A trucker trying to hack the haulage industry [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30588704 <comment><USER2> Self driving cars are going to upend this industry (eventually). Many mining companies are actively working on getting their mining equipment to be automated to do the riskier jobs without risking drivers. The same ideas apply here. Remove the driver and suddenly you have a truck that runs deliveries 24/7 and only stops to refuel and get serviced. One would hope that as the technology gets more sophisticated the number of accidents would drop, the vehicles could safely drive and react at higher speeds, and of course self optimize their routes and driving styles to save on fuel.

<comment> at-fates-hands I've always be leery of self driving cars. They run on software. Software is only is good as the guy programming it.

What happens when the software develops a bug? Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph?

For all of the great things we know self driving cars can potentially bring to the table, how do we account for the issue of buggy software?

<comment><USER3> You mean you'd prefer humans to do the driving? Youtube is full of human examples - start here as an example [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S-- E5oQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwL7S--E5oQ) \- and note that it ranges from minor fender benders through some very serious injuries and destruction.

There are lots of examples of not being able to stay in lane, pulling out, not seeing stopped traffic, not paying attention to surroundings. Humans can't even get the trivial simple things right in broad daylight.

(Yes I am aware that you are in the 97% of drivers who are absolutely convinced they are above average. That doesn't make it true. Yes the video mainly has clips from Russia - you can find USA based ones too. And a 9/11 happens on US roads each and every month. People are dying in large numbers because of human drivers.)

Edit: added warning about video content

<comment><USER4> All the same, I have a large amount of trust in my own driving. I trust my driving more than my own programming. And I sure as hell trust my code more than some sketchy offshore team's. It's only a matter of time before the first car segfaults.

Plus it's a huge security risk. Cars are internet-connected these days.

<comment><USER5> Well, for one you can be pretty sure that self-driving car software isn't going to be written by hippie webdevs changing frameworks every other week. Companies and programmers that tend to work on this kind of software have pretty good track records - we don't see planes falling out of the sky or medical machines randomly killing patients all the time. Uou're going to have an app store for your car drivers.

<comment><USER3> Cars have it simpler than planes etc too. In particular they can always fail safe by stopping - something that isn't applicable to planes. Other complexities aren't present either due to the 2d nature of roads - for example car software doesn't have to worry about stalls, coffin corner or similar.

I believe that self driving cars will primarily be owned by companies with fleets of them, rather than individual ownership we have today. It doesn't make sense to have them sitting idle 23 hours a day. The owner companies will have a very strong incentive for safety since even rumours would be bad for business. They will also be in a better position to do something about it due to having multiple vehicles.

<comment><USER6> _they can always fail safe by stopping_

Not if you're in a highway.

<comment><USER3> Especially on a highway. I am talking about a situation where normal operation isn't possible such as due to hardware or software failure. Of course it isn't ideal, but wouldn't be much of a problem if the other vehicles on the road are driverless. (To be clear I mean they can just stop in the middle of the road if things are bad.)

A plane can't just let go of all control surfaces. Heck it can't even leave them where they are. It must do something and always must provide some degree of control. A flying plane is moving at several hundred miles an hour and cannot stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This guy is fantastic for being so proactive in his approach while being careful to (what appears to) run the system in such a way that it does not interfere with the way the truck operates. Not to mention the saved seconds or minutes which add up after a while.

</comment><comment><USER8> Kind of fascinating that his preferred interface is physical buttons built into the cab, and a barcode scanner.

I can't imagine no one has built mobile software in this space yet, so there's got to be a reason he doesn't have a tablet sitting on his dashboard. He even built an app but curiously didn't opt to use that as his primary interface for the other functions. Says something about what a working truck driver actually needs & wants vs what a software developer would expect as the solution here.

<comment><USER9> Tactile feedback, muscle memory or feeling for buttons without moving eyeline around, not getting grease/dirty hands all over a tablet, etc

<comment><USER8> I just realized that truck drivers may also be regulated regarding what types of devices they can have when driving, which would explain a lot. Yellow cabs in NYC for instance are forbidden to use GPS due to safety reasons and generally rely on dispatchers to get around. Truckers probably have even more safety rules to follow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Brilliant. Seems to be a simple but effective time saver.

He's got more information here: [http://www.idatatruck.co.uk/](http://www.idatatruck.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It is nearly unbelievable to me that this hasn't been done already by shipping companies.

<comment> _-__--- In the US, I do believe that this technology exists. Whether or not all shipping firms have adopted it, I'm not certain.

As for the UK, I have even less of an idea. Either way, this fella had to call in each time a haul was transferred, so it seems that he's saved himself and the company a bit of trouble.

<comment><USER12> It does exist in the US. The ones I've seen are linked to GPS trackers that are added to fleets, so it's more a company adopted thing than a driver adopted thing.

The amount of data that you can get is pretty impressive from tracking a driver in real-time. There are even versions with cameras pointed at the driver and the road to record any "adverse events". In this way, it's less focused on the driver and more focused on fleet management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Instead of going through all the hassle of doing barcodes and getting a barcode scanner, he could make a mobile application with buttons for each predefined message to send over email/twitter. Probably something like this already exists.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't have video... can someone summarize what this guy did in plain text?

</comment><comment><USER15> Saw his code had a bunch of sleep() statements in it -- I wonder why that is?

<comment><USER16> they appear to always be on gpio 23 and 24, which a comment implies is for making beeping sounds (I'm guesing two-tone?). I'm guessing it's just to play beep sequences after it has done X or Y.

<comment><USER17> In the BBC video you can hear a few different beep patterns at 3:00-3:08.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Facebook open-sourced its datacenters - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/04/why-facebook-open-sourced-its-datacenters.ars?comments=1#comments-bar <comment><USER2> Not very much substance to the article - Facebook opened their designs because they can't afford the manpower Google can.

</comment><comment><USER3> After google, yahoo and microsoft released their designs. Welcome to the party!

Seriously, more open and efficient designs are good for everybody.

<comment><USER4> Google, Yahoo, and MS have released photos of their servers and datacenters (and like online dating, sometimes the photos hide more than they reveal), not CAD files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They open sourced datacentres so they can sell their used servers and craps later on.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Best comments come from

monkeyrun: Just like why google can open source Android, because they are in the business to sell Ads, not OS.

and trilby: Not to get soapboxy but is it a good thing that the pillars of innovation in America are companies that run free consumer services in order to sell ad space for products manufactured in China? I'm not one to ignore the global economy but I wonder in this innovation and new economy are really all their cracked up to be or if China really will own the west within 20 years.</comment>


TSA: Fail - <AUTHOR> http://gmancasefile.blogspot.in/2012/01/tsa-fail.html <comment><USER2> As someone who travels regularly and is not an American, I've had nothing but frustrations generated by the "TSA". Initially it caused me to unfairly assume all Americans are like TSA agents (i know this isn't true, but i guess its just my human bias). A few things that frustrate me:

\- They are not friendly, have a real attitude problem and treat you as if you are guilty before proven innocent. You are the face of the country, the first impression every traveler gets. When i say "how are you doing?" as i approach, its what i say to everyone. Have the common decency to say "Yeah i'm ok" or "Not so great" rather than just looking at me like i'm an idiot.

\- The TSA doesn't make it clear that they are just specific to the USA. When boarding planes in another country you hear about the "TSA" and you're like "who the hell is this International body that rules transport?". They are private agents of the US, no different to the guards that any other country has. This should be explicitly clear, because they act like gods.

\- They seriously invade my privacy and treat me as if i have no rights just because im from somewhere else. Nothing says "Welcome to the USA" like having your body photograph, fingerprints taken (the finger printing seriously bothers me...i cant explain why because i dont know why, but it seriously bothers me is all i can say) and some border guard with an attitude problem treating you like you've turned up to take all the jobs. So much freedom, give me a break...

Moving all invasions of privacy aside, forgetting about how effective or ineffective the TSA is...i just hate the way they treat people. They have a reputation to up hold, they are everyone's first impression of the US and...given the USA's global reputation today, they could really do with some advice from Rackspace on how to deal with customers.

EDIT: Fixing my spelling of "planes" :-(

<comment><USER3> There are actually two groups you don't like: the ones who greet you when you enter the USA are Customs & Border Protection agents. They have a lot of power. The TSA employees are the folks in blue shirts who screen you &/ frisk you once you're inside the US & trying to fly. As an always-clean-shaven-when- flying US citizen, I have never had the displeasure of being treated poorly by CBP, though I know (and regret) it's par for the course for non-citizens.

<comment><USER4> I am not a citizen, but I crossed into the US many times, and never had any trouble with CBP. But I know they do have a lot of power and I can totally believe some of them can't deal with it, especially when suitably provoked or think they are. Unfortunately it is very hard to estimate the extent of the problem based on third-party anecdotal evidence.

<comment><USER5> There is no consistency across border crossing sites. I spent most of my life living on the Ontario/NY border and I can say for sure that I've never had a problem at the border crossing at the Thousand Islands Bridge. Everybody there, from both sides, are nice and polite. The Niagara Falls crossing is a decidedly worse experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I am stunned, quite frankly, that the same people who fought against the Patriot Act because it was invasive and violated privacy rights have not howled about this invasion of personal privacy rights."

Say what? I see the same people railing against both, all the time.

<comment><USER7> I think he's referring to politicians more than private citizens. A portion of the Democratic party, after voting for the PATRIOT Act, spent the last 4-6 years of Bush's time in office speaking out against it. But TSA has generally maintained strong support.

I'm not 100% sure that this is all true, but it is my own impression and, I suspect, the author's as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As this terrific article says in many different ways: the TSA is a fundamentally flawed institution. It's an example of something that anybody who has spent too much on consultants will recognize: if you have money, there are people who will gladly say they will solve a problem, even if the problem doesn't make sense and there is no solution. It's like that old demotivator image says about consulting "if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" (<http://www.despair.com/consulting.html>)

Don't get me wrong, the agency can be full of the most wonderful and talented dedicated intelligent people imaginable. I kind of doubt it, but it doesn't make a difference. If the paradigm of the agency is seriously broken, it'll never do anything but prolong the problem. If anything, it'll make the problem of terrorism worse (for many reasons too involved to go into here.)

After 9-11 we overreacted and created a monster. We've created a system where the general public is the "enemy". Is the system so broken that even after this is obvious to 90% of the public we still can't get rid of the TSA? </rant>

I know when I go on like this about the TSA that I sound like somebody running around with their hair on fire, but dammit, out of the dozen or so major intrusions on my privacy and life by the security state and corporate system over the last 20 years, the TSA is like a poster child for what's went wrong. Good intentions, a real (but very small) threat, bipartisan support, a mission to support air travel safety (something everybody is for). The problem is although it's great at getting votes, it's just not worth the trade-off. And it's such a political football that nobody can touch it. We're giving up too much for way too little in return. And it looks from here like the change is going to be permanent, no matter what we say or do about it.

<comment><USER9> Great post, I do however much prefer the quote,

"If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR: Bruce Schneier is still right.

<comment><USER11> Its natural to read your comment as though the article disagrees with Bruce and you think the article is wrong and Bruce is right.

We all know that the article is completely in line with Bruce and he even blogged it: www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/02/fbi_special_age.html

Just clearing that up ;)

<comment><USER12> Erm... I honestly didn't read that from what he said... I thought the article was in agreement with Bruce. Where would someone get the opposite idea?

<comment><USER13> It's in the interpretation of the "TL;DR". GGP could be read as, "Don't bother with TFA, listen to Bruce."

For the record, I interpreted it the same way you did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny to try to predict what's going to spark the inevitable huge flame war on a thread like this, given that there isn't a soul on HN that thinks the TSA is a good thing.

(I didn't flag this article; it's pretty great.)

<comment><USER15> DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT ABOUT RON PAUL

<comment><USER15> So it turns out that even though the only display up to -4, it keeps going down from there on the karma score. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Carried to its logical end, TSA policy would have to require passengers to travel naked or handcuffed._

I always just assumed that sooner or later they'd start issuing us some sort of jumpsuits and we wouldn't be allowed to fly in "street clothes". Sadly that sounds almost reasonable in this climate. Or at least no less reasonable than some of the other stuff they do.

</comment><comment><USER17> I disagree, he missed a vital point.

TSA: Success

The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles.

<comment><USER18> Before the TSA, didn't you have to wait in a similar luggage screening line anyway? Other than the addition of the backscatter machine, checking your id before you enter the line and some other procedural changes what is different?

<comment><USER19> Take off your shoes, get rid of all liquids (unless they're in a plastic bag, of course -- those are always safe), look up at the anxiety detection cameras, and enjoy flying in Complete Safety (R) (TM).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TSA should be and should have been funded directly from air fair increases. That way it will end tomorrow or would never had happened.

</comment><comment><USER21> True Story:

A friend of mine was traveling through various airports in the states. He had accidentally left his pencil bag in his back pack which had a pair of scissors in it. The scissors were over the length allowed on a plaine (Something like 4" is considered safe.)

He went through 2 security checks in the states, and boarded planes with these scissors in his back pack. It wasn't until he went through a simple, small security check in a small Canadian air port that they were found and confiscated.

I find it funny that he made it through all this elaborate security in the States, and a simple security check in Canada with a Security guard who did his job well found the scissors.

<comment><USER22> This happens ALL THE TIME. I accidentally boarded a plane (through SEATAC) in 2007 with this knife in my pocket: [http://www.amazon.com/Gerber-45860-Ranger- Serrated-Knife/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Gerber-45860-Ranger-Serrated- Knife/dp/B000670CRS)

<comment><USER21> With an item like that there is no real excuse for them to miss it. There is no mistaking that as something else. It is clearly a knife. It just proves the whole thing is "Security Theatre".

<comment><USER22> It was in my pocket. I walked through a metal detector. It was just a matter of the detector not being calibrated correctly or not being set to an adequately high sensitivity setting. That such things are possible is a testament to the uselessness of the system, if they can't manage to promulgate standards and procedures sufficient for the proper operation of a metal detector what hope is there that any other equipment is being operated correctly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My life-long dream of becoming a TSA Agent is a little tarnished, i suppose. This Post is full of excellent lines.

E.g., "Another time, I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said."

"With the congressional spotlight on the organization, TSA is finally feeling what it's like to be screened."

</comment><comment><USER24> While I agree with his points, this is yet another rant with no solutions.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not as convinced by his arguments as everyone else seems. He starts out with a huge -- and admittedly hugely impressive -- appeal to authority. The tilting at windmills argument -- you can't fix all security holes, prison inmates can macgyver deadly weapons out of iPod cables (not to mention laptop batteries), you'd have to tie up people naked to make it safe -- is well taken, but nothing new.

His argument for random screening was more original (to me, at least): Certain terrorist organisations shy away from risk. Make the risk of failure high enough, and they won't strike. He proposes that 10% risk of failure is the sweet spot (based on his own experience with Al Qaeda) and says that thoroughly searching a random selection of 10% of the passengers will result in 10% failure.

Two things don't add up there, in my eyes. First of all, you just told us that there _is no_ security anyway: the iPod cable thing, naked tied up people. What if a terrorist was among the 10% "unlucky" ones, and he had simply been clever enough to think of a solution not covered by your screening process? Granted, the more thorough searches will be harder to "beat", but allegedly even very ordinary items can be used to do bad stuff. And while the fact of the search will be unpredictable, the process of the search will probably be just as predictable as before: with 10% of all passengers being searched, the procedures can't hope to remain secret. So I guess you have to rely on being extremely thorough; with the thoroughness of a search probably coinciding with the amount of inconvenience caused by it.

Secondly, he does rely on the failure probability of 10% being enough to stop an attack. That might be what it takes to stop some organisations now, but other organisations might not be as risk averse, others might change their mind in the future (particularly if such a strategy is adopted). Obviously operations other than random screening will increase the failure probability beyond 10% anyway, but that is beside the point; as is the fact that he only addresses screening while also reporting that many threats originate from persons that are never screened because they are not passengers.

Apart from the random screening argument, he addresses the impropriety of backscatter scanners. There is nothing new there at all. Apparently this is a huge issue to a large percentage of the population. Apparently, having a person of the same sex look at your naked picture would be an improvement. I don't really get it, personally. Maybe I'm a hippie.

All that said, I guess his random search procecure would be a net improvement to most passengers, with his argument standing and falling depending on whether or not you buy into the risk-aversity argument. And of course if you assume that neither procedure gets you any notable amount of security, as could be argued from his first point, the procedure with the least amount of convenience -- his -- wins.

<comment><USER26> You need to consider what threat you are defending against.

Before credit cards were popular, it was common for aircraft passengers to be armed with handguns and carrying a lot of cash -- yet there were few incidents. Think about that.

An organization planning an operation against any nation-state relays on secrecy and anonymity to function, period. That is what random screenings will help combat.

The current TSA regime is really trying to stop crazy people. I believe there is some documentation to establish that they are somewhat successful at that too. The problem with the TSA approach is that they are too big to be competent at what they do, and the near universal contempt that they are held in hurts that mission -- even deranged people hunk the TSA is dumb.

<comment><USER27> You don't stop crazy people by strip-searching them. You stop them by asking them questions to detect the crazy ones. The TSA focuses on the mechanism instead of the person, and that never works. There's a reason israel's airports are safe from terrorism, and it's not because of fancy body scanners.

<comment><USER26> True. The problem with that approach in the US is that our laws demand an "objective" approach to dealing with this stuff. We don't trust police to make subjective decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There needs to be a webapp that grades airports for hassle index. So we can steer our dollars away from them.

<comment><USER29> _So we can steer our dollars away from them._

How would that work? Most cities only _have_ one airport.

If I live in Tulsa, I use the airport there. It's that or drive two hours to Oklahoma City.

<comment><USER28> It would decrease tourist dollars, dollars of people moving to tulsa, and encourage young upstarts leaving and never returning. The government is accountable, technically, but only when people vote with their actions and dollars.

<comment><USER29> One problem with this.

TSA is a federal organization.

The pain would be felt at the local level.

TSA is like the phone company. They don't care - they don't have to.

Aside: the idea that anyone would go to _Tulsa_ as a tourist is bizarre. But I grew up there so it's hard for me to see it as anything but a good place to leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> But won't somebody please think of the children!

<comment><USER31> They already did. That's why they started patting them down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "I am, as I have said before, a political conservative, a law and order kind of guy and I get misty when the national anthem is played at a football game and jets fly over in salute. If anything, I am pre-disposed to support the United States government."

This doesn't sit quite right with me. I could be wrong but I don't imagine a conservative would fancy themselves a "supporter of the United States government." That sounds more like, right or wrong, what a liberal thinks of a conservative (and what a conservative thinks of a liberal, for that matter).

Supporter of "the troops" or "the nation" sure, but "the government" seems a bit off.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't really buy the argument "TSA has never [...] foiled a terrorist plot or stopped an attack on an airliner.": it could be argued that the TSA measures act as an effective deterrent.

A stronger argument could be to show that in _none_ of the countries that do not adopt TSA-like measures there have been any terrorist attempts, let alone successful.

How easy would it be to board in, say, Mexico or Canada, and hijack the flight to the US?

EDIT: looking at the comments (and the downvotes) I have the feeling that I wasn't clear. I agree with the article pretty much on everything, I'm just trying to say that where there are no body scanners deployed, for example in Europe, there have been no terrorist attacks, and I think that this is a stronger argument than "the TSA hasn't prevented any attack".

<comment><USER34> As he said in the article, if they HAD stopped someone, that someone would have been charged with a crime. Where are the charges?

<comment><USER35> That's a fairly naive argument. My local bank discourages potential robbers with armed guards, alarms, and a locked vault. Just because they've never charged anyone with bank robbery doesn't mean those measures didn't prevent potential robbers from deciding to become actual robbers.

It's really not any better than the argument that of course the TSA keeps away terrorists and tigers because there haven't been any hijackings or tiger maulings on airplanes since they took over.

<comment><USER36> Let me tell you about this new product of mine. It's called Rhinoceros powder, and it does - you guessed it! It scares away Rhinos. As long as you spread Rhino powder everywhere, you will not be attacked by a Rhino. It works particularly well in urban areas.

It clearly works, too! I've been using it for decades, as have many of my customers, and wouldn't you know it! None of them have ever been attacked by a Rhino.

$60b a pack.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure if it's intentional, but there was a Simpsons parallel in "Much Apu About Nothing":

      [Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch.  Homer watches proudly.]

      Homer: Not a bear in sight.  The Bear Patrol must be working like a
             charm.
       Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
      Homer: Thank you, dear.
       Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
      Homer: Oh, how does it work?
       Lisa: It doesn't work.
      Homer: Uh-huh.
       Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
      Homer: Uh-huh.
       Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
              [Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
      Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
              [Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]

<http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html>

<comment><USER36> This story archetype is centuries old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "I have a unique position from which to make these statements. For 25 years, as many of readers know, I was an FBI Special Agent..."

I couldn't believe he didn't finish the last paragraph of his background with "I am the most interesting man in the world."

<comment><USER39> After reading the same paragraph, I think he is the type we need leading the TSA

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does he really think potential terrorists or criminals are going to hijack a plane using toothbrushes or popsicle sticks? The purpose of the TSA is to screen all passengers for real threats like guns, blades, and most of all, bombs.

He says there was no outcry over the backscatters. That's just out of touch; it was all over the Internet and even major news media back around November of 2010. Liberals and conservatives alike found the idea of their nude images too far. This kept backscatters from being deployed for the most part; have you ever seen one?

Seems to me that the TSA has changed their backscatter approach since then. Instead of showing the full images to security personnel it will do some computational analysis of the images and then represent any anomalies on a simple drawing of a human. The people going through the machine will see the same images the TSA will. See this image: [http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA- Bo...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA-Body-Scanner- Image.jpg)

Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes. But I'd much rather do that than let people get onto my plane with explosives. Forget patriotism, it's a matter of your own personal safety.

<comment><USER41> > Does he really think potential terrorists or criminals are going to hijack a > plane using toothbrushes or popsicle sticks?

Yes. Actually there's an interesting connection with a recent HN article about how space missions are being severely hampered by an irrational aversion to the risk of loss of human life. In the same way, someone with a sharpened stick holding it at the throat of an innocent woman could very well lead to the hijacking of a plane because the people in the situation may very well consider doing "anything" to save that one life. Hollywood, and all that.

> Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes.

This is one reason why you may deserve some downvoting - this is a classic straw-man argument, and minimizes the true root of the problem: we have a vast, faceless beauracracy that seriously messes with millions of Americans (and foreigners!) for no good purpose. This is a serious problem, and minimizing it like this won't earn you any influence.

P.S. I disagree with the parent comment, and yet I upvoted it because it is cogently argued, if wrong.

<comment><USER42> Holding sharp objects at someone's throat was a tactic that worked for only part of one day (on 9/11). Try it now and there will be one passenger with a cut throat, and an entire plane swarming you.

<comment><USER41> I agree with you, and that they should really just let pocket knives on planes since they are an equivalent threat to a toothbrush and 5 minutes of modification.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AI Designs Computer Chips for More Powerful AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/ai-designs-computer-chips-for-more-powerful-ai <comment><USER2> And this is how we get Skynet...</comment>


Ask HN: Job retraining ideas after Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> I'm a Sr. UX + HMI Designer with some previous front end Dev experience, and was recently laid off. Given the effects of COVID-19, I'm thinking that senior UX jobs may be hard to come by, and am wondering about retraining and entering another field. What do you think might be good job options? <comment><USER2> You could look at becoming a project manager. Study up for the PMP and certify. I have no idea how insecure software project managers will be a weakened economy though.

Likely more secure positions will be network engineers or security engineers. Which way to go depends on your current income level. If you are deep into your career and earning a high income you are better off with the security path. Security engineers cap much lower than top network engineers, but pay well starting out. For security study up and take the CISSP test.

Network engineering will kind of feel liking starting over in your career. You will want to start with an entry level certification like the CCENT and work towards the beginner CCNA certification. Years later once you can pass the CCNP certification you might well be making more in networking than in software. Then if you stick around long enough to become an expert you can attain a CCIE which provides excellent job security at high pay, especially if you have extensive software scripting experience.</comment>


Oracle Open World: Ellison Preaches Cloud Religion - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/oracle-open-world-ellison-preaches-cloud-religion/

<comment><AUTHOR> 4 years ago, Larry had this to say about Cloud computing: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0></comment>


Free-to-play, free-to-move, startups, and free-to-innovate:  Valve HQ - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGg0OmtslUI

<comment><AUTHOR> Warning: youtube vid. But this is some of my favorite personalities from ye olde mod scene talking about their very successful business. Very happy for them, and i'm always interested in non-standard corporate hierarchies.</comment>


6.851: Advanced Data Structures (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/fall17/lectures/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in Data Structures classes, I also strongly recommend Keith Schwartz's CS166. Unfortunately there are no public video recordings afaik, but slides and handouts are available, and also of exceptional quality: [http://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs166/cs166.1196/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs166/cs166.1196/)

<comment><USER3> That is a nice set of materials, can confirm. I loved the range-minimum-query parts, amongst others.

RMQ is cool because there's a bunch of different approaches, there's different tradeoffs to make (time, memory, implementation effort, pratical and theoretical efficiency, etc.), and some of the results are surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really interesting class, and Erik Demaine is a top notch lecturer. If you're interested in algorithms I can easily recommend this class.

This isn't intro material though, and most of it is fairly niche in terms of usage. Your average programmer probably won't use any of this knowledge.

The most generally useful bits I remember were on the different types of persistence in data structures, which is legitimately cool and occasionally useful, especially in purely fuctional programming.

I also found the link-cut trees to be about the most interesting data structure I know of, they're cool as hell. You start with a pretty simple DS (splay trees), add some interesting analysis that's also related to heavy- light decomposition, and extend them to do something impressive. It's just a fun mix of analysis and implementation towards a goal. The moment it clicked for me was one of those once-a-year satisfaction events.

If any of that somehow talked you into doing this class, I'd recommend the Intro to Algorithms class also in MIT OCW first, at least one of the years is partially taught by Erik Demaine as well.

<comment><USER4> I found the hash table lecture really interesting, somewhat practical, and it made me sound really smart when I got the inevitable hash table questions during interviews.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I don't remember that one. Maybe I should check it out again!</comment></comment></comment>


An Alternative Approach to Re-Orgs - <AUTHOR> https://caseyaccidental.com/alternative-approach-re-orgs/ <comment><USER2> My company recently went through a re-org and placed one of the senior developers in a new lead engineer for R&D projects. He certainly is an excellent developer and quite a competent communicator however it really was a sudden move to shift this position into the company.

Under the surface I couldn't help but note that the lack of internal advertisement of what would be a very desirable role must have annoyed several other senior members. Additionally, it segregated a team of developers off to work on 'cool' things while the other half is left working on legacy projects.

I would agree with my companies perspective that something like this was necessary however as the author notes, the lack of involvement outside of C-level discussions was quite surprising and is likely going to backfire.

<comment><USER3> The lack of involvement is generally a problem in companies. Not only with reorganizations but also with things like remodeling of the workplace. Instead of getting feedback from the people who eventually have to sit in that space management usually closes itself off and doesn't explain the reasons. Once it's done you will see a self congratulatory email how great things will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going through my third re-org in less than a year and a half. This is my 6th new boss in 3 years and I've no faith that my new boss even understands what my teams job is as the re-org stuck us in with people openly hosttile to our job. Looking for the door is right.

</comment><comment><USER5> The author doesn't spend much time on _why_ re-orgs "almost always make some people unhappy, cause employee departures, and stifle productivity," but I'd claim it's organizational politics. Every re-org has winners and losers, almost by definition: there can only be so many people in charge, and likewise not everyone can work on that cool new feature. This is particularly true in relatively stagnant organizations: your best chance to move up the hierarchy as a manager might be during the once-in-a-blue-moon re-org. _Of course_ zero- sum shifts in organizational status of a bunch of imperfect human beings are going to be political.

The central thesis seems to be that by "involving the team members that would be effected from the beginning and making it their decision," the discomfort around re-orgs will be avoided.

I might be missing something obvious from the article, but I have a hard time believing that adding more imperfect humans (in fact, all of the imperfect humans the organization has!) into the mix and letting teams self-organize would reduce awkward politics rather than making them worse.

<comment><USER6> A few other reasons reorgs can "almost always make some people unhappy, cause employee departures, and stifle productivity": A. Most orgs have multiple unmapped communication channels that smooth operations. With reorgs those get broken and have to be reformed and operationally remapped, which creates mayhem in day-to day productivity B. Change is unsettling even when welcomed; C. The view of how work gets done and why is highly localized. Reorgs often clean up only certain hierarchical levels of this how/why coupling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This works for small companies that are scaling up, but fails when larger orgs need to scale down / reduce expenses. Particularly:

> Inform the teams affected that the new objectives create an opportunity for > them to re-organize to be more effective at achieving these objectives.

In the US, reduction in force requires companies to file a WARN statement with that companies state. There's a few other legal requirements as well: almost all of them require c-level staff to absolutely say nothing to all employees until the day they announce it.

If an employee catches wind of a layoff early, there could be a leak to investors, which leads to insider trading and a whole host of other legal battles. As a result, CEO's and other decision makers typically cannot "inform the teams affected" until all the details have been set in stone.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about something more fundamental? Do we really need layers of management? There are interesting examples of more-agile organizational structures examined in [https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/](https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/)

<comment><USER8> Found this somewhat-cliackbaity take: The Most Dangerous Notion in "Reinventing Organizations" [https://medium.com/@jessicajprentice/the-most- dangerous-noti...](https://medium.com/@jessicajprentice/the-most-dangerous- notion-in-reinventing-organizations-9032930295e2)

... TLDR: the dangerous notion is that "teal" organization is something new, when in fact we have millennia of history to learn from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At a certain size, a company re-org essentially amounts to pushing the deck chairs around on the Titanic

</comment><comment><USER10> For some organizations, their business reality changes constantly. The general approach is to reorganize the labor force to match the business reality. But this can mean that organizations can end up reorging many many times. Because the folks at the top of even moderately sized organizations don't really understand the day-to-day life of those most affected by the reorgs, the effort is usually something of a waste and can often produce "curious" movement of staff into positions that make little sense. But ultimately, the real problem is that a reorganization is supposed to introduce some semi- permanent shape to the workplace, and constantly changing that up becomes counter productive and pointless. One thing that also gets lost in reorgs is that an organization is not just an arrangement of people, but also the mechanisms and processes by which those people work together.

One way of handling this is to organize in such a way that assumes flux and then organize around that basis. There's lots of ways to do this, but one of my favorites is to group functional areas into labor pools with a lead (and maybe a deputy or two depending on the size of the pool). The lead's job is to match people to needs based on requests from project leads, manage work load on staff and ensure nobody ends up overtasked.

The project leads come from a pool as well. When a project arises, determines the roles, percentage of time, length of engagement, and skills they need filled and requests the staff from the functional labor pool leads. The project lead and the pool leads negotiate and if there is somebody who can do the job they're assigned to it. If not, a hiring event is triggered.

After that point projects are run by the project leads with their staff until completion. Once completed, the staff and their percentages are returned to the pool. Assignments and end-of-assignments _must_ occur on a weekly basis as it simply makes planning easier. Starting projects in the middle of a week simply aren't allowed.

It takes careful tracking of time, usually a weekly meeting between all of the labor pool leads to ensure people aren't over/under tasked, staff issues raised, hiring needs and so on. A big matrix of people vs. projects with percentage of time and duration is usually all that's needed to track things reasonably well.

There will inevitably be a few people who are basically "permanently" assigned to certain projects and that's fine. Just track them as 100% and "indefinite" or "end of FY" for duration and they become very simple to track.

Source: I've run organizations of up to 70 people in ways similar to this and it was considered to be _very_ effective in both productivity as well as stopping the constant reorgs. While I ran those orgs like this, the reorgs effectively stopped and many people who were on their way out stayed around and were ultimately quite productive. When I left those places, they usually assumed a more traditional line-and-block org structure and the reorgs started all over again, shedding staff and losing productivity.

Downsides were that not all staff can handle having multiple projects and be matrixed out this way. For many people though, they thrive in it.

<comment><USER11> Congratulation, you've just killed ownership. My current org is like that (a "Linux team", a "Network team", an "Ops team", a "Windows team that's also in charge of user management because AD", an "Info sec team". It's hell. Having a team by product, with various skills and a person clearly in charge of that product from the draft to the after sale, would be so much better.</comment></comment>


Alfred 4 Is Here - <AUTHOR> https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/announcements/alfred-4-is-here/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested to hear thoughts about the value brought by V4 vs V3.</comment>


Domino's stock has outperformed Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon this decade - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/938620/dominos-dpz-stock-has-outperformed-google-goog-facebook-fb-apple-aapl-and-amazon-amzn-this-decade/ <comment><USER2> Soon to be the exclusive distributor of MtDew VeriCans.

In all seriousness, getting service right is all it takes for most people to want to do repeat biz with you.</comment>


Assemblers and Loaders (1993) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidsalomon.name/assem.advertis/asl.pdf <comment><USER2> If this is the book I recall seeing mentioned before, for a while, a number of years ago, it was considered both excellent and "hard to find."

Haven't read it. But thought I'd mention that, by way of sort of an indirect, old plug for it.

P.S. Correcting myself, my old memory: I seem to recall that one was called "Linkers and Loaders". Seems to be this?

[https://www.elsevier.com/books/linkers-and- loaders/levine/97...](https://www.elsevier.com/books/linkers-and- loaders/levine/978-0-08-051031-6)

<comment><USER3> Yes, _Linkers and Loaders_ is an excellent book. There's also this 20 part linker essay by Ian Lance Taylor who went on to write _gold_ :

[http://inai.de/documents/Linkers.pdf](http://inai.de/documents/Linkers.pdf)

[https://events.linuxfoundation.org/slides/lfcs2010_taylor.pd...](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/slides/lfcs2010_taylor.pdf)

[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34417.pdf)

And while _gold_ is good, _lld_ ups the bar even a little further.

[https://lld.llvm.org/](https://lld.llvm.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Always worth knowing what's happening behind all the flashy UIs and JS. Great read!</comment>


YC Partner Harjeet Taggar Gives Insights - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/02/08/y-combinator-partner-harjeet-taggar-gives-insights-interview/

<comment><USER2> Harj started working with YC in W10 (my batch), and even 3 batches later, he still responds instantly to our emails and hops on skype whenever we need advice. Truly a stand-up guy and someone we really trust.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I've noticed that technical founders especially have realized that local small business will pay you money for products_

This is true. They also pay a fair chunk of change with a very short sales cycle (even no-touch in some cases -- though Hubspot and Groupon certainly prove you can do well with higher touch sales), and they're not unwilling to be billed monthly for software/services which demonstrably add value to the business.

</comment><comment><USER4> > With all this experience, I asked about when he launches his next startup, > what will he do differently? "I would definitely work on a problem or > product that I personally was interested in and meant something to me. When > I was working on Auctomatic, we bought all this stuff from China and tried > to trade it on Ebay [Auctomatic was an auction and marketplace management > system] to try and understand how power sellers work and the problems they > faced. But it wasn't the same as making something that I really resonated > with."

So, so true. Trying to take this lesson to heart this time around, and build something I want to use everyday.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the most in-depth write-ups I've seen on YC anywhere on the web.

<comment><USER6> I'm impressed with The Next Web.

I hadn't heard much about them before last week - when we launched <http://lanyrd.com/> on TechCrunch they conducted an interview with us that same day (through olark, our live-help chat widget) and posted their own story, which was well written and had new information not covered by the TC story: [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/31/lanyrd-launches-to- cha...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/31/lanyrd-launches-to-change-the- conference-landscape-using-twitter/)

The Harj interview series has been excellent too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "At our stage companies fail because ... the founders don't get along"

It seems that this is a serious but less talked about problem to watch out for. Anyone have insight into how to avoid one of the less visible mistakes beyond the obvious know your co-founders well and set expectations upfront?

<comment><USER8> Only start a company with people you've known for a while and worked on projects with before.

If you don't know anyone like that, you can manufacture them. Find good people and try working with them on projects that are not the startup. College and (especially) grad school tend to create these situations, but you can also make them happen deliberately, e.g. by collaborating on some open source project.

The chances of us interviewing a team of founders who'd built some fairly well regarded open source software together would be close to 100%.

<comment><USER9> This generalization seems to ignore teams who work together over time - say a year or three - and while bootstrapping. Have you never seen a data point in that direction?

Teams thrown together for the sole purpose of YC seem likely to have poor records. But YC is a very, very special case. Bootstrapping takes time and effort that either deepens relationships or destroys them. I don't see a middle ground there, actually.

Have you ever looked at how long a team has known each other as a predictor of success/failure? It seems your philosophy assumes more is better. Is there any data to support that belief? What's the record for spouses?

<comment><USER10> A founding team who's already been working together for years or survived the bootstrapping experience match, or at least approximate, the criteria pg's looking for – a cohesive team that can handle stress well. My take is that the advice he gives is suited for people looking to start a brand new company during yc, not those who have already started and are applying to yc.

More importantly, I don't think pg's saying that length of relationship is a deciding factor. Rather, he's highlighting that you need to know you work well with your cofounders and the relationship – new or old – won't fall apart under stress and trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On the last picture on the page, I think there should be a bubble coming out of pg's mouth, "One of you has betrayed me. Judas, did you add unnecessary features before launch?"

</joke, don't mean to offend anyone>

<comment><USER12> The first thing I thought of was that it looked strikingly similar to The Last Supper.

<comment><USER13> Well covered territory. :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=643741></comment></comment></comment>


A Mastodon toot has reached the front page of Hacker News for the first time - <AUTHOR> https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/104768703650147309 <comment><AUTHOR> Toot: [https://qoto.org/@freemo/104765288863293481](https://qoto.org/@freemo/104765288863293481) HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275)</comment>


Recursive, a free variable font for code and UI, now on Google Fonts - <AUTHOR> https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Recursive <comment><USER2> The Google Fonts page doesn't really do justice to how dynamic this font is -- [https://www.recursive.design/](https://www.recursive.design/) has a live demo that shows more of the options, maybe the link should be changed to their demo.

There are four dimensions and a few other flags that the font can be adjusted by in CSS: natural-width to fixed-width, Linear to "Casual", Font weight, Font slant, and cursive variants.

By tweaking any of the variable font parameters it you can get anything in the range of a "serious" monospace font to a more casual font useful for UI mockups. I don't spend a huge amount of time in the font design world but this is one of the first variable fonts I've seen that feels less like a gimmicky demo and more like a seriously versatile tool, really great work!

<comment><USER3> The question is: do we need flexible fonts? Other than fine-tuning the monospace font to fit your exact preferences given the hours you spend coding, everything else seems to be a matter of just picking an appropriate type that fits your project

<comment><USER4> As a coder, probably not.

As a designer, absolutely. The exact weight of a font can make a ton of difference in a finished product, and it's frequent to be frustrated that the font isn't available in the weight that would look right for the needs -- you need something in between semibold and bold, or something in between regular and condensed, or something oblique but not _that_ oblique.

It's the difference between a design being good, and a design being beautifully "just right" with everything _perfectly_ in proportion.

So for that, variable fonts are a godsend.

That being said, I've never seen a slider between proportional and monospace before. That's just weird. :)

<comment><USER5> It's perfect for those times where you need something monospace, but not too monospace.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if you're being facetious - it's actually not a crazy idea. For example: displaying 'code' at display font sizes.

If I want to show something that _looks_ like code - like an HTML tag or something - at a heading size on a page or a poster, a proper monospaced coding font is going to look bad. Playing with the MONO slider on [https://www.recursive.design/](https://www.recursive.design/) for a string like '<blink />' does a good job of producing something that looks like code but isn't swamped with too much whitespace...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know this font is about versatility, but when it comes to a coding font I have yet to find something that beats JetBrains Mono (and I've tried many coding fonts).

[https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/](https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/)

<comment><USER8> On windows, I tried dozens of trending fonts like fira code, new ms font, jetbrains etc but nothing looks more natural to read than Consolas (and also Roboto mono)

<comment><USER9> Exactly same. I try different fonts from time to time but always end up going back to Consolas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Die-hard fan of Iosevka[0], a narrow monospace font family (regular and term) and nerd-font patched varieties [1].

Just love how they display in emacs gui on a 4k display.

[0] [https://typeof.net/Iosevka/](https://typeof.net/Iosevka/) [1] [https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd- fonts/tree/master/patched-...](https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd- fonts/tree/master/patched-fonts/Iosevka)

<comment><USER11> hell yeah, same here. when i heard first of iosevka, i didn't like it at all, and it wasn't til a few months and the every-so-often shoutouts later that i understood. it is the best programming font i've ever used.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can also learn more about Recursive & configure advanced Google Fonts API calls on the Recursive minisite: [https://www.recursive.design/](https://www.recursive.design/)

<comment><USER12> I really enjoyed reading about your design process! I'm also a big fan of sign-painting aesthetics.

Can you elaborate more on the technical side? Once you have your designs and sketches, how do you go about digitizing those and creating the actual font?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are several things I look for in a "code" font: distinct 0 vs O, distinct l vs 1, readability, etc.

I don't think I'd use this for code, but I might for UI.

Edit: it seems that the variations are more code-oriented when you shift the code more "MONO" (based on experimentation on its website)

<comment><USER14> In fact instead of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" there should be a standard sentence for code fonts using those characters. Zero[0] = Oh[0]; One[1] = El[l]; or something ;)

<comment><USER13> yes!

Il|i! and DO0Q

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really must recommend Inter[1]. It's also open-source and available as variable.

[1] [https://rsms.me/inter/](https://rsms.me/inter/)

<comment><USER16> Inter is almost as good as Apple's SF, and with a much more permissive license. It's my default when designing apps for the web.

I used to default to "system font stack", but that was always because SF is such a great font. Defaulting to Ubuntu font on Ubuntu is... unfortunate. Luckily, Inter is fantastic, and it can be fantastic on every OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is by far the coolest font I've seen. Having this level of customizability in one font seems like a fantastic idea

</comment><comment><USER18> This is so great! Has anyone put out a good variable Serif font that is taking advantage of all the variables?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one really good serif variable font:

[http://www.gt-alpina.com/](http://www.gt-alpina.com/)

Different variable fonts use different variable "axes" – choosing what parameters can/should be variable is just another design decision in making a font.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any comments from someone using this font as a daily driver? I cant seem to move on from Source Code Pro (not that i'm looking to, just tried a couple and found myself clinging to Source Code Pro at the end of the day) This looks nice (similar to what I thought about JetBrains Mono)

<comment><USER20> I tried the mono version but a double forward slash glitches and overlays the next two characters - which kinda makes it unusable for anyone touching the web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I ask what software you ran into that issue with? Probably, it was a strict-monospace environment, like vim in a terminal. I have created code- specific fonts to deal with this issue:

there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don't want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn't support that).

[https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m...](https://github.com/arrowtype/recursive/tree/main/fonts/rec_m..).

The issue doesn't occur in web browsers, as far as I know, as they support proportional type (include mostly-mono families with a few proportional glyphs).

<comment><USER20> macOS Terminal with any of Rec Mono Duotone, Rec Mono Casual, Rec Mono Linear, and Rec Mono SemiCasual installed from `~/git/recursive/fonts/Recursive- Beta_1.053/Recursive_Code`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some background [https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brushstroke-variable-font- tak...](https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brushstroke-variable-font-taken-to-its- extreme/)

</comment><comment><USER6> The google page seems not to support the '+' glyph, which at first seemed like a bit of a failing in a programming font - but then I remembered how many bugs string concatenation was responsible for and I realized they might be onto something.

Sadly, the version on [https://www.recursive.design/](https://www.recursive.design/) seems to include the symbol.

(spoiler: it's nothing to do with the font - it looks like it's actually a URL encoding glitch with the way the page manages the preview text - it can't round-trip a + symbol correctly)

</comment><comment><USER22> No Cyrillic support :/

</comment><comment><USER23> Since I have to do lots of TeX editing in emacs, every "coding" font disqualifies, if it doesn't have at least polytonic greek and cyrillic glyphs. So, misc-fixed forever!

</comment><comment><USER24> The capital 'A' renders very strangely for me. Firefox, OSX.

[https://i.imgur.com/DmxoWeM.png](https://i.imgur.com/DmxoWeM.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange, usually if a font is rendered with that issue, it would be in several other letters, as well.

That is often from the font renderer using an "even-odd rule" in vector rendering.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule)

What is your OS & browser version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> ...Am I the only one who, for some fonts, has issues with the overlapping section of the "A" character in Firefox?

[https://i.ibb.co/8sbMvL3/Screen- Shot-2020-07-23-at-6-49-52-P...](https://i.ibb.co/8sbMvL3/Screen- Shot-2020-07-23-at-6-49-52-PM.png)

Recursive isn't the only font where this happens, but I did notice it for Recursive. I've also observed this on more than one computer, so it's not just my machine!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, you are not the only one! That is an issue of the font renderer using an "even-odd rule" in vector rendering.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even%E2%80%93odd_rule)

What is your OS & OS version? This has generally gotten better over the past couple of years.

You can also use the static fonts, however, which don't have vector overlaps, and Will therefore avoid this issue. In fact, it you were working on print design, it would probably still be better to use static fonts at this point.

<comment><USER26> Maybe it helps to set the OVERLAP_* flags as described in the glyf table spec?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The characters within both subfamilies, Sans & Mono, maintain the exact same > width across all font styles, independently of the values set on the Weight, > Casual, Slant, and Cursive axes.

It's very impressive that they have managed to duplex the styles across all four dimensions. This is very difficult to do across a wide range of weights while keeping the whole family cohesive.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow. That is cool.

If you have a big negative slant, and auto cursive enabled, you get much more of a humanist sans-serif, versus a neo-grotesque without those parameters. That's a huge amount of character to build into one single font.

And the absolute max size for the font is 281kb, and a more pared down version is about 100kb. Yes, I know, you'll protest, page bloat! But if I wanted to use a non-variable font, each individual font would be around 20kb, so if I needed a pretty typical stack of 300-400-600 font weights, with matching italics, I'm looking at 120kb, with individual requests for each weight.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it has been a fun project to work on, and you are correct about variable fonts offering more range in fewer bytes!

Another thing worth considering in a "page bloat" debate is that while a very extensive variable font is maybe 300 kb, that size is fairly average for a JPEG, but you can do _far_ more with a variable font.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can you download the font to the server and avoid Google on each page load? Or is it a copyright issue?

<comment><USER21> Good question. I might guess it's as free as most things in surveillance capitalism.

Well, even if it were legal to host it yourself, most won't do it, so Google still cashs in on the surveillance side.

<comment><AUTHOR> The font is under the OFL license, and you can definitely host it on your own server, no connection to Google required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Neither monospace variant looks good in a Linux terminal or a text editor. Linux is very peculiar about rendering fonts, and this font is likely designed for macos. I noticed that this font doesn't have powerline symbols which makes it even less usable in the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does fontconfig support this? I know that you can set boolean flags for some fonts (like old-style vs. lining numbers) using the fontfeature property, but what about the "casl" axis, for example?

</comment><comment><USER32> Why isn't the plus character, '+', valid? Shows up as one of those empty box thingies. Maybe it is just a limitation of the preview? Or does the font really not include a plus character?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, well spotted. Yeah, it seems to maybe be an issue of how Google Fonts sends preview text to the URL, and the "+" conflicts with the general separator. I've sent a message to the folks over there, and hopefully they will put it in their backlog to fix.

The font definitely has the "+" symbol, along with many other math & currency glyphs (and many more).

Please check it out (and try the preview/tester) at:

[https://www.recursive.design/](https://www.recursive.design/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It looks super unbalanced to me. Letters have different visual weights at different parts for seemingly no reason at all.

</comment><comment><USER34> The designers did an amazing job. Setting --mono to 1.0 makes it look very similar to Jetbrain's font which I like.

<comment><USER35> The lowercase "m", for one, looks terrible though. It's a cool demo but I'd never use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you perhaps say more about what you dislike about the lowercase "m"? It has to be extremely condensed to fit into a fixed-width space, just the same as any other monospaced font for code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Would be nice for a "code" font if the '+' character was displayed correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, yeah, that is a Google Fonts UI bug, and I've sent a message to folks over there about it.

The font has math symbols that render well. :-)

Please check out the font and try the preview/tester at:

[https://www.recursive.design/](https://www.recursive.design/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Only latin glyphs. Пиздец.

<comment><USER38> ακριβώς!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking out the font. As the main maker of it, I would love for it to include Cyrillic & Greek characters (and Arabic & Thai & more...), but this font's variable axes mean that it is veeery slow to draw additional characters for (they have to be drawn in 12 or 24 different styles for things to work). But:

1\. If someone wants to contribute the work in a PR, or the funding for work, I would be happy to extend the character set.

2\. The font sticks to the most common width for monospaced fonts, so many fonts that do include Cyrillic & Greek glyphs will work elegantly as fallbacks. I recommend IBM Plex Mono, for one free + open-source option that is particularly good. Or, of course, you could just use Plex for everything, and you wouldn't be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> m and @ really suffer as you crank up MONO. I like how the 0 gets a line as soon as MONO ≥ .50

Not a fan of those inktraps at heavier weights. If it's for UI and code, why does it need inktraps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Small type can lose definition on screen just as much as in print, so "inktraps" are really just there to help make things more crisp in text.

Of course, they are there just as much for aesthetics if the type is used at large sizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Supports over 200 languages but not Greek and Russian.

</comment><comment><USER41> why is this a big deal? can someone provide insight?

<comment><USER34> Try out the sliders on [https://www.recursive.design](https://www.recursive.design)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Some of the variants look a bit like Comic Sans.

<comment><AUTHOR> A beloved classic. Thanks for trying it out, and thanks for the kind words!</comment></comment>


Obama-era techies weigh staying under Trump - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-trump-tech-silicon-valley-231819 <comment><USER2> > The official describes talking with one colleague "who's Jewish and is > outraged that [incoming White House chief of strategist Steve] Bannon will > be steps from the Oval [Office] and frightened by all the anti-Semitism > that's been swirling since the campaign."

People realize that Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka is Jewish, and converted to Judaism to marry her husband, Trump's son-in-law right?

It's a whole lot of FUD swirling around right now, and people who have strong convictions with very little basis in fact squawking loudly.

<comment><USER3> And her Jewish husband Jared Kushner ran the campaign's data operations: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Jared+Kushner+data](https://www.google.com/search?q=Jared+Kushner+data)

The ADL's complaint about Bannon is thin gruel: [http://www.adl.org/sp/stephen-bannon-backgrounder/bannon- bac...](http://www.adl.org/sp/stephen-bannon-backgrounder/bannon- backgrounder.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/)

It boils down to their claim the Alt Right is anti-Semitic, when that's only the small portion of it that's the Alt White vs. the vastly larger Alt West and even larger Alt Lite which isn't there yet, plus our rule that we don't shoot at people who are shooting in the right direction (which, come to think of it, has not as of late characterized the Alt White), Breitbart.com is not an entirely polite or Leftist publication, "Bannon is a Critic of the Republican Establishment and the Left." (a truly devastating charge, how _dare_ he!), "Bannon has Held a Number of Positions in his Career." (the gravamen of that is they weren't on the Left), and they bury the lede by ending with "We Are Not Aware of Any Anti-Semitic Statements From Bannon." (even they are not willing to take his ex-wife's claims from their 2007 divorce as credible).

Seriously, the establishment, _remarkably_ excluding the GOPe, has gone all in on smearing the next Republican Karl Rove figure with abject lies even the ADL can't defend face-to-face, and our response is "We Don't Care". As I've commented here before, that the GOPe is included in the "we" should and I suspect does _terrify_ the Left, they're rapidly losing one of their potent weapons short of lawfare.

<comment> norea-armozel The Alt-right is just a code word for White Nationalism. So, if you don't like it then denounce it.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, but you don't get to define what the Alt Right is, the members of it have that privilege.

Any reason you don't show us the respect of self-identity that you, at minimum, _desire_ from others for your identity ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13055540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13055540))?

<comment><USER4> Your own descriptions _are_ the substance of White Nationalism. I will accept that they are different (but overlapping!) _identities_ , but they are the same _substantive political ideology_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My advice is this: if there is any question whatsoever, then get out now. If you're sure that staying will be a benefit to your government, then stay.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel Because me being openly transgender doesn't oppress people? Whereas white nationalists demand the full scale deportation of native born citizens who aren't white?

See the difference? If not, I think you're trolling then.

Also, if you want to talk about my comments in that thread, none of what I've said is contrary to common sense (i.e. supporting civil rights). You're the idiot that decided to conflate a patient having a disease and respecting their civil rights with giving civil rights to the disease itself. That alone pretty much puts you in the "I'm bad at being a good person" category. If you want to apologize and start over I'm game. Until then, I'm going to skewer you on these points.

<comment><USER6> > _You 're the idiot that..._

No matter what thread we're in or what we're responding to, personal attacks aren't OK here. We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058266) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DumbAss – be too stupid for complex tools - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dosyago/dumbass.git <comment><USER2> Best thing ever to happen to mankind! I wish more things were as simple as this

</comment><comment><USER3> I am stifling laughter</comment>


Ask HN: Which full stack language will prevail when web assembly arrives? - <AUTHOR> A major factor for javascript's rise is that you can reuse the same language in the client and server. I don't think many people would choose JS for its language characteristics but rather for its ecosystem and ease of use.
When web assembly comes to life what do you think developers will use? GO? Elixir? Haskel? Rust?
Do you think people will choose to develop in JS?
I am making the assumption that all languages could be full stack languages and almost no team will choose to use two different languages for the frontend and backend. <comment><USER2> A new language or two will come up, and try to "fix" where every other language fell short. Web assembly will then be ported over to server-side like NodeJS. Someone will create a JVM on top of web assembly and try to put back Java in the playing field. Game engines will all be porting over to web assembly. IoT will then be powered by webassembly.</comment>


Microsoft Fluent Design System - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/design/fluent/#/ <comment><USER2> Despite this beautiful page, and the "new" Microsoft of the Nadella era, I'm not yet convinced that Microsoft actually cares about design.

On the hardware side, their Surface line is beautiful. But the modern Windows UI/UX is...uninspired and sterile. So is Edge, Explorer, and Office suite.

Google and Apple are the leaders in the application design space re. UI/UX, and I just don't see Microsoft treating it seriously just yet.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft does care about design. It is just that they don't understand what is good design. Some parts of Windows 10 has atrocious design. For example if you have multiple overlapping Command Prompt windows open, and they are filled with text, it is very hard to see where one window ends and another window starts, because the window edges are extremely thin. Drives me crazy on a daily basis.

Google and Apple are not much better. Neither have upgraded to Flat 2.0 [1] although Apple is slowly moving in that direction in the post-Jony-Ive era.

Apple's name used to be synonymous with good design. But that was back when Jobs was still around.

[1] [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat- design/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/)

<comment><USER4> Design is much more than flat vs skeuoumorphic. In fact, this debate (despite its publicity) is of little concern to designers. We are often more focused on how things work, not just how they look. Also, usability (what NNG tests) is but one aspect of design (an important one nonetheless).

As a designer, I feel truly inspired by Apple's UI even today. Google tries to get design but their company goals do not place user experience on as high a pedestal as Apple, and they are always a little behind.

My two cents.

<comment><USER3> But how things look has to reflect how they work. This is what many designers today are missing. Without it things become hard to figure out. Also, this is the aspect that designers have most control over. Most designers don't have the skills needed to go deeper into how things work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After reading, I have no idea what Fluent Design is.

<comment><USER6> I share similar sentiment. This documentation needs to be better structured, perhaps more like the bootstrap documentation is, with clear examples of style class usage throughout. E.g.:

[https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/components/alerts/](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/components/alerts/)

Perhaps a gallery of example websites & apps could help a lot. That was the first thing I was looking for. Couldn't find any, so I had to drill into the docs in hopes of finding some case-by-case examples of each UI element. It really helps me to get going on frontend design, especially on a new framework, when I can see a completed sample that has some similarities to what I want layout-wise in my design.

<comment><USER7> Comparing Fluent Design to Bootstrap is a bit apples-and-oranges. It's a design system for multiple possible implementation somewhat more akin to Material Design [1], and just like you might use a Material Design Theme to Bootstrap, you might find a Fluent Design Theme for Bootstrap.

The most direct Fluent Design System library to consider compared to Bootstrap would be Fabric UI which covers Web, iOS, and Android:

[https://developer.microsoft.com/en- us/fabric#/](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/)

Up until recently Fabric UI didn't always match Fluent Design goals, but they've aligned to Fluent a lot more over recent releases.

Though, generally the "closest to homebase" implementation of Fluent Design is often regarded to be the WinUI library that is the basis for most "modern" UI controls in Windows, in particular its where you see the most of some of the exotic materials Fluent Design likes such as the "acrylic" backgrounds that a lot of people really associate with Fluent:

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/uwp/toolkits/winui/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/toolkits/winui/)

[1] [https://material.io/design/](https://material.io/design/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related from 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347090)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323553)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317171)

</comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft Fluent Design System was introduced in 2017.

The homepage is useless, but the real docs are decent [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/design/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/)

Sadly, Microsoft still does not provide guidance or necessary APIs to desktop app developers (e.g. those primarily using .NET, Win32, WPF, WinForms, etc) to implement Fluent Design elements/controls.

I'm hopeful we'll see a change here, but fear it'll happen too late, that is, before another design language is introduced.

<comment><USER7> > Sadly, Microsoft still does not provide guidance or necessary APIs to > desktop app developers (e.g. those primarily using .NET, Win32, WPF, > WinForms, etc) to implement Fluent Design elements/controls.

I feel like the guidance is clear enough at this point: migrate to WinUI 3. If you can't migrate your app "all the way" to UWP today, you can use XAML Islands in Win32 apps and embed UWP/WinUI XAML in places that are appropriate. Some common WinUI controls that you might want to use have easy to find wrappers on NuGet to do most of the XAML Island magic for you for WPF and WinForms applications.

<comment><USER9> That sounds great on paper but XAML Islands introduces insurmountable airspace issues. For example, you can't have a nice acrylic window--per Fluent design-- and draw your existing WPF XAML on top. It's a non-starter in most cases.

WinUI 3 has yet to be released. (It's only barely in alpha now.)

<comment><USER7> > That sounds great on paper but XAML Islands introduces insurmountable > airspace issues. For example, you can't have a nice acrylic window--per > Fluent design--and draw your existing WPF XAML on top. It's a non-starter in > most cases.

If you are already using XAML, the WPF => UWP XAML transition shouldn't be so much of a hurdle as to be a "non-starter in most cases". In most Enterprise CRUD the biggest problem is DataGrid, but you pull one in from the Community Toolkit or one of the 3rd Party components vendors like Telerik. WinUI is talking about first party formally "Fluent" productizing the Community Toolkit's version sometime later in the 3.x timeline.

Of course, my view of it is biased by doing a bunch of WPF <=> Silverlight XAML transition work by hand for a few years, and compared to that era, WPF <=> UWP is a lot more civilized.

> WinUI 3 has yet to be released. (It's only barely in alpha now.)

I forgot that part. Just replace WinUI 3 with WinUI 2 for "today" (up until 20H1, supposedly), and my statement stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ever since the GUI lawsuit with Apple (yes, the one from 25 years ago), I think Microsoft has been stuck in this middle ground of design where they can't actually design things the "right" way, as to avoid possible lawsuits. Maybe that's not a real thing they should be worried about, but it has at least made them gun shy. This how we got things like "Recycle Bin" instead of the obvious trash can, and all kinds of other oddities.

<comment><USER11> I like "Recycle bin" more than trash can, because it makes it clear that the point of dropping things there is to "recycle" the disk space...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Personally, I find it "too wide".

Example:

[https://static2.sharepointonline.com/files/fabric/fabric- web...](https://static2.sharepointonline.com/files/fabric/fabric- website/images/controls/android/datetimepicker/calendar-view.png)</comment>


Show HN: Lwc, a live-updating version of the Unix wc command - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/timdp/lwc <comment><USER2> Great idea and looks awesome, but why javascript for a shell utility? :(

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI, Golang port: [https://github.com/timdp/lwc- golang](https://github.com/timdp/lwc-golang)

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Kudos to you. I wasn't trying to be discouraging by questioning why JS; I just like to keep my shell scripts dependency free. The frowny face was meant as commentary on the trend of using JS when it might be overkill. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

But the go port looks nicely done, and with a fast turnaround time! :) I will be using it, so thanks.

Also, welcome to HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> You weren't the one being rude. I've got thick skin, and you made a good point anyway. Glad you like it. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Product "to-do" lists - <AUTHOR>

Inevitably, when you build a prototype you discover "to-do" items where expanded functionality impacts base functionality. Or, new ideas crop in your head to get to later. Sometimes these items depend on another item to be resolved/added first.
Right now, my answer is a "ToDo's" plugin to Firefox. This no longer meets my growing needs to keep track of items, priority, and dependencies. Especially, when new co-founders are added in the near future.
Can anyone recommend software that would help me better manage these items? If not software, how have other startups managed the priorities and direction of their product? <comment><USER2> It's funny that you mention it as I wrote something that might be what you are looking for just a few weeks ago.

(edit as I re-read: doubtful that this fulfill your needs, you are probably better off with a more traditional Bugzilla-type-of thing. Keeping this posted anyway :)

This is an application that I wrote for internal usage. Have you ever heard of TeuxDeux (<http://teuxdeux.com/>)? Well, basically, I fell in love with the user-interface and it fulfilled that part of my needs. So, I took the look & feel and ran with it and made the following additions to my own version:

\- Under the "some day" items I added categories which could be edited by dragging & dropping the category into the "some day" input box.

\- Encouraged the usage of "hash tags" to TODO-items (#projectabbr Fix nasty crash bug)

\- Added a filtering box which would highlight queried TODO's with that search filter

\- Made it so that when you hover over a todo-item during drag/drop: a tree would pop-up with issues that depend on parent. You can drop the todo-item you are dragging and dropping into any of the items in that tree. When a parent is "freed" (done), its immediate children become separate TODO's in the list again. Rince/repeat.

\- A detail screen which would appear when clicking on "..." next to a TODO item.

Put in mind here that I like the minimalistic and straight-to-the-point of this layout. I want my TODO lists to act like post-its :)

Unfortunately I have not open sourced it and I really never intended to do that for the very reason that I basically "ripped off" the look & feel of Teux Deux. But this might give you a few ideas, though. And it's not really too hard to implement. Give me a holler if you need a bit more info :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like you have an application worth selling back to Teuxdeux or releasing yourself after "tweaking" the UI so as not to steal from them. Just took an overview of their product and your additions seem like good ideas.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I actually sent them a mail telling them what I did and a few minor implementation details (and apologized for, ahem, liking their implementation too much).

Alas. No money to be made here :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> At the last startup I worked at, we used Jira [<http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/>] as an issue tracker. As ideas came up, we had a separate category for "idea issues". This kept everything in the same place, so when we wanted to work on a feature that was previously a TODO idea, we'd just assign it to someone to work on. Because it had been kept in JIRA for its entire lifetime, all thoughts and comments that people had had about it were already there for the implementer to consider.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're mac based, I really like things from cultured code. It handles multiple users and they have a great iphone version that syncs to the desktop app. Helps me keep track of ideas better than a stack of napkins. <http://culturedcode.com/things/>

</comment><comment><USER5> basecamp or tadalist</comment>


How do you measure credibility of information? - <AUTHOR> I am concerned by how common it is for users to "eat-up" whatever a news latform says as doctrine. How do you all actually verify the credibility of information? <comment><USER2> The only thing I think I can do is to initially make a guess, and then revise the guess according to what is being figured out later. Some things it is possible to verify by yourself, others is more difficult to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> I double check the same news on different websites, by using Google News. I do this when the title or the content of the news expresses a sort of sensationalism.

</comment><comment><USER4> It has never been easier to access primary/original sources anytime in history, yet people generally don't bother.

</comment><comment><USER5> True or not matters less than the emotions evoked When it comes to harm done.

For instance if a news network thinks school shooting are newsworthy what does it matter if 20 people were killed or 15? If it happened in South Dakota or West Virgina? If the shooter used an AR-15 or a AK-47 or 9mm pistol?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have put news as an example. How do youv erify information generally?</comment></comment>


Learning from Imbalanced Classes - <AUTHOR> http://www.svds.com/learning-imbalanced-classes/ <comment><USER3> Solid article. Especially important are the suggestions to consider a probabilistic evaluation metric.

If you want to work with really imbalanced data, try working with data from the LHC. There were on order of 1000 Higgs in a year, while there are around 600 million proton-proton collisions a second.

<comment><USER4> LHC data = EPIC

<comment><USER5> This is one of those few moments when saying Big Data is actually a well-used term.

<comment><USER6> There's a really great episode of Linear Digressions[0] (a Data Science podcast) that goes into the different scales of data that exist in the world. Everyone thinks of Google and Facebook as Big Data, but the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder collects 7.5B TB of data per second!

[0]: [https://soundcloud.com/linear-digressions/whats-the- biggest-...](https://soundcloud.com/linear-digressions/whats-the-biggest- bigdata?in=linear-digressions/sets/linear-digressions)

<comment><USER7> And it's going to end up _quite_ a bit more than that.

Check out slides 21 and 22 from [1]. There are parts that will process 4 PB/s (!)

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/SparkSummit/distributed-data- proce...](http://www.slideshare.net/SparkSummit/distributed-data-processing- using-spark-by-panos-labropoulosand-sarod-yatawatta)

<comment><USER5> It's not a secret that in the process of automatic manufacturing there are terabytes of data produced in a matter of minutes. OF course how many of such data is of any use is another story, but anyway it still requires storage and processing power capable of handling that volumes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a current Kaggle competition that is a good learning opportunity for imbalanced data. The goal is to predict parts that will be rejected by quality control.

[https://www.kaggle.com/c/bosch-production-line- performance](https://www.kaggle.com/c/bosch-production-line-performance)

</comment><comment><USER9> Quite an interesting article!

I had two research projects on finding low quality - deleted and closed - questions on Stack Overflow [0, 1]. Since, these question classes always suffered from imbalanced class problems (2% closed and 8% deleted) - I decoded to under sampling of the majority class. Later, I used an ensemble - <USER2> Decision Boosting Tree, Random Forrest - for classification. However, rather than taking bootstrap samples - I took various random samples from the majority class (equivalent to the minority class) and built many ensemble classifiers for each random sample. In the end, I checked the variation on the final classification results. It just seemed intuitive to me. I had no idea about Wallace et al.!

[0] Denzil Correa and Ashish Sureka. 2014. Chaff from the wheat: characterization and modeling of deleted questions on stack overflow. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web (WWW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 631-642. DOI: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2566486.2568036](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2566486.2568036)

[1] Denzil Correa and Ashish Sureka. 2013. Fit or unfit: analysis and prediction of 'closed questions' on stack overflow. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks (COSN '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 201-212. DOI=[http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2512938.2512954](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2512938.2512954)

</comment><comment><USER10> In addition to unbalanced classes, where let's say 2% of data is from a minority class and 98% is from the majority, how do people handle when 2% of data is from the minority and 98% is of an unknown class, but pulled from a known distribution?

<comment><USER11> I am not completely following what you mean by "98% is of an unknown class, but pulled from a known distribution".

Are you suggesting that: 2 percent of samples are positive, drawn from p(x|y=1)

98 percent of samples are drawn from a distribution p(x), but may be either positive or negative?

The setting that you described above is called "positive and unlabeled (PU)" learning. This paper: [http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~elkan/posonly.pdf](http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~elkan/posonly.pdf) is one of the seminal articles on the topic (although the equation on the bottom of page 214 contains a statement that may not necessarily hold true). There are quite a lot more recent papers on this topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I usually find that SVM's do really well with very unbalanced data due to its hinge loss</comment>


Origin of the name "Google" - <AUTHOR> https://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html <comment><USER2> Check the html source for this additional tidbit

 _> The following day, Tamara entered the office she shared with Sean and Larry, and saw "google.com" as the final name remaining on their whiteboard. Recognizing the misspelling, she brought it to their attention. Sean checked the domain name registry for "googol.com" and found that it was already taken. Larry said he preferred the "google.com" spelling anyway, and when he and Sergey later received their first angel investment check for $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, it was made out to "Google Inc."_

<comment><USER3> Weird, I wonder why this was commented out? Was it something the author preferred to leave out and didn't do it properly? Or was it just an editorial mistake?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't remember if I knew the word "googol" before I knew this story or not. I think I may have encountered it in World of Mathematics in high school. Or I may be misremembering and making up a pretty story to make myself sound smarter than I am.

Human memory is so weird sometimes.

<comment><USER5> I did know "googol" and "googolplex" but only by virtue of picking it up as trivia when I was a kid. Pretty sure it was a kid named Mike in grade school who enjoyed one-upping other kids on nerdy facts who told me it was "the biggest number". Then again, this was the same kid who later on told me that the actual biggest number was "inthidity".

I have no idea why I remember this but it's just a memory that sticks out for some reason. He must've only heard the word "infinity" but not seen it written out because it wasn't like a speech impediment or anything. Later on I remember learning about the word/concept of infinity and realizing that must've been what Mike was talking about.

Anyway, sorry for the grade school flashback. Just one of those things I haven't thought about in ages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back when you could register the domain you wanted because some dickhead didn't squat it to try get 75k out of your idea for a startup.

<comment><USER7> If it's not a trademarked word, registering a domain name is like investing in real estate.

Or is every property owner who doesn't live on that property a "dickhead" ?

<comment><USER8> Absolutely yes! It's a nightmare in high-density cities like London.

<comment><USER7> Then why don't they make laws that you have to live on a property to own it?

<comment><USER9> It would likely be more popular to institute a land-ownership tax that includes leased properties and exempts up to 80 acres, plus 10 additional acres for each additional person if the size of your household exceeds 8, but only for land in the same county/parish as your official domicile, or within a 50 mile radius of it.

In theory, that would allow rents extracted from the local economy by (presumably non-voting) absentee landlords to be recovered.

A straight ban on absentee ownership would simply lead to workaround legal arrangements, such as strawman purchasers who can then turn around and sign a 99-year "peppercorn" lease to the true buyers. You would be playing whack-a- mole with evasion tactics and corporate shell games.

If you just introduce an economic penalty, people would only evade/avoid to the extent that it produces a profitable bottom line. Rich people and foreigners could still buy up all the available local property, but they would at least have to pay to keep it unavailable to the local market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read something recently that claimed that Googol (the mathmatical term) was in fact a corruption of Google in the first place, though the evidence is thin, it's vaguely plausible:

[http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/05/15/comic- bo...](http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/05/15/comic-book-urban- legends-revealed-155/)

<comment><USER11> That seems to be wrong, look here for the details:

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

The terms googol and googolplex were first published in 1940.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if you read the link or not.

The word "Googol" was coined in the 1920s. There's speculation that the child who came up with it was inspired by a Comic book character called "Barney Google" who was famous at that time.

<comment><USER12> > how likely is it that Sirotta came up with the world "googol" on his own, > and was not influenced by the massively successful comic strip of the same > name, which was EVERYwhere (comics, cartoons, toys, you name it)? I say the > odds are extremely unlikely, to the point where _I think it's safe enough to > say that he DID get the term from the comic strip_

To be honest, that's just wild (and a bit arrogant) speculation on the part of the author. I knew about the comic book, so I expected at least an ounce of evidence, not just the author convincing himself...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the early pop-culture mentions of googol was Peanuts, 23rd Jan 1963

[http://www.peanuts.com/search/?pubdate=&sort_by=bydate&seaso...](http://www.peanuts.com/search/?pubdate=&sort_by=bydate&seasonal=&startdate=&enddate=&selectcharacter=&keyword=googol&type=comic_strips)

</comment><comment><USER14> What are the incorrect origin stories the author referred to?

</comment><comment><USER15> Why didn't Sean just google the spelling of "googol?"

</comment><comment><USER16> Douglas Adams.

<comment><USER17> "I described myself as the second greatest," intoned Deep Thought, "and such I am." Another worried look passed between the two programmers. Lunkwill cleared his throat. "There must be some mistake," he said, "are you not a greater computer than the Milliard Gargatubrian at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?". "The Milliard Gargantubrain?" said Deep Thought with unconcealed comtempt. "A mere abacus - mention it not."

"And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

[https://books.google.com/books?id=cUSqB1xA8OkC&pg=PT89&dq=go...](https://books.google.com/books?id=cUSqB1xA8OkC&pg=PT89&dq=googleplex+star+thinker&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBmoVChMI58i9l4ysyAIV4xqmCh2jMwxW#v=onepage&q=googleplex%20star%20thinker&f=false)</comment></comment>