Senator Al Franken: No joke, Comcast trying to whack Netflix - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/sen-al-franken-no-joke-comcast-trying-to-whack-netflix.ars <comment><USER3> Level 3 did a great job spinning this into public outrage. Here's what actually happened:

1\. Level3 started offering CDN services. By leveraging their existing peering relationships (as a tier 1 ISP) they could essentially subsidize the transit costs of the CDN business, compared to e.g. Akamai which had been paying Comcast for peering to reach Comcast customers.

2\. Netflix got a good offer for CDN services from Level3, and switched a bunch of their content from Akamai to Level3's CDN.

3\. Comcast therefore saw a bunch of paid traffic turn into unpaid traffic overnight, and complained.

This is a business dispute between two self-interested parties. Is it really fair for Level3 to use their position in the ISP business to undercut competitors in a new CDN business? Was it fair a few years ago when Akamai caved and agreed to pay Comcast for peering? Will it be fair for Comcast to use a newly acquired media property to exact revenge on Netflix/Level3?

The problem with Network Neutrality is that it takes a complex issue, the product of many complex business relationships, and frames it in a black-or- white context. The history here is complicated, and the only thing I'm sure of is that everyone's a bad guy sometimes.

<comment><USER4> The problem with Network Neutrality is that it's very easy to see the development of a monopoly/oligopoly that will have near complete control of the world's most valuable man-made resource.

When it comes to the corporate behavior, only the most cynical predictions have been at all reliable. Those sanguine about the result of absolute freedom-of-action by internet providers clearly have little sense of history.

God forbid that internet access become a relatively unprofitable commodity rather than an utterly complicated, multi-tiered service in which profit is extracted through the creation of an artificial shortage.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand why the Internet is not government controlled. Would you leave road maintenance to private companies? How about air traffic, or sewers or water? The Internet is as important, if not more important (in a Constitutional way) than these services, but we leave it in the hands of self- interested parties.

<comment><USER6> The difference between these and the internet is right of way and externalities. That is, the government is involved in roads and sewers because (1) you can't have a road network in most places without the ability to forcibly purchase small strips of land from lots of people and (2) until recently, there was no efficient way to charge usage fees in a reasonable way. The internet doesn't really have that problem: charging is quite simple and the flexibility of routing means we're not nearly so beholden to any one set of property owners.

Now, I think there might be a case made for making last mile internet either municipally run or a heavily regulated business in the same way that water/power/sewer service in cities is, but that's a very different argument.

<comment><USER7> Ideally, the last mile fiber would be divorced from the IP connectivity to the rest of the world, so that a residence would pay the same money to use that last mile fiber whether they're running 1 megabit or 1 gigabit. If you then had real competition for options from your central office to the rest of the world, you'd see performance for a given price increase dramatically.

<comment><USER8> This is basically how things are done in Sweden, at least outside the major cities. A municipality builds and runs fiber to every home, residents choose from a number of different ISPs and each ISP pays a flat rate to the municipality for each active subscriber they have. ISPs can then offer any type of service within reasonable limits. This means that I can get for example 100 Mbps service and VoIP for ~25 dollars a month, or 10 Mbps for 15.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I should send the Senator my comment on Comcast's blog when they posted their letter complaining about Netflix, which did not get approved by their moderator:

====

I am a Comcast residential HSI customer, and have many clients who are business HSI Comcast customers. At the same time, I do maintain servers in my own racks at a datacenter.

What is not mentioned in this letter, is that Comcast is already being paid - by me, and by every other customer, for access to the content.

Note that Comcast has never said that the Level3/Netflix issue is about users exceeding their allotted bandwidth (currently at about 250GB/month for residential); presumably, were a Comcast user to use 249GB of bandwidth downloading cute pictures of cats, Comcast would have no objection.

It appears to be the specific issue that Netflix is a possible competitor to Comcast's TV business, that somehow causes Comcast to decide that there is a problem.

Understand this: every Netflix video to be streamed, is specifically requested by a Comcast user, operating under the Comcast-advertised "High Speed Internet" service and presumably within the bandwidth caps that Comcast's own contract allows.

That Comcast presumes to have the right to limit, modify, or decide for me which pieces of the Internet I can have access to, removes Comcast's common carrier protections, calls into question the truth of your (meaning Comcast) advertisements for the HSI service, and raises the issue of whether Comcast is dealing in bad faith with each and every Comcast HSI subscriber.

====

<comment><USER10> I'm probably going to get downmodded for this because its unpopular to side with the big guys.

But..

The Netflix/Level3/Comcast dustup was not a net neutrality issue. It was a peering disagreement. Comcast pays Level3 to be a transit provider, so they pay to connect to Level3's network. Traditional CDN's such as Akamai and Limelight _pay Comcast_ in order to get a direct pipe into Comcast's network. Level3 in the meantime was charging Netflix as a CDN since they already had a direct pipe into Comcast's network as a transit provider. So in essence Comcast was _paying_ Level3 to act as a CDN as opposed to the other way around.

While Level3 quickly screamed "Net Neutrality" when Comcast wanted to fix the agreement, that was just a smokescreen for a peering issue.

EDIT (Shimon has covered this as well <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121472>)

<comment><USER9> The reality is that Comcast never raises the issue over transit to e.g. ICanHasCheezburger.

Do you not see that Netflix competes directly with the Comcast sister offering of cable TV and video on demand?

This is a test case to determine how to "tax" every content provider for access to Comcast customers; who as I mention, are already paying for access to the Internet.

<comment><USER10> Comcast never raised this issue with Netflix specifically. They raised it with everyone using Level3 as a CDN, if ICanHasCheezburger is using Level3 as a CDN then it got raised. Netflix's volume of traffic over Level3 is likely what made it a pressing concern.

I'm well aware of Comcast's dislike of Netflix. Probably better then most. But a vast amount of data being thrown around on these networks is video, most of it by Netflix. While there are net neutrality concerns there, there are also legit network stability and infrastructure concerns.

<comment><USER9> You say "there are also legit network stability and infrastructure concerns"

I would like to ask, "how do you know this"?

Also, would reference my original point - "Comcast has a residential cap of 250GB/month as being acceptable usage by a customer" - if a Netflix user is staying within that limit, and if Comcast is having problems - <USER2> deliberately under-engineered their network, yes?

<comment><USER10> _I would like to ask, "how do you know this"?_

Umm.. check my profile, I worked for Comcast for 4 years I know their broadcast and HSI infrastructure pretty well.

 _Comcast has a residential cap of 250GB/month as being acceptable usage by a customer_

Yes and if everyone used it at the same time your network would crawl. Bandwidth on Comcast (And most networks) is a shared service. Caps be damned there's not an ISP in existence who can survive massive simultaneous usage by all their users (such as everyone using Netflix around 8pm in the evening). Unless you want Comcast to throttle down their limits?

Again you keep making _this_ argument a battle between Netflix and Comcast and its not. If Netflix used Akamai as their sole provider of CDN services (who have CDN agreements with Comcast) this would not be a Netflix issue. This is a Level3 and Comcast business dispute.

<comment><USER11> How is it the end user's fault that Comcast's network can't handle everyone using the service they paid for?

I understand that everyone does overselling because it's profitable, and makes sense, but don't expect the customer to not use what they are paying for because you have oversold your services.

<comment><USER12> No ISP on earth can "handle everyone using the service they paid for", the same way that the electricity grid can't handle everyone using their full 100 Amp supply.

Overselling is the way the industry works.

<comment><USER9> It depends; there are some ISPs that have enough capacity in their burstable circuits, that they could actually do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _"Now is the time to decide if we want four or five companies owning and delivering all of our information and entertainment"_

Way, way too late. It went from 10 to 5 a few years ago.

<http://www.sarahstirland.com/archives/mediacon.htm>

[http://web.archive.org/web/20071025061940/http://www.thenati...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071025061940/http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten11.swf)

[http://www.nowfoundation.org/issues/communications/tv/mediac...](http://www.nowfoundation.org/issues/communications/tv/mediacontrol.html)

[https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fadage.com%2Fi...](https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fadage.com%2Fimages%2Frandom%2Fmediafamilytree07.pdf&docid=416850233c18c6eeebf6c81208b81d38&a=bi&pagenumber=1&w=2000)

Remember it makes no difference if it's Republican or Democrat they are both pro massive-corporation. Wait until Comcast starts moving it's call centers overseas to increase their profit by reducing US labor costs.

If politicians aren't going to fight corporate control of health care decisions for the nation, why do you think they are going to bother about something like the internet.

<comment><USER14> "they are both pro massive-corporation"

More specifically, they are both pro-campaign donations. And it's much easier to court a few big players than thousands of small ones. They may even think they're being fair and objective. But they can only chat with so many lobbyists a day, and the most polished, friendly, helpful, professional ones are - surprise - hired by huge companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am reading Tim Wu's excellent book "The Master Switch" right now that is relevant to Franken's concerns. Covers corporate takeovers of information systems starting in the late 1800s.

<comment><USER16> Tim Wu recently discussed these issues on CSPAN and I posted his interview on Charlie Rose a few days ago (videos):

<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/TheMas>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080742>

 _Warning: put in a historic context, he predicts a somewhat disheartening outcome._

A cringe worthy update from the CEO's of Time Warner and AT&T. Straight from horses mouth [starts at 18:40], the two share their perspectives on regulation, innovation and the net (recorded on 1/12/11):

<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/InnovativeI>

Summary: Innovation requires less tax, less regulation. Pleased with recent FCC rules on net neutrality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand why the government should create regulation to tell private companies what to do with their property in this case. I think a lot of the 'net neutrality' hubbub is irrational driven panic. If you don't like the service they provide just pay for something else that does. Running to the government every time a company does something that inconviences you as a user strikes me as dangerous. This isn't life saving health care, the vast majority of the arguments and infographics highlight the many shows you might not be able to watch or websites you might not be able to access. I'm sorry but your need to catch the latest Glee or access your friends update on Facebook aren't a convincing enough argument to agree to letting the feds regulate what private companies do with their business.

Let the downvotes commence.

<comment><USER18> Here's the problem, in my view, with your position

" If you don't like the service they provide just pay for something else that does. "

In many localities there aren't many options for high speed internet service. The fear is that ISPs will find it easier to form a cartel and exact tolls than to compete with each other on service.

<comment><USER19> Then that is the problem, ask yourself why that is?

Oh yeah, its because the local government gives monopolies to certain companies. That is the root of the problem, address it there instead of bandaid hacks that break core system.

<comment><USER20> It is not explicit granted monopolies, but more so de facto monopolies arising because the costs for a competitor to enter the ISP business are prohibitively expensive. With material costs, labor costs, and easement costs, it takes a major investment to run a mile of cable.

My question is this: Why are fiber lines not administered by public utilities? It works for power and roads.

<comment><USER19> Here's a slightly older article (1998) about localities granting cable companies monopolies: <http://www.fff.org/freedom/0598d.asp>

As for the public utilities I completely or agree, or perhaps do it one better. Set up a not for profit that's independent from the government that sole purpose is to provide bandwidth with no restrictions.

<comment><USER21> Several locations have tried this (including my home state of Utah), and the cable/telco duopoly lobbyists got new laws passed that prohibited or severely restricted municipal broadband projects.

<comment><USER19> So once again, it's a problem with local government - a government that is a lot more responsive than the FCC or any federal solution. If the teclos can manipulate your local gov, imagine how effective they'll be at the national level.

<comment><USER21> I agree that local and state governments are a problem, but only because these national corporations have so much power over them. I don't agree (or at least I'm not yet convinced) that the FCC or Congress adding some "light touch" neutrality regulation would be a terrible problem, or that it's an either/or situation. In other words, these national ISPs need to be fixed at a national level, while broken local regulations need to be handled at a local level. Fixing one may help fix the other.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask PG: What Is An "Exploding Accelerator Offer"? - <AUTHOR>

Yesterday on twitter [1] pg mentioned "exploding offers" from some accelerators, and to be honest, I'm just clueless by what that means in context. I've heard the phrased used in big company buy-out situations. An example might be the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T having a condition where if the deal didn't get approved, then AT&T would have to pay a whole bunch to T-Mobile (for the brand damage etc.).
Dan Shapiro (hn:danshapiro) submitted the tweet to HN yesterday during the most busy part of the day for submissions, so it didn't get much of a chance for up-votes.
This morning I woke up wondering what the heck an "exploding accelerator offer" really is? How do they work? Is there yet another, umm, "non-transparent" or "potentially risky" investment practice that founders need to be aware of?
(Yes, I intentionally tried to phrase it nicely since terms and practices are just terms and practices people/companies agree to)
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/321657682761232384
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520295 <comment><USER3> Well in most contexts, an exploding offer is an offer with a set deadline - <USER2> in, an offer is going to "explode" (aka expire or be taken back) within a specified timeframe.

Using this, I'm guessing pg meant that if applicants have got an offer from another fund/accelerator/incubator that expires before they get an Y combinator acceptance, they should let him know.</comment>


Common Misconceptions About Applying to YC - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/common-misconceptions-about-applying-to-yc/ <comment><USER2> Without knowing how many applications meet each criterion, advertising how many YC companies meet those criteria is more misleading than helpful. If 95% of applications are from pre-revenue companies, then the 50/50 split between acceptees which are with/without revenue would indicate that companies with revenue are 19x more likely to be accepted; if half of applications are solo- founder, the fact that only 8.5% of accepted companies have solo founders indicates that they are at a huge disadvantage.

Frankly I expect better than this from YC. You guys have the data, and don't need to be actively deceptive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. With this post I was hoping to clarify misconceptions that might be used as reasons not to apply. I tried to avoid doing an analysis that could be interpreted as a playbook for getting into YC because it would result in the same issue: "If I'm not like X I shouldn't do YC."

Anyway, thanks for the feedback and it's cool to know there's interest around YC data.

<comment><USER3> Counterpoint: if the data strongly suggest a set of profiles are far more likely to be accepted it is perfectly rational to evaluate one's own profile first against that information in order to assess the effort required to overcome differences and evaluate the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The post is biz-dev, not friendly advice.

Look, it benefits YC if you apply. They are trying to reduce the probability that you don't apply. It takes a lot of time and effort from you to put together a high quality pitch and very little for them to evaluate it. They lose nothing turning you down. They lose a lot if you are successful but didn't bother to apply.

The numbers are kind of a crock of shit for reasons others have articulated in this thread. YC is a business, this is a press release. Don't be shocked that it's transparent biz-dev bullshit. (But do be offended, and do let it reduce the probability that you do business with YC, because if they can't treat you like an intelligent customer, they're probably peddling snake oil.)

Edit: I'm not trying to discourage startups from seeking funding. I just hate pre-21st-century marketing hype. Developers live in a post-Cluetrain-manifesto universe, we expect intelligence, authenticity, and depth. Our currency is trust, you build trust by being correct, thorough, and sincere. The blog post was correct but shallow and insincere. That loses trust; lost trust means lost business.

<comment><USER5> After reading it, I totally disagree. They provide numbers, they assume the reader is intelligent and hope they will learn new things and unlearn wrong assumptions.

Yes, their interest is in more people applying, but I don't see them being misleading. For me, they are actually really assuming intelligence from their readers. They don't say "We love foreign companies! Apply if you are foreigner!" They say "29% [of W16] were from outside the US". Which I read as "we are pretty US-centric but you still have a chance".

They don't say "Apply even if you are solo!" They say that some solo project were funded but that they are a small minority and that they do not recommend this path.

Of course this is self-interested, but I fail to see where it is dishonest.

<comment><USER6> YC encourages founders to be concise and get to the point, so if they wanted to say "we are pretty US-centric but you still have a chance", they could have and should have just said in plain language.

> They provide numbers, they assume the reader is intelligent and hope they > will learn new things and unlearn wrong assumptions.

This exactly is the issue people here are intelligent and that is why they can see the glaring gaps in the way the data is presented.

I think people are little pissed because the article chose to go the data route and dint provide the complete information for people to infer from.

<comment><USER5> You seem to complain that they did not dumb it down enough and that did dumb it down too much.

They provided a number, explaining what this number was. Assuming the reader is actually educated in statistics 101, that is not misleading at all.

Yes, they could publish all their data, but you also said you want concision. You can't have it both ways!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Misconception: I need to raise a seed round before I apply to YC.

> S16: False. 14.2% of accepted companies weren't even incorporated when they > applied.

This didn't actually address the misconception - it sidestepped it. I would love to see data on what percent of YC companies raised a seed round prior to being accepted (or had a cofounder who had raised a round for a prior company), and how that's changed over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. I'll update this post/thread once I pull together more seed info.

<comment><USER8> While you're at it, could you update with:

1\. the respective percentages of companies that _applied_ with and without prior seed funding, and

2\. the respective percentages that were accepted from applicants with seed funding and applicants without seed funding.

As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, I think applicant vs. incumbent numbers would be a more honest reflection of the data if you want to dispel these myths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found these statistics to be very helpful.

I'll be honest, I have my own misconceptions about YC and it's put me at an impasse of wanting to apply.

1.) From what you read, it seems like everyone has a positive experience. At least in my network, that doesn't seem to be true. I'm not applying the logic that it sucked for X, therefore it must suck for everyone. I just want to know who YC works best for and who it doesn't. After all, the old adage goes, if you're selling to everyone, you're selling to no one.

2.) Following up on that point, I thought very few enterprise startups did YC and that YC would be weak in that category. From the stats, it seems like a majority of startups were enterprise focused! But, the standard YC terms kinda suck for enterprise startups. If your ACV is +$100k, why raise $120k for 7%?

3.) When is the right time to apply? Taking some thinking from pg, you should make 100% focus your customers and product. If I needed to raise $ now and wasn't accepted into YC, I would just go try raise money at that moment. Seems odd to hold out and keep trying.

Once again, I think most of my points are misunderstandings about how YC works. I don't think this should help reflect anyone else's decision to apply. I think it's very likely that I will apply to YC. I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out.

<comment><USER10> > 2.) Following up on that point, I thought very few enterprise startups did > YC and that YC would be weak in that category. From the stats, it seems like > a majority of startups were enterprise focused! But, the standard YC terms > kinda suck for enterprise startups. If your ACV is +$100k, why raise $120k > for 7%?

I believe the "enterprise" number in the article includes B2B startups, not just enterprise.

That being said, it's a pretty common misconception that YC is about the money. It generally isn't! Money might be the smallest part you get for that 7%, and certainly is the most short lived, which is why in many cases even companies that are already generating revenue find it valuable to apply. This page covers a lot of the benefits (beyond money): [https://www.ycombinator.com/why](https://www.ycombinator.com/why)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yuri is right. The enterprise number contains B2B. I'll update the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > MessageBird was making $20M a year and profitable prior to YC.

Did they get the standard valuation deal (7% equity per 120 K$)?

</comment><comment><USER12> Even though YC may be a good fit for me, I won't apply to YC because I can't afford (or don't want to) to uproot my life to go to SF or NYC for the duration. I expect this has a lot over overlap with the average age of applicant (or accepted participants.)

<comment><USER13> YC will invest in your company, and part of that money you should be able to use to reasonably live in the area.

<comment><USER14> Not if you have a family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everything listed there makes me more pessimistic about my own chances.

Only 30% of founders are from outside the US, only 14% aren't incorporated, 50% had no revenue, only 8.5% are solo founders, 54.7% were recommended by YC alumni...

So basically the odds of being accepted if you fit into ALL those buckets are probably very very slim. I don't see how fitting into all those buckets make your company unworthy of investment.

It's good to know this though then you can mess with your startup to make it fit into high-probability buckets. I don't think it would improve the startup, but it would certainly improve your chances of getting into an accelerator.

<comment><USER14> If you look at it that way the stereotypical startup that's:

-US based

-Incorporated

-Recommended

-with Revenue

\- 2 Founders

has only a .71x.85.8x50x46.3x61.3 ~ 8% chance of getting in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The biggest surprise for me was this:

"Misconception: YC doesn't accept companies without revenue. S16: 50% were not making money when they applied."

Which means 50% were already making money when accepted. Given that I'm guessing way less than 50% of applications are making money, this would seen to be a big advantage.

Of course, I could be wrong on that too. :)

<comment><USER17> Ultimately what you want to do is de-risk the potential investment by showing that you have significant traction, and having actual paying customers is a great way to do that.

<comment><USER16> Absolutely. It's a great sign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Misconception: If I applied YC and got rejected, there's no point in > applying again.

> S16: 45% were rejected at least once before. Of those previously rejected, > the average number of rejections before being accepted was 2.

What's the most rejections for someone that _was_ accepted and most rejections for someone that was not?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually a pretty neat stat. Most rejections for someone that was accepted in S16 was 7.

<comment><USER19> I'd like to hear that story!

<comment><USER18> " _Well we can all agree you 're persistent ..._"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Adding a thought here. It's easy to find a reason not to apply. But 100% of the companies accepted into YC applied. Don't let any stat deter you, you have to start somewhere.

<comment><USER2> _100% of the companies accepted into YC applied_

Is this true? I know companies have been accepted which didn't apply before the deadline, and IIRC one of the early YC companies got in basically because they bumped into one of the principals and were told "you should be part of YC".

I wouldn't be surprised if there have been a few companies which due to unusual circumstances got into YC without submitting a formal application.

<comment><USER21> >> 100% of the companies accepted into YC applied

> Is this true?

Depending on how you want to think about it, you can trivially falsify this by looking at ImagineK12.

<comment><USER22> codecombat might fit this criteria too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > S16: 54.7% did not have a recommendation.

This begs the question: How much weight does a recommendation carry?

Or put in another way: Should you network with YC alumni in case you ever want to apply?

<comment><USER8> _> >Or put in another way: Should you network with YC alumni in case you ever want to apply?_

Absolutely, yes. It doesn't mean that you will certainly get in, but having a professional relationship with one or more influential YC alumni will be very helpful.

Like almost anywhere else in life, networking is an essential business skill to have and use.

<comment><USER24> not good

<comment><USER25> Why not? Relationships give trust. On the other hand I think if you don't have any relationship but your business is obviously good I am sure you will be selected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How many groups were accepted without having a live product or a prototype with users?

> Misconception: I did another accelerator so I can't do YC.

Sam posted back in January that it was actually much harder to get into YC if you'd done program: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/getting-into-y- combinator](https://blog.ycombinator.com/getting-into-y-combinator)

Did this change?

</comment><comment><USER27> What does YC have to lose by telling people the actual numbers? You created the misconceptions in the first place. It's also reinforced by the number of 'Common misconceptions' articles...

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm wondering how many companies fit _none_ of the listed criteria?

<comment><USER29> Hard to be both making money and not making money. ;)

<comment><USER30> "revenue positive"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One more question: do you accept services oriented companies? I am confused by the typical YC mantra about scale and by this response: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12275696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12275696) . Services companies like consulting are difficult to scale but they can be interesting.

<comment><USER31> We might. Usually service companies have not led to huge businesses, so you'd need to explain how yours would be the exception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think YC wants everyone to apply to get the complete picture/data about the startup market around the world which nobody currently has and has a lot of value. Like Google seeing what is happenning around the world with search and ads, you can leverage the startups you fund with better global information.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm curious as to overlap in the portfolio. It is my understanding that VC firms wont typically invest in competing startups but if you see a competitor in the previous batch does that hurt your chances?

I know you have at least a couple areas where you have had overlap but I believe they were all at least separated by a year or two.</comment>


My Dinners with Harold - <AUTHOR> https://story.californiasunday.com/my-dinners-with-harold <comment><USER2> What a lovely profile. That dinner at El Bulli, like the Yalta conference of scientific cooking.

</comment><comment><USER3> > a new book that he describes somewhat cryptically as "a guide to the smells > of the world,"

The practical application of this will be in pairing foods with one another. There are only five fundamental flavors for the tongue, but trillions of different smells. Pairings tend to share scents. Most pairings are only based on tradition, though - trial-and-error over thousands of years. Should be an interesting read.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone to get chrome to allow JavaScript one time? - <AUTHOR>

I use Chrome with javascript turned off. AFAICT chrome only allows javascript to be all the way off for a domain or all the way on? Is there any way to have chrome have quick "JS" button that turns javascript on for the site until you close the tab/window?<p>Ideally, I want a keyboard shortcut that toggles it on, refreshes the page and allows me to turn it off again, freezing the current state of the page. i.e. something more like the pause button on a walkman where you can toggle execution with one mouse click or keystroke. <comment><USER2> There is also this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871331)

</comment><comment><USER3> noscript?

<comment><AUTHOR> Found SafeScript. Thanks. For whatever reason I assume that the browser's own javascript blocking feature would have worked more like noscript/safescript.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Measure the cost of Kubernetes containers/services in real-time - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubecost/cost-model <comment><USER2> How does this compare with Cloudability and others?

<comment><USER3> Today kubecost is different in a number of ways 1) open source with easy installation 2) exclusively focused on kubernetes-centric infrastructure and 3) offers a fully deployed solution.</comment></comment>


Why is git named git? - <AUTHOR> https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitFaq#Why_the_.27git.27_name.3F

<comment><USER2> Citation:

[http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/129776/after_controver...](http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/129776/after_controversy_torvalds_begins_work_git_/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This FAQ is much better than many tutorials and guides I've seen around, at least for someone who knows a little.

Funny how I don't remember ever encountering it when search for help.

</comment><comment><USER4> Git is a polite way of saying bastard before 9pm on TV in the UK, e.g. _You lucky git_. They also use it in Ireland and down under.</comment>


Found this on a uni's confession page (r/HongKong) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dxy0rg/found_this_on_a_unis_confession_page/ <comment><USER2> Yikes! I hope this kid and others in their situation are able to escape.</comment>


The World is Full of Real People - <AUTHOR> http://jumpstartlab.com/news/archives/2012/01/13/the-world-is-full-of-real-people/ <comment><USER3> The point that developers tend to live an extremely privileged life compared to the human average is an excellent one. However, I must strenuously object to the characterization of building tools for other developers as simply being self-pleasure.

If developers really _can_ do good things for society, then by helping other developers, am I not helping to achieve that goal? If software is useful, and I build something that makes developing software easier/faster/cheaper/better, why should I be criticized for wasting my time while the guy who uses my stuff to build something else easier/faster/cheaper/better gets lauded?

To me, this is like praising a farmer for feeding the world while criticizing the company who builds his tractors for indulging in self-pleasure. Yeah, people can't eat tractors, but those tractors enable a vast increase in the farmer's food output.

The economy is a vastly complex interlocking web of interactions. You can help people enormously while still being far removed from the pointy end. People on the pointy end deserve our respect, but people far removed from it who still assist in some indirect way don't deserve our scorn.

User interaction isn't my strong point. Low level arcana is. Am I really going to improve the world more by resting on my weak points that would help people directly, rather than concentrating on my strengths and helping people indirectly?

Computers are enabling massive changes and improvements in the collective lot of humanity. And yet most of the innovations driving that started out as toys, as computer people building things for other computer people, or as tools for massive corporations and the massively wealthy. Imagine if the people working on early cell phones had said, you know what, I don't want to build flashy toys for 1% Wall Street types, I want to build stuff for the underprivileged in poor countries. That approach does _not_ result in said underprivileged people obtaining cell phones, whereas the former does.

In short: this stuff is complicated and making enablers feel guilty because they aren't out at the front is counterproductive.

<comment><USER4> You're right. However, there comes a point where we don't need yet another framework, or productivity app, or another project management tool. I also think the author is addressing people who build "thin value" startups as well, not just developer tools. Like Color, or Farmville, or Diaspora.

<comment><USER5> People who build things that "we don't need" get the message when no-one uses their product and they run out of money. But it's still a valuable process for them and everyone else, as long as they learn how to build things we _do_ need.

<comment><USER6> I can strap on wings and jump out of a window and have a hard landing and break a few limbs and "get the message" that I shouldn't have jumped in the first place. To claim that jumping was a valuable process is a bit far fetched. I could have gotten that same lesson by simply taking a course in aerodynamics, or better yet, watching those black and white videos from the history channel of people in the 1900s doing similar stunts before the Wright brothers came along. Having worked at startups for a bunch of years & having interviewed with several others & speaking with their founders in person, I see a very distinct divide. The vast majority are building things "we don't need", throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something will stick. Purely from a statistical perspective, something will indeed stick. otoh the very tiny minority that are building stuff we do need are handicapped by too many factors to even have a remote chance of success.

<comment><USER3> The problem is then figuring out what's valuable. But being told that building an entire class of extremely useful tools is not valuable just gets it completely wrong.

To take your analogy, it's like seeing some people jumping out of windows with wings and telling them, hey, stop trying to invent stuff. No, the correct message is, do your research.

Developer tools can be extremely useful, you just have to make sure that what you're building _is_ useful and hasn't already been done before. This is completely different from saying that all developer tools are useless, which is what was said in the post.

<comment><USER6> > "This is completely different from saying that all developer tools are > useless, which is what was said in the post."

That isn't what was said nor what was implied. Someday we will stop pretending that what we do is "extremely useful". A developer tool is nice. It is neat. It is cool. It is a bulletpoint on your resume. It is a repo in the github. It buils your brand. It scratches your itch. It generates revenue. It has a long tail. etc etc... But "extremely useful" ? To the real world full of real people ? Not in a million years. Let me look at my own work, at this very instant. I'm coding up a scala sobol sequence generator by solving a recurrence on a primitive polynomial of the Z2 field. Why in the world would I need this ? Well if I have a low discrepancy sobol sequence I can generate quasirandom montecarlo variates in scala instead of importance sampling. Why in the world would I need that ? Well with a million of those variates I can tell you with a lot of accuracy whether a commercial loan will default & what the expected loss would be ? Why in the world would I need that ? Well since we have a portfolio of millions of commercial loans, like every bank on the planet does, we need to compute the value at risk so we know how much capital to set aside in case of defaults. Why in the world would I need that ? Well since....I can go on and on, but at some point, I will be forced to acknowledge the very point the post was making - that the world is full of real people. These tools & algorithms are neat, but they are a workproduct of privilege. Everytime we build a piece of software, we are simply resorting to the rifleman's creed the marine core uses ( you know, the one that goes - <USER2> scala sobol sequence is mine. There are many like it, but this one is mine! ) So f __*ing what ? It is definitely a life of privilege. It is far far removed from the world of real people. Personally there is nothing else I would rather do. But to pretend that what I'm doing is on the same plane of someone say vaccinating a kid with malaria in the tropics, or providing shelter to a homeless person etc is highly disingenuous. That would be reality. otoh coding software is simply privileged cs guys playing games with bits and bytes so that after the talent acquisition exit, we get to play games with vc money on techcrunch :) Lets not kid ourselves.

<comment><USER7> _...we need to compute the value at risk so we know how much capital to set aside in case of defaults. Why in the world would I need that ? Well since....I can go on and on..._

And if you went one step further, you'd have realized: "to reduce the risk of a bank failure and potentially saving thousands of jobs."

 _But to pretend that what I'm doing is on the same plane of someone say vaccinating a kid with malaria in the tropics..._

Lets think about the guy vaccinating a kid to prevent malaria.

But lets think a few steps back. Rather than thinking about the guy with the needle, think about the guy in the lab coat. He's currently sitting in a lab somewhere, fucking around with gene assays in order to create antibodies. Why does he do this? Because some other guy might use the antibodies to stimulate an immune response to malaria parasites in rats. And the other guy might find out the first guy was wasting his time.

The vast majority of people who are trying to do exactly what you ask (creating a malaria vaccine) are "building things 'we don't need', throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something will stick."

And if you back up a couple steps more, you realize all this was only possible because someone built biologist tools (e.g. gene sequencing machines, bioinformatics software) which are neat and cool and bullet points on a CV and also completely useless to "real people".

<comment><USER6> Tremendously enjoyed your post, particularly the part about fucking around with gene assays. My wife is a physician, and sometimes I rile her by saying she is not helping real people because she is just a glorified hashmap. She does a lookup on the disease and returns a drug prescription. She says that's still better than fucking around with gene assays in a labcoat :) I'm completely familiar with your line of reasoning. Its just that the number of nodes needs to traverse from a styloot to a vaccine is significant. Its not zero. Most companies get around this by simply making large philanthropic donations from time to time. But you'll still agree that's not the same. Some of my classmates got their math & physics PhDs and then gave it all up and returned to India to feed the poor and work with the homeless. When I look at that and then look at the fact that I'm messing around with sobol sequences....it just irks me, that's all. I think that was the point of the article - dealing directly with the real world full of real people, and not via some long indirect causal mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is kafkatrapping (<http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122>):

"The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator's personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others."

I actually agree that the software development community tends to be too inwardly focused, but this style of argument needs to go.

<comment><USER9> Great link - I think that this can be used as a mild form of coercion. However, in this case I have to object more to the target than the method. Developer tools, as mentioned above, can certainly be used to improve the world by making it easier to develop - sure.

My main gripe is with startups that make something that is a net-negative to society - which I'd argue Zynga, et al. are actually doing - just sucking money out of society. I don't care if people use it and like those games. Why not make educational games more addictive instead - easier said than done I know.

I think it's wrong to sit back an tell everyone the your choice of project is irrelevant to your social impact - it's irrefutably not!

<comment><USER10> By that token you could say that any passive form of entertainment is bad , from movies to sports.

There's value in helping people to relax I guess.

<comment><USER11> Not really. Most movies and sports aren't carefully crafted to induce psychological addiction like many Zynga games are. Zynga will actually make games less fun and less relaxing if there's some set of people who will be driven to play more (even if they don't seem to be enjoying it much) because of the changes.

<comment><USER10> Is Zynga different in this regard? They design their product so that people want to keep playing it , in the same way that a TV serial will end an episode on a cliffhanger in order to get you to watch the next one. Sports also encourage you to emotionally invest yourself in a particular team and create long term stories (leagues etc) so that you will continue spending money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a load of crap. Everyone contributes to society according to their want and abilities. Software and technology by design help people live happier lives. The article starts from the valid assumption that some software is built for the echo chamber (it's a tiny amount proportionally) and generalize to absurd statements such as

 _you lead a life of privilege._

 _the problems of our world can't be fixed with software_

Software helps fulfilling needs and most of us are just doing our job.

<comment><USER13> I don't think software development always contributes to the society, but that is true of most jobs out there. At least I can see some positive effects of software _in general_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I want to make a small counterpoint. The reason it is so easy for developers to make products for other developers is that well, developers are more motivated to _learn_ and _experiment_ with new products. The old adage, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink," applies fully here. A lot of people (maybe even the majority) simply will not invest one second into learning or trying a new thing, even if that learning will immediately translate into greater productivity for them.

EDIT: I should note that there are plenty of non-developers who are into learning new tools and new technologies and there are many developers who are extremely closed-minded regarding the tools they use. Regardless, I've noticed that in my personal experience, someone who develops software for a living tends to be more open to learning and using new technology than someone who doesn't. I don't think that's a controversial point.

For example, I know of people (and not just older people) who insist upon using only one tab in their web browsers. Keeping track of more than one tab is just "too complicated", and they can't be bothered. When confronted by an attitude like that, what can you do? Sometimes, it's just not possible for you to boil down a complicated concept into a simple default option for users. It's something that Apple and Google (with their multi-million dollar design budgets) have trouble with. As an ordinary developer at a small-ish firm, do I really stand a chance?

Another point is that I don't necessarily make software because I want to change people's lives. I make software because I like making software. It's my vocation, and my avocation. I don't always want to spend the time and research necessary to make whatever I've built easy to use. It's okay to have one-off projects. It's okay to build tools for yourself before building tools for others.

</comment><comment><USER15> _I want to look back and say "I worked harder than I had to. I gave up time with my kids, with my friends, to do what needed to be done. To give back to the rest of the world, to enable them to live just a little bit happier, a little bit better."_

I don't want to say that. I'm rather fond of my family and my friends. Who are these strangers you're asking me to sacrifice for?

<comment><USER16> True (and that's the one issue I had with the article).

I want to look back at my life and say something like, "I labored to make a sustainable business, was able to see my kids grow up and be there for them. All while working towards making the world a little bit happier, maybe employing some people, or let people live a bit happier or a bit better".

(I don't really want to look back on my life and see nothing but crazy deadlines and late nights)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed entirely. I only meant that when you choose do work harder than you have to, the necessary trade off is that you're sacrificing time with other people you love.

A typical dev could probably work 60% of a normal schedule and afford a comfortable life for their family. You could go home at 1pm every day and that'd be fun, but you can also sacrifice a bit of that and make change.

IMO, life without friends and family is wasted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "I worked harder than I had to. I gave up time with my kids, with my friends, to do what needed to be done."

You know what one of the absolute best ways you can give back to the world?

\- By spending time with your children and raising them to be good productive people so they can become contributors as well.

\- Another way to give back to the world is to spend time with the people you care about which hopefully makes them happier as well.

Thinking that you are a martyr to build software for the greater good is somewhat laughable. In fact you may find that when you write your software what you really have done is put some people out of jobs - that seems to be one of the things software is really good at.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you want to work on technology that helps people find jobs we're looking for another smart person to hire. We're based in the Midwest, and write software to help people find jobs and employers find people. My email address is in my profile if you're interested. I'm a dev here, and we have a wide latitude, lots of input, and a lot of work to do without enough people to do it.

edit: I'm not with the company in the OP.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most programmers are not pleasuring themselves by writing cute software for other programmers (that's merely a local HN echo chamber phenomenon). Nor are they busy solving real problems for the masses.

No, most programmers are probably slaving away writing .NET, PHP, or Java boilerplate for internal invoicing apps and such.

So what's needed is to free up the time and energy of programmers. Once they do that they'll be more motivated to do more useful stuff. I think the most realistic way there is individual empowerment through things like freelancing and lifestyle design.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think most people just aren't exposed to big problems, and that's why we build software for other techies. We also tend to solve our own problems, which are mostly "trivial" compared to the bigger problems outside of our lives.

One way to solve this is to encourage multi-disciplines in school. CS students should interact and do more projects with Pre-med students, psych majors, etc.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. It's also an argument for just being a well-rounded person even after entering adulthood. Staying on top of non-technology news & issues, taking time to travel, spending time with (and learning from) friends outside of the tech industry...all of it exposes you to problems outside of your normal circle of awareness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bullshit. The reason we don't have to worry about getting a job is because a computer programmer provide value and because we are good at it.

So no we don't live a life of privilege. We worked for, and earned, our position.

<comment><USER22> I don't know the circumstances of your life, so maybe what you say is true, but at least in my case, I had huge advantages in reaching the point where I could provide said value:

1) I was born in a wealthy, stable country

2) to, even for said country, well-off parents

3) with a natural inclination to mathematics/logic

4) and access to computers/internet resources from a young age

All of these seem like privilege to me.

<comment><USER23> ...and were you to switch places with one of the great unwashed masses, and they were to piss all that opportunity away, they'd be fools still.

We all play the hands we're dealt in life, using whatever calculations make sense to us. We are "graded" by the effectiveness of these calculations. The fact that somebody else given the same inputs could still screw everything up or make the same decisions implies, to me anyways, that we shouldn't worry about or have guilt for our initial conditions.

You could have thrown all that wealth and opportunity away (as many do), but you didn't. Don't undervalue your own efficacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm always skeptical of this attitude. It reminds me of politicians who go to the Midwest looking to campaign to "real" Americans, and end up campaigning to no one. The thing is: I know what I want. I have absolutely no clue what anyone else wants. And at the end of the day, I don't buy that I'm _that much_ of a freak. At the end of the day, I want the same thing as anyone else: software that works and is easy to use.

 _Meanwhile, your new testing framework didn't make any jobs._

What's your point? Neither did your blogpost.

 _But if you could say that you really changed ten, what would that feel like?_

Ok, now I'm calling shenanigans. You really don't believe my (hypothetical) testing framework can't make 10 peoples' lives better?

<comment><USER10> Allot of software that is good and useful to people might actually destroy jobs.

If you create a testing framework that is more robust and simpler than a previous one then it makes testers more efficient so a company needs less of them.

If it can be picked up easily and intuitively then it destroys the jobs of people who sell training on testing frameworks.

Your best hope is that your testing framework makes someone else more efficient at doing something innovative which does create jobs.

<comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite_fallacy>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _I want to look back and say "I worked harder than I had to. I gave up time with my kids_

Then you gave up the greatest influence you could have.

The author fails to note the "butterfly effect" where a small but worthwhile improvement in a development tool could be the key to doing something "really important" ... and raising a child to not just do a single limited task but to engage in a lifetime of helping others - even if by "just" writing marginally improved development tools - can in turn have a huge impact.

As others note, the author's sort of guilt-trip opining serves to tear down people who are doing good for the world. The luxury of early cell phones has translated into a race to bringing cheap ubiquitous computing to the world, what was then multimilliondollar building-filling supercomputers to everyone's pockets, $25 Raspberry Pis to any student who wants one, and the laudable OLPC practically becoming a moot point thanks to wireless low-power computing proliferation.

And among other unexpected consequences to my "extremely privileged life", I'm able to acquire cubic yards of artisan bread and distribute it weekly to the underprivileged/poor/needy - in no small part thanks to me _having_ time to spare, and to include my kids in so _they_ will grow up caring for those not so blessed.

"Strange how much human progress and achievement comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim

</comment><comment><USER26> While he seems well meaning, his point is a bit silly and shows a lack of understanding as to how capitalism works.

>> _Instead of measuring ourselves by the size of our Series A or our average profit per employee, let's measure in lives changed._ <<

In an article that talks about the power of software to scale and effect entire populations of people, just how does he propose to "measure lives changed"? He doesn't, really. And how could he?

For example, if you rescue me from a burning building, you've certainly changed my life. But by how much? Do you now get credit for every accomplishment (or bad act) I do from that day forward? Or, if you're polite and let me get the cab we both hail, which allows me to get to my meeting on time, which allows me to close the sale and get the promotion... you've actually changed my life quite a bit, and you'll almost certainly never know about it.

The problem is, many more lives are changed by actions that are seemingly trivial, and often even unseen, than by those that are visibly heroic. Measurement then becomes impossible. Except we've figured out how to measure it. We use money.

If you're getting paid a princely some to design some system that end users will never see, you can be sure it's because the middleman thinks its valuable. He thinks _he_ will be able to change people's lives. And, his belief will be confirmed when the end users pay him. In exchange for money, the end users get something that makes them better off. And that's the entire basis of capitalism.

So, while it's sexy to say that we have a responsibility to better the world at large because of our privilege, don't overlook the fact that by performing some service for pay, you are already bettering the world at large. By definition.

</comment><comment><USER27> Most developers are not writing code for other developers: they are writing for 'real people', _because_ there are so many of them. I don't know what audience CodeMash has, but if it's like most developer gatherings, there will plenty of of developers from 'real' companies that are contributing to the lives of 'real people'.

For most applications you write it's necessary to be aware of the fact that people like yourself aren't the people mostly using the application.

</comment><comment><USER28> Build what you build, as long as you help one person, you are contributing to society. You don't need to affect end users directly to sit back and think that you are really helping the world to be a better place.

</comment><comment><USER29> I find it hard to believe that anyone here takes this crap seriously. If you're making good progress as a developer, it can be very taxing on the mind and body. Do I really need to point this out here??

</comment><comment><USER25> The author needs to read "I, Pencil" <http://www.fee.org/library/books/i-pencil-2/>

</comment><comment><USER30> Can anyone tell me why the font there looks awful in Firefox?

<comment> Tim-Boss Chrome isn't much better...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, I know the typography needs works. The orange-on-grey is tough on my color-blind eyes. We've been stretched thin getting ready for this conf (CodeMash) and launching Hungry Academy.

<comment><USER31> Ironic that you state you have no time due to working on a Developer Conference here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> lies!

</comment><comment><USER33> While the article is a nice and up-stirring read, I have to play devil's advocate here and ask:

So how many lives have garbagemen changed in the way OP talks about? How much impact do workers in a steel mill have? What about other simple but very common (and very necessary) jobs like the building maintenance and cleaning?

There are a lot of jobs out there that do not really directly advance society or change human lives on a large scale or have any other big impact but they still exist and people make a living off off them. And I would say most jobs are like that - (very) few people ever get the chance to actually do something truly great, meaningful and have real, direct impact on "real people".

And despite all that, what do I contribute to society although I am quite unimportant? I pay my taxes, my insurances and thereby contribute to not only my own well-being. And any software I might have written or I am maintaining is doing something useful somewhere in a very specific context and it helps people do their job which again has some impact on others and enables a company to exist and do something people are willing to spend money on and thereby that company offers jobs and etc...

Nothing wrong with being "just" a small wheel in the humongous machinery that is our world. If you ask me, it is actually (a much welcome and appreciated) luxury of modern life that we can allow space for all those "weirdos", all the diddling-around and all those strange new jobs that "real people" don't understand.

Also, it is pretty megalomaniac to assume everyone working "in IT" or reading HN is really such a rockstar and genius that they might find themselves in a position where they suddenly change the lives of thousands of people. Just because you know C or Javascript or Rails doesn't automatically make you a shining beacon of advancement of the human condition. Many people who are much, much smarter and better educated than you and me are living just as "unimportant" lives and will very likely never have a chance to become the next Einstein or Robert Koch. Learn to be more humble.

And countless scientists and artists who did change the way we think forever only did so long time after they were dead because during their lifetime, they were lucky not to get burned at the stake or starve to death in bitter poverty.

<comment><USER34> > So how many lives have garbagemen changed in the way OP talks about?

Let's start with yours. Have you ever been in a city (e.g., New York) that was experiencing a sanitation worker strike? Garbage-men are easily some of the most important people in a modern society. The guys that empty my building's dumpster change the lives of hundreds of people every day. I can think of quite a few scientists and doctors who would love to have that level of impact.

Ditto for building maintenance and cleaning. At one point, my university decided that it could save money by cutting back on cleaning staff. Going forward, they would only come by to empty the trash and vacuum our offices once per month; the bathrooms would get cleaned every week or two, but other than that we were to be entirely on our own. We thought that this would be mildly inconvenient- it was worse. Oh, your office-mate had a banana with their lunch? That peel's gonna be in the trash can for a _long_ time...

It turns out that the cleaning people had been changing our lives in numerous significant ways, every day, and when that change _stopped_ happening, we sure as heck noticed. After far too many months, the administration decided that there were better places to cut back, and reinstated more regular cleaning services. And there was much rejoicing.

Your life is the way it is because a very large number of people are doing very unpleasant and/or difficult jobs, often for surprisingly small amounts of money. These people are to be honored and thanked at every opportunity, IMHO, and personally I try to as mindful as I can about the numerous and concrete ways that they change my life.

<comment><USER33> Yes, I realize that and was sort-of pushing for this reply... in a way you can apply that to hackers and sysadmins too because just turn off a couple of mail servers or routers and people's lives will get worse quickly as well. The point is, while most of us won't be a Henry Ford, we still contribute in our own way - OP seems to not value or count that.

And I absolutely agree with your last paragraph. Too many places they are still being looked down upon...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm 22 and feel already depressed - <AUTHOR> I'm in a difficult season, I have to make choices.
I started programming at 14, computer science was my passion.
I'm in my 4th year of engineering school and have a contract with my company and school since 2 years so I work as a software engineer in the financial field (in France). I still love programming but need another dimension, new breath where I could be more useful.
I'll start soon (November) the last year of my degree and of my contract but it's very mentally tough. I'm homesick, I want to leave all to go to North America and pursuit my dream, my other half is there. If I break my contract, it will be financially difficult and need to pay the last year (7.000$) even if I leave school.
I loose my mind, I don't know what to do. I took my diploma at the current level of my study I case of, but I really want to stop. In France the diploma is important but in America it's more about experiences and skills.
I currently wear a mask at work, I try to show the passion and the willingness to my coworkers and my manager.
I looking for more human connections, I do not think I will make the world better stilling in front of my computer...
Did you already be in this situation ? How did you overcome that ?
(If you have work opportunities in Montréal, QC I will take it with gratefulness !) <comment><USER2> If you really need a break, see if your university has an "academic leave" policy or a sabbatical policy. Some universities will let you take 12 months away from your classes and then come back without any consequences. You could take a year off, do what you _really_ want with your life, and then come back refreshed to your last year of studies. The greatest danger is that you just won't want to go back.

</comment><comment><USER3> My advice is just to finish the remaining 1 year of school, it's also great to have a degree, in the end, it will give a sense of fulfillment. I actually envy you because you started that young. I started when I was 19 w/c was just doing the basic things like html, css, and php.

Don't be in a hurry, you have a good start. If you feel alone, call/message your relatives often. Talk to a friend regularly.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't be in a hurry. There seems to be some youthful impatience. Finish the studies you've started, it's only one year. Use the time to learn something useful for your next step in the Americas!

Perhaps you may try Meetup [https://www.meetup.com/cities/fr/paris/](https://www.meetup.com/cities/fr/paris/) to meet people, or just some random café terrace?</comment>


The reason why mouse cursor is slightly tilted and not vertical - <AUTHOR> http://hacksandstuff.com/computers/why-mouse-cursor-is-tilted-reason_1234210.html Technically it's only tilted by 22.5 degrees. But the story is interesting :) <comment><USER2> Original StackExchange answer with roughly the same content: [https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/52336/why-is-the- mous...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/52336/why-is-the-mouse-cursor- slightly-tilted-and-not-straight/52338#52338)</comment>


FloydHub – Like Heroku for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.floydhub.com/ <comment><USER2> That looks really nice. I run my deep learning jobs at work, so I am not your customer, but if I was working independently your service would be a great fit.

BTW, I am a long time off and on Heroku customer. Any service like your and Heroku's that saves developer time is good, at small scale.

<comment><USER3> Hey, thanks! I'm one of the co-founders at FloydHub.

Our focus has been on individual data scientists thus far. We'll be rolling out a teams plan soon since folks doing deep learning at work (with on-prem or cloud infra) tend to run into more or less the same difficulties as individuals. If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear :) sai (at) floydhub.com</comment></comment>


Concurrent Haskell in the real world - <AUTHOR> https://www.stackbuilders.com/news/concurrent-haskell-in-the-real-world <comment><USER2> Flaws in the article aside, we use STM and TChans with Haskell threads, and it's awesome!

</comment><comment><USER3> "All 101 threads run 99.9% of the time and we get an almost 100× speed-up"

Yea I'm going to call shenanigans.

<comment><USER4> This is a classic example for a completely IO bound workload.

The program spends almost all time waiting for the web API responses and the the DB inserts, and the computations take a trivial amount of time.

An almost linear speedup can be expected, since GHC has a pretty good microthread implementation.

Up to a certain thread count of course, since at some point you either saturate the network / database with requests, or there are to many threads fighting for the CPU.

It's very similar to what you could expect from goroutines in Go.

The first answer here gives a very simplified overview of GHC s microthread model: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5847642/haskell- lightweig...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5847642/haskell-lightweight- threads-overhead-and-use-on-multicores)

And more in depth: [https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts](https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts)

<comment><USER3> What I'm missing is how an IO bound workload is really ever a good chance to showcase a language's threading and concurrency performance or featureset. When I think about a language's threading model, I think about memory sharing/message passing, synchronization and fences, signaling, context switching and scheduling, preemption etc.

None of that is really important if the threads aren't doing any real work.

<comment><USER4> Of course it is.

In many languages that don't have microthreads baked in, this is not straightforward.

You either have to use OS threads, which have a way higher overhead in memory and context switching costs and are not trivial to get right. Or you use some async IO framework with callbacks or the event based OS apis directly, which is also FAR from trivial to get right.

Do you really want to think about memory fences and context switching when writing concurrent code? I don't. Of course you should be aware of how it works underneath though.

<comment><USER5> The problem with the article is Amdahl's law: he is speeding up the part of the code that takes a small fraction of the time and handwaving the bottleneck that takes most of the time. "Currently the bottleneck is writing to the file system..." (and then the rest of the paragraph makes no sense at all).

"We cannot do writing to disk from several threads for the following reasons..." \- so his threading speeds up everything except the bottleneck that takes all the time.

<comment><USER4> I highly doubt that the disk writes were the original bottleneck. It probably is the _new_ bottleneck, after parallelizing the data fetching and database IO.

I agree that the article has some flaws, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter baits developers into their API again - <AUTHOR> https://developer.twitter.com/en/labs <comment><USER2> I'm quite sure this title will be changed when the mods see it, but for the record, since it's funny, the title the OP gave this was _" Twitter baits developers into their API again"_, which honestly is a pretty good summary.

After what they did the last time, why would anyone trust them again?

<comment><USER3> I sure hope the mods don't change it, because the title is accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I built so many apps using the first apis and then using the streaming apis just so they kill them that I don't wanna try again

</comment><comment><USER5> > Twitter baits developers into their API again

Lol</comment>


Fun with Ruby 1.9 Regular Expressions - <AUTHOR> http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/10/fun-with-ruby-19-regular-expressions.html <comment><USER2> Old school: <http://is.gd/4q57>

(Actually <http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#>(DEFINE) but the URL parser seems to hate this)</comment>


AR.js: Efficient Augmented Reality for the Web Using ARToolKit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jeromeetienne/ar.js <comment><USER2> I suppose I should just try (don't have an android ATM) but in the past, ever time I've tried one of these AR demos it requires basically perfect lighting. Nothing is ever stable, the thing being projected to match the world bounces around, disappears, jumps 10-30cm.

I'm rarely in a good lighting situation apparently.

Has this kind of thing gotten any better?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are having problems using this it's because only a handful of mobile browsers allow the camera feed.

See my question to HN here about this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13593193)

</comment><comment><USER4> Really cool.

I've tinkered with Augmented Reality in Android some years ago but all I got was a native module (actually ARToolkitPlus) and you'd send frames from the camera to it and it would identify markers and output the area where it was located in screen coordinates.

Once more really cool work on AR.js!

</comment><comment><USER5> Super cool! Good framerate too... I wonder if there's a workout to get run it on iOS.

<comment><USER6> Not until Apple implements getUserMedia in Mobile Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> None of the demos work for me. I only see the camera picture. Firefox for mobile.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately this doesn't do markerless.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK, ARTK doesn't do markerless. ARTK is owned by Daqri, and last I knew, Jerome was still working there; so I'd bet that it this integrates with the Daqri tracking cube (for markerless) before ARTK gets the feature. Mostly because, AFAIK, the cube exists and the pure software version doesn't.</comment></comment>


Google vs Bing Test - <AUTHOR> http://bingiton.com

<comment><USER2> Considering Bing steals Google search results[1] this test makes me laugh. I guess when it comes down to this debate I like and use many of the services Google provides so I have no problem using their search engine and seeing their ads. Also with the history they've built up using all my previous searches I rarely have to go past the second result to find what I'm actually looking for.

[1]: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing- uses-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google- search.html)</comment>


Undisrupted: HubSpot's Reflections on "Disrupted" - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/undisrupted-hubspots-reflections-disrupted-dan-lyons-dharmesh-shah <comment><USER2> I'm only a quarter of the way into the book, and it's really pretty funny, but also insufferably harsh and cynical and misanthropic and holier-than-thou and self-righteous and downright mean. Oh, and I guess I should apologize to Dan for being 25 and therefore knowing nothing at all and being useless. In my opinion as a business owner, the world doesnt owe you a job and if you immediately think you hate the place maybe you should quit. I understand that he had twins though (and thus was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons).

I guess I'm not used to reading something so mean-spirited.

Disclaimer: I don't work at HubSpot and they do indeed sound like a stock- pumping cult that has a large boiler room selling average software.

<comment><USER3> I'm about halfway through. So far I find the book to be an amusing send up of startup culture. A bit like an updated version of Coupland's Microserfs with slightly more factual basis. Although, I am confused by his condemnation of HubSpot and his former colleagues for age discrimination when he regularly questions his colleagues for their own (lesser) age. Especially since many of his younger colleagues obviously had more industry experience since this was his first time working for and not writing about a tech company.

<comment><USER4> Dan has written on Linkedin a summary of his experience as well.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech- comp...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech-companies- dont-even-bother-lie-dan-lyons)

<comment><USER3> Basically the same arguments as the book... just condensed. Slightly more bitter if anything. Comparing ageism to sexism or racism, as he constantly does, is a complete cop-out. He was 23 once... as I am now, and I'm in a worse economy. Everyone ages... it's a shared experience; we all do one day. I should add, if he was such a toxic employee from day 1, as his own commentary suggests, he was lucky to make it two years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This entire post is just PR spin. I looked for substance. Couldn't find any. Exactly the sort of response I should expect from a company as awful as claimed in the book.

In 'Disrupted' Dan claims the company is cultlike, ageist, sexist, and whiter than a Klan meeting. The book argues HubSpot is cruel and the management engages in childish as well as grossly abusive behavior. In the postscript even criminal behavior is alleged. I'm not sure whether Dan is a reliable source (and he certainly has his share of character flaws), but the book is utterly damning of HubSpot as a company. Unless HubSpot figures out how to counter some of the claims their reputation is (perhaps irredeemably) tarnished.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by substance?

<comment><USER7> Well, this is the opposite of "substance":

> improving our margins by 12 percentage points in Q4 2015 (non-GAAP)

i.e. not "Generally Accepted Accounting Practices," i.e. "we made up two numbers, and one of them was 12% larger than the other."

The rest was pretty standard damage control lip-flapping. Here's another good bit:

> When people were fired did you actually call it a graduation? Unfortunately, > yes. In certain groups we used the term graduation to describe the event > when someone was leaving the company, either because they resigned or we let > them go.

The curse upon the undead creature which wrote this would not let the words "Yes, we called firing someone 'graduation'" pass its fingers.

<comment><USER6> >i.e. not "Generally Accepted Accounting Practices," i.e. "we made up two numbers, and one of them was 12% larger than the other."

Numbers don't lie: [http://d1lge852tjjqow.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001404655/1ca8a3db...](http://d1lge852tjjqow.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001404655/1ca8a3db-22b2-4d98-bf1a-6dc4537e2286.html#)

> The curse upon the undead creature which wrote this would not let the words > "Yes, we called firing someone 'graduation'" pass its fingers.The curse upon > the undead creature which wrote this would not let the words "Yes, we called > firing someone 'graduation'" pass its fingers.

Because not everyone is fired from a company, sometimes they leave on their own accord?

<comment><USER7> > Because not everyone is fired from a company, sometimes they leave on their > own accord?

Absolutely, but most humans recognize the difference. Maybe HubSpot could use "X has graduated" vs. "X has been graduated."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My 2 cents (Well, 1 cent really):

Something that stuck out to me when reading an article about Hubspot that Dan posted: "Hubspot's offices were colored bright like a Montessori school" as some type of criticism.

However, having walked around their offices all too many times, I can say that it's orange and white splattered around a brick-and-glass warehouse[1]. Pretty standard way to brand your own offices, and stark contrast to Newsweek's offices[2].

If Dan is making a fuss about something like this, I'm really not inclined to take him too seriously, despite the good points he makes.

[1][https://media.glassdoor.com/l/48/40/0b/62/new-lounge- area.jp...](https://media.glassdoor.com/l/48/40/0b/62/new-lounge-area.jpg)

[2][http://www.dc4mf.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/articles...](http://www.dc4mf.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/articles- large-image/articles/images/000_arp2469692.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Wait, so you think orange and white is more standard for an office than wood colored and white?

The Newsweek office looks like it could be anywhere. There's nothing even remotely non-conventional about it. The Hubspot one screams pretentious start- up, probably in SF or someplace in the US following its lead.

<comment><USER9> He said "Pretty standard way to brand your own offices", meaning using your own brand's color scheme to color your stuff. Yahoo's offices are purple, Virgin's offices are red, etc etc

<comment><USER10> Purple offices. Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Remember that this book is entertainment, and Lyons advertises it as entertainment. I have already forgotten everyone's names, and would have forgotten the company's name had it not come up in the news recently over this book. But the book has valid revelations about the industry (one reason I read the book was to hear this, since I am a software developer with lots of startup experience and now some big-company experience); and it also has sad material about poor inter-personal interactions with lots of covert aggression (which can happen in any industry, but it will be mitigated or exacerbated by company culture and the quality of the role models --- which is one reason you want elders in your company, for if you don't have role models and coaches, you are in for a sorry life).

To make a book entertaining, you need material. This startup and some of the employees gave him lots of material that he didn't want. I think that Lyons would have been much happier if the startup had provided a flourishing environment rather than material for writing such a book. I do not think that he sought this out --- I've experienced a languishing environment and it is punishing. The irony is that (based on his telling of the story) people used quite a bit of covert aggression towards him, assuming that he would be some powerless guy out of fear of losing his job due to his age, yet he has power through an audience that will read his books, and the aggressors walked right into it with poor behavior.

<comment><USER10> A similar thing happened to the Australian comedian Judith Lucy when she was a breakfast DJ for 2DayFM. She turned the experience into a stand up comedy tour called _I Failed_.

[http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/judith-lucy-- i-fa...](http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/judith-lucy-- i-failed/2006/04/14/1144521489741.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought that was a solid response, take ownership of some of the more egregious things, re-contextualize some of the impressions. But I was pretty amazed at the 12.6% annual turnover? That is 126 people a year, it would be interesting to know the mean and median tenure length. Its very expensive to replace that many people a year.

<comment><USER13> Turnover rate is one of the best indicators of whether a place is a good place to work. You can game most indicators without significantly impacting people's quality of life. But ultimately if people don't like working at your company they'll leave. You can delay that a bit by having equity take a while to vest but that doesn't prevent some people from leaving and when it does, it really only delays the turnover by the vestment period, doesn't change the rate.

<comment><USER14> Thats true in my experience as well.

Is there any way that data can be accessed easily?

<comment><USER13> I ask in the interview. A lot of companies are willing to share. It's a small red flag if they won't or can't tell you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good response, I'll give him that. It succeeds it bringing focus away from the fact that they tried to kill the book before it got published

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying to kill the book doesn't mean anything what company wouldn't try to kill a book like this?

<comment><USER15> Could you expand on that more? From my perspective, there are a lot of ethical concerns with silencing opposing viewpoints. In fact, one of the execs was publicly admonished and fired because he tried to do so:

[http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/07/30/hubspot-ceo-and- ct...](http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/07/30/hubspot-ceo-and-cto-discuss- firing-of-companys-third-founder-over-ethical-lapse/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like the book was just sour grapes because the author didn't receive a J.E.D.I. award despite having so much H.E.A.R.T.

Using a 128-slide PowerPoint presentation to convey their culture is ironic at best.

<comment><AUTHOR> How so?

<comment><USER16> Overly verbose. Good culture isn't compromised of four-letter acronyms, or photos that suggest conflating professional and personal relationships is a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read the book on Sunday. I think there was a lot of selection bias -- a company which would hire a random journalist at a high salary to write blogspam, badly, and not fire him for underperformance, is the kind of company which will have asshats in various management roles, too. You end up with the bozo explosion.

Imagine that book if he had gotten hired into a meaningful role at a company like SpaceX. I suppose that is ultimately what happened -- joined a great writing team at HBO and performed as well as the team.

<comment><USER18> Well, yes, that's the point of the book - war stories from an awful workplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really impressive response - they took the high road here and the data was nice. The whole time I was reading the book, I just felt like something was off. Like he was sort of out of touch and hypocritical in a lot of his arguments (like accusing the company of ageism, right after complaining that his manager was 28). It seemed like Dan may have wanted to write this book before even taking a job at the company. Too many low-ball shots and unsubstantiated stories of hearsay. Glad to see the other side of this.

<comment><USER9> > It seemed like Dan may have wanted to write this book before even taking a > job at the company.

This seems pretty likely to me.

<comment><USER20> He worked at the company for 20 months. That's almost two years. If this was an undercover stunt, then he was pretty committed to this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They are pleased that, to their knowledge, they employ over 100 parents. First of all, it's fricking telling that a company isn't even aware whether or not its own employees have kids, and has to resort to eyeballing insurance numbers. That kind of screams "doesn't give a crap," especially for a company which otherwise seems to feel a need to invade every aspect of its employees' lives.

Google says HubSpot has 785 employees. i.e. 12.7% of their workforce has children. 75% of U.S. adults have children and only 5% do not want children. Granted that number might be lower in Singapore, but it's higher in Ireland.

So this is basically a definitive admission that HubSpot is a workforce that is incompatible with having children, hostile to them, and in all likelihood actively discriminating against parents. And it doesn't take much probing to see why.

Mr. Shah editorializes on the "over 40" statistic that it "needs work," but apparently not the fact that only 12% of its workforce is managing to raise a family (at least for the time being).

</comment><comment><USER22> As my mom says, class never goes out of style.

</comment><comment><USER10> "We were pulled into the process". Yeah, kicking and screaming, I'll bet!

</comment><comment><USER23> The book is the "Liar's poker" for startups. Biased, cynical take, but worth a read if you are into startups / > 30 / work for an unicorn startup.

I am disappointed with the post above, they did not address the FBI part of the question. What did Cranium do to get fired? How badly did they mess up Dan Lyons' life?</comment>


Google Removed 50 Million "Pirate" Search Results This Year - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/google-removed-50-million-pirate-search-results-this-year-121228/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29 <comment><USER2> Well, there is always Yandex, over on the other side of the North Pole, far away from the DMCA. I wonder if anybody had done a comparative analysis.

Or, you could try Bing instead. Last May, MS sent Google a takedown notice for a Bing search result, which was still working[1].

[1][http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121008/03500520637/micros...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121008/03500520637/microsoft- sends-google-dmca-notice-to-block-microsofts-bing-search-engine.shtml)

<comment> guard-of-terra Yandex will still have to comply with DMCA in their English/USA-oriented .com version.

But I guess what will actually happen is people skipping Google and going straight to torrentz.eu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I've searched for content that falls under a DMCA takedown there is usually a link to the original DMCA notice at chillingeffects at the bottom of the google page.

In theory shouldn't all the take down notices _include_ the URL that was de- listed? So how hard would it be to take a search term, run it through google, look at all the DMCA results at chilling effect that are linked, parse out the original offending URL and result Title, then reconstruct something close to what would have been the pre-DMCA search result?

Is googlewithoutdmca.com available?

I'm not going to pursue this. If anyone wants to pick it up, knock yourself out.

<comment><USER4> Cool idea, but I don't think it's possible.

I just Googled "hobbit torrent" -- there were 5 DMCA notices at the bottom of the page -- so far, so good.

The problem is a single DMCA complaint contains thousands of URLs for many movies (ex: <http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=709810>). To reconstruct the page with these results would require Google revealing which of the thousands of urls was actually withheld.

<comment><USER3> I think it's possible, just a bit too hard to make it a quick "piss off the RIAA" project. Instead of merely parsing out the URLs it would require linking the infringing titles at the top to the URLs below.

I would do a first pass that tries to compare the URL string to the infringing content. The second pass would cURL all of the yet to be identified URLs and then parse it for content that would link it back to the infringing content titles. I'd actually expect the page titles to contain the infringing content title most of the time (also there's probably a small number of sites that account for 90% of the takedown notices).

This all leads me to another thought : what's to stop someone from parsing all the DMCA takedown URLs for the content they contain and then generating a search engine for them. Legality for US citizens would be minimal here at best but not all of us are from the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And yet Google is _still_ the easiest way to search for pirated content. I think that the most interesting part of this article is that the biggest alleged infringer, FilesTube, doesn't actually host any infringing files! It's simply a search engine which uses hyperlinks and iframes to embed results.

<comment><USER6> Apparently the rules are pretty simple; FilesTube gets indexed by Google[1], so it's a candidate for deindexing.

[1] I won't speculate about whether FilesTube is actually a search engine or a Mahalo-style SEO arbitrage play, since that's off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> DMCA take downs surely have been growing.

However, isn't 50 million still a drop in the bucket, considering google's index is around 45 billion?

<comment><USER8> At the rate the requests are growing there is no way to see if the requests are legitimate. This allows the DMCA to be used as a weapon against sites that are not infringing anything.

[http://techflap.com/2012/10/microsoft-sends-dmca-notices- to-...](http://techflap.com/2012/10/microsoft-sends-dmca-notices-to-non- infringing-sites/)

<comment><USER9> On the site you can see which individual requests were rejected (or partially rejected).

e.g. [http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/requests/32259/)

if you look through the page of all requests

[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/requests/)

there is a column which shows which requests have urls that were rejected. You have to go back pretty far to find requests with rejected URLs (since there are a lot of requests and urls are rejected only rarely).

e.g. [http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/requests/?p=200)

<comment><USER6> I applaud Google for at least trying to do the right thing, but how do we know what percentage of false positives/negatives are in there?

<comment><USER10> A third party is free to go through googles transparancy reports, there take down requests, and use the engine itself to validate what got taken down. As far as I am aware, Google is the only party devoting the resources nessasary to go through their DMCA requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, baidu.com ;)</comment>


We need freelance software requirements reviewers - <AUTHOR>

Our community of software requirements reviewers is growing and we need your eyes! Are you looking for additional freelance work to supplement your income and enjoy pinpointing flaws or gaps in requirements? (I know, it's fun!) Visit us at ArgusQ.com/invitation and register to join our community! The pay is great and you'll love the challenge! <comment><USER2> This actually sounds like fun, but I would like to see some examples because I'm not sure what you would call quality requirements.

For argument sake, are you using Volere or IREB or any other recognised requirement engineering method?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ukigumo, great question! We're asking our reviewers to assess functional, UX Design or Agile requirements to look for gaps, errors, omissions, contradictions, or other flaws to help our customers improve the quality of their requirements. In the registration process, we actually ask you to do a sample exercise to help explain what we're looking for. In that exercise, you'll develop What If scenarios to spotlight issues that could turn into bugs and defects. So it's not about a specific methodology per se but rather about your observations and logic. It's like solving puzzles!</comment></comment>


Irreducible Complexity or mutantdidit - <AUTHOR>

"I've heard claims that Behe's idea of irreducible complexity has been refuted. Does anyone know more about this?"<p>You'll hear that alot, but in reality, you can neither affirm nor disaffirm by a hypothesis as easily as citing one or two examples.  I feel that IC is one of the foundational principles underlying ID.  I see it as 'unrefutable', since refuting one example doesn't rule out other examples.  Further, I don't feel that Miller has come close to refuting it.  I just discussed it here (beauLeeman): http://onlineathens.com/stories/120709/let_532782940.shtml#mdw-comments <comment><USER2> Here is a hypothesis which can be refuted: "There does not exist any naturally occurring genotype whose existence is not explicable by a process of natural selection in the context of non-directed mutation." Let's call that the DarwinWins hypothesis.

The DarwinWins hypothesis is logically equivalent to the statement that all naturally occurring genotypes are explicable by a process of natural selection in the context of non-directed mutation. It's useful, though, to state it as I did the first place... the "there does not exist" form, because:

If the DarwinWins hypothesis is true, then the hypothesis of intelligent design is false. This is a problem for intelligent design advocates because so many genotypes have been reasonably explained as the result of natural selection and non-directed mutation. If you want to prove that intelligent design even has a _chance_ of being true, then you must prove the negation of DarwinWins. That negation is:

There exists a feature, Y, inexplicable by natural selection and non-directed mutation. You could call that hypothesis, DarwinLoses. Proving that DarwinLoses is true would not prove intelligent design true, but it would prove that DarwinWins is false. And intelligent design can only possibly be true if DarwinWins is false. So if you want to argue for intelligent design, you must provide some proof that DarwinLoses is true.

In other words, you must come up with an observation of a single, naturally occurring genotype, Y, which can not be accounted for by natural selection and non-directed mutation. That would be your "black swan" ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability> ) that disproves DarwinWins.

In your comments on that other blog, you offered one suggestion: the eyes of higher animals. Unfortunately for your case, the complexity of the eye is hardly a surprising outcome in the DarwinWins case. (E.g., c.f. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/grand/> )

Now, it is true that DarwinWins is as impossible to prove with absolute certainty as hypotheses such as "No elves with magical powers exist." However, the NoElves hypothesis is a very effective and simple theory of why no direct or indirect evidence for magical elves has ever been observed in a controlled experiment. We would say that the YesElves counter-hypothesis lacks any evidence whatsoever to support it. Elf believers might be upset and say "But you haven't yet proved with absolute certainty that there are no magical elves!" and they would be correct - but they are being unscientific when they say "I'm pretty sure there are those elves!"

Similarly, intelligent design fans, who must embrace DarwinLoses if they have even a chance to be correct, have yet to show one single piece of evidence against DarwinWins. Meanwhile, lots of evidence in support of DarwinWins has been collected, again, and again, and again.

We don't teach the YesElves hypothesis in biology or physics class as an open- minded alternative to NoElves. We don't regard YesElves as a viable scientific theory. I.D. (DarwinLoses) has about as much logical and empirical support as YesElves... it is hard to take I.D., in the form you are arguing for it, any more seriously than YesElves.</comment>