Clojure.rb - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2010/06/09/clojure-rb/ <comment><USER2> I'm coming to Clojure from doing some relatively basic scientific programming in Ruby and Python. Mostly Python. I don't have a formal background in programming, and both Ruby and Python made it easy for me to automate portions of my data analysis tasks. Python's excellent scientific libraries allowed for even further integration into my data analysis tool chain.

I ran into a few issues that nudged me toward Clojure:

1\. Although Python has a richness of libraries, there were still some niche, domain-specific libraries available only in Java that look really appealing.

2\. I looked at learning Java a few times, and I had a hard time justifying spending a lot of time learning it. The gains didn't seem that big for the tedium I was feeling doing the reading/exercises.

3\. Lisp syntax is quick and easy to learn.

4\. Functional programming makes more sense to me. For example my Python style involves an unreasonable amount of list comprehensions.

5\. For scientific/numeric computing, baked in parallelism/concurrency is _extremely appealing._

6\. I was also considering learning R, but when I saw Incanter have been hoping I could learn Clojure and make use of this excellent library. That way I con't have to move between a general purpose language and a data analysis language.

I suspect I'm not alone.

<comment><USER3> Clojure has (roughly the equivalent) of problem #1. Java has a lot of, err, great libraries, I guess but many of them are, sadly, hidden behind a Java- esque API. To use them from Clojure you will need to spend time wrapping up the Java-esque nature of the API into something more Clojure-like and unfortunately the answer to the question "How do I do X in Clojure" is often "Use Java library Y." Thankfully Clojure's Java interop is relatively painless.

Personally I spent a long time in the Java world and then migrated to Python and Ruby. I was shocked at how easy to use many libraries are in the Python world. Libraries like Feedzirra, Mechanize, Python Twitter Tools and so on don't really have equivalents with respect to ease of use in the Java world.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Feedzirra, Mechanize, Python Twitter Tools

Except these are exactly the kinds of libraries that are easy to write in Clojure. Yes, it's important to have these excellent utility libraries, but having those is just a function of time and the size of the growing community - nothing inherent to Python itself.

But then you start looking at these really, really powerful mature Java libraries like Joda, Lucene, Neo4j, Netty, Colt, LWJGL - and you realize that creating or adopting a simple idiomatic Clojure wrapper for your use case is going to be downright exciting and fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No intention to bash Clojure - it's a wonderful platform & community. But...

I recently switched back to Ruby from Clojure. It was rather pragmatic - i'd love to experiment more, but I needed to use some libraries I knew very well; also the peak of productivity which Ruby offers to me was tempting again.

And it happened after a couple of months I had to look to chunks of my Clojure code to port it to Ruby as it had to be incorporated in a new product. And...

It wasn't so easy to decipher it at a first glance. I also had to jump back into a state of mind in which I created a bunch of macros to realize wtf were they doing.

I always was a big fan of macros but this time I realized they like write-only memory. Hard to share with others without careful documentation. Even hard to share with future self :)

I just don't have this issue when reading Ruby. In fact, most of Ruby code, mine or some else's, is instantly comprehensible. There's something in the brain or what...

<comment><USER5> I doubt anyone reads into what you've written as bashing. There is a definite complexity cost to using macros, but as you will hear often... avoid using them unless you absolutely need to... and even then try using a function. A similar sentiment can be said for monkey patching, metaclasses, and eigenclasses. They are advanced techniques that introduce complexity and should be avoided if at all possible. It's the cost of power I suppose.

<comment><USER4> Actually I never took the argument 'avoid macros unless absolutely needed' seriously. Macros are sexy and fun to code. The ease of writing macros in a syntax-less Lisp is ubercool. And programming should be fun, right?

I code in Ruby using monkeypatches and dirty hacks. I mostly use functional style with lots of blocks and lambdas and rarely write a proper class. So I'm a programming language power abuser, and proud of it ;)

But here I'm talking about a cognitive experience of reading code written some time ago or by someone else. Let's say that with macros/metaclasses/DSLs you prepare some environment to make your final code more spicey, and then you write that final code. My conclusion is that for Clojure my reaction on reading such code was usually "WTF?!?", and for Ruby: "Ahhh that's clear".

Btw I wonder why someone downvoted my original comment..

[edit] One more thing on macros: the On Lisp book which is armed to the teeth with macros was the cause why I learned Lisps years ago :]

<comment><USER5> Certainly on my own projects any and all dirty hacks are fair game. When I work with others I try to avoid being cute for cute's sake. I suppose it's no great revelation that some prefer Ruby syntax to Clojure's. However, I can say that Clojure works hard to reduce the number of parens that you might find in similar Lisp or Scheme code. For example, the `let` form in Common Lisp looks like:

        (let ((a 10) (b 20)) (* a b))

After many years using CL in school I can sympathize with the idea that Lisp is full of parens. Common Lisp's `let` is nicely delineated and is easy to reason about... for macro writers. Experienced Lisp users don't blink an eye at this. However, Clojure takes a different approach:

        (let [a 10, b 20] (* a b))

There are still parens, but they've been reduced leading to (IMO mind you) a cleaner look. Our opinions clearly differ on aesthetics, but I think it's worth noting that Clojure libraries will strive for the latter over the former.

<comment><USER4> It's true that average Clojure code looks cleaner than average CL code. Still I'm looking for something more cleaner, still being a Lisp. Time for Arc maybe :]

<comment><USER5> I wish I could speak for Arc, but sadly I can't say that I know more than superficialities. Hopefully someone else can chime in. Let me say that the example with `let` is just a small example of an over-arching trend in the way Clojure code looks vs. CL. I would love to hear more about Arc's approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone point me to some good introductions on programming in a functional style for people who can already program in OO and imperative languages?

My day job is Java mainly with some javascript mixed in, did a lot of PHP too. I used to hate JS, untill I learned about closures (and libraries like mootools and jquery). Having functions as first class citizens is truly nice!

I can see that the concept of immutability has a lot of value in a world where multicore reigns. And seeing code as data sounds like an awesome feature. But for me the question remains, how do I use it in practical everyday use? I mean, after 7 years of developing OO has ingrained to my mind. How do I transform that OO mindset into a functional one?

Yeah, perhaps I've become lazy, but most tutorials I've found don't tell me anything usefull. They show me how to print fibonaci numbers. Great, but how many times have you needed to generate fibonaci numbers? I need to know how to sort a list, find your next connecting flight or make a transaction to deposit 100 USD on a bank account.

I've build and helped design a couple of systems I'm proud of, even though I can see big flaws in all of them looking back. I've been most productive in garbage collected OO languages. I'm not willing to throw all that experience away but I am willing to accept that there are better ways to solve problems in code.

I see great potential emerging from both JVM / Closure and .Net / F#. If anyone can give me pointers to resources which learn me how _not_ to reinvent the functional wheel, but how to be more productive in my day-to-day job, I'd be deeply gratefull.

<comment><USER7> I hate to be one of _those people_, but maybe you should check out Real World Haskell and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good: <http://book.realworldhaskell.org/> <http://learnyouahaskell.com/>

If you want to learn functional programming, I'm of the opinion that Haskell is a great language to learn it. Then again, learning by immersion works for me, and may not for you.

In any case, Real World Haskell does a good job of explaining, well, real world examples. And "Learn You" is a nice intro to the language itself.

<comment><USER8> I'd played around a bit with Clojure, but in the end it kinda left me scratching my head, unsure of how to go about doing anything useful in it. Not to mention that it's a pain to get it installed and set up properly.

I've been reading learnyou over the past few days, and I can definitely feel the wheels starting to turn. I'm really looking forward to finishing it and diving into Real World Haskell.

Though I'll definitely give Clojure another try once I have a better grasp on the mindset with which to approach it.

<comment><USER9> A good trick with lyah is to try to write the code for a function _before_ you see the actual example code. It'll get you in the functional mindset much faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Clojure feels like a true "next step" after Python, for me. Before Clojure, I casually observed Lisp and thought, "That's nice, but I'd lose the benefits I currently get from Python's standard library." But with Clojure, taking advantage of Java's libraries is almost as good. The power of lisp with a vast library of existing libraries.

Is it a good idea to base a language off of another, in the way that Clojure runs on the JVM and relies on Java libraries for the places where there isn't a pure-clojure alternative? I go back and forth, because I don't want to see Clojure take a hit if Java starts plunging. But when I look at it from a more practical perspective, the interop gives Clojure an essential ingredient -- without it, I doubt Clojure would thrive.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if Rick Hickey would've used Parrot VM if he started Clojure today.

Some of the limitations of Clojure like the lack of TCO and continuation were due to the JVM. Parrot VM has these features. You also get to access libraries implemented in other languages, though I'm not sure how much libraries are in reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For Rubyist's unfamiliar with Clojure, here is a link to a welcoming talk by Stuart Halloway at RubyConf 2009:

[http://rubyconf2009.confreaks.com/21-nov-2009-10-25-clojure-...](http://rubyconf2009.confreaks.com/21-nov-2009-10-25-clojure- for-ruby-programmers-stuart-halloway.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Of course this begs for a series of posts: clojure.py, clojure.js, clojure.pl, and clojure.arc. ;-)

<comment><USER7> Without dragging out the whole "Ruby is an acceptable Lisp" thing, I feel that your choice of Ruby was appropriate, though. With the obvious exception of Arc, I feel that Ruby is far closer to Lisp than any of those other languages.

Then again, maybe it's just because I'm reading Metaprogramming Ruby right now.

<comment><USER13> Python offers most of the same abilities, though Pythonista culture seems to emphasize them less.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. The Python culture is explicitly anti-functional programming, even though the language doesn't have to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Call me crazy, but it seems that there is a large influx of Ruby programmers exploring the Clojure programming language."

This is true in my experience. And this is the reason I stay away from Clojure, although I have great respect for Rich Hickey and admire many of the decisions he made in its design. The migrants _seem_ (completely subjective perception) to be less the thoughtful ultra competent core Ruby devs,(who seem to have largely stayed on in RubyLand) and more ... vocal .... folks from the Ruby on Rails wing of the Ruby community. DHH is strident _and_ competent. A lot of his followers/emulators picked up just the stridency.

</comment><comment><USER15> Michael's article makes sense to me. BTW, I am trying to do all of my work in just Clojure and Ruby - a nice choice, but some Java and Common Lisp work keeps coming up that prevents a clean break.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope they didn't bring their attitudes. ha!

<comment><USER17> You can't survive more than 15 seconds in the Clojure world if you bring an attitude. Learning the language is a humbling experience. As such, the community is in 2 distinct groups right now.

1\. Those that are going through some serious growing pains.

2\. Those that recently went through the same growing pains, and have much sympathy for group 1.</comment></comment>


The new, subtle ways the rich signal their wealth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170614-the-new-subtle-ways-the-rich-signal-their-wealth <comment><USER2> Are the rich really spending money educating themselves? Or are they spending it on their children?

<comment><USER3> purely anecdotal evidence but i've heard of one former wall street person is taking a programming course to get exposure to that world. he also happens to be quite wealthy.</comment></comment>


Colorado doesn't need to replicate Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2404 <comment><USER2> In the 60s or 70s, IBM made all their plastics, worldwide, for their machines near Boulder, where SparkFun is based.

As a result of that, when IBM moved production elsewhere, much of the talent stayed in the area - now there are a lot of high quality smaller companies with injection molding and other plastics experience etc. in the area.

Another area in business where the high rents and "you need a VC" mentality would have worked against real world success.

CO attracts high quality people - although the housing prices skyrocketing is going to affect whether the younger people who are less financially established, will come in the same numbers as before.

<comment><USER3> > although the housing prices skyrocketing is going to affect whether the > younger people who are less financially established, will come in the same > numbers as before.

But at least you can just go East here. The towns surrounding Boulder-- Superior, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, etc.--are great places to live, costs are far lower than in Boulder proper, and your commute is still only 15-30 minutes. I live in Lafayette and commute into Boulder; it takes 20 minutes and it's mostly on 2-lane roads going past farmland.

And as an added bonus, when I'm missing a part for one of my electronics projects, I can always stop by SparkFun. :)

<comment><USER4> It strikes me as something of an "own goal" that the "green belt" in Boulder has had the effect of putting a lot of people in that area out of reach of public transportation or bicycling as viable transportation options, requiring more cars and parking and traffic and pollution. Instead of growing out a little bit (god forbid they build 'up' or 'in'), people just drive _even further_ out.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I gave up on bicycling when I moved outside the Boulder green belt. Boulder has a ton of cyclists but, for whatever reason, refuses to build proper bike lanes. The major roads in/out of Boulder barely have shoulders in places. California, by contrast, has proper bike lanes everywhere--seriously, even Central Expressway in the bay area is safer to bike on than any of the major roads going in/out of Boulder.

I switched to a motorcycle as a result, and while it doesn't have the health benefits of bicycling, it's a good way to commute.

<comment><USER5> It must depend on where in Boulder you live and work. From my perspective in South Boulder, there are many bike lanes and bike paths. I don't even have to touch asphalt to get to work.

<comment><USER6> I started bike commuting to Pearl today from south Boulder and I never have to go on a road.

<comment><USER4> Boulder's bike infrastructure is pretty good for the US. The week I spent there, I got around by bike with no problems.

They've done a lot right there, it's the housing that's completely broken thanks to people like Mr. "No more jobs":

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti- growth-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth- sentiment-reflected-in-zoning-laws-thwarts-equality.html?_r=0)

Having grown up in a place with its share of economic hard times, and having lived in Italy for many years, the idea of "too many pesky jobs" is... absolutely mind boggling. Like something from another planet.

<comment><USER6> That man is a colossal moron, which is part of why I love that article's line about how he too is a transplant.

"I'm here! Lock the doors!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Boulder, CO

I don't know, that place has actually tracked SV in a lot of ways, from a good university, to a concentration of smart people, to some good VC's, to being a nice place, to ... rampant NIMBYism that has driven housing prices up to nearly 700K (Zillow).

<comment><USER7> Do any of you modern Colorado people have an opinion of Colorado Springs these days for startups or tech or really anything?

I went to school there (CC) but that was back in the early 90's so I'm not exactly up on things, but I've long considered reconnecting with the area, finding an excuse to open a satellite office or something.

In my memory the Springs was pretty sleepy and outside of the small little hippie commune liberal arts college was mostly comprised of retired or military or both.

Does Colorado Springs figure at all in Colorado's business/tech scene?

<comment><USER8> I lived in COS for 15 years, and recently bailed and moved to Boulder.

COS had the good seeds of a tech hub prior to the dot com melt down. Lots of cities did.

But what I think helped drain the potential was 9/11 and the uptick in defense contracting. All the engineers went to one of several contractors and all the non-engineers who would get involved in startups left town because they couldn't find engineers who would take the risk.

It's a great town if you want to work on the fringes, or commute to Denver, or work in government contracting. Since none of those three fit my needs I packed it up and moved to the Broomfield corridor (I couldn't afford Boulder proper).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Silicon Foo is a meme for non-technical types used to communicate some sort of software renaissance by a city. It makes them picture the AmaGooFaceSofts of the world opening up offices to rescue their economy. Or maybe they picture the next UberLyftAirbnb will happen in Fooville.

Of course it makes us want to vomit because we take it literally and know that isn't what's going to happen.

The Bay Area[0] is the Emperor of building software (business and consumer) and it will always be that way. The Bay Area's primary business is the building of software and thus software is created there for software companies as well.

At the rest of the Silicon Hopefuls, just getting a handful of legit tech companies that want to build software specific to that city's primary economies (oil, real estate, defense contracting, lumber, etc.) would do A LOT of good.

Disclaimer: I don't live in the Bay Area. I live in Silicon Foo where talented software builders either run away or work remote for Bay Area companies.

0 - Citizens of other very large cities: please don't have your egos bruised. Your cities matter, too. Ok, you know I'm really just talking to New Yorkers who have a hard time not being the best at everything.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Just like Detroit will always be the global epicenter of the automotive industry /s. A lot can change in 50 years.

<comment><USER11> Related: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map- the-most-common-job-in-every-state)

Maybe this is just a lot of lying with graphics, but it has always bothered me that Colorado has been a tech center on and off for decades, while California is nothing but truck drivers and secretaries. Yet it seems like Colorado is the last place people look for tech talent.

<comment><USER12> Having worked here for the last two decades, since I arrived in '94, I've never had real trouble finding a computer programming job.

(I don't count the time period when all I knew was Visual Basic and was re- training in another language while job-hunting, because really, that was on me.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sparkfun has not had to compete talent just yet. Wait until the competition for talent in Colorado reaches SV level. Sparkfun will have to stop relying on "I want to work at a cool/fun/relaxed place badly" and start paying market rates for talent. Take a look at their crazy application process. It's built around how badly labor wants to work there. This strategy doesn't work in SV anymore.. Good candidates want to get paid, not have "fun times" at work. Sparkfun's talent strategy is built on concepts that are well over 15 years old.

<comment><USER14> I agree with this comment as it applies to the general tech ecosystem here, but Sparkfun might actually be exempt from this because it is legitimately a very cool place to just be around... But that said yeah, it is very apparent that too many companies here are coasting on the general area's appeal. We're just starting to hit the point where that won't cut it anymore, and I think a lot of companies that have gotten by on quality talent at cut rate prices due to the lack of competition and the inherent desirability of the area are in for a serious rude awakening.

Salaries are already starting to rapidly increase (more than they already were) in Boulder just with the announcement of companies like Google moving large offices here and it's been very disconcerting to see companies resort to the same tactics used by Bay Area companies to circumvent paying people (company commuter busses so you can live in more affordable areas, $500 ski passes instead of $5k raises, free food, etc etc). This area can't really even bank on the usual scam of promising big exists since those are much more rare in these parts. Watching the economics of the whole situation has been very interesting, especially when you see that they're only going to make many of the social problems we're dealing with much much worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I work at another Boulder company just down the road from SparkFun, also founded by a CU student in his dorm room, which has been successful without VC investment. Boulder is an odd hybrid of new tech companies and more traditionally bootstrapped companies like SparkFun.

There's plenty of VC-funded startups in Boulder, too. The main pedestrian mall downtown, Pearl Street, is flanked by tech companies on the 2nd/3rd floors, above the retail shops. It feels quite similar to University Ave in Palo Alto, back when I lived there in the 90's.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that where Silicon Valley is geographically locked-in and there's no cheap office space to be had, in Boulder you can go East a little bit and the price of office space drops dramatically. Taking SparkFun as an example, it's not on Pearl Street, it's several miles outside of town in an industrial park.

As such, Boulder gets to be both a micro-size Silicon Valley and a more normal commercial environment as well. It's also just a great place to live, housing costs are reasonable (relative to California anyway), there's tons to do, and it's a good place to raise a family.

</comment><comment><USER15> Boo! No, don't move to Colorado! It's terrible here! Too much snow! White people all the way to Nebraska! The views are over-rated! Skiing is too expensive! Beer is all just hop-juice or Coors! Terrible food! Nothing but Papa Jonh's and stoners! Stay Away!

<comment><USER16> What's wrong with white people?

<comment><USER17> I'd say it goes hand in hand with the bit about "terrible food". OK, "terrible" is hyperbolic, but I'm specifically avoiding places that are as white as snow because of food.

I'm looking at moving, and one hard requirement for me is that the suburb I'm moving to have an Asian population of at least 15%, specifically for food- related reasons. I live in the northern suburbs of Dallas, which have fairly high Asian populations. I want a large amount of Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, regional Chinese, Indian, etc. food wherever I live, and if a place is 90% white, I'm not going to get that. I'd also like a Hispanic population above 15% too because I love me some tacos, but I'm willing to forego that as long as a nearby suburb is >15% Hispanic.

I've narrowed down my search to the suburbs of Los Angeles and Las Vegas; specifically, Torrance (or Irvine) and Spring Valley, respectively, and ethnic makeup is one of my most important criteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I agree and like this article but the midwest needs to adopt a few things the valley did right. 1) Hand out more equity to early employees and create a flywheel of entrepreneurs who build and finance other businesses. 2) Get rid of the non-compete culture. Standard form in Chicago is 18 months. This is unenforceable in Cali. 3) Put value on youth. We still live under a manufacturing seniority mindset. One woman once told me "I can't wait to turn 30 so I can be taken seriously". The midwest has all the talent and ingenuity it needs. It has a unique perspective and is relatively inexpensive to live in, but the rules need to be revised to favor competitiveness.

<comment><USER19> I think the social conservativeness of the Midwest is also a huge negative for many.

<comment><USER18> Chicago is an oasis for that. Check it out if you haven't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Front Range isn't really part of the 'Heartland', unless your definition is naively "all things not close to an ocean".

<comment><USER21> Yeah midwesterners can fuck right off, Colorado wants nothing to do with that. Heartland is like Ohio or something right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I graduated with my CS degree, I knew I wanted to be a part of startups, so I decided to move to either SF or Boulder. And I'm so, so, so glad I picked Boulder.

My company operates in several cities and it's great to have options like SF, NY, DC, etc. where there's a ton of activity and a ton of $$$, but most of the time, we just don't need it. Most of the time we want a place to actually enjoy our work. We frequent Boulder & Austin since we have investors in both locations.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think you need to replicate Silicon Valley. Why would you want to? It has serious problems that are not going to be easily addressed.

Also, it isn't a given that money has to continue to concentrate in a few places. This is not some force of nature we are watching. It is human activity. Sure, human activity gets influenced by factors outside of our control. It is easier to "go with the flow" of various things than to swim upstream. But we have a lot more ability to choose to do something else if we don't like how this is going than most creatures have.

I don't like how articles (like the Wired article that inspired this post) just seem to presume all we can do is document the trend and make our peace with accepting it. That is crazy. If people think this is a terrible, corrosive trend, then why not write articles that give push back to the trend (like this one does) instead of just documenting it like a runaway train we cannot stop?

VCs can go invest money wherever they want. Rich people have far more mobility than others. They don't have to limit themselves to a handful of places. Nor are other people simply doomed to curry favor with them. Most of their so- called _money_ isn't actually in the form of money per se. They own stocks or real estate or whatever. Money has to circulate like blood in order to stay alive. They need things to invest in. It isn't in their best interest to let it sit in a vault rotting.

It is absolutely not a given that these trends have to continue in this same direction. Humans can say "Oh, we don't like where our behavior is taking us. Let's consider other options." It isn't a Greek Tragedy where the more you try to resist your fate, the more doomed you are to entrench it as the only option.

</comment><comment><USER24> At the end of the day, it's about access to capital. My wild hypothesis is if some angel investor said, "I'm going to invest 10 billion dollars in funding startups but you have to relocate to Colorado/midwest/anywhere for the first 5 years", then in the next 5 years that city will definitely "have a prosperous startup industry". Yes, you can be successful bootstrapping but it seems so much easier once you have funds to use for hiring/marketing/scaling/etc. (Note: I've never raised any amount of capital before.) In addition the "we've raised money" badge also signals legitimacy to potential employees, customers, partners.

<comment><USER25> Friendly amendment: it's about access to capital relative to local costs. Arguably OP's point is that he had access to enough capital relative to his local costs in Colorado to afford to bootstrap, whereas he'd have needed VC to hit the same ratio in the Valley. Turned out well for him, and has worked for others like him.

"I'm going to invest 10 billion in startups but you have to relocate" is basically what Tony Hsieh did in Las Vegas, and it... based on how rocky that got, I think it's about more than _just_ access to capital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It begs the question of why we (generally) feel like tech startups need to think/behave differently than traditional businesses.

"Startups" in the sense of new businesses have been around for centuries (arguably longer). But recently, the popular image of most tech companies is raising large amounts of money to grow/scale really quickly. If anything, shouldn't the fact that engineers understand how to leverage technology lead to higher profitability and lower need for capital than all the brick-and- mortar businesses that came before us? Like the SparkFun founder says, _as an engineer, I started a company that I knew how to build and implement on my own_.

<comment><USER27> It is mostly a question of terminology. Around here, "startup" is defined as hyper-growth, because YC chose to define it that way and HN came from YC. In other places, it can have a more flexible definition. So while most of the audience here will absolutely agree that you don't need VCs or insane growth to start a business, on HN, that would be coined as a "lifestyle" company, not a "startup". (And in my mind, more power to anyone who goes that route.)

<comment><USER26> Good point on the terminology. My main (and relatively early) experience has been that there are good lessons to be learned from both sides (like sustainable growth and profit models on the "non-startup" end, and rapid innovation/marketing on the "startup" end)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _" In those beginning stages, I never would have been able to pay for warehouse space in the Bay Area while waiting for investors to commit"_

You'd be crazy to start a warehouse _in_ Silicon Valley -- run your development and operations there, but when you're ready to move out of your garage into a real warehouse, put the warehouse (and product assembly) in Tracy or someplace like that that's an hour's drive away and much more affordable.

</comment><comment><USER29> If it's 100% employee owned, does that mean SparkFun is a co-op?

<comment><USER30> A cooperative[0] is usually operated and run for the mutual benefit of it's members. So for example, a credit union co-op provides services by members, and for members.

Since Sparkfun provides the majority of it's services to non-members, it's unlikely that it would fit the bill of a co-op.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)

<comment><USER31> This isn't true -- there are worker cooperatives, where workers own the means of production and sell the goods to others: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative)

Which isn't to say that Sparkfun is a coop -- I don't think it is, just a bootstrapped company where the equity has stayed within the hands of founders/employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> They don't need to, but Colorado, and Boulder in particular, is trying like hell to do it anyway.

<comment><USER33> St. Louis here. The startup scene here are also trying to copy the Silicon Valley model, instead of trying to be something unique and different. It is frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The headline posted here is misleading; the actual article says "Colorado Doesn't Need to Replicate Silicon Valley _to Have a Prosperous Startup Industry_ "

</comment><comment><USER35> As a QA Engineer (living in Broomfield, 9 miles east), the number of cold calls I am getting from recruiters for tech positions in Boulder is averaging 4/week. This number has been steadily rising the past 3 years. Boulder may not be SV, but as Nate says, it doesn't have to be. It is it's own beast and it is, by my eyes, succeeding.

<comment><USER21> Yeah the startup scene is pretty rag tag and unprofessional in a lot of ways, but in other ways it far exceeds any capabilities you'll find in California or anywhere else for that matter. Boulder doesn't really need a model, they are sort of pushing a bunch of envelopes uphill all on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Related: I run an engineering team in Dallas, TX and moved to Colorado recently. Where would you look for high quality, heavily growing firms in the area? I'm only interested in running large teams - otherwise I get bored. Eg: CTO or Managing Director style roles.....

<comment><USER37> A lot Bay area startups have opened offices around the Boulder area. I'd look there as a starting point if I were you. There's a big tech sector just south of Denver but its mostly filled with more established type companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Especially not the Man Jose gender imbalance.</comment>


Rules for supervising projects - <AUTHOR> http://third-bit.com/blog/archives/4003.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The advice here is not specific to the subject at hand - there are several lessons to be learned about startups, interactions with people, interactions with colleagues, and yourself.

I found this highlighted some of the things I knew, but didn't know how to express.</comment>


The "Mindset" Mindset (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/ <comment><USER2> I've worked in three school systems. My experience accords with many things Kohn says, especially:

 _Unfortunately, even some people who are educators would rather convince students they need to adopt a more positive attitude than address the quality of the curriculum (what the students are being taught) or the pedagogy (how they're being taught)._

I'll add: Students can "smell" when teachers are disingenuously trying to convince students to adopt a more positive attitude, _even when the teachers are unaware of their disingenuity_. The students grumble the same way a subordinate grumbles when a boss advocates a more positive attitude. The subordinate can _feel_ an injustice, even when he's/she's can't put it into words.

 _[Studies supporting effort-oriented feedback] included no condition in which students received nonevaluative feedback._

A primer on nonevaluative feedback that changed my life (not to mention my teaching style) is Teacher and Child, by Haim Ginott. I then read all of his other books, which were equally rewarding. If I have time later I'll quote sections from his books I wrote down.

 _Along with many other education critics, I'd argue that the appropriate student response to much of what's assigned isn't "By golly, with enough effort, I can do this!" but "Why the hell should anyone have to do this?"_

Indeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not link to the html version? [http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/](http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/)

<comment><USER4> Good idea. Changed from [http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/?print=pdf](http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/?print=pdf).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Elodie – A Personal EXIF-Based Photo and Video Assistant - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal-exif-based-photo-and-video-assistant-d92868f302ec <comment><USER2> This is very close to what I'd consider the ideal photo organizer. However there's a feature I'd like to see that I'm not sure is possible without a database. Tell me what you think.

How does this handle dupes and near-dupes? People have photos scattered all over. Can I throw a random old folder of photos at this and trust that it won't overwrite an otherwise identical jpg with a bit-rot corrupt one for example?

You mention idempotence in your blog post, if I run this twice using the same 'unorganized' source folder, will it copy all the files again the second time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Duplicates are handled in two ways.

If the same photo (based on a sha256 hash) is imported twice it will ignore it and return the location where that photo exists. This information is kept in a ~/.elodie/hash.json file but is only for efficiency. Read on...

The second way it's handled is that the rules engine will deterministically map a photo to a file path. This means two photos named IMG_0001.JPG with the same EXIF will be stored at the same location. If the sha256 hash is not found it will simply overwrite that file with itself. The likelihood of an accidental collision is extremely low but not zero.

That leads me to answer your last question. One of the goals was that you can run a corpus of photos that was already organized through the software and get the exact same output. If you specify a different _output_ folder it should be identical to what was already organized.

Hope that helps :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My photos are in disarray and it would be nice to have something like this to help me organize them, but I store my raw files (.NEF) as well. Does this support raw files?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. NEF and DNG are supported. Other RAW formats may work or might easily work but I haven't looked into them yet.

What others have done with RAW and JPEG counterparts is to keep them together in the same directory with the same file name. This way they are organized in tandem. If you add EXIF using Elodie then just include both the RAW and the JPEG so they stay consistent.

MOV, MP4, M4V, AVI and 3GP video files are also supported.

<comment><USER4> What would your thoughts be about integrating this into an open API service? Where photos could be uploaded, and then delivered to a storage system (Flickr, S3, Dropbox) of one's choice?

<comment><USER5> My thoughts: Bandwidth.

For it to make sense, he'd have to do hosting too, and charge for it. (Otherwise it'd be inefficient and costly.)

I'd be ok with having a web-based frontend to this that I could run on my own server, though. That or make a better (and libre!) Google Photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> My original goal was for this to become a static API generator from which a static website could be created. Once I started down this path though that destination became less attractive. I love the idea of a libre Google Photos but once I integrated Elodie with Google Photos [1] I lost the motivation to have another front end for my photos :).

[1] [https://medium.com/p/my-automated-photo-workflow-using- googl...](https://medium.com/p/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google- photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very slick, nice to see a different take on things than just a Lightroom alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. A few folks have asked how this can work _with_ Lightroom. I'm not a Lightroom user so I don't have the answers or the motivation :). I assume it's possible but I question the benefit.

For the rest of us who don't use Lightroom I hope this works well.</comment></comment>


If you stay in the office any longer, I'll start charge you rent - <AUTHOR> https://ayende.com/blog/184195-A/if-you-stay-in-the-office-any-longer-ill-start-charge-you-rent <comment><USER2> That 60+ hour week job ad is a bit weird- surely anyone good who reads it would immediately be put off? Why would you include that?

Then I read the CEOs reply after being called out for it on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/larbysamirouche/status/10314168074526351...](https://twitter.com/larbysamirouche/status/1031416807452635136) If you don't want to look at twitter:

"Update: @dhh Nobody @GitHub cares about your tweets. The post expired. Focus on your irrelevant development framework, failed career as a race car driver, or Basecamp, which as you know, has no future and has been replaced by much better alternatives that are highly innovative."

@dhh created Ruby On Rails

No wonder their website is still "under construction". Who funds these kind of narcissistic idiots?

<comment><USER3> Wow...can easily call out @dhh for "unsuccessful" attempts at various endeavors, but fails to recognize his impact on the very industry this guy works in? Basecamp, being around since 1999 with 50 ish employees and contributed heavily to the remote work culture. 17 years profitable is nothing to sneeze at either.

I'd call a guy who can even try to be a race car driver in his spare time immensely successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll admit in my early 30s I did 7a-12a 5 (sometimes 6) days a week. But I was the founding CTO and had a good amount of skin in the game. My hours broke down as: 7a-4p support, calls, meetings, being available to the team. 4p-12a working on my coding tasks.

It also involved walking around 6p-7p and "kicking out" others. Very rare was anyone else there on the weekends with me.

Do I regret it? No.

Would I do it again? Hell no.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like you made a choice, and like the examples he cites in the article, you had significant upside. And, kicking everyone else out meant that you were aware of the tradeoffs, at least conceptually. Think a lot of us have chose tradeoffs like that in our lives. The thing that's tacky here is that the CEO assumes his employees need to behave like a founder.

</comment></comment><comment> EZ-E Working anymore than 40h a week as developper for someone else is non-sense is you just earn a fixed salary

<comment><USER6> I have never had a salary job that did not require on a regular bases over 40 hours a week. I worked for a college and during August I would work easily 70+ hours a week getting ready for the school year.

<comment> saiya-jin On contrary, I never had such a job - always 40h weeks, having 6 different employers. In past 15 years I worked literally once hard over whole weekend, to deliver on Monday 1am. In my current work I had to come during weekend once every few months for go-live, but it was due to business nature of employer - you can't patch ebanking or banking core integration during week (unless fixing showstoppers of course).

I have some colleagues around me who work more than I do, for no good reason - they don't get pay more because of this, some vague promise never put on paper/email that maybe yearly bonus will reflect that (it rarely does), or they might get a raise (they rarely do), or even get promoted (happened like once in past 6 years). Surprisingly, their private life ain't very rich, they definitely don't compensate "quantity with quality".

The remaining life that you have - be it next 30 or 60 years, NOW are the best times to enjoy it. You will not get healthier or stronger over time, you will not have more free time or motivation. You can't put a price on a life lived well. What you definitely can do is having regrets later, when its too late.

<comment><USER7> Yup, I work 35-40 hours a week, outside of emergencies and legislative deadlines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently this guy and his biggest "admirer" in that thread were both sued for fraud (separate cases):

[https://twitter.com/larbysamirouche/status/10314168074526351...](https://twitter.com/larbysamirouche/status/1031416807452635136)

[https://www.scribd.com/document/153765712/Class-Action- Lawsu...](https://www.scribd.com/document/153765712/Class-Action-Lawsuit- Against-Eagle-Web-Assets-Ryan-Eagle-Harrison-Gevirtz-Others-In-Cook-County- Circuit-Court-Chicago)

</comment><comment><USER9> I saw this Twitter thread yesterday and it was really strange and cringeworthy.

I saw this guy Ryan Eagle[0] and man I just don't think I've ever not liked anyone as much as I now dislike him.

[0] [https://twitter.com/realryaneagle/status/1031541248451125248...](https://twitter.com/realryaneagle/status/1031541248451125248?s=21)

<comment><USER10> I noticed both Ryan and Larby (job poster) are in Chicago, same city as DHH. I find it hard to believe being involved in Internet marketing and angel investing they don't know of Rails and DHH, and being in the same city as him, almost makes me think this is a joke the 3 came up over beers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why I stopped practicing law and started my own web design company where I could set my own schedule. We strive to work 35 hour weeks and usually come in around 35 to 40 per week. Burnout will happen at higher numbers.

</comment><comment><USER12> > I'm going to assume that this job pay six to nine times more than the > average developer can make

[...]

> I'm assuming there is no such upside.

So which is it? :)

<comment><USER13> You cut both sentences midway through in full they read:

>Based on the job posting and the interaction of the CEO on twitter, I'm going to assume that this job pay six to nine times more than the average developer can make, because otherwise I can't really figure out why anyone would work in such a place.

And,

>For this job posting, again based solely on the text and the CEO's behavior, I'm assuming there is no such upside.

The first quote is a complete enclosed thought about how for such a large downside there _must_ be a large upside. It sets up the rest of the article.

The second quote comes much later in the article after he's explored why he thinks the 60+ work week is such a bad thing and given examples of careers where it is prevalent and that in most cases come with an upside to balance it. He's returning to the starting assumption and coming to a conclusion for the article based on all the points he's made in it including that the behaviour of the CEO makes it unlikely in his opinion that the job really will pay the employee back for all they give up to work a 60+ hour week.

This isn't a contradiction you've just smashed together two sentence fragments without considering the context that led up to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think somewhere there exists a perfect happy balance between work hour requirements, project productivity and employee hours. My ideal candidate is okay with a 45+ hour requirement, BUT does not become a clock-puncher. Hopefully putting in 50+ because they want to or are deep into a project and can't step away. But, will easily coast out of the office after 40 hours on occasion.

I think the focus needs to be on setting a reasonable baseline and encouraging productivity without sacrificing well-being or the work/life balance.

edit: I think maybe I wasn't clear about my last point. I'm very much on the life side of the work/life balance. I'm okay with an employee who puts in 35 hours but is meeting/exceeding expectations. In fact, I encourage it. It's up to the manager and the individual to have an understanding of what's expected.

<comment><USER14> "BUT does not become a clock-puncher"

if my employer is tracking everything i do and asking me to log time against tickets/projects etc etc . . . yet doesn't expect me to be intentional about defending my own time/life outside of work? sorry, but it goes in both directions.

<comment><USER3> I can't ever see myself requiring time tracking on projects, that's far too scrutinous. Unless we were billing hourly on project.

It's more about finding that balance of what the business needs and what the employee needs. Setting standards and expectations is important so that there's very little left to question or ambiguity if an issue ever comes up. BUT, it's up to the manager to decide if there's other factors outside of hours worked that contribute to productivity. I doubt that I'd ever write up or fire somebody for putting in 35 hours and is meeting project/productivity requirements.

I lean more towards the life side of the work/life balance. The company I currently work for has purchased vacations for employees who took little or no time off. Not out of policy, but out of need.</comment></comment></comment>


The YouTube Gaming app shuts down this week - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/googles-killing-the-youtube-gaming-app-this-week/ <comment><USER2> This is actually a shutdown that makes sense to me: why would it need a separate app/website? I don't think it was actually really useful for most people:

* As a standalone gaming streaming service, I don't think it ever had the potential to dethrone Twitch, for various reasons already said by other commenter

* On the other hand, if you are a heavy YouTube user, it doesn't add anything: almost all features are available in the main YouTube app.

Basically, it always seemed redundant to me.

<comment><USER3> IIRC YouTube Gaming was created to establish streaming on YouTube. When it was created, they didn't allow streaming on the main YouTube app. That all changed in about 2015, when they started bringing the livestreams in to YouTube proper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this article misses the point when it describes the lack of content creator/viewer interest as not being a market leader. The rhetoric from the gaming content creator YouTube community is that the money for twitch is just flat superior to whatever you could make on YouTube in the current market, and they can collect what they can by dumping the VOD's on YouTube. I didn't see any evidence that YouTube Gaming did anything to fix that or any of the other problems that seems to be plaguing the individual/small group content creators when it comes to Content ID, mature video tagging, or probably some things I am forgetting.

I think if the YouTube Gaming property did more to separate itself identity- wise from YouTube (even if it was just YouTube under the hood) it would have stood more of a chance. Maybe it was a good test pool for live streams, chat, and that sort of thing but it felt like those things were already started (a search indicates it was kicked off YouTube Live in 2011 where YouTube Gaming started in 2015).

<comment><USER5> Plus many content creators in games have been driven off youtube proper by DMCA accusations. So some twitch streamers have completely abandoned their YT side simply because it is far easier to harass them on that channel than within twitch itself. Youtube is a damaged brand in many of these content creator's eyes

then throw in that twitch pretty much hit a home run last summer/fall with the ability to easily gift subscriptions and many streamers saw their numbers explode. Once you have an audience if you are in popular categories you can get sponsorship for playing specific games and that is money not easily recouped by changing platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The subscriber + hours viewed restriction to monetize combined with rampant copyright take down trolling, an algorithm that hides your content from viewers and adpocalyses just made the Youtube gaming platform not worth anyone's time.

Why would anyone put up with that mess when Twitch is simple, works well and is designed from the ground up for game streaming?

</comment><comment><USER7> For one thing, gamers who used to upload recorded game play to YouTube left _years_ ago to live stream on Twitch. Second, YouTube's treatment of creators I'd say has people primed to go anywhere else. So too little, too late, wrong attitude towards the people making content. Finally, Mixer at least has a few cool features, such as Hype Zone. Pretty sure YouTube gaming didn't offer anything appealing/innovative.

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually used Youtube Live (as a viewer) a bit and found the experience inferior to Twitch.tv . You could see the effort of Google devs to clone the best features from twitch, but they just did a ~bad~ job. From the graphics/material design, chat, etc., none of it would have even breathed life if it didn't have Youtube/Google's userbase pushed into it.

Google product owners need to ask themselves, would this business be viable without the artificial stimulus of existing Google users? GCP - yes. Youtube - yes. Youtube gaming - no.

</comment><comment><USER9> So they are just killing the alternate UX, the content is still there just needs to be accessed via the main youtube website

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure they're only killing this because it's going to compete with Stadia whenever it gets released.

<comment><USER11> Stadia/YouTube stands a very good chance at being a Twitch killer. Gaming is natively digital, so linking that data in a native way will make life very hard for Twitch.

<comment><USER12> Twitch is more than just game-streams and overall works well now. What relevant difference can stadia make? AFAIK it's just a cloud-service, not something that fundamentally would change the game-experience?

<comment><USER11> You can directly link into and share game states. I presume that a variety of interactive observer modes would also be fairly trivial to accomplish based on their architecture. This experience will be significantly different to normal YouTube and Twitch. It won't kill Twitch, but the viewing method will be different and likely eat into their market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1 million x reason not to stay loyal to any google products. they get killed in a flash

</comment><comment><USER14> Wasn't gaming a thing during this year's IO?

<comment><USER15> the old silicon valley adage :

'move fast and break people's trust in your brand's product longevity, thus alienating anyone from actually using it.'

I might have got that saying wrong..

<comment><USER16> No kidding. After Google killed Inbox, I'm going to be a lot more wary of trying out Google's new products. That and releasing half baked products like Allo/Duo are why no one uses Google's new products and then years later Google ends up killing it for not reaching enough people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another addition to [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

<comment><USER18> Except not really, as it was just rolled into the main app and website.

[https://www.youtube.com/gaming](https://www.youtube.com/gaming)

<comment><USER19> There's a lot of stuff listed on that site that didn't actually go away, just got rolled into something else or rebranded. It's not very picky about what it chooses to list as "killed".

<comment><USER16> Also according to Google, Inbox was rolled into Gmail but I think most people would agree that Gmail still lacks a lot of the important features that pulled people to Inbox in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kiran-rao RIP Inbox. You won't be forgotten.

<comment><USER20> it still works (more or less) if you use an old APK

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I had never even heard about this product until just now. I guess it was just too irrelevant.

<comment><USER22> Same. I watch Twitch and YouTube videos, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google are getting very good at this whole shutting down of something which doesn't quite make the usage levels that they want even though it might be very popular. Surely this burning of the end user will get old to consumers at some point and they will go elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a youtube gaming app? Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, it's about time for Google to kill another product.

<comment><USER26> What has Google killed other than Altavista?

<comment><USER27> Here you go: [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

<comment><USER26> I mean killed in the market, not bought and shut down.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stellar Wind (code name) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name) <comment><USER3> My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is accurate.

Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you- didn...](http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didnt-know- about-mormons-2011-6?op=1)

" The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "

I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?

<comment><USER4> It also has a bearing on the sorry state of U.S. human intelligence, since Mormons make terrible interlocutors with foreign informants.

<comment><USER5> Their language training software for missionaries is the envy of many a diplomatic agency, let me tell you.

<comment><USER6> Any further information on this? That's an interesting comment and I'm curious now. Maybe I'll talk to them next time they knock on my door :)

<comment><USER5> Well then full-disclosure, I'm a Mormon, I served the usual 2-year mission speaking Spanish, and I used to work on said software :)

The church operates Missionary Training Centers with the main one in Provo, UT and other smaller centers distributed around the world. When somebody starts their mission they go there for a few weeks for a crash course in how to teach religious priniciples, the policies for missionaries, etc. A lot of missionaries are assigned to foreign countries or even language-specific assignments in the US. Those missionaries stay for 2-3 months to learn the language. It tries to be a fairly immersive program, taught by native speakers of the language and former missionaries, and has a fairly significant software component to it as well. I don't know specifics first-hand, but it was widely spoken about that groups in governments, etc... would visit to learn more about why the program was so effective in so little time. I don't think it's entirely the software, it's a pretty good program all-around - but it's certainly nothing to dismiss.

edit: The main website is <http://www.mtc.byu.edu>, but as language learning consulting is hardly their main goal, I doubt you'll find much more of an answer to your question there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on.

Glad to finally see some outrage though.

Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?

<comment><USER8> Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now?

Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.

<comment><USER9> The Guardian posted the FISA court order up on DocumentCloud. Check it out: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon- telephone-data-court-order)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> "According to Mueller, approximately 99 percent of the cases led nowhere, but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about""

No, it's the 99% of cases that were completely unwarranted in the first place that we've _actually_ got to be concerned about.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing.

I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:

 _On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)

A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.

... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.

My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic- to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.

In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis._

[http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects- all...](http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all- telephone-records)

This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.

<comment><AUTHOR> We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at facilities around the country:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A>

And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years:

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1)

The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.

<comment><USER10> The mythos of Room 641A is troubling as it relies on the idea that spying at 10 or 20 such sites across a handful of providers actually sees enough internet traffic to build a useful picture of US internet activities.

AT&T is just one of ~15 Tier 1 providers, never mind large number of tier 2 providers that carry the majority of internet traffic. There would need to be 1-10 such rooms in every NFL city and metro area in the US to do that owing to peering (public & private) and regional traffic. IMO that's simply too big of a undertaking to happen in secrecy.

Far more likely that it happened to be a handy place to watch traffic from transpacific cables or non-US IP traffic from non-US Tier 1. Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your expert analysis flies directly in the face of the testimony of former NSA analyst turned whistleblower William Binney. Given he wrote the software that underlies Stellar Wind, I'm going to go with his assessment of the situation.

His claim is that Stellar Wind was originally designed specifically for foreign intelligence gathering, then repurposed by the NSA to do domestic spying. Domestic spying was his motivation for leaving the NSA and becoming a whistleblower in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Binney wrote worked on ThinThread which was a competitor to Trailblazer which is reportedly the software behind Stellar Wind. None of the public information that I've seen says he had any role in the deployment of Trailblazer.

The fact that a program has the capability to process certain information does not have any bering on whether or not the information is actually capable of being collected and delivered to the program.

I guess it depends on how broadly one defines "all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on". I'm saying they can't get their hands on that much, and what they can, based on the reported locations of other intercept rooms, could be legitimately foreign traffic at points where foreign providers peer.

So far as tapping any significant portion of US internet traffic goes, a large portion of the entities on this list: ftp://ftp.arin.net/info/asn.txt would have to be in on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You claimed:

      Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying
      on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.

If you really believe that, why do you think Binney risked his entire livelihood to reveal what he believed to be a domestic spying program?

<comment><USER10> I don't need to think anything about Binney's motives to reason about the possible scope of surveillance on IP traffic.

Based on what you'd have to do to capture foreign traffic as opposed to US traffic it makes sense that the Room 641A sites are intended to capture foreign traffic. All the public information supports this. There isn't any public disclosure of the type of infrastructure needed to comprehensively monitor US IP traffic.

If they are trying to capture foreign IP traffic there would need to be a intercept device where the foreign network interconnects with the US networks and where cables land. Large foreign providers tend to have 20 or fewer IP POPs in the US clustered in the same places. Look at networks maps from Tata, ReTN, NTT, etc. You will see many of the same locations. To tap them you'd put a intercept site in Seattle, Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and Virginia. Maybe Atlanta & Texas.

By the nature of the internet US traffic would get caught in that. E.g. ReTN had too much inbound traffic so they sold a college in Chicago some cheap outbound traffic. Now ReTN loses a router and their peering goes down so the bits to that college get hauled out to Europe and back. Bits just got captured. ThinThread (Binney's program) reportedly accounted for that and would mask US person PII pending a court order to decrypt it.

The fact that Trailblazer doesn't mask PII is a issue, but both programs would have captured US person PII, the difference is the addition of a bureaucratic hoop that the current and past administration would order jumped in a heartbeat. It isn't like ThinThread required a FISA Judge to walk over with a crypto token and descramble the data.

The nature of the problem means some US traffic will be caught but that does not make it a domestic spying program.

Unlike many other countries with a domestic internet surveillance regime (Syria, Egypt, Iran just to name a few) the US does not mandate that traffic pass through the national carrier or otherwise limit connections within its borders. Syria can drop in a few Blue Coat boxes and catch everything. In the US you'd need thousands, if not tens of thousands of intercept devices -- one or more for every edge in the graph of ASs ([http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/](http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/)). It is not a insurmountable problem but it would take a act of Congress (likely challenged to the Supreme Court) and the cooperation of a lot of people to implement. It would not happen overnight or in secret.

Now, US providers are required to support CALEA but that is targeted at individual subscribers and most manufacturer implementations aren't suited to wholesale spying.

This isn't to say 641A sites couldn't work in hand with CALEA, just that it would be a bit more legit than "omg nsa taps all the wires". E.g. 641A could be watching traffic to/from a Jihadi site hosted in France without a court order under the Protect America Act of 2007. NSA notes someone from a US IP has been posting things that indicate radicalization. NSA passes it to FBI to check out. FBI gets a court order for a CALEA tap for the US IP. FBI sends order for tap to ISP. No wholesale tapping of US traffic is necessary. Of course in this example watching anything to/from the US without a FISA order is likely not kosher prior to PAA hence the warrantless surveillance controversy.

When fearmongering over home-grown lone wolf terrorism get louder, that's when the real trouble starts (except they probably have all the info needed for that over the counter from TransUnion etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> So I'm confused: are you accusing William Binney of lying, or do you just think he doesn't understand Stellar Wind as well as you do? To reiterate: William Binney's allegations are that the NSA had the opportunity to intercept (and I mean in the Webster's sense, not the USSID 18 sense) only foreign traffic by putting these taps specifically on fiber entering the country, but they elected to spy on domestic traffic anyway.

And what are your credentials, exactly? Did you work for the NSA? Is there some reason I should believe you over an NSA whistleblower? As far as I can tell you're just guessing, and your guesses disagree with someone with insider knowledge.

<comment><USER10> I'm doing neither. I'm saying that nothing Binney has said or that has been leaked thus far shows evidence of a program that is designed to comprehensively intercept internet traffic between US persons and that doing so covertly is technically and politically impossible because of the number of intercept points required, not because they lack the software (we know it exists via Binney), or have a place to store it (they do-in Utah).

Putting taps on undersea cables is risky. Cables are closely monitored and quite frequently are owned by multi-country consortiums so if you don't want a party to the consortium to find out you might not want to stick a tap in the landing station. Also, you might only care about public IP traffic and not want to see piles of corporate MPLS traffic. I'm not saying that's what happened, just that there are valid reasons why tapping fiber coming into the country wouldn't be desirable.

It is entirely possible that you are claiming a "there exists" and I'm arguing against a "for every". I'm sure we both agree that there exists a NSA program that happens to intercept some US traffic. That's what Binney and others have claimed. I'm arguing that going beyond that isn't supported by the leaks OR the nature of the internet.

I run operations at small regional Tier 2 ISP/transport provider with 25 provider edges on that AS graph that I mentioned before. I've personally installed, repaired, or inspected all cable and gear that 12 of those links traverse end to end and there weren't any secret spy boxes. So, no, I'm not just guessing. I can guarantee that quite a few people aren't having their bits snarfed wholesale when they email (local ISP mail to school mail), post on locally hosted community forums, or reserve a book at their local library.

My network may be too small to matter, but any comprehensive intercept regime would require myself and every other Tier 2 (transit + unpaid peering) ISP to cooperate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ???

At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.

<comment><USER12> The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal.

Al-Awlaki was murdered on _suspicion_ that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.

Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.

Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.

<comment><USER13> So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Con It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared _that_ much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".)

Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale.

I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.

<comment><USER14> I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.

<comment><USER15> They could cut their funding and/or use the data center for parts. That data center alone costs billions to build, it makes me uneasy knowing my tax dollars goes to abuses of power like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S. intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint. There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot of ThinThread.

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8>

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing>

<comment><USER17> Note that Binney resigned on October 31, 2001. While he may have been privy to planned initiatives, his knowledge is now 12 years old. We don't know what new tech has been developed since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is _truly_ a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.

The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking _dictator_ , Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul.

I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who _actually give a fuck_ about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon.

And for those who think this is elitism:

      We are not now that strength which in old days
      Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
      One equal temper of heroic hearts,
      Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
      To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

      - <USER2>

<comment><USER19> > What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people...

This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy.

Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?

<comment><USER18> Mindless with respect to political issues, is quite appropriate, I think. When my mom or my dad or my grandma says, "I have nothing to hide" (and they do, whenever I call them about some privacy concern), my respect for them with regards to political issues, drastically drops. Perhaps "mindless" is harsh, but they certainly aren't being insightful or politically educated.

I'm not trying to launch ad hominem attacks on you or your relatives. I'm trying to get people to wake up.

<comment><USER19> My parents are extremely politically educated, as is my wife. My dad has traveled the world extensively (80+ different countries) and seen nearly every kind of government under the sun. He was very involved politically when Bangladesh was seeking its independence. My wife, for her part, lived in east Germany after high school and observed the political situation in a city where many people still remembered life under communist rule. Yet, none of them care about your pet issue.

Fact is not everyone sees life in terms of slippery slope fallacies. The status quo is really pretty good, and it's perfectly rational to think there are more pressing political concerns than the NSA knowing how often you call your mom. My dad has his pet issue (he's anti-war), and my wife has her's (she's an adherent feminist). People aren't mindless or irrational because they don't share your political beliefs or your priorities with respect to political issues.

<comment><USER20> > Yet, none of them care about your pet issue.

Actual former East Germans still remember the Stasi and Germany itself has fought for privacy (see Germany v. Facebook).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of journalists and politically unfavorable activists.

Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies.

The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.

No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.

<comment><USER22> Exactly. Just look at the Spitzer thing - outed for political reasons based on data collected "because of the terrorists".

And do those who say "if you've got nothing to hide, it's not a problem," I ask the classic question: "so, why do you own curtains?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The worst thing is that people will talk about all this for a few days and then go back to living their lives. I hope I am wrong though.

</comment><comment><USER24> On December 15th 2005, Barack Obama viciously denounced this and the Patriot Act.

Which he now supports in the fullest.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, he deserves some big hypocrisy points on that.

But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300 years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non- scandals.

<comment><USER26> Who do you think put the Patriot act into place to begin with? At the time the GOP not only held the White House, but both houses of Congress. Among the first things they did on obtaining legislative control in late 1994 was start work on rewriting immigration law - resulting legislation so draconian that experienced criminal lawyers are often floored by its provisions when they have occasion to study it.

For example, an alien with a criminal record who is unable to prove their right to be present in the US on the spot can be detained incommunicado for _six months_ before being entitled to any kind of hearing. This is a step forward; until a few months ago, the government was able to detain said alien _indefinitely_ : [http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9721558833419753...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=972155883341975337&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr)

Bear in mind that the President is sworn to uphold the laws as they are, even when he disagrees with them; his powers are far more circumscribed by Congress than most people appreciate, viz. Obama's oft-repeated desire to close Guantanamo, which has gone nowhere because Congress won't authorize funds for setting up detention facilities on the mainland. It's not so much the case that Obama wants to know who you were calling last Tuesday as that he's supposed to maximize the government's _legislated_ powers to defend the US from attack. If he ordered the NSA to suspend this sort of intelligence- gathering and subsequently a terrorist attack took place that could supposedly have been prevented, he'd be impeached. The whole Benghazi thing is arguably an effort to build momentum for impeachment, IMHO - if the GOP gained supermajority control of the Senate the current House would draft articles of impeachment in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sometimes I wonder what I'd have to write online to get a knock on the door.

Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills all the best ideas.

<comment><USER28> Last we had a news story, the bar was as low as:

"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked permission for it in the present.

</comment><comment><USER30> M-x spook

[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail- Amusements.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war?

If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?

 _To be clear: I don't want to go to war._

<comment><USER32> You're right, with one big caveat.

All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.

<comment><USER33> I assume this is how China can functionally be running an active and violent war of hacking with no repercussions.

<comment> X-Istence As if the US doesn't do the same thing ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV

Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me

</comment><comment><USER35> The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious.

I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.

<comment><USER36> the pizza case thing reminds me of the scene in Arrested Development "Nope... you're looking at balls"

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU>

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Also see this NY Times documentary short, "The Program":

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national- secur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security- agencys-domestic-spying-program.html)

It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen This is probably why US bandwidth hasn't increased in ten years. Telecoms didn't want it to, obviously, but more importantly, the US government didn't want it to either, because more bandwidth increases the amount of information they have to store to have a carbon copy of everything.

<comment><USER38> Individual connections haven't gotten a great deal faster, but more people have higher speed connections and they are using them more. Traffic has increased by some enormous factor in the last 10 years (picking conservatively from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic> easily gets a factor of 20 or 30).

<comment> daniel-cussen True, but it was planned in the nineties to go up by much more than that, and it could have increased faster than storage technology increased in density.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is picking up.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thanks for the reminder. I almost forgot.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm eerily reminded of Deus Ex and the Aquinas Router. The main difference is that it was located in Nevada, not Utah... And that the NSA probably does not have a human-level general artificial intelligence developet yet. Although one never knows.

</comment><comment><USER42> Reddit's /r/conspiracy hasa pretty good post on the matter as well:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_n...](http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_now_confirmed_fact_the_nsa_is_tracking/)

</comment><comment><USER43> You do know that the internet exists outside of the US, right?

<comment><USER44> The NSA's charter is to monitor foreign communications and intelligence, so yes, the whole point of what they're doing is because the internet exists outside of the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'd like to know what kinds of criminals this stuff is really being used to catch, since it's clearly not being used to fight terrorism.

<comment><USER46> Dissidents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'd really like to know more about this from tech and logistics aspect of it! Imagine the challenges!

</comment><comment><USER48> Introducing the World's First Private Cloud Appliance. <http://www.starkitsystems.com/>

<comment><USER49> ...isn't this at least the world's third or fourth private cloud appliance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Can we _please_ stop with the politics/outrage posts? If I wanted to see articles recycled from /r/politics, I would read reddit.

<comment><USER51> This one actually has techie relevance, but I hear what you're saying. The political links and their duplicates and their duplicates are drowning out the technology posts, even on /classic.</comment></comment>


Why It's Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo - <AUTHOR> http://inkfish.fieldofscience.com/2013/12/why-its-nearly-impossible-to-castrate.html <comment><USER2> From the comments: >Here's another really radical idea; how about.....eating them?

At first I wondered, "What? Eating? Eating what?" until I realized he was referring to baby hippos. Then I wondered what baby hippos taste like; veal? It's so stupid it might work.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't solve the aggression problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had planned to castrate a hippo over the long holiday weekend, but now i'm taking it off my TODO list.

</comment><comment><USER2> >They also mention using a "two-handed technique" and "moderate traction."

I was comfortable with the article until this.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if chemical castration would be an option.</comment>


Ask HN: What angle of startups or AI isn't covered by YouTube creators? - <AUTHOR> I've just started creating content on YouTube and want to know from the HN audience what you think is lacking from the videos and creators that are currently on YouTube?<p>And I say startups and AI specifically as I've started and sold a few startups previously. And now help lead an AI/ML team within a large asset manager manage ~$320 billion across a number of asset classes. <comment><USER2> (This is my first comment on hacker news) but I would like to see more content targeted to people who know how to program but don't know the slang and words in this specific field. For example Sebastian Lague did a great tutorial on machine learning [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVQUSndDllU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVQUSndDllU) I would love to see something like this but from the angle lets pick a random programming language and lets program this together from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER3> In general, most content on YouTube is a bit pedestrian. I would like to see more serious academic resources referenced, longer and more in-depth videos, and better production values. Something like _Every Frame a Painting_ but for other topics.

</comment><comment><USER4> Everything. The state of YouTube content on ML is similar to what the state of software engineering _would_ be if there were only videos on "Hello, world!" _or_ conference talks about awesome products demoed on "Hello, world!" problems.

Practically none of the content creators seem to have ever executed a project that used ML, or worked in an ML team, and those who are doing that professionally don't do YouTube videos, except for talks in conferences that they _did_ something, not really _how_ they did it.

I think you are in a great position and can do a lot of good by showing how _you and your team_ execute a project from _start_ to _finish_.

Seasons and episodes. One season per project. One episode every week or two that addresses the problems solved, and how. I want to look at your screen and listen to conversations and brain-storming. How do you do ML, in long form videos from the field, not some bullshit 5 minutes videos with sentences like "then you only have to deploy your model". How do you collaborate on a project, how do you choose metrics that translate to the real world, how do you retrain your models, how do you do workload management, how do is your private cloud, do your ML practitioners have self service infra for training, how do you do self service deployment, manage data and access, how do you test data is not tainted, deploy and expose models, embed models.. How do you collaborate. How do you track knowledge, decisions, and assumptions and hypotheses.

For example, if you could take papers like _" The ML Test Score: A Rubric for ML Production Readiness and Technical Debt Reduction"_[^1] or _" Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems"_[^2] and show how _your team_ is dealing with each point, it would be great content.

All the thing that anyone who has spent a day in the real world knows isn't covered by 99% of the content online because the people doing it are either too busy, consider it competitive advantage, or don't know it even exists (had people working at FAANG try our internal platform, and they don't even deal with these problems because they're in "research" and they have teams of ops they can offload their notebook to).

[^1]: [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/aad9f93b86b7addfea4c419b9100c6cdd26cacea.pdf)

[^2]: [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5656-hidden-technical-debt- in-m...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5656-hidden-technical-debt-in-machine- learning-systems.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I don't often self-promote, but my channel, DanDoesData, hosts the long-form type of series you may be looking for. Every video is a hour of live-stream where I research, design, and implement the model on the fly, explaining my thought process along the way.

One of my longest and most "real-world" projects was a (relatively simple) self-driving car based on single camera input. I used this model for a self- driving PowerWheels race. It later served as a starting point for a small autonomous RC car.

Here's the start of that playlist, but I've put together several projects. Working on a GAN for fake startup names right now.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meU1fXXIAOQ&list=PLFxrZqbLoj...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meU1fXXIAOQ&list=PLFxrZqbLojdJIMff4WzpXpk1G2pEa3jAb)</comment></comment>