit, reported in one story as an 'extensive team of quirky internet experts'.
The discussion for this particular story is surprisingly incredulity-light: a major upvoted post unpacks an 'investigative' backgrounder of Harry Harrison, with only a few downvoted posts exclaiming 'fake'. The usual 'investigative energy' of Reddit seems focused only on confirming what many in that community would be highly skeptical of.
A quick glance at the public profile purported to be of Assange contains such odd statements as an interest in 'white collar crime' and 'trickery', which seems to indicate some cheeky character assasination more than anything else.
I'm left with a sense the community there has been astro-turfed. Not an uncommon occurrence, but it has left me wondering how you could determine any irregularities in a community discussion like this? <comment><USER2> People think it's real because the "last login" date on the account is Dec 31, 2006.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a world where Stuxnet exists and Gawker might not, a date field in a dating site database should probably be taken with a shovel of salt though right?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but it's many orders of magnitude more effort than you'd expect from a fake joke profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd disagree, and state that it's exactly the sort of effort you'd expect if you were to assume sophisticated character assasination is the order of the day.

The alternative is to assume that Assange did create a public profile (when many are private), completed numerous dating site 'tests' (backed by what many HN people would consider are very unsophisticated algorithms), and left it on display for 5 years, undetected until now.

I'm inclined to eliminate the alternative as impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can tell it's real because he lists his interests as "Rape, white collar crime, trickery and rape"

<comment><USER4> Things like Wikileaks need to be kept in check as much as the governments they are exposing. However, I don't think it is constructive to joke around about the three things you mentioned as being something to be put on a dating profile.

If you want to argue against his credibility make an objective statement about his acts.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure hugh3 was being sarcastic.</comment></comment></comment>


Optimize Onboarding - <AUTHOR> https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/08/28/Optimize-Onboarding.html <comment><USER2> >It takes roughly 2 weeks to form a habit; it takes roughly two weeks to get comfortable in a new environment. A common mistake is to treat a new report's first couple weeks like college orientation - social, light hearted, get-to- know-you stuff. If your report spends the first two weeks reading C# documentation and having lunch out on the town with the team, guess what, they've just normalized that behavior as what the role is.

Humans are not dogs. I've worked at companies with both styles of on-boarding (two weeks of doing nothing vs jumping right in). The output in a month was realistically no different.

<comment><USER3> Quite so. In addition, as a manager of a new employee I make an absolute point of being a "helicopter mom" from the moment they hit the area until about week 2 or 3.

Payment at the hotel _will_ foul up. I want overcharges and idiocies on my card and not on my employee's.

Access cards and tokens _will_ foul up. I need to meet the new employee the first day on the morning and probably for lunch.

Network account provisioning _will_ foul up. I need to see what the problem is and go escort the process through.

Lots of people _will_ blow them off for asking beginner questions. I need to be around so that people answer the question properly.

The _presence_ of a manager means that everybody who normally just fluffs off onboarding will pay fscking attention.

As for timelines, it takes about three months for a new employee or intern to no longer be actively hazardous. It takes another three months until they become a positive force for productivity.

Yes, during that time they're doing something useful otherwise they won't learn, but they're generally a productivity drag until about 6-8 months in.

<comment><USER4> I 100 percent agree that it takes up to 6 months on average for most developers to become super productive in a code base and at least 2 months for them to be at the comfortable but still not sure on everything phase.

I also agree with the helicopter aspect as well, that's a key insight on your part and I bet your team likes your mangement style (mostly :)

I dislike when employers don't structure their expectations accordingly. I once worked somewhere where we almost lost one of our most talented developers (in terms of productivity and quality and insight, a real rock star) because initially failed to understand this. Thankfully our director stepped in and made it right.

Great lesson to have learned early in my career

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once got told by a manager that they didn't expect new hires to make big contributions in the first year. That was after I complained I was feeling very unproductive and wanted some help to speed things up. I quit after a few months because the slowness of everything around me was making me depressed.

This was at a top5 website company.

<comment><USER6> But this is still something we should teach youngsters. Interns this summer started again they second-day standup with "Yesterday I installed my computer, and today I'll finish bug 1". Which is good until you notice that he intends to stay all night long and do more than expected, to exceed expectations.

And that is how you burn out. In fact, exceeding expectations takes a lot of talent, because you need to exceed in the correct directions. And often, you burn out because of the lack of recognition. It's a real talent that takes years to learn, not the kind of heroic behavior that someone should strive for in year 1. In year 1, just learn 3 frameworks at home and change jobs often ;)

About the intern: By the middle of the second month he settled down to developing the minimum features that satisfy a maximum of users, but polishing the bugs and buffing out the UX (first impression, etc) and that was awesome, by the third month he was productive at this and came back to school. Damn I didn't notice he'd learnt so much, but totally outside of programming. I guess the lesson is programming is long if done correctly, don't expect to do everything by tomorrow or you'll risk lowering the quality.

<comment><USER7> It's important to teach juniors the importance of avoiding burnout. As a manager, it's not very difficult to gauge burnout by keeping an eye on time spent in the company Slack, when e-mails are spent, timestamps on commit messages, and so on. More importantly, building a genuine relationship with the employee is important for keeping the conversations open.

Having someone try to stay all night to get work done on day 1 isn't reasonable, obviously, but I wouldn't go so far as to discourage people from trying to exceed expectations. I'd always love to tell young people that they should relax, never work more than 40 hours per week, never stay late under any circumstances, avoid on-call, and so on, but then I remember that much of my early career success came from exceeding expectations when the situation called for it. That doesn't mean everyone should be crushing it 100% of the time or sacrificing themselves for the company, obviously, but in the real world it often requires going above and beyond if you want to move up and get ahead.

Many interns have no baseline, so they're constantly in fear of getting fired. I think it's most important to set clear expectations and to provide constant, honest feedback. Once they get over the irrational fear of getting fired, they can start deciding how much, if any, additional effort they want to put in to the job. I'd be lying if I told the interns they're all guaranteed return offers, so I can't honestly tell them that they don't need to do better work than their intern peers. It's best to explain the situation as clearly as possible and let them make their own decisions.

<comment><USER8> I'm interested in why you stuck "avoid on-call" in there. I'm about to start my first on-call rotation next month

<comment><USER9> Nice. You're about to learn why to avoid on-call in the most practical way possible.

<comment><USER10> Haha, that's the best response I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Personal anecdote: Started in a developer position a couple years ago to work on an internal corporate app on an isolated network.

Week 1: Get to the desk; meet my neighbors; submit request for necessary network account; and start on mandatory security training for the systems.

Week 2: Finish the mandatory training; ping the network owners a few times about the account request; start reading up on unfamiliar parts of the stack.

Week 3: Continue pinging network owners about the account request; ping my own manager about the account request; stare at the workstation that I cannot log in to; ask around, "Is this normal?" "Yes."

Week 4: Do some more newly assigned mandatory training; ping network owners and manager again.

Week 5: Finally get the network account!

<comment><USER11> I recently started working at a huge financial concern and it was 12 weeks before I got my laptop in the mail.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I just... What did you even _do_ in that time? (Sincere question; if I started a job and didn't have a machine I don't think I could work, and I assume a financial place won't let you BYOD)

<comment><USER11> That's the crazy thing actually, virtually the entire company is BYOD with Citrix access to a Windows VM hosted in a datacenter. Only software developers need a specific machine.

I spent the whole time watching compliance training videos, no joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I once started as a senior engineer at a company most folks here would have heard of and was told on arrival that every engineer first has to work a short period in support. The idea was to learn the product and customers.

In theory this sounds like a good idea. In practice, it was a poorly thought out system that left me frustrated with the company, disconnected from my team, and looking for a new job before I even finished the half implemented on boarding process. It felt more like a hazing ritual than a useful learning process and completely soured me on the company.

Doing support isn't something I find particularly egregious, but you should absolutely not segregate new hires away from their team for a long period of time immediately after hiring them. More generally, you need to equip new hires to do their job as soon as possible, less you risk smothering their enthusiasm for what they were hired to do.

<comment><USER13> An old employer did this, but instead of just at the beginning this was a monthly rotation thing (3 days each month or so). Being forced to do support definitely was a major factor in my quitting. I don't even mind support so much, used to do it for a job in university. But you don't hire a highly educated professional and stick them in an entry tier role part of each month, not if you respect them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with pretty much all the OP has to say.

In my experience, onboarding is something that is usually an afterthought, if it is considered at all. Which is why, when starting from scratch as CTO at two companies, I set it as a top priority from day one. In both instances, onboarding was optimized as much as possible. In one company, we used Okta, and 90% of accounts needed to be productive (Git, Jira, Confluence, the HR system, etc) were auto-created prior to the start date. We reduced, as much as possible, the need to manually create or request access to needed systems. Instead, based on your job function, we already knew what you would need access to and automatically made those requisitions. I realize this is easier to do when you are starting from scratch, but it demonstrates that it is feasible. It's simply a matter of will and valuing the importance of a smooth onboarding experience. After all, you spent a ton of time and money finding this candidate - why not get them productive as fast as possible?

Setting up the development environment was also scripted. We had scripts for setting up and installing the tools needed for frontend and backend development. Common aliases and scripts were shared via a shared "dot files". In most cases, it was possible to checkout the relevant repos, run unit tests, commit code and deploy to production on the first or second day. There is no reason one can't have all you need ready to go on day one. Certainly things get out of date as time passes, but the expectation of every new hire was to improve the documentation and fix any flaws. This "onboarding as code" mentality also made it easier when an experienced engineer needed to set up a new laptop. Documentation is like a garden - it needs to be constantly weeded and pruned.

Finally, there's the matter of learning the tech stack, code base and current toolset. Again, this needs to be a deliberate, well thought out experience rather than an ad-hoc, thrown into the deep-end of the pool, sink-or-swim challenge. A manager needs to make it their top priority to figure out how to get new employees (or internal transfers) up to speed and confident as quickly as possible. This requires special skills in writing good documentation and figuring out the various learning styles of engineers.

I agree - if you onboard, and struggle getting code to compile, can't find the right documentation about how things work - then it sours your experience with the company. In some cases it feels like onboarding is a struggle and it's a badge of honor to have survived. That you "made it through" and "paid your dues." This may work with certain engineers, but I don't think it is healthy or wise.

<comment><USER15> For me setting up my dev tools was always part of orienting myself. It's foreshadowing of what's to come. Oh we're installing this tool I bet that means yada yada.

If you want to install and set up Office, Chrome, a virus scanner, backup and VPN software then more power to ya. Having dev tools automated might not save all that much time overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article rings true, but I can't tell if it's a chicken or the egg problem. Are firms with long on boarding processes less effective because bad habits are setup and normalized at the start, or are they dysfunctional from the get go and dysfunctional teams setup poorly thought out onboarding processes. At a previous job at a large tech company I was given a period of ~6 weeks of onboarding. This was rather excessive, but the organization did not have a clear sense of what needed to be accomplished in the first place. I doubt that things would have been more effective if the onboarding simply a day or two of setup.

<comment><USER7> I had the same thought. At some point, loading employees up with structured activities and obligations that aren't entirely related to doing their job becomes counterproductive. It can be a sign that the company has lost focus.

My favorite onboarding process was to simply give the person's team a budget to do whatever they wanted with the new hire for a day or two, then get to work. Managers would write up a document with all account info, login info, key communication info, and then let the teams fill the new person in on the day-to-day details while they went out to lunches or went go-karting or whatever they wanted.

The more HR tries to structure things, the less effective it becomes at onboarding people. Let the teams handle it and make them responsible for getting the person up to speed quickly. They're closest to the work, and therefore they know best what the person actually needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Obviously it depends on the role and the seniority of the new hire to some degree.

I think, as a senior embedded software engineer, the first couple weeks (months?) should be spent with the last new hire figuring out tools, processes, and keeping internal documentation up to date as you go. Questions should be escalated as necessary, but generally this should not involve much interaction with more senior engineers so their work is not interrupted. New hires should start out with big fixing tasks and not be expected to participate in architecture or feature creation yet. If they display the ability, fine, but set the bar low.

Some companies I've worked at have such complicated development workflows that it regularly takes 3 months for an engineer to become independently productive.

</comment><comment><USER18> Getting engineers to commit code ASAP can become entrenched to the point that it's unhelpful; the tail wags the dog and all of a sudden you're leaving easy bugs unfixed or small UX issues or whatever to make sure you have "first day" tickets. Just so you can say "our new hires ship code on day one" or whatever your flex is.

Does it really matter? Aren't you teaching the lesson that speed is the first principle?

It's just another excuse to avoid building actual onboarding, whatever that looks like for you. Too relaxed, too aggressive... are you really doing it thoughtfully?

<comment><USER19> My experience is more that there's always a bunch of tickets/bugs that are a) not critical b) not 5-minute fixes and c) tend to be "we should really..." \- those are optimal, because they wouldn't get done otherwise anyway.

<comment><USER18> That's a serious problem. Whether work gets done should be independent of whether or not you have new hires around. And what lesson are you teaching if that's how you complete that kind of work? Onboarding is "hey do this thing nobody else will ever do, so we can say engineers ship on day one"

<comment><USER19> I disagree, it's a much more helpful way to let them explore the code base than "here, write a test for some feature you also don't understand".

Where I was it was never a stated goal to have them ship asap, the goal was a) to let them learn quickly and b) let them not hate their new job.

Incidentally, everyone except one person liked this approach. Hands-on, have the genuine feeling to do something sensible (maybe not important, but hey, it's your first week) and NOT spend 2w just reading docs.

<comment><USER18> I think that's a false dichotomy. For example, have new hires pair with someone who is making good progress on something medium sized and medium impact. Share in a nearly guaranteed success, learn, and no need to hoard one- pointers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Committing code on day 2....I guess the author had never worked for a Fortune 500 company. It usually takes at least two weeks before you get a level of access that allows you to commit code.

<comment><USER21> I work for a non tech fortune 500 company and was committing code by day 2. It's really about being willing to figure out what the blocker's to access are and making sure they are taken care of before hand.

<comment><USER22> I've heard this a few time about submitting your first PR within one or two days at a company. It's cool and all for you to get code out there, and if you've got good CD it probably won't screw anything up, but I know my stack at work. I know there are nuances, and deliberate details, and designs, and prioritize and a million other things. How can a person be expected to write a bug fix and truly understand what is happening, when they may not even yet full understand the product yet?

<comment><USER23> If you're working at these big companies then working in a codebase you don't fully understand will just be a fact of life. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for 4 years, but of course I didn't understand even half of the million-line Scala codebase I was working on by the time I left.

The way you make people productive in that environment is you have, and enforce, good coding and design standards so that code will do what you expect and you can rely on parts of the codebase that you don't necessarily understand the internals of. Frankly, having to consider "nuances, and deliberate details, and designs, and prioritize and a million other things" is not a good use of people's mental capacity, and you should aim not to have a codebase where people have to do that. Write your codebase like a tower of libraries/DSLs, where each layer presents a solid abstraction to the layer above it, and the topmost layer is just the business logic written in the language of the domain; then it's easy to make a simple change to that business logic because you just have to make the same simple change to your code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From a personal experience, the onboarding process should be gradual and proceeds by steps (which doesn't mean it should be slow). As others said in the comments, it depends a lot on the role the person has (junior vs. senior) but starting a new position in a new company can be stressful for anyone. That is why a business should give its new employees the time to fit in rather than creating an overwhelming environment around them. By doing so, people will give their best and the outcome will be higher at the end. An interesting article I read on the matter is the following --> [https://hronboard.me/blog/employee-onboarding-best- practices...](https://hronboard.me/blog/employee-onboarding-best-practices/)

<comment><USER25> i actually agree

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article doesn't provide good context on WHEN in a company's life to optimize EMPLOYEE onboarding. It could even be detrimental to optimize onboarding during the startup stage, when one could've been using the time and resources optimizing CUSTOMER ONBOARDING.

When the company is like a 10 person startup, find people who can onboard themselves. When it's like 100 person company, then start thinking about optimizing employee onboarding. Between the 10 and 100, I'd say find that product market fit and onboard customers faster than you onboard employees for a successful company...

</comment><comment><USER27> This isn't great advice for technical hires. Maybe for seniors experienced with the stack, but for anyone else you'd get a lot more mileage out of the on-boarding process by having them do stack-related tutorials, explaining things like the deployment process and setting the standard for collaboration/communication within the team.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that lazy engineers will be lazy and that motivated engineers won't lose their spark just because they spent a week meeting the team. The author seems to think that the opposite is what takes place both counts. I don't agree with that.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anecdotally: The best jobs I've had were ones where I was able to contribute to the team on day 1 or 2. The worst jobs were the ones where it took me 3+ weeks before I got assigned enough permissions to make a single change.

Which goes a little against the idea of slowly introducing trust, but these were sysadmin/devops jobs, not coding. YMMV.

EDIT: By "best" I mean "most productive, most enjoyable, most memorable". All accusations of selective memory or bias on my part are of course accepted.</comment>


Facebook Has Been Sucking The Life Out Of Artist / Fan Communication - <AUTHOR> http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/11/facebook-has-been-sucking-the-life-out-of-artist-fan-communication.html

<comment><USER2> Note that one artist complaint, vocalized by David Lowery, is that Facebook has also made it extremely difficult for artists to maintain fan relationships outside of Facebook. The gravitational pull of Facebook and Youtube is so strong that independent artist websites are outcompeted by default by any fan activity on those sites. Facebook fan pages also tend to rank extremely well on Google SERPs.

So the artists are doubly screwed, first by not being able to maintain a direct fan relationship (which is what they need in order to exist outside of the label system) and secondly by being forced to play by Facebook Edgerank rules just to keep on their fan radar inside of Facebook.

<comment><USER3> It will be ironic if Facebook causes MySpace to be reborn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's already a mechanism to push out every piece of content that you create to your fans: it's called email. (Also, RSS feeds on your website, blogs, etc.)

For better or for worse, Facebook is a place that a billion people go to, and they've decided to charge for access to that pipeline. The fact that they would do this has been widely known for years, since Facebook Beacon. People are on Facebook to see content from companies, friends, family, coworkers, classmates, etc... in that jumble, your band isn't going to get first-class placement for free.

If you don't want to get "monetized" by Facebook, don't tell your fans to "Like" you on Facebook, tell them to sign up for your mailing list. If you want the convenience and access that Facebook gives you, get ready to pay for it.

<comment><USER5> _There's already a mechanism to push out every piece of content that you create to your fans: it's called email. (Also, RSS feeds on your website, blogs, etc.)_

I'm 24. I don't communicate by email with anyone in my age group or, indeed, anyone under 30, unless it's to pass around attachments (and that's rarer these days with Dropbox). I know of one person my age or younger who actually maintains an RSS reader; I tried, but I couldn't really be bothered. I know _no_ non-technical people in that age bracket who make a point of regularly reading blogs (but many who read one or two posts that reach them through--you guessed it--Facebook).

Facebook is rapidly leaving _convenience_ territory, and that's what makes a lot of their recent behavior concerning.

<comment><USER6> > _I don't communicate by email with anyone in my age group or, indeed, anyone > under 30, unless it's to pass around attachments_

If you don't mind me asking, do you just use Facebook, or other means too (e.g. Twitter, IRC, ...)? I'm just curious about what people are using these days (I'm 34).

<comment><USER5> I, personally, use email (with people who use email), Twitter (with a pretty diverse group of people), Facebook (as little as possible), IRC (with technical collaborators and some friends), AIM (a lot of people), and Google Talk (a few people). I also use Campfire to talk to coworkers. Also, a lot of text messaging.

But I'm not very representative. I don't say "everyone uses Facebook" because I use Facebook, I say "everyone uses Facebook" because nobody uses the other mechanisms that I mention (Twitter excepted, and in my experience that's a very different type of crowd). ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is most likely just a desperate grab by FB. Such a bad financial year with the stock debacle.

They know they have let artists freely gain fan bases on facebook for years now so they are able to control it with an iron fist. A good temporary budget increase for them is to take that iron fist and grab all the artists by the balls and squeeze them for all they're worth. Which when I put it that way it sounds an awful lot like blackmail... _ahem_ anyway...

Will it get them a burst of money? Sure. Will it hurt facebook in the long run? Probably. Does it really matter? Only time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find that Twitter does pretty well for communicating with my fans, and the people I'm a fan of, without any of the modifications this guy would like to see. YMMV.

On the other hand I've really never used Facebook much. Mostly because I really hate its symmetrical following model. Which supposedly doesn't actually apply any more… IF you can persuade people to hit the "subscribe" button instead of the "friend" button, and good luck doing THAT. But people are in that habit of friending EVERYONE back to broadcast their content, so they set things up to spam themselves.

I really need to start pushing my content to Tumblr. IMHO that seems to be where a lot of the action is nowadays. At least in the circles I'm interested in selling stuff to.

(Disclaimer: yes, I know that anecdotes are not data. This is my experience with getting the word out about my artwork.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Bands have a product "music" which they need to market. Much like any business. Some bands I have liked on Facebook, because they are friends, I don't necessarily want to hear every piece of information from them. You are asking Twitter to change its model to accomodate bands. Twitter seems to be doing OK. Bands should change their model and not rely on MySpace then Facebook then Twitter then ...

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the Google Plus is much better way and good combination of both world. Everyone should think of switching to Google.

<comment><USER11> Great point. As G+ allows people to choose the filter settings for each circle. Just add all musicians/artists into such a circle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does/did Myspace compare?

<comment> k-mcgrady I don't think it really compares. For the majority of artists Myspace was their website so they never thought about being locked in like they do with Facebook. Back then setting up your own website, hosting it somewhere, selling content and merchandise through it, and blogging on it wasn't such an easy thing for someone with little/no technical skills to do. Now you can setup a Wordpress site, use Bandcamp for sales (which you can easily integrate with your site), stream audio using Soundcloud (which you can embed) and it's pretty easy for anyone to set it all up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think people keep confusing "like" with "follow".

Just because I "like" Sierra Nevada beer doesn't mean I want updates from them, maybe I just wanted to like it because AirTime will then use those likes to link me up with someone else who likes Sierra Nevada beer. On the other hand if I follow Sierra Nevada on Twitter its because I want to see their every 140 character thought that they feel like sharing.

That being said I think he makes a good point about differentiating between brands, artists, non-profits and individuals. Perhaps they should just expand on "Subscribe", their version of "follow", so users have the choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "like" vs "follow" might be true today, but for many artists people clicked on "become fan" not "like". That's a huge semantic difference.

<comment><USER14> When they originally made the change from 'fan' to 'like' in 2010 I thought it was enough of an issue to write something about it. It wasn't a very popular complaint at the time though.

<http://shufferingandshnacking.com/?p=255></comment></comment></comment>


Pastes on Have I Been Pwned are no longer publicly listed - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/pastes-on-have-i-been-pwned-are-no-longer-publicly-listed/ <comment><USER2> I run the Twitter account @dumpmon[0] that HIBP gets the data from.

This is an interesting decision and I applaud Troy for, as always, doing what's best for his users. He's a great example of the kind of person we need more of in the industry.

Unfortunately, I run into the same problem. I have no doubt people can (and probably do) use dumpmon for nefarious purposes. My take on the matter when I first made dumpmon was that this data was clearly already known to the bad guys. The goal of the Twitter bot was to give a sense of how prevalent these "mini-breaches" were, but also to give the good guys (like HIBP!) a feed they can use to help stop the problem. I've been fortunate that multiple services have been able to use the feed to respond to these types of credential dumps really quickly.

If anyone is interested in some of the stats behind dumpmon, here's a shameless plug to an article I wrote a couple of years ago on the matter: [https://jordan-wright.com/blog/2015/05/26/two-years-of-at- du...](https://jordan-wright.com/blog/2015/05/26/two-years-of-at-dumpmon/)

Happy to answer any questions!

[0] [https://twitter.com/dumpmon](https://twitter.com/dumpmon)

</comment><comment><USER3> To be fair, I was saying this from the very beginning, but Troy should have never even started to disclose user emails and in which data breaches they have been affected publicly via HIBP.

There is no good reason why every random Joe should be able to type in my mum's, daughter's or son's email address in HIBP and see whether one of them has been signed up on a Cannabis website, gambles online, or trades with bitcoin or is signed up with an organisation that tries to help people with a certain condition. Troy decides based on his own personal world view which web sites are unethical to disclose publicly (e.g. porn sites or Ashley Madison) and which not, which is often very problematic in my view. Even though Troy tries to act as ethical as possible, in the end his world view is only the one of an old(er) white male Aussie who loves old petrol fuelled sports cars, which is quite antique itself. Clearly there's issues then when services such as Cannabis.com, crackcommunity.com, Foxy Bingo or Acne.org are publicly disclosed by him, but Ashley Maddison not.

HIBP is a good service, but there should be two major changes made:

\- Don't let anonymous people type in email addresses and disclose information to them. Just don't show people any information about an email which is not theirs. Period.

\- Allow people to remove themselves from HIBP. Not everyone is comfortable to think that some dude in Australia is collecting a huge database of all data breaches in which they have been affected, ultimately building a user profile about someone's interests, sexual preferences, political views and more without their consent.

<comment><USER4> > There is no good reason why every random Joe should be able to type in my > mum's, daughter's or son's email address in HIBP and see whether one of them > has been signed up on a Cannabis website, gambles online, or trades with > bitcoin or is signed up with an organisation that tries to help people with > a certain condition.

Not only that, but seeing what pastes their email can be found in is an issue. Just last week was a post on the front page of HN where someone did exactly that: found what paste a friend's email was in, downloaded the paste, and using a few extra steps recovered the hashed password [0]. While it's possible to find all the leaked information and search it manually, aggregating in a single place adds convenience for those with legitimate uses but also for nefarious purposes.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919845)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When something is leaked, it is leaked.

Trying to stop the spread the info after the fact is useless - the real bad guys and those happy to do more research will always find it.

Stop thinking "hopefully not too many people see my password on pastebin", and instead think "my password has leaked, change it asap".

</comment><comment><USER6> Wouldn't the easy solution for blackhats using HIBP's lists be to sign up an account on thousands of services to get clear notification and a list of accounts once there's been a breach?

</comment><comment><USER7> >Now I'm sure there are "reasons" why their policies are as they are and maybe it'd take Spotify themselves to lodge an abuse report here, but this sucks.

So Troy complains about Blogger not quickly removing credentials dump on demand. What about other public sources of data for HIBP? Pastebin, file hostings, etc.? Should they remove such data after first report, not bothering to investigate anything (including whether credentials listed are real or fake)? That way the whole HIBP project database may get stale soon. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is just annoying.

</comment><comment><USER9> I kinda hope he at least keeps the ability to notify the emails of those whose passwords may have been breached, removing the public page is fine, but it might be more useful if that paste service lives on in the background.

<comment><USER10> Isn't that stated in the post ? That only concerned emails will have access to the paste ?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Using personal code at work - <AUTHOR>

I'm developing a number of web applications for my university over the summer months in PHP. I've been working with the language for years, and have developed a number of custom database and template handling classes that I can hardly live without. I want to integrate these into the projects I'm developing over the summer, but I don't want to get bit in the ass if I use them in a personal project in the months ahead.<p>Has anyone here run into the same sort of issue as me? Is it a legitimate concern, and is there an easy way to address it? I'm perfectly fine with opening up/sharing my code with the rest of the world if that might solve the issue. Would a simple confirmation with my boss hold up in court? <comment><USER2> I would publicly open source the code, placing it in either Google Code or Github with a BSD or Apache 2.0 license. Doing this will protect both you and the university from using random (though your) unlicensed code in the project.

Placing the code in Guthub or Google Code will make it much easier to validate that it is truly open source and will allow the next developer on the project to download the latest updates.

<comment><USER3> That's what I would do, too, but also verify with the employer over the summer that he is fine with open source code to be integrated into the project.

Also it might happen that while integrating it, improvements to the open source code come to mind. Then it should be clear from the start if it would be OK to feed improvements created during employed time back into the open source project.

<comment><USER4> I agree and I would also check the contract for an "Entire Agreement" clause which basically says that side agreements, whether verbal or written, are not considered part of the agreement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have done it before. I put my personal copyright in the code. Then I ask permission in a letter to to include it. I have never had a problem. This was in the days when every line of code was part of the crown jewels. It is a legitimate concern, but easily handled, very unlikely to appear in court.

You do need to give them pretty much open ended permission to use the code. A BSD license might make it easier, because they know how to deal with licenses.

If the code is closely related to their core competencies, it is much more complicated. For example, supplying trading algorithms to a bank.

If your code is really generic, maybe all you need is a comment telling where the code came from. Still mention it to your manager.

Aside: I consider it good professional practice to mention in comments the source of an algorithm or code snipit. Future maintainers will appreciate.

</comment><comment><USER6> It wasn't clear whether the university is your employer, or whether you're a student. Some general thoughts:

A) Double-check your employment agreement for clauses that might give ownership of the code to your employer, even though you thought you were developing the code on your own time. (In some U.S. jurisdictions, overly- aggressive clauses along that line may be unenforceable.)

B) If you developed the code in question before going to work for your employer, keep an eye out for ways to demonstrate that fact. (In court, truth is always the goal, but what actually matters is admissible evidence.)

C) "Playing nice" is usually the best approach.

D) It's almost as important to be able to document that you played nice -- without being too self-serving in your writing -- as it is actually to play nice. That's because in court, judges and juries can sometimes be skeptical of the testimony of witnesses who have interests to protect; contemporaneous written documentation is often regarded as more reliable.

E) Assuming your employment contract doesn't contain any special language giving your employer the ownership of your code, a simple exchange of emails -- which you'll want to keep in your personal files -- may well do the trick. At a minimum, it would make a lawyer for your employer think hard before recommending taking any action against you.

F) If you're a university student, vice employee, the ownership issue might be a bit more complicated, but OTOH the university may be less likely to care about ownership than a company would.

(Usual disclaimer: Don't rely on this as a substitute for legal advice, consult a lawyer, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I would suggest reading about "Work for Hire" it's a legal term. I'm not a lawyer, so don't take what I'm about to say as legal advice, just my personal experience.

In my understanding, in general, if you are paid to do it and there is no explicit contract that says the employer owns your work, then you own the work. However, you must look at your contract with your employer. I am guessing you signed something saying the University owns what you do while you work there, most do. Universities are smart like that. It may be a sticky issue to say who wrote what and when, so probably best to avoid using your own code at work if you want to retain ownership of it.

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22work+for+hire%22>

If I were in your situation, I'd take the opportunity to solve the problem in /another/ way, one that may be better. Worst case scenario, your brain gets bigger and you can still do things the way you were doing them before you wrote the new way for the university.

</comment><comment><USER8> Talk to you boss, and look at your contract (assuming you have one that covers this). Most will have some clause in there saying that if you use code that you created before your employment, by using it at work you're giving the University an unlimited and irrevocable license to use that code.

In terms of saving your ass for the future, I'd put a note in the source of the file saying where it came from initially, and keeping a copy of the email from your boss saying that it's OK to use that code (and expressly acknowledging that it's your code that you wrote before being employed with them).

Do watch out about transferring the other way, however - if you use these libraries and add to/modify them, you can't then add that new function to your "clean" version to use in the future (it belongs to the employer, even if you type it into your clean version off the clock). Also check the part of your contract/clarify with your manager about what happens to code you write for personal projects while employed - some companies have especially onerous policies about them owning that code, even if you weren't at work when you wrote it.

</comment><comment><USER9> You need to check any contract you might be under with the University. If your code was developed on university time with university resources it probably doesn't belong to you! If you open source personal code then add it to the University code base you may be creating a problem if the code will ever be sold. Sadly you need to realize that todays market doesn't automatically assign ownership rights to your code even though you created it. In most cases ownership will be governed by any contracts or license restrictions you might be working under. Study everything very carefully!

</comment><comment><USER10> As far as the 'court' thing goes, I'm not sure why you would be concerned, as long as you can prove that you wrote the code before joining the company.

Seeing as you are open with sharing your code, you can do it in such a way that it builds your cred as a coder, and it could even be a bit of PR for your boss (if you want it to be).

But I'd definitely sit down with your boss, and explain the situation. If you're with a small company, I don't see why it would be an issue.

Best of luck

</comment><comment><USER11> How much money will you be saving them by using your pre-existing work? I realize you're a college student with a summer job, but it seems that you've got the situation backward.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm being paid considerably more then my co-workers mainly because I've demonstrated the ability to complete projects very quickly. To a certain extent, this code is one of the reasons I was hired; that said, I'd still like to be able to use it when I eventually move on to other, even more exciting projects

<comment><USER11> If you own the copyright to that code, it's not clear to me why putting it in the code you're giving to them would necessarily even give them the right to use it, much less give them the copyright to it.

Meaning: if I were your prospective employer, I'd be more

(a) concerned that your work product contains code that I do not have clear title to than

(b) hopeful that I will somehow grab the copyright of your pre-existing work.

You'll be a lot better off if the arrangement is clear beforehand, and don't sign anything that would alter or undermine that arrangement. People will have more respect for your being above-board and straightforward, and for the fact that you have enough self-respect to assert your proper rights while making a fair bargain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The law usually says work done while you're employed belongs to the employer. Off topic: at least in my country this is a special exception to the general "author" legislation, which says for example a painting you make for a buyer will forever be "by you", and even after selling it you still retain some rights. In software, what you write belongs to the company, period.

Now depending on the specific wording of the law and in your employment contract you may or may not be able to work on something related on your own. The only solution I can think of which would not require a lawyer and/or reading a lot of legalese is making a piece of paper in which you grant the company the right to use your software and the company agrees it's yours, and get your boss to put the company's stamp on it. That would work in pretty much all cases I can think of, and it's reasonably easy.

</comment><comment><USER13> One important distinction to make is:

Are you considered a contractor or an employee?

I'd recommend talking to the legal department, or contacting someone you know in IP law(an actual lawyer, not some random HN reader).

</comment><comment><USER14> I have run into this before and I have never put someone else's code, including my own, onto a customer's or employer's computer.

What I have often done, however, is write another version of basically the same thing, but only what I need for the job at hand. I never use the same program or variable names. I want it to look like I wrote it just for them, which technically, I did. Sometimes I bring a hard copy and sometimes I cut and paste a little from my gmail account, but usually I just rewrite most of it from memory (which is good practice, too.)

They're paying for me to write them software, they're getting it, and I keep what is already mine. Winners all the way around.

<comment><USER15> > They're paying for me to write them software, they're getting it, and I keep > what is already mine. Winners all the way around.

Except that you just took money out of their pockets to write something that you _already had_.

<comment><USER16> If they're happy with the software they got at the price, the labor (or lack thereof) that went into it doesn't matter. Of course, if he's being paid by the hour, it might be different, but I'm sure he wouldn't be padding time like that if he were.</comment></comment></comment>


Bones discovered on a Pacific island belong to Amelia Earhart - <AUTHOR> http://www.watoday.com.au/world/bones-discovered-on-a-pacific-island-belong-to-amelia-earhart-a-new-forensic-analysis-shows-20180308-p4z3hc.html <comment><USER2> Announcement at University of Tennessee, [https://news.utk.edu/2018/03/07/researcher-new-forensic- anal...](https://news.utk.edu/2018/03/07/researcher-new-forensic-analysis- indicates-bones-were-amelia-earharts/)

</comment><comment><USER3> MIGHT belong.

No definite proof at all.

In truth: PROBABLY DON'T</comment>


Diminish.ai – Noise reduction in home environment - <AUTHOR> https://www.diminish.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, my name is Eric La Force, and I have been working on a new product idea with my twin brother Keith. While we think it would be helpful in our own lives, I wanted to post to determine if others can evaluate the concept and weigh in on whether or not there is a market before we invest more time. If there are additional applications for the idea we'd love to hear about it.

In my house, we have a real problem with noise, especially now that I am working from home every day. I wear noise-canceling headphones, but there are times when I can not or do not feel like wearing them. The ambient noise can be distracting while trying to focus. In addition, noise is a problem for my youngest child (1-year-old). The toddlers are constantly waking her up. My wife and I use white noise sound machines, but they have to be turned pretty loud to be effective and even that sometimes does not work.

In order to solve these problems, my brother and I put together a proof of concept to build a noise reduction system for a residential size room combining white noise and active noise cancellation algorithms. We have a working proof of concept, but it definitely needs work before I would call it a prototype, much less an MVP. Before we invest more time in the idea, is this a pain point worth solving? You can see a concept video here: [https://www.diminish.ai/](https://www.diminish.ai/) and sign up for a newsletter if you are interested in keeping up with the product. We would appreciate any feedback!

<comment><USER2> Overall I think you might be on to something. I have a nice set of bose noise cancelling headphones but I don't like to wear them for the entire day.

My particular challenge: my home office is pretty quiet except when my extremely high-pitched-voice retired lady neighbor is scratching around in her garden while bossing her henpecked husband around. In that case she is just on the other side of my exterior wall and is basically 9 feet away. I've tried to deal with it by putting some small bluetooth speakers against the window but, as you pointed out, that music has to be pretty loud to drown out her whine.

If your solution would help in this scenario you would have a customer!</comment></comment>


Show HN: ORC – Onion Routed Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://orc.network <comment><USER2> Sorry I have not dug too deeply, but I have some questions.

1\. Are there controls (i.e. proof-of-stake) to enforce equitable and lasting storage of your items on others' machines?

2\. What is the consensus model for marking peers as bad actors?

3\. What are the redundancy guarantees? That is, how many nodes store my data?

4\. What is the "currency" of sorts that I must "pay" in order to store a certain amount? Amount of hard disk I contribute back?

5\. Why was the AGPL chosen? Surely adoption by any means, commercial or otherwise, would be welcome in a system that has equitable sharing guarantees. Now if I want to implement your spec in my choice license, I can't even read your reference implementation.

Maybe some fodder for the FAQ. If not answered later, I'll peruse the whitepaper.

<comment><USER3> proof-of-retrievability, I imagine somewhat like what Storj, Sia and Filecoin do.

zcash is the currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like the opposite of IPFS in terms of what gets stored on your computer if you are part of the network.

On IPFS, something gets on your computer only if you decide to let it, and there are blacklists to automatically keep off material you don't want.

On ORC, it seems that encrypted pieces of everything get stored, so you can wind up with all sorts of things you don't want, but on the other hand might be able to deny legal responsibility.

<comment><USER3> Well, in ORC you get paid for storing things, in IPFS you don't.

<comment><USER5> Another comparison would be FreeNet, also where you don't get paid anything, but you don't know what's on your particular hard drive either.

With FreeNet though, you can anonymously post and distribute content to others. I didn't see anything on the page or FAQ indicating if you could create a public key/link (like you can with Mega).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Based on what I'm reading here, it looks a lot like freenet. Does orc give any kind of privacy promises like it?

<comment><USER7> Yes, functionally it's like Freenet. But it's all done through Tor onion services, so participants can be at least somewhat anonymous. With Freenet, there is no anonymity, only "plausible deniability". Which in practice has ended up being pretty worthless by itself. Consider that guy in Philadelphia, who's rotting in prison for refusing to provide his FDE password. He claims to have forgotten it, but that's not working out so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, does anyone know how this is related to storj.io?

<comment><USER9> IIUC, this was a fork of storj created by a recently-former maintainer [1]. Strikes me as a great time to liquidate your SJCX (I just did).

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/storj/comments/6llxpn/so_long_frien...](https://www.reddit.com/r/storj/comments/6llxpn/so_long_friends/)

<comment> trevor-e Yikes, there are a lot of grievances being aired in that thread. To clear up any confusion:

      Yes, I have forked my work on Storj and have given it to
      Counterpoint to help raise some money to continue to develop
      it. Please note that this project is not a competitor to
      Storj as it is fully distributed, there is no business model
      (because there are no bridges), and it is managed by a 501c3
      organization.
      Edit: see https://orc.network

<comment><USER10> I don't know the Storj project or this situation well, but the timeline of events I've gathered from reading those reddit comments is:

\- You acquired some "pre-mine" tokens (apparently with no vesting)

\- You pre-sold those tokens before the fundraiser

\- You quit the company shortly after

\- You then proceeded to slander the company on Reddit (something something "radical transparency")

\- You then forked the company's project and started calling it your own. But it's not "competing" because you're using a 501c3 tied to an unrelated hackerspace in Georgia as an umbrella for its fundraising (possibly risking its tax-exempt status).

I think this is a fair question to ask given the circumstances: Is your goal here to create a great open source project, or to damage Storj?

<comment><AUTHOR> Believe me, I understand how this looks. To answer your questions:

\- Yes, early storj employees were given tokens on a schedule related to achieving certain milestones

\- Yes, when I felt it was appropriate for my own future, I sold those tokens

\- Yes, not long after I sold, I (and others) left

\- No, my intent was not to slander, but simply to explain why I have disappeared from the community and why core development has slowed

\- Yes I forked a free software project and our hackerspace is providing what's called a "comprehensive sponsorship" which in no way risks 501c3 status

My goal has always been to create a great project and never to harm Storj Labs. Though, admittedly, given the circumstances I understand how it might appear that way. Because of that, can we not turn this thread into what happened on Reddit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is it? There's no explanation of what it is in the website, although there is a whitepaper, documentation, a tutorial and a description of the protocol.

From the whitepaper Abstract:

"A peer-to-peer cloud storage network implementing client-side encryption would allow users to transfer and share data without reliance on a third party storage provider. The removal of central controls would mitigate most traditional data failures and outages, as well as significantly increase security, privacy, and data control. Peer-to-peer networks are generally unfeasible for production storage systems, as data availability is a function of popularity, rather than utility. We propose a solution in the form of a challenge-response verification system coupled with direct payments. In this way we can periodically check data integrity, and offer rewards to peers maintaining data. We further propose that in order to secure such a system, participants must have complete anonymity in regard to both communication and payments."

<comment><USER11> Somewhat related: why every project out there that wants to appear as serious has to publish a "whitepaper", which is basically any gibberish you want in a PDF format?

(Not saying ORC is gibberish at all, but I do have seem the most simple and stupid ideas written in tech projects whitepapers over the last years.)

Why can't a project write all it wants in HTML pages, with links, clickable topics, separated pages, images, code snippets, examples etc., everything that could make it better to read and understand?

<comment> vertex-four Because of the Bitcoin whitepaper, its prominence in the Bitcoin community (it's almost a Constitution), and people wanting to replicate that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The web page says files are encrypted and then split into chunks that are stored around the network, and then reassembled when you want to access your file. That sounds like no one could alter your file.

The webpage also says, "Redundancy is achieved through the use of erasure codes so that your data can always be recovered even in the event of large network outages."

Does this means files can't be lost, as long as you keep paying your bill?

<comment><USER12> >The webpage also says, "Redundancy is achieved through the use of erasure codes so that your data can always be recovered even in the event of large network outages."

>Does this means files can't be lost, as long as you keep paying your bill?

The white-paper mentions:

>"ORC will soon implement client-side Reed-Solomon erasure coding (Plank (1996)). Erasure coding algorithms break a file into k shards, and programmatically create m parity shards, giving a total of k + m = n shards".

So at first glance its seems like the usenet parchive/PAR2 redundancy methodology, but storing the parity shards locally (client side). Well that's my interpretation of this section of the white-paper anyways.

So in short: it certainly doesn't mean that the files "can't be lost", but it means the owner of the files can rebuild the files using parity shards from client side in that case that network outages affect file availability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds interesting and got me thinking, i have some high bandwidth storage just sitting around. However i the machine runs on a skylake pentium and docker seems overkill. Is there anything like this that works without docker?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not required to run in docker, just there for ease of setup. Check out [https://orcproject.github.io/orc/tutorial- install.html](https://orcproject.github.io/orc/tutorial-install.html)

<comment><USER13> Nice. Seems there is a error tho:

        npm install -g @orcproject/orc

only works as:

        npm install -g orcproject/orc

<comment><AUTHOR> Aanndd just saw you did that already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this viral marketing for Silicon Valley?

Mostly kidding, but really, this is pretty close to "Pied Piper" isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how much storage would cost? I found Amazon's cloud storage surprisingly affordable. It doesn't seem like it would add so much cost just to run it through a TOR network.</comment>


Contaminant found in vaping products linked to deadly lung illnesses - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/09/05/contaminant-found-vaping-products-linked-deadly-lung-illnesses-state-federal-labs-show/ <comment><USER2> One thing I haven't seen in any of the reports, is this afflicting folks who took a single hit or who have been habitually smoking (whatever adulterated substance is in there)?

<comment><USER3> It may be hard for even the patient to know. They may have been vaping adulterated cartridges for a while but it was less or they may be sensitive to the additives. They could have had a day where they vaped a couple cartridges in a day when normally it would be a few puffs but had done that in the past with no problems. They can't even confirm the brands they think they are buying are what they say they are. People are taking spent cartridges and filling them to resell them. It's hard to tell on a micro or macro level who is doing it. Seems to me it could just be that CBD Oil with Vitamin E is at almost every gas station in the US so it's a reasonable cut to local dealers who are not health professionals.

It's the same problem that guy had who sniffed like 10 bags of microwave popcorn a day fresh out of the microwave because he loved the smell, lipid pneumonia.

Also the reports have said that many of the patients also vape nicotine so it's hard to tell. This looks like it's cut cannabis vape as the financial upside for it are more in line. People have had lipid pneumonia in the past from weird nicotine vape brands using oil based flavorings but that industry has an established pack of conscious producers of fairly safe products.

If it tastes weird, don't vape it. If it produces too much vapor and makes you feel like your breathing is even slightly restricted, stop vaping it. Don't vape smuggled carts from legal states if you're in an illegal state unless you are really really sure it is what you think it is. Almost anything can be in a mildly viscous amber liquid. Your lungs are your life!</comment></comment>


Membership in the Communist Party of China: Who Is Being Admitted and How? - <AUTHOR> http://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/ <comment><AUTHOR> It is a significant career booster in China's highly politicised economy and men of ambition are certain to want to get in; just like any other prestigious establishments all around the world.

Two other articles:

1\. [http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/communist-p...](http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/communist- party-membership-is-still-the-ultimate-resume-booster/276347/)

2\. [http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/11/21/chinas- communist...](http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/11/21/chinas-communist- party-how-to-join/)</comment>


New Cancer Drug Gets Dramatic Results  - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/26117/

<comment><USER2> Hint: it's a fairly BRAF-specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor, and it had a remarkable impact on progression-free survival.</comment>


Booth 1.0 has been released (Geo-cluster based on Pacemaker and raft) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ClusterLabs/booth <comment><USER2> Curious if the Raft implementation from scratch or based on an existing one. If a new implementation, how was that process?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that it's a custom implementation adapted to the booth use-case, but I don't know any details.</comment></comment>


OpenBTS: Cheap, open source cellular network - <AUTHOR> http://openbts.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> There are currently (to my knowledge) two working open-source/free-software implementations of the GSM stack.

OpenBTS (<http://openbts.sourceforge.net/>) puts everything, beginning at the modulation/demodulation of the radio-frequency, into your PC and uses a USRP (<http://www.ettus.com/products>) as the radio-frequency frontend (~$2000).

OpenBSC (<http://openbsc.gnumonks.org>) uses a different approach and starts implementing at the Abis-interface, which is what the Base Transceiver Station (the thing with the antennae...) connects to. Here you don't need the USRP but a surplus GSM BTS (currently around or a little less than $500/€500 and the necessary E1-interface (for the Abis-link) is $200/€200, afaik). OpenBSC has been successfully tested at <https://wiki.har2009.org/page/GSM> and <http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/GSM> using officially allocated frequencies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks very cool, excited about the possibilities, but my first thought was "FCC violation."

Did a quick Google search, looks like they did a test at Burning Man in 2008 and got local FCC approvals: <http://lwn.net/Articles/297038/>

<comment><USER4> One more problem: Patents.

GSM implementations require licensing IP from several major manufacturers (Nokia, Ericsson and others). As long as the project is small they probably won't bother. But just try basing a femtocell product on OpenBTS and they will be knocking on your door soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose something like this would find much of its use in places where neither FCC nor patents have a lot of clout.

<comment><USER5> If you dig deeper on OpenBTS, the primary motivation of the project is altruistic, rolling basic coverage out in the developing world where there is no current economic incentive, or respect for IP.

That's not to say that it would be disruptive in developed markets as well, or course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been interested in software radio for some time now but lack the technical knowledge to understand it fully. Can someone point me to links that can help me understand this ? I am sure it will be helpful to many people.

From what I have read one needs a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) for sending and receiving radio signals but searching for this leads to things like daughter boards etc. which I did not understand.

Can someone explain it here ?

Thanks

<comment><USER7> The wikipedia page on the USRP seems to explain it pretty well: <[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Software_Radio_Periph...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Software_Radio_Peripheral>). It also goes into the issue of daughterboards, although not in-depth.

The reason for daughterboards is given as "[...] designed to be flexible, allowing developers to make their own daughterboards for specific needs with regard to connectors, different frequency bands, etc."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish they made a (much) cheaper USRP specifically for GSM, I wouldn't use the rest of the radio functionality (AM, FM, etc).

<comment><USER2> The USRP doesn't do any AM, FM,... It's only a very fast ADC/DAC. Some of the additional modules have up-/downmix capability, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My dream of creating a GSM network called "Free Public Wi-Fi" is one step closer to fruition...

<comment><USER10> Almost all of those non-AP networks you see (usually with that name, and never with a route to the internet or dhcp) are due to a pernicious _Thyphoid Mary_ behavior in Windows' wireless networking UI.

In at least Windows XP, if you _ever_ join a "computer-to-computer" network, your computer will advertise that network (or the last such network) whenever it is not connected to another SSID, in perpetuity. Airports are the primary breeding ground for this disease.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. And I think it would be amusing to see your cell-phone connected to that network instead of "AT&T" or "T-Mobile" or whatever :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This would be awesome to try and build my own magicjack femtocell. I wonder what hardware is needed and how much it would cost to do.</comment>


Curation Should Be a Feature, Not a User Interface - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@heyyoudvd/curation-should-be-a-feature-not-a-user-interface-ae52384bc30c <comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure Netflix does this mainly just to obfuscate how shallow their catalog really is, but some of the bigger content platforms really have no excuse for taking away features as basic as filtering and sorting.</comment>


Ask HN: What skills should teens/young people focus on during the lockdown? - <AUTHOR> I have two kids soon to graduate High School, just thinking how to use their time creatively <comment><USER2> I'm always tempted to push people into programming. Mostly because I wish I had learned it in high school instead self-teaching in my mid-20's.

But really, at their age it's mostly just important that they try to make something. Doesn't really matter what it is, or if it's successful. Just pick an idea and fool around with it for awhile. They need to figure out what they like and what they don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Writing: 1) Research papers on topics researchable on the web, and 2) Short stores. Here's an exercise. Submerse yourself in the writing of a favorite author for a week, then rewrite a story by someone else in the style of the favorite author. Repeat for 3 different authors and without trying you will have developed a style of your own based on what you like.

</comment><comment><USER4> Striking a balance between consuming and producing. Creative endeavors are lifelong skills that add ease and finesse to other domains of life. Get them thinking about how to make stuff.</comment>