Google Cloud Platform Blog: Using GitHub for Push-to-Deploy - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.it/2014/04/using-github-for-push-to-deploy.html <comment><USER2> I always have the idea of hoping that Google would look at Google Code project and reactivate its momentum. I say this because GC was my first DVCS store. I used to host my own wordpress and phpBB plugins back when I was a high school kid (that was 6-7 years ago).

Furthermore, Google has everything in _pieces_. They got AppEngine to deploy service, Compute Engine doing IaaS. They have Google Docs, Gmail and Hangout which allow people to connect with colleagues and friends. Docs can share files and store some level of data revisions. Gmail can do easy attachment and recognize drives' files. They have a search engine which is powerful and Google probably can invest more money to do code search and data search quickly.

What irritates me is that we have a broken system. There are tens of different dashboard, deployment tool and monitoring system to choose. That's great. The way we use them is like getting all the car components and try to build a car from scratch. This is where startup comes in to fix problems, which is great!

I am not saying "Google, please take over the world." But Google has everything but I fail to see why they can't connect their platforms together, as of 2014.

</comment><comment><USER3> Earlier submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616004)

<comment><USER4> I was hoping to find an empty discussion on this article, thanks.</comment></comment>


Copyright, Censorship, and Domain Name Blacklists at Home in the U.S.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/wseltzer/copyright-censorship-and-domain-name-blacklists-home-us <comment><USER2> I think we should be equally concerned about well-intentioned efforts by DNS standards people to create private distributed DNS blacklists. We at least ostensibly have due process rights with government censorship.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564761></comment>


Steve Jobs listens to jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on Pandora - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/pandora-privacy/

<comment><USER2> This privacy buzz is getting ridiculous.

 _Anything you listen to on Pandora is not confidential and is available to anyone who has or guesses your e-mail address._

So. what. It's music, just short of death metal advocating the overthrowing of a government, I don't think people really mind others knowing what they listen to. This is invariably the opposite of people being able to see a status update where you may or may not express certain negative viewpoints about an employer.

Furthermore: slow news day, Wired?

<comment> daniel-cussen Seriously, it's like anything related to Steve Jobs counts as news.</comment></comment>


Apple iPad's Tiny SIM Is Just There to Mess With You - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/micro-sim-business/ <comment><USER2> It appears increasingly likely that...

Gemalto, which probably... Gemalto couldn't confirm... Gemalto is the likely maker...

There is no evidence that... But the circumstantial evidence suggests...

Carrara agreed with our prediction...

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been thinking about this last week. First I thought it was some sort of "conspiracy", to make us all buy new data plans. However, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense: Apple just always goes with the newest and latest. They have changed their display ports about 4 times over the last few years, as new standards erupted, while the old would have sufficed. Why not do that for sim cards? Also, it's not really an issue, as you can just cut your current sim to fit the iPad. I'm sure as soon as the iPad gets any traction, there will be tools for this, as well as cheap plastic adapters to fit the uSim in your current phone.

<comment><USER4> They are making good money with display adapters. Mine cost 30€ from the Apple store (MiniDVI -> DVI).

<comment><USER5> I don't know if Monoprice ships to Europe, but there _has_ to be a better alternative to the Apple Store there. You can get a comparable cable from Monoprice for about 8 Euros.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't it also possible that the next iPhone will have a micro SIM as well, and that Apple is simply going for (eventual) parity across their product line? I certainly think that interior space may well be at a premium in the next iPhone, necessitating the need for the smaller form factor.

<comment><USER7> Precisely. The article has a strange inability to look forward in time.

I also wouldn't trust these journalists and their crack team of wild guessers to know for _sure_ that space isn't a premium even in the iPad itself. You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge the internals of a piece of modern portable electronics by squinting at the outer case. The engineers have to pack _a lot of stuff_ into these devices, in a specific configuration, as well as leaving room for the next generation of stuff. (Does anybody doubt that the iPad will someday grow a camera? That it might someday need a CDMA multiplexer?) And the size of the SIM may well have ramifications: It affects the size of the access panel that leads to the SIM, for example. It also has to be placed in a spot on the motherboard that makes it easy to omit, since not all iPads will have a SIM, and such space may be at more of a premium than we think...

<comment><USER8> _Does anybody doubt that the iPad will someday grow a camera?_

I don't doubt that the iPad could grow a camera. But it seems to me that it's not technical limitations keeping a camera from the iPad. I wonder if it's just the _awkwardness_ of holding an iPad in the way necessary to take photos that led Steve Job to scrap the idea. He'd rather leave a feature off entirely than have it be implemented in an inelegant way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is gonna look pretty stupid when the next iPhone uses a micro SIM.

That whole micro SIM thing is really pretty ridiculous. Imagine for a moment a world in which the iPad uses a normal SIM card. Space is certainly no problem. But there is this other device where space is a problem. How was it called again? Oh, right! iPhone. It seems more than reasonable that Apple would put a micro SIM in there as soon as possible. So now, what do we have in this hypothetical world? Incompatible SIMs! The press gets to write the exact same story, no matter what Apple does! Yay!

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. I was under the impression all I needed to turn a SIM into a micro-SIM (or whatever they are called) is a sharp blade and a little eye-hand coordination. If I don't mess up big, all I need to build an adapter that allows me to use my newly made micro-SIM on any GSM phone are the plastic pieces I cut off, some glue and a little bit of thin, rigid, plastic to help hold the freshly made micro-SIM in place.

Seriously... Are all these articles about how Apple is out to screw AT&T's customers really necessary?

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like a nice opportunity for someone to make a micro-sim to sim adapter. That can't be that hard, it's just a mechanical adaptation.

Manufacturers have used incompatibility to achieve business goals for the longest time, check out the print cartridges and the diagnosis plugs on european cars.

Now if apple would have come up with a proprietary sim card that would be (bad) news.

It's pretty clear they don't want you to use your Iphone voice plan on the Ipad anyway because it can't make voice calls.

</comment><comment><USER4> "This way, they can charge customers twice for 3G wireless data: Once for the iPhone, and once for the iPad."

How braindead would a customer have to be to fall for that? Alternatively, the customer could just be super-rich and not care.

<comment><USER12> How else are they going to get 3G access?

AT&T is going to say, "sorry, we can't give you a micro-SIM, because your plan is for the iPhone" or "sorry, we can't give you a normal-SIM, your plan is for the iPad". End of story, as the 3G radios only work on AT&T's network.

My guess is that the 3G version is just not going to sell very well. It's super-expensive initially, and has a super-expensive monthly cost too.

<comment><USER7> If a large SIM can be cut with scissors and turned into a small SIM, the small SIM can be slid into an insert (purchased for a buck or two, or simply cut out of plastic or cardstock) and turned back into a big SIM.

I think it more likely that the sheer hassle of swapping out SIMs every time you want to switch devices (or take a phone call while using the iPad) will mitigate against doing this all the time. But there's no reason one couldn't do it.

I'm leaning toward the "buy a WiFi iPad and an optional MeFi box" option at the moment -- that way I keep my phone a phone, diversify my wireless options, and get WiFi for my laptop as well as the iPad. But I will need to do a bit more research and budgeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surely, it must be possible to make a non-hideous adapter? I imagine, though, that it must be more complex than a microSD -> SD adapter, or someone would have said something already.

</comment><comment><USER14> You can file a regular "mini" SIM down to size.

<comment><USER15> The same is true of hard drives, and monitors. _Snort_</comment></comment>


There's Basically No Way to Not Be a Gentrifier - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/04/theres-basically-no-way-not-be-gentrifier/8877/

<comment><USER2> TLDR: We're all evil - but it's ok (as long as you write your congressman)!</comment>


A farewell to bioinformatics (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://madhadron.com/?p=263 <comment><USER2> John Graham-Cumming (jgrahamc here) co-authored a piece on making scientific code open. It was received well-enough that Nature published it [0]. This approach has inspired others to do better work by describing a concrete problem, then outlining steps to fix it on an individual and institutional level.

When someone finds fault with the way a field conducts itself, I would implore them to constructively influence that field. You might be surprised how many are actually sympathetic to your concerns.

I'm not dismissing this author's concerns: to do that would really require knowing the molecular biology field (which is more than sequencing, it turns out). I do neuroscience right now, and programming can be a problem for some. But a constructive suggestion to change can have much more impact than a long rant.

[0] [http://www.runmycode.org/data/MetaSite/upload/nature10836.pd...](http://www.runmycode.org/data/MetaSite/upload/nature10836.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Off topic, but since you mentioned jgrahamc's article in Nature, interestingly, this was what I read last night on Simply Statistics: [http://simplystatistics.org/2013/01/23/statisticians-and- com...](http://simplystatistics.org/2013/01/23/statisticians-and-computer- scientists-if-there-is-no-code-there-is-no-paper/)

It's a similar issue. I think statisticians are taking constructive steps to correct their path, since you know, ML is the new sexy thing. Bioinformatics could take a much longer time to self-correct though.

Although, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, Fred seems to be in a prime position to disrupt the bioinformatics field since he seems to know all the problems that afflict it

<comment><USER4> Regarding "ML is the new sexy thing," check out these graphs:

[http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=machine+learnin...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=machine+learning&year_start=1950&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=)

<http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=machine%20learning>

<comment><USER5> From your second graph, Iran and Pakistan have stronger interests in Machine Learning than the US. (I am not surprised about India, South Korea, and China though).

Is the interest in advanced Info Tech that widespread in those countries or simply because the only people who could use Google in those countries are government-sanctioned researchers? Anyone familiar with the reason could shine light for the rest of us?

<comment><USER6> I am not sure how you based your conclusions.

Pakistan's internet is generally open (except youtube and pornography). But there is no widespread interest in ML particularly. Only a few companies - most of them outsourcing from the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > the software is written to be inefficient, to use memory poorly, and the cry > goes up for bigger, faster machines! When the machines are procured, even > larger hunks of data are indiscriminately shoved through black box > implementations of algorithms in hopes that meaning will emerge on the far > side. It never does, but maybe with a bigger machine…

I spent five years working in bioinformatics, and this is exactly the attitude of both the researchers and the other developers on the projects I worked on. It was very frustrating.

<comment><USER8> Hi, I'm a bioinformatics researcher. Apparently I work for this guy's ex(?)-employer although I have never heard of him before.

My single most limited resource is programmer time. My time and the time of other people who work with me. I have access to loads of computers that sit idle all the time, even if it is on nights and weekends. There is zero opportunity cost to me in using these computers more fully. I have enough human work to do that I can wait for the results without having any wait states.

There can be a big opportunity cost in trying to rework a workflow so that it is more efficient and then test it thoroughly ensure correctness. Doing this may seem more appealing to someone who is interested primarily in computational efficiency. But I am more interested in research efficiency, and so are my employers and funders.

<comment><USER9> >There can be a big opportunity cost in trying to rework a workflow so that it is more efficient and then test it thoroughly ensure correctness.

Hi, I recognize your name as a legit bioinformatician, am a huge fan of the lab that you're currently in, and others should listen to you.

I'd like to add that for many projects, general reusable software engineering is not necessarily a huge advantage. Instead of verifying a single implementation, it's often better for somebody to reimplement the idea from scratch; if a second implementation in a different language written by a different programmer gets the same results, this is a much more thorough validation of the software than going over prototype software line by line.

Also, I've seen way too many software engineers come in with an enterprisey attitude of establishing all sorts of crazy infrastructure and get absolutely no work done. If Java is your idea of a good time, it's unlikely that you'll be an effective researcher (though it's not unheard of), because it's not good at maximizing single-programmer output, and not good at maximizing I/O or CPU or string processing. In research it's best to get results, fail fast fast _fast_ , and move on to the next idea. If you're lucky, 1 in 20 will work out. Publish your crap, and if it's a good idea, it will be worth polishing the turd later, but it's better to explore the field then to spend too much time on an uninteresting area.

The only time you worry about efficiency is when it enables a whole other level of analysis. So, for example, UCSC does most of their work in C, including an entire web app and framework written in C, because when they were doing the draft assembly of human genome a decade ago on a small cluster of computers that they scrounged from secretaris' desks over the summer, Perl wouldn't cut it.

<comment><USER8> Software engineering is important for bioinformatics, in my opinion. But it's important to identify the things that are important and aren't:

Reproducible code: extremely important. Correct code: extremely important. Readable code: very important. Efficient code: often not as important.

Even today, the UCSC Genome Browser is an example where efficient code is important. It is interactive software, has _many_ human users who can work much efficiently when the browser is responsive. And with projects like ENCODE, there are now incredible amounts of data available from the browser that would not be easily possible with a less efficient system.

Very different from an analysis system that will be run a handful of times in batch mode.

<comment><USER10> >Reproducible code: extremely important. Correct code: extremely important. Readable code: very important. Efficient code: often not as important.

You want Haskell. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have some experience working at a genomics research company and I'll broadly +1 Fred's experience about the industry, although in less negative terms. I got out before I got jaded, so my perspective is a bit more "oh, that's a shame" than his. I really like genetics, bioinformatics, hardware, deep- science, and all that but the timing and fit wasn't right.

The tools are written by (in my experience) very smart bioinformaticians who aren't taught much computer science in school (you get a smattering, but mostly it's biology, math, chemistry, etc.). Ex:

[http://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/programs/bioinformatic...](http://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/programs/bioinformatics.php)

[http://www.bme.ucsc.edu/bioinformatics/curriculum#LowerDivis...](http://www.bme.ucsc.edu/bioinformatics/curriculum#LowerDivisionRequirements)

[http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/biotechnology/ms-in- bioinfo...](http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/biotechnology/ms-in- bioinformatics/course-requirements/index.html)

The tools themselves are written by smart non-programmers (a very dangerous combination) and so you get all sorts of unusual conventions that make sense only to the author or organization that wrote it, anti-patterns that would make a career programmer cringe, and a design that looks good to no one and is barely useable.

Then, as he said, they get grants to spend millions of dollars on giant clusters of computers to manage the data that is stored and queried in a really inefficient way.

There's really no incentive to make better software because that's not how the industry gets paid. You get a grant to sequence genome "X". After it's done? You publish your results and move on. Sure, you carve out a bit for overhead but most of it goes to new hardware (disk arrays, grid computing, oh my).

I often remarked that if I had enough money, there would be a killing to be made writing genome software with a proper visual and user experience design, combined with a deep computer science background. My perfect team would be a CS person, a geneticist, a UX designer, and a visual designer. Could crank out a really brilliant full-stack product that would blow away anything else out there (from sequencing to assembly to annotation and then cataloging/subsequent search and comparison).

Except, I realized that most folks using this software are in non-profits, research labs, and universities, so - no, there in fact is _not_ a killing to be made. No one would buy it.

<comment><USER12> Why wouldn't anyone buy your product? If it is easy to use, and SPEEDS UP RESEARCH TIME, your researcher/PI who is spending thousands on computing clusters will buy your software for their graduate students. Hell, my PI keeps asking me if I need a faster computer so I can run Matlab better/quicker. Really, if I had a software that helped me perform research faster/better/quicker and compare my results to ground truth or gold- standards, that is a much more useful tool than a bunch of hardware for my research. You push out papers fast.

So I disagree with you on your very last sentence (agree with the rest)

<comment><USER13> Ahh the efficiency argument.

The trick is, academics often have excess manpower capacity in the form of grad students and post-docs. Even though personell is usually one of the highest expenses on any given grant, they often don't look at ways to improve the efficiency of their research man-hours.

That's not a blank rule, as we have definitely had success with the value proposition of research efficiency, but in general, a lot of things business adopt to improve project time (like Theory of Constraints project management, Mindset/Skillset/Toolset matching of personel et) is of no interest to academic researchers.

<comment><USER10> After researching this field (biomedical R&D) a bit, I found that the mindset and workflow is mostly pre-computers. The relevant decision makers in the labs usually don't see a need to change something because "it works" and "it's done always this way".

<comment><USER12> "its always done this way" is the ultimate motivation of any startup. We wouldn't have any competing startups if everyone just accepted that, probably, not have any entrepreneurs or have a better world for that matter. The fitness function of the world will flatline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I sympathize with the author, but this piece fails because many of the specific criticisms are off-base, and he's not trying to be at all constructive.

For example, it isn't true at all that microarray data is worthless. The early data was bad, and it was very over-hyped, but with a decade of optimization of the measurement technologies, better experimental designs, and better statistical methods, genome-wide expression analysis became a routine and ubiquitous tool.

The claim that sequencing isn't important is ridiculous. It's the scaffold to which _all_ of biological research can be attached.

However:

There is a great deal of obfuscation, and reinventing well-known algorithms under different names (perhaps often inadvertently). There's also a lot of low-quality drivel on tool implementations or complete nonsense. This is driven largely by the need in academia to publish.

The other side of this problem is that in general, CS and computer scientists don't get much respect in biology. People care about Nature/Science/Cell papers, not about CS conference abstracts. Despite bioinformatics/computational biology not really being a new field anymore, the cultures are still very different.

<comment><USER15> No kidding about reinventing wheels. I once saw a manuscript based entirely on dot-product as 1-D least-square. I don't know what happened to it, but one reviewer called it a seminal event in GWAS.

Bioinformatics is hard, but too many careerists take advantage of difficulties and uncertainty to publish as many papers as they can get away with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree with him, and have been complaining about the same shit for ages (I work in bioinformatics too). Sadly, biologists don't care. We're treated as the number crunchers. The real problem isn't that we waste computational resources, it's that many biologists download programs, run their data through it, and if it spits out an answer rather than an error, they trust it. Since that program probably has zero unit test coverage, and the results may be fed into pharmaceutical decisions, disease diagnostics, etc, you're basically fucked if something went wrong. Lots of us have said this[0].

Minor quibble: genome assembly is definitely still an open problem that's computationally difficult. So is robust high dimension inference, but that falls more under statistics.

I've wanted to leave at least a dozen times too, for the better pay, for working with programmers that can teach me something, and to not have my work be interrupted by academic politics. But the people pissed at the status quo are the ones that are smart enough to see it's broken and try to fix it, and if we all leave, science is really fucked.

[0] [http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/19/buggy-simulation- co...](http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/19/buggy-simulation-code-is- biased/)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you really want to get a feel for how deluted the Bioinformatics community is, look for a job in the field as an outsider. It's not uncommon to see requirements like:

"Must be an expert in 18 technologies" "Must have a PHD in Computer Science or Molecular Biology" "Must have 12 years experience and post doctoral training" "Pay: $30,000"

It's delusional because they apply the requirements it took for themselves to get a job in Molecular Biology (long PHD, post doc, very low pay for first jobs) and just apply it carte blanche to all fields that may be able to aid in their pursuits. Especially when it comes to software engineering where it can often be extremely difficult to explain why you did not pursue a PHD.

<comment><USER8> I assume these are separate requirements. I have not seen any doctoral-level positions advertised for a salary of $30,000. The minimum NIH salary for postdoctoral _trainees_ is more than that.

It's only delusional if they can't find people to fill the jobs. The idea that, as an outsider, you know what requirements they should use in their hiring process better than they do is perhaps more delusional.

<comment><USER17> I'm not an outsider and the 30K was a bit of an exaggeration, and I apologize for that. The point I was trying to make was that if you look in as an outsider, you would see the requirements being extremely daunting compared to what you might see elsewhere with a pay scale that is very low and unappealing to anyone who might match it. Unless, of course, you just finished your degree in some biological discipline where the jobs are scarce. They are absolutely delusional (and so am I, most likely) because in most cases what they really need to solve the problems they have, is the same type of person most companies would need in a similar situation, a quality software engineer with experience building quality applications that are both extensible and maintainable.

I worked in bioinformatics for more than 10 years before I moved on, and In my experience they do have a lot of trouble finding people to fill positions, especially outside of massive government funded groups like the NIH. This often results in passing on competent software engineers with a B.Sc. that don't meet the requirements in favor of PHD level biology graduates who have taken a year or so of undergrad computer science courses. In my experience, this leads to many of the problems discussed (and exaggerated) by the OP. While some of these people are smart and produce good work, much of the time they produce poor quality software that gets the job done, but as inefficiently as possible and they leave a code base that is virtually unusable. Overall, I mostly just wanted say that it's a mindset they REALLY need to get past for the long term success of the industry.

<comment><USER18> If 30k is the inaccurate number, what's the accurate one? I'm curious as to what the realistic requirements are from your experience with the field.

<comment><USER17> I've seen a lot of job listings, at very large companies and academics for the 45-50 range. Keep in mind, these are jobs requiring a PHD, 10 years of experience, and a dozen or so technologies.

It's not really the money that's skewed, it's their idea about the person they need for the job. They don't need someone with that background (most of the time), they just need a junior level software engineer in which case the pay scale may not be too bad. There's a problem in realizing this, however, when the standards for your own field (molecular biology for example) are extremely high, so you expect it of all others as well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is pretty hilarious, from my brief experience with bioinformatics I can very well imagine someone writing the opposite rant, about CS people getting into bioinformatics not knowing sh*t about biology. I mean, browse through bioinformatics textbooks, those are either written by computer scientists and those are little more than string algorithm textbooks or by biologists and then the layer of jargon for someone coming from CS is just impenetrable. Same with bioinformatics teachers, I come from a CS background, but spent one solid month seriously trying to understand the basics of molecular biology and my bioinformatics seminar instructor sometimes seemed to know less about it than me. Terrifying, no wonder nonsense results are produced.

<comment><USER20> My friend said: Bioinformatics means that computer scientists – who don't know mathematics and don't know biology – are trying to do mathematical biology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I always feel awkward reading these rants, mainly because I've burned my bridges before and it really wasn't worth it. Even if it is true, it's better to leave it and move on.

If you really feel strongly about something, write it dispassionately (normally some time after the event) and treat it like a dissertation, backed with case studies and citations.

</comment><comment><USER22> Basic science moves forward slowly limited by the pace of fortuitous discoveries. I have found that many people from the field of computer programming have unrealistic expectations of what can be done in biology and other sciences.

</comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like a fed up academic with a stick up his backside.

Sh*tty data? Comes from the community. If the data and algorithms are so poor, and the author so superior, he should have been able to improve the circumstances.

This whole screed reads like an entitled individual who entered a profession, didn't get the glory, oh and yeah, academia doesn't pay well.

In the realm of bioinformatics, lets ignore the work done on the human genome and the like.

<comment><USER24> > Sh*tty data? Comes from the community. If the data and algorithms are so > poor, and the author so superior, he should have been able to improve the > circumstances.

Why? Aren't you assuming a lot about the incentives? What if the ground truth is simply that all the results are false due to a melange of bad practices? Do you think he'll get tenure for that? (That was a rhetorical question to which the answer is 'no'.) Then you know there's at least one very obvious way in which he could not improve the circumstances of poor data & algorithms.

<comment><USER8> He's not getting tenure because he doesn't have a PhD. According to LinkedIn, he has a master's degree awarded after four years of study [1], which often indicates someone who did not complete a PhD.

[1] <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/frederick-ross/13/81a/47>

<comment><USER25> According to his 2009 CV he was working a PhD in biology back then and expecting to finish in 2011.

Given that he is not a professor it is not clear why he would be expected to be seeking tenure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My experience working as a scientific programmer is this: my colleagues aren't forthcoming. I could list case after case of failure to document or communicate crucial details that cost me days, weeks and even months of effort. But I won't, until I have another job lined up. If I were in the author's position (I'm in another field), I would insist that my colleagues-- all of them, in whatever field I ended up working, were forthcoming about their work. This is non-negotiable. Being over-busy is no excuse. (It may be an excuse for not being forthcoming, but right or wrong, I couldn't care less --I would not work with such people if I could avoid it, for whatever reason.)

Academia rewards journal publication and does not adequately reward programming and data collection and analysis, although these are indispensable activities that can be as difficult and profound as crafting a research paper. At least the National Science Foundation has done researchers a small favor by changing the NSF biosketch format in mid-January to better accommodate the contributions of programmers and "data scientists": the old category _Publications_ has been replaced with _Products_.

Naming is important to administrators and bureaucrats. It can be easy to underestimate the extent to which names matter to them. Now there is a category under which the contribution of a programmer can be recognized for the purpose of academic advancement. Previously one had to force-fit programming under _Synergistic Activities_ or otherwise stretch or violate the NSF biosketch format. This is a small step, but it does show some understanding that the increasingly necessary contributions of scientific programmers ought to be recognized. The alternative is attrition. Like the author of the article, programmers will go where their accomplishments are recognized.

Still, reforming old attitudes is like retraining Pavlov's dogs. Scientific programmers are lumped in with "IT guys." IT as in ITIL: the platitudinous, highly non-mathematical service as a service as a service Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library. There is little comprehension that computer science has specialized. For many academics, scientific programmers are interchangeable IT guys who do help desk work, system and network administration, build websites, run GIS analyses, write scientific software and get Gmail and Google Calendar synchronization running on Blackberries. It is as if scientists themselves could be satisfied if their colleagues were hired as "scientists" or "natural philosophers" with no further qualification, as opposed to "vulcanologist" or "meteorologist" (to a first order of approximation).

<comment><USER27> Right now experimentalists generate data and then try to find computer people to analyse their data. However, in the not too distant future computer models will drive experimental research as hypothesis generation tools. Then the computer people will be seeking biology people ( or robots) to run experiments to validate their hypothesis and there will be more respect for the field.

<comment><USER26> This seems to presume that scientific programming is merely a service to the important and more deserving persons who generate scientific hypotheses, from whom it can be decoupled and isolated, instead of being the collaborative effort that it is--if elevating the professional standing of scientific programmers must wait for the widespread adoption of automated hypothesis generation software. For example, the computation of ecosystem service indicators--what you might call the interface between biogeophysical models of Earth systems and economic and policy modeling--is an interdisciplinary and collaborative activity that relies heavily on computational technique and technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "I'm leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company [...]"

"[bioinformatics] software is written to be inefficient, to use memory poorly, and the cry goes up for bigger, faster machines! [...]"

Well, the author is heading for a very bitter surprise...

</comment><comment><USER29> You know, I'd be more inclined to listen to him if he didn't also completely decry almost all of modern biology, which (in my view) has been to the late 20th and early 21st centuries what physics was to the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.

</comment><comment><USER30> I spent a year in a bioinformatics PhD program and got the feeling I was studying to be science's version of the business analyst. Not knowing enough about the biology or computation, but expected to speak the language of both. And what would my research consist of in such an applied science? Luckily I had another opportunity and became a software developer (which I'm happy with). The worst thing about the experience was listening to so many research presentations where I could tell the presenter didn't understand the science and could barely explain it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Some thoughts on this article:

\- This guy clearly has a limited understanding of the field. This quote is laughable: "There are only two computationally difficult problems in bioinformatics, sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction."

\- As a bioinformatician, I feel sorry for this guy. Just like any other field, there are shitty places to work. If I was stuck in a lab where a demanding PI with no computer skills kept throwing the results of poorly designed experiments at me and asking for miracles, I'd be a little bitter too.

\- Just like any other field, there are also lots of places that are great places to work and are churning out some pretty goddamn amazing code and science. I'm working in cancer genomics, and we've already done work where the results of our bioinformatic analyses have _saved people's lives_. Here's one high-profile example that got a lot of good press. ([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene- sequencing-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing- treatment-for-leukemia-glimpses-of-the-future.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0))

\- I'm in the field of bioinformatics to improve human health and understand deep biological questions. I care about reproducibility and accuracy in my code, but 90% of the time, I could give a rat's ass about performance. I'm trying to find the answer to a question, and if I can get that answer in a reasonable amount of time, then the code is good enough. This is especially true when you consider that 3/4 of the things I do are one-off analyses with code that will never be used again. (largely because 3/4 of experiments fail - science is messy and hard like that). If given a choice between dicking around for two weeks to make my code perfect, or cranking out something that works in 2 hours, I'll pretty much always choose the latter. ("Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." --Donald Knuth)

\- That said, when we do come up with some useful and widely applicable code, we do our best to optimize it, put it into pipelines with robust testing, and open-source it, so that the community can use it. If his lab never did that, they're rapidly falling behind the rest of the field.

\- As for his assertion that bad code and obscure file formats are job security through obscurity, I'm going to call bullshit. For many years, the field lacked people with real CS training, so you got a lot of biologists reading a perl book in their spare time and hacking together some ugly, but functional solutions. Sure, in some ways that was less than optimal, but hell, it got us the human genome. The field is beginning to mature, and you're starting to see better code and standard formats as more computationally-savvy people move in. No one will argue that things couldn't be improved, but attributing it to unethical behavior or malice is just ridiculous.

tl;dr: Bitter guy with some kind of bone to pick doesn't really understand or accurately depict the state of the field.

<comment><USER32> Out of curiosity, what other computationally difficult problems are there?

I'm very interested in bioinformatics, but sadly don't know as much about the field as I'd like.

<comment><USER33> One that comes immediately to mind is genome assembly, which is a hugely complex problem, and essential to a variety of fields that rely on re-piecing together the genome without a reference (or with a reference that is highly divergent from the sequence data).

<comment><USER20> Genome assembly relies heavily on sequence alignment. So: Is genome assembly hard just because sequence alignment is hard? Or would genome assembly present separate algorithmic problems even if there was a super-efficient solution to sequence alignment?

<comment><USER34> It is far more difficult than sequence alignment. Sequence alignment has quadratic complexity, while fragment assembly is NP-hard. Se for example

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=131745416915434219...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13174541691543421945&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5)

<comment><USER35> Yes, for pairwise sequence alignment. The globally optimized multiple sequence alignment problem is NP-complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Really makes me want to learn more about molecular biology.

Any solid factual resources besides the references mentioned in this justified rant?

<comment><USER37> Biostars.org is a stackexchange-like site for bioinformaticians.

See there for answers to your question, eg:

* Best resources to learn molecular biology for a computer scientist. [1]

* What are the best bioinformatics course materials and videos (available online)? [2]

[1] <http://www.biostars.org/p/3066/>

[2] <http://www.biostars.org/p/10766/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Also, yes molecular biologists with few exceptions know little more than fuck all about ecology. Hence the mostly gung-ho attitudes to GM of crop foods for example. Honestly. I've done real molecular biology work (simple commercial protein chemistry and molecular phylogenetics of mitochondrial DNA) and tried to start a PhD in ecology (failed due to funding issues and realising it was a dead end job wise).

</comment><comment><USER39> There are a lot of problems in bioinformatics. Mainly, lack of reproducibility (ie "custom perl scripts"), poorly organized and characterized data and plenty of wheel reinvention (I heard Jim Kent, who first assembled the human genome, created his own version of wc [word of mouth, citation needed]).

The fact of the matter is that through high-throughput sequencing, microarrays, what have you, generation of biologically-meaningful results is possible.

There are a lot of problems in bioinformatics that need to be solved. Github has helped. More of bioinformaticians are learning about good software development practices, and journal reviewers are becoming more enlightened of the merits of sharing source code.

</comment><comment><USER37> Also see the discussion at the bioinformatics subreddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/bioinformatics/comments/179e9k/a_far...](http://www.reddit.com/r/bioinformatics/comments/179e9k/a_farewell_to_bioinformatics_since_i_am_about_to/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting to read since I made the same career move last year. I agree with about half of it but don't see a lot of value or useful advice here.

I find it curious that he stops to salute ecologists, since I was in an ecology lab. I liked my labmates and our perspective, but we didn't have any magical ability to avoid the problems he aludes to here.

I think a lot of his frustration comes down to not being more involved in the planning process. That's not a new problem. R.A. Fisher put it this way in 1938: "To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of."

Perhaps the idea that we can have bioinformatics specialists who wait for data is just wrong. Should we blame PIs who don't want to give up control to their specialists, or the specialists who don't push harder, earlier? Ultimately the problem will only be solved as more people with these skills move up the ranks. But the whole idea that we need more specialists working on smaller chunks of the problem may be broken from the start (<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1183512/>).

</comment><comment><USER41> OK, I agree that there are some shitty work on this field, but he can't think they we all in the same boat. For example "Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex the parrot dwarfs the scientific contributions of all other sequencing to date put together." this is not true. Bioinformatics is not just blinding sequencing new DNA, but analyzing data and almost every new breakthrough in medicine is based in a direct (or indirect) bioinformatics analysis. I used to work in an agrobiotech company and the sequencer was the first source of data for any breeding program. Bioinformatics was used to design primers for PCR to find molecular markers. There is bad software out there? Yes, but I see this as an opportunity than a problem. And the cause is not the need to hide something, but the lack of ability of biologists with no CS background in the field.

</comment><comment><USER42> Maybe overblown, but it echoes complaints I've heard from other bioinformatics people.

Surely this means there's a goldmine waiting there for someone to produce a non-broken toolchain for bioinformatics?

Or is it even possible to produce standard tools? Maybe all the labs are too bespoke?

</comment><comment><USER43> i totally disagree on Fred's negative view of Bioinformatics. as "software is eating the world", it's actually bioinformatics is eating biology. today's main-stream biology is dealing with exploding amount of data from modern instruments, images or clinical data collected every day and mostly machine readable. to stay up-to-date a modern biologist / bioinformatist need to think biological problems in a "big-data" (i know, cliche) way, then try to gain some insight from the data with (computational) tools. today it's the algorithms, mathematical models and software packages on top of databases to pinpoint cancer SNPs and drive drug discovery. and today it's these same algorithms and math models driving how web bench works are designed. if you think biological data are "shitty", i guess you never see other kind of unstructured data out there. so many scholars in other fields envy biologist and medical scientists for something called "PubMed". on the other hand, for those purely wet bench "biologists" who think computers are magic boxes to give answers, insights, models with one push of the button, i do feel sorry for them. they are so last-gen as they just don't have the essential techniques nowadays (just like a molecular biologist not knowing pcr).

</comment><comment><USER44> This is a little discouraging - BioInformatics was my top choice for a Master's program I'm planning to start this year. The program at Melbourne Uni looks really good (accepts from three streams, Math/Stats, Biology or Computing and tailors the course based on your background). Maybe I should go for a more generic Machine Learning one and try to apply that to healthcare in some other field if things are really this bad.

<comment><USER31> As someone in the field, let me assure you: This article does not accurately reflect the state of the field.

<comment><USER44> Thanks for the reply. I wasn't basing this just on the article, there seem to be a fair number of comments here supporting a less-extreme version of what he's saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Some things are going to suck in academia, as this guy points out. But, its a necessary step and todays progress is almost always going to be tomorrows shit. So quit bitching.

Biologists are almost never good coders, if they can code at all. But thats not what they do, they signed up for pipettes, not python.

Its the programmers who wrote said shitty code that are to be blamed, but you can't hate under-paid and over-worked phd students who write this code even though it usually has nothing to do with their thesis (the math/algorithm is the main part, the deployable implementation is usually not the most important).

If you want good code and organized/accountable databases, go to industry. Theres nothing new about this transition. The IMPORTANT part, is that industry gives back to academia. So when you get an office with windows and a working coffee machine, remember to help make some phd student's life a little easier by making part of your code open source.

</comment><comment><USER46> Where does the Rosalind project (rosalind.info) fit into all of this, I'm wondering? It seems to be written by people who have actual understanding of the mappings between biology and informatics, with clear explanations of problems in terms of the programming challenge involved.

Surely they can't get that far without having some kind of sensible method?

</comment><comment><USER47> Why is this on the front page or why is it relevant? It's kind of a rant. I did some work on a publication in this field and was published once; I don't think it is a horrible research program. There may exist some of the issues in bioinformatics described here but I don't think it is terribly productive.

</comment><comment><USER48> Having working in the bioinformatics industry as an SE for 9 years I can both agree and disagree.

1\. I agree that SE standards and good coding practice are completely absent in the bioinformatics world. I remember being asked to improved the speed of some sequence alignment tools and realized that the source code was originally Delphi that had been run through a C++ converter. No comments, single monolithic file. The vast majority of the bioinformatics code I worked with was poorly written/documented Perl. In addition a lot of bioinformatics guys don't understand SE process and so rather than having a coordinated engineering effort, you end up with a lot of "coyboy coding" with guys writing the same thing over and over.

2\. I agree that productivity is very slow. This is a side product of research itself though. In the "real world" (quoted) where people need to sell software, time is the enemy. It's important to work together quickly to get a good product to market. In the research world, you get a 2/5 year grants and no one seems have much of a fire under them to get anything done (Hey we're good for 5 years!). You would think that the people would be motivated to cure caner quickly (etc), but it's not really the case. Research moves at a snail's pace - and consequently the productivity expectations of the bioinformatics group.

3\. I disagree that research results from the scientists are garbage. Yes it's true that some experiments get screwed up. However, if you having a lot of people running those experiments over and over, the bad experiments clearly become outliers. Replication in the scientific community is good because it protects against bad data this way. Somehow the author must have had a particularly bad experience.

4\. Something the author didn't mention that I think is important to understand: most scientists have no idea how to utilize software engineering resources. The pure biologists, many times are the boss, and don't really understand how to run a software division like bioinformatics. Many times PHD's in CS run a bioinformatics group, who have never worked in industry and don't know anything about good SE practice or how to run a software project. A lot of the problems in the bioinformatics industry is directly related to poor management. Wherever you go you're going to have team members that have trouble programming, trouble with their work ethic, trouble with following direction. However, in a bioinformatics environment where these individuals are given free reign and are not working as a cohesive unit, you can see why there is so much terrible code and duplication.

</comment><comment><USER49> This piece seems to have touched a nerve in the bioinformatics community, though I have no idea why. Much of what is said here is obvious to anyone working in academic research that requires programming expertise.

Yes, industry typically pays more than academia. Yes, most molecular biologists cannot code and rely on bioinformatics support. Yes, biological data is often noisy. Yes, code in bionformatics is often research grade (poorly implemented, poorly documented, often not available). These are all good points that have been made many times more potently by others in the field like C. Titus Brown (<http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/category/science.html>). But they are not universal truths and exceptions to these trends abound. Show me an academic research software system in any field outside of biology that is functional and robust as the UCSC genome browser (serving >500,000 requests a day) or the NCBI's pubmed (serving ~200,000 requests a day). To conclude from common shortcomings of academic research programming that bioinformatics is "computational shit heap" is unjustified and far from an accurate assessment of the reality of the field.

From looking into this guy a bit (who I've never heard of before today in my 10+ years in the field), my take on what is going is here is that this is the rant of a disgruntled physicist/mathematician is a self-proclaimed perfectionist (<https://documents.epfl.ch/users/r/ro/ross/www/values.html>), who moved into biology but did not establish himself in the field. From what I can tell contrasting his CV (<https://documents.epfl.ch/users/r/ro/ross/www/cv.pdf>) to his linkedin profile (<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/frederick-ross/13/81a/47>), it does not appear that he completed his PhD after several years of work, which is always a sign of something something going awry and that someone has had a bad personal experience in academic research. I think this is most important light to interpret this blog post in, rather than an indictment of the field.

That said, I would also like to see bioinformatics die (or at least whither) and be replaced by computational biology (see differences in the two fields here: [http://rbaltman.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/bioinformatics- comp...](http://rbaltman.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/bioinformatics- computational-biology-same-no/)). Many of the problems that apparently Ross has experienced come from the fact that most biologists cannot code, and therefore two brains (the biologist's and the programmer's) are required to solve problems that require computing in biology. This leads to an abundance of technical and social problems, which as someone who can speak fluently to both communities pains me to see happen on a regular basis. Once the culture of biology shifts to see programming as an essential skill (like using a microscope or a pipette), biological problems can be solved by one brain and the problems that are created by miscommunication, differences in expectations, differences in background, etc. will be minimized and situations like this will become less common.

I for one am very bullish that bioinformatics/computational biology is still the biggest growth area in biology, which is the biggest domain of academic research, and highly recommend students to move into this area ([http://caseybergman.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/top-n- reasons-t...](http://caseybergman.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/top-n-reasons-to- do-a-ph-d-or-post-doc-in-bioinformaticscomputational-biology/)). Clearly, academic research is not for everyone. If you are unlucky, can't hack it, or greener pastures come your way, so be it. Such is life. But programming in biology ain't going away anytime soon, and with one less body taking up a job in this domain, it looks like prospects have just gotten that little bit better for the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER50> I agree that a lot of effort that is put into bioinformatics is wasted. But it's silly to say that bioinformatics hasn't contributed much to science, and naive to think that dysfunctional software development is less widespread outside of bioinformatics.

</comment><comment><USER51> Fascinating HN thread. I work in the geoinformatics domain where many of the same comments apply. I agree scientists turned programmers are often poor software developers. Moreover, this group often belittles industry established best practices in software development. But in truth, the "pure" software engineer/computer scientist lacks sufficient domain expertise to accomplish something useful. Learning fluid dynamics requires many years of education. Ideally, you would like these two groups to work closely together and with mutual respect.

</comment><comment><USER52> I largely agree with Fred's opinion on the shortcomings of bioinformaticians and the general attitude in the industry, but my personal experience was actually pretty positive. My past research was on building visualizations of the complicated biochemical processes, for use in educating undergrads. It was certainly more interesting than slogging through mounds of crappy data.

Just another data point for someone contemplating a career in BINF, although some purists might say that my work did not really fall under the same category.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spelling error: 'technically apt', not 'ept'.

"Ept" means effective. As in "inept"

I don't understand this part:

> No one seems to have pointed out that this makes your database a reflection > of your database, not a reflection of reality. Pull out an annotation in > GenBank today and it's not very long odds that it's completely wrong.

In fact this entire article seems to be a rant on why bioinformatics as a field is rotting. But instead of ranting, surely something can be done about it?

Shouldn't we as hackers see this as an opportunity to revolutionize the field?

<comment><USER53> As a general rule, the people on the short end of the stick are the people least capable of producing change. Worse, change that they bring about tends to be good from a strict, technical viewpoint but has huge negative side effects that go unnoticed or deliberately ignored until it becomes difficult to distinguish the resultant system as a better one.

Rants like this, and providing interviews to third parties, are actually one of the more positive things that he could bring to the table: it provides information to people who aren't aware and inspires motivation in people who aren't entangled.

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but I think Fred is in a prime position to disrupt bioinformatics. He knows all the flaws, he knows all the problems. If I were him, I'd have seized the opportunity and work on a hard problem.

Then again, I am in no position to judge what Fred should or should not do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Say for the purposes of argument that this thesis were true. What is there (if anything) to be done about it? I ask as a naive interested party with a CS background.

</comment><comment><USER55> That's a shame. I just finished a uni module about bioinformatics. It seemed like a cool field where progress was being made, and as an undergraduate I could generate meaningful looking results by following very recent papers. I hope the field has some saving graces even if this is all true. The idea of CompSci folk working with biology folk to solve human problems inspired me a lot.

</comment><comment><USER56> The author is exactly right about the quality of data in bioinformatics. There are datasets with genes named MAR1, DEC1, etc. getting mangled to 1-Mar, 1-Dec, because of Microsoft Excel autoformatting.

[http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name- errors-a...](http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and- excel-lessons-not-learned/)

</comment><comment><USER57> The bio in bioinformatics is the important bit. Informatics plays second fiddle, even in the name. Very few will appreciate your beautiful code, but many will appreciate you finding a cure for cancer. That is the reality of bioinformatics, most of the code has a short shelf life. If you luck out, your software may live longer, as is the case with samtools. That samtools code is crappy is true, still the much cleaner code alternatives, sambamba and bamtools, are not much used! Go figure.

Maybe bioinformatics is not the place to aim for great informatics. We do bioinformatics because of love of science first and foremost. This is frontier land, the wild west, and it pays to play quick and dirty. I would suggest to hang on to some best practices, e.g. modularity, TDD and BDD, but forget about appreciation. Dirty Harry, as a bioinformatician you are on your own.

To be honest, in industry it is not much different. These days, coders are carpenters. If you really want to be a diva, learn to sing instead.

</comment><comment><USER58> molecular biology has been dead for years now, but the amount of money poured into it makes it impossible to publish its death certificate. Here is why and how it happened (among other things): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0b11S1FjXY>

</comment><comment><USER59> Come work with me in my genomic interpretation company. Fun application building, no data mess, big money!

</comment><comment><USER60> >> I'm leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money.

More money, good on you. Starting off your critique of your former colleagues with "technically ept people'...not going to get a lot of sympathy for the correctness of your work.

<comment><USER14> Everyone is jumping on that, but (while I had to look it up too) 'ept' actually is a real word:

from the OED:

ept, adj. Pronunciation: /ɛpt/ Etymology: Back-formation < inept adj.

      Used as a deliberate antonym of 'inept': adroit, appropriate, effective.

1938 E. B. White Let. Oct. (1976) 183, I am much obliged..to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject.

1966 Time 30 Sept. 7/1 With the exception of one or two semantic twisters, I think it is a first-rate job—definitely ept, ane and ert.

1976 N.Y. Times Mag. 6 June 15 The obvious answer is summed up by a White House official's sardonic crack: 'Politically, we're not very ept.'

<comment><USER61> That was…surprisingly thorough.

<comment><USER24> That _is_ the point of the OED: to be comprehensive and include real usages.

<comment><USER53> That's the point of any half-decent dictionary.

The OED is a gold standard, though.

<comment><USER62> James Murray was the true Scotsman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Someone's got a bad case of God Complex.

</comment><comment><USER64> i'm not into bio, but read articles on latest development. my sister also took bioinformatics but the scope in India is very less it seems.

have you checked out synthetic biology? will it be easy to understand when you have a degree in bioinformatics?</comment>


The Results of Europe's Lockdown Experiment Are In - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-europe-lockdown-excess-deaths-recession <comment><USER2> Restrictions don't do much when it's too late. If they are implemented early, everything goes well.

Compare: italy, turkey with greece

</comment><comment><USER3> Something I find interesting, the excess mortality charts in the article only go down to zero but if you go to the euroMOMO website you will see that for France and Spain we are well into the negatives. France is almost at a score of -10 which is a lot lower than any historic data.

</comment><comment><USER4> > But, as our next chart shows, there's little correlation between the > severity of a nation's restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess > fatalities

<comment><USER5> Without the context that extract is at best misleading. The article continues,

> The overall impression is that while restrictions on movement were seen as a > necessary tool to halt the spread of the virus, _when and how they were > wielded was more important than their severity_. Early preparation, and > plentiful health-care resources, were enough for several countries to avoid > draconian lockdowns. Germany, with better testing and contact tracing and > more intensive care units than its neighbors, could afford to keep the > economy a bit more open. Greece, by acting quickly and surely, appears to > have avoided the worst, so far. (Emphasis mine)

The other related conclusion from the article Is that countries like Italy needed more extreme measures because they lacked the rest of the necessary infrastructure. That lack was not a wealth issue as the example of Greece shows.

The US, with its second tier medical system and laggy response, seems likely to require an Italy response rather than that a Germany/Greece one.

There's an additional interesting conclusion that suggests that the high level of economic integration means the economic pain will continue to be spread around even among the better responders as their markets and suppliers will be suffering no matter how well they did themselves.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK the US isn't faring particularly worse than most European countries. Especially if you remove New York, the perception of the US as having had uniquely bad outcomes seem pretty unfounded. And if you focus on individual states, states like California responded very early and have absurdly low cases per capita.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Seoul is South Korea, but NYC is not the USA. A full lockdown for super dense areas, but looser everywhere else.

<comment><USER7> If a lockdown would make sense. As you see with the data, it didn't. Hygiene measures could be much more effective.

<comment><USER5> With which data? This article reaches the opposite conclusion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Comcast wants to sell your Web history to advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/03/comcast-wants-to-sell-your-web-history/ <comment><USER2> >A bargained-for exchange of information for service is a perfectly acceptable and widely used model throughout the U.S. economy, including the Internet ecosystem

Isn't bargaining a two sided affair?

Also something that should be part of the article and is a LARGE omission is the fact that Comcast is literally a shareholder in Hulu.

This could mean it is them selling ads on a service they are owners of using the data they gathered as an ISP and not only as a service, like the data Netflix would have. It seems to me a much more egregious offense then them selling my data, something I expect to happen with a monopoly.

Comcast is the company that seems like the entity that one would provide as an example of why Libertarian ideology can't feasibly work, but the example would seem so absurd it still shocks me it exists.

<comment><USER3> I was with you until you mentioned the Libertarian ideology. Comcast's position is not aided by the "free market". If there was a free market, there would be a ton of other competitors that wouldn't be willing to do this and people could switch over to them.

Comcast has its monopoly position because most cities and states give them local monopoly - which is like the opposite of what a libertarian would allow.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, only one cable company per area. The only option is a 3G/4G hotspot which charges per GB and is outrageous, then slower DSL. Some people are lucky to have Fiber offered.

Cell phone carriers, there's only 4 I think nationwide than all the other "carriers" just resell them as a white label.

I never got why 1GB is $10 a gig, when with a VPS I can buy bandwidth for like 10 cents a GB. Why a 100x price increase for just making the bandwidth wireless?

<comment><USER5> >> Why a 100x price increase for just making the bandwidth wireless?

Because they can and will continue to do so as long as they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Imagine if car companies were allowed to sell your driving location history.

That's why their analogy to websites collecting data is awful, by the way: I cam choose whether or not to visit a particular place, but my car goes with me no matter where I go.

<comment><USER7> I remember reading an article a while back about BMW attempting to use location information to display ads for certain stores on the integrated display (iDrive). They even talked about using the weight sensor on the seat (for the air bags) to determine if there was a child in the car or not so that they could optimize the ads.

I can't seem to find a link though. Apparently, the idea was scrapped due to negative publicity, but who knows...

I do know that my car (2011 BMW) has a GSM telemetry link that is in periodic communication with their dealer network, even well after the warranty expired. I get calls all the time from my local dealer saying that my "car called in requesting service". I would normally call BS, but this always occurs after the service light comes on (I change the oil myself and sometimes forget to reset the oil life system).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much is a persons browsing history going to be worth in the long run? I simply don't see how anyone can make money on knowing that I spend five hours a day on PornHub, two hours on Hacker News and 15 minutes on the Django documentation.

Or even that I primarily spend my money on Amazon when actually buying something.

<comment><USER9> You do not seem to provide much direct sales potential but perhaps a future mrsweasel, employer or insurance provider might find that information very useful, valuable even.

<comment><USER8> You're right in that respect, but it says "to advertisers". My data would be valuable as potential blackmail, or as you suggest: Not giving me a job, but for advertisers not so much.

It's my feeling that for the majority of people their browsing data will rarely translate to direct sales.

<comment><USER10> Dear mrweasel,

Our unencrypted database was compromised and all your browsing history and our analysis of your daily habits is now on sale on blabnlablabla.onion/sell.php?product=123 starting from 0.002BTC per year of history of a user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After making a reasonable outlay on a watch in a bricks and mortar store recently and then being retargeted aggressively by watch manufacturers on my browser (apparently card companies selling purchase history is par for the course) I became rather upset about the whole "we like to track everything you do because advertising" theme of the web.

I was recommended and have started using the free "Privacy Badger" Chrome extension from the EFF which is exceptional. The web sans skeezy cookies and 3rd party tracking is a rather different (and enjoyable experience). What's really funny too is that some sites (Bloomberg is an example) simply won't work without all of these nasty trackers switched on.

<comment><USER12> How is it possible to connect your browser to a credit card you used at a brick and mortar store?

<comment><AUTHOR> Data brokers like Axciom collect offline purchase transactions and have partnerships with Facebook, Google and others, [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/05/14/data-broker-acxiom- mo...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/05/14/data-broker-acxiom-moves-to-tie- physical-world-to-online-data/)

<comment><USER13> From that link: > The company was censured by Facebook for the practice, which involved pulling data from apps against the social network's rules.

Sounds like they just ran an app and misused the API? Are FB and Google really allowing this kind of stuff? Random companies like United, meh I don't expect them to have much scruples. But Google and FB?

Any info on which banks/companies do this? Does it happen with debit cards, too?

<comment><USER11> > Yes, Your Credit Card Company Is Selling Your Purchase Data To Online > Advertisers[0]

[0]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/credit-cards-sell-purchase- da...](http://www.businessinsider.com/credit-cards-sell-purchase-data-to- advertisers-2013-4)

<comment><USER13> That's not even close. That's CC companies selling aggregated data. That generally won't identify a user, to link their CC purchase of a watch with watch related ads. (Unless they were the only customer in that region.)

The link says MasterCard sells info on which ZIP codes have which purchases. That's extremely different than offering a cookie (or somehow identifying) to say "this guy bought a watch".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Most of us agree to give up our data in exchange for using online services such as Google, Netflix and Facebook. Cable and Internet providers have said it's only fair for them to compete on the same playing field."

No Google and FB are free. Comcast is not only not free but an expensive service and often a monopoly in a market.

This is how it starts, Comcast dips their toe into the water and if it cant get away with this on some limited basis, then it will eventually become the default. AT&T and Verizon are already doing this with wireless businesses. Their argument was also that FB, and Google were doing this and they needed to as well in order to compete.

If this happens we will need to purchase VPN service from a third party in order to protect us from the monopoly internet provider. What a sad state of affairs this will be.

P.S., Can you anyone tell me what I would agree to give up with a Netflix account? This is news to me.

<comment><USER15> Your browsing pattern on their archive, your watching history, your watching pattern (in terms of time of day, days of week, time of year) as well as location history and ... .

<comment><USER14> Oh sure but they aren't selling that data to third parties are they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wouldn't use of VPN bypass their ability to collect my browsing habits?

If difference in cost of service > cost of monthly VPN, this might be an interesting loophole.

<comment><USER17> Sadly using a VPN for general usage is getting more difficult.

Many sites block traffic from known VPN providers (PCPartPicker.com just leaves an unhelpful message similar to " we are down right now" of you connect over some VPN providers), and sites like Netflix are blocking all VPNs they can in an effort to stop people from watching things outside their region.

I used to run my whole house through a VPN 24/7, but now I need to only turn it on when I know it won't cause issues.

<comment><USER18> What about data center IPs? A pay-by-the-hour VPS can be cheaper than any VPN service. I've been using one recently and it hasn't been flagged by any site I care about.

<comment> ryan-c I had a bank account locked to the "show up in a branch with id" level for this.

<comment><USER19> So explain that if it happens again you intend to switch banks.

<comment><USER20> Not me. I'm very happen when this happens. When it comes to identity, it's far easier to deal with false positive than theft. For example, my credit card gets flagged for fraud every holiday when I go on a gift card purchasing spree. I have no problem with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This might be one of the reasons Comcast is so keen to put cable modems with built in WiFi into people's homes. This would allow them to track Web history all the way down to a particular device. (It could also probably be used to track down who's particular computer was used in file sharing.)

</comment><comment><USER22> How is this different that a telephone company selling the record of phones you have called?

[https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/protecting-your- telepho...](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/protecting-your-telephone- calling-records)

<comment><USER23> Verizon actually already sells your web history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wait, are they planning to track data and sell targeted ads, or to literally sell web history? The headline implies the latter but I can't see in the article where it says that.

That is a pretty huge distinction..

<comment><USER25> There is a significant distinction here, but I opine that either behavior is unacceptable for an ISP. I'm reading this and the comments and imagining a telco switchboard operator listening to my call, and then randomly either breaking into my call to suggest I buy something (targeted ads), or then publish the full text of my conversations to any third party (history). And I do mean the full text. The link from home to your ISP must necessarily contain all the inputs you request of the web. This is not analogous to your call history; your computer is only making one "call" (to the ISP) and is having a long "conversation" (all your Internet activity) within that "call".

Disclaimer: I'm not very proficient at how the Internet works at this level. My comment's making it sound more and more like a pen register.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wouldn't be so opposed to this if we had more choice of an ISP.

<comment><USER27> If we had more choice they wouldn't try to do this to begin with. They're only doing this because so many of their customers effectively have no other viable choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google gets web history via Google DNS, and they're the advertiser. So, I don't know that we really care about ISPs collecting and selling similar data. Probably the distinction is we trust Google more than Comcast with the handling of this data, and possibly to what degree we as individuals are abstracted from aggregated data, compared to what Comcast is capable of collecting.

If the trust is low enough to prompt paying more money to Comcast for a non- tracking tier of service, why trust that Comcast is in fact not tracking their non-tracking tier anyway? Why not just pay for VPN service? Or maybe some combination of OpenDNS's DNSCrypt plus HTTPS is sufficient?

<comment><USER29> I think the distinction is Google has specifically said they _won 't_ correlate Google Public DNS data for targeting advertising [1], while Comcast is specifically saying that's exactly what they _do_ want the option to do.

If you don't trust either company, that distinction won't matter. But if you take their statements at face value, there is a difference.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Public_DNS#Privacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Public_DNS#Privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> People keep recommending VPSs or ssh/vps/socks running on a VPS

the problem is that if you go to likes of amazon and then place an order your account will be yanked in minutes

good luck then trying to get anyone human there to help you, you are automatically blacklisted

<comment><USER31> Not if you use SSL on top of your proxy/VPN.

<comment><USER30> You dont get it, =commercial datacenter ip ranges are blacklisted or trigger flags

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would be surprised if they didn't already track their customers' browsing history (and DNS lookups for insight into HTTPS browsing). Maybe they have to announce it now that they want to sell the data.

<comment><USER33> _and DNS lookups for insight into HTTPS browsing_

No need, SNI will tell you the hostname in the stream itself.

<comment><USER16> I was going to suggest we can change our DNS to someone other than our ISP, but if what you say is correct, then that becomes irrelevant, too.

<comment><USER34> That doesn't help, they can read your DNS requests as they pass through. Unless you do as some others here suggested and use a full VPN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. As long as they don't try to do it for https which is probably impossible unless some major flaw is found or you install some plugin. I think in 2016, installing software for an ISP is so outdated, reminds me of AOL and if they went that route I doubt they'd be able to even write software/plugins for all the devices people use such as iOS. It'd basically be spyware.

I do know though with my ISP DNS, I do get ads and search like results on domains where DNS doesn't resolve, but with Google DNS that never happens :)

<comment><USER35> HTTPS doesn't encrypt the SNI information so Comcast can still tell what sites you're visiting. They can also sniff all your DNS traffic even if it's going to Google's DNS server. DNSoTLS is not deployed anywhere except in testing at this point.

<comment><USER4> DNS isn't widely encrypted yet? That's scary.

So does that mean if a rogue ISP wanted to, they could serve up Twitter.com on their internal network and return their fake DNS record instead assuming the user's cache expired?

Kinda like a man in the middle but at the DNS level... Only problem is pretty much every, if not all SSL cert company requires domain verification. So they couldn't probably easily fake the SSL part for Twitter.

<comment><USER36> With DNS encryption your ISP still sees IPs correct? Then it can do reverse DNS lookup. Then it can also serve whatever it wants on said IP.

When I write in browser twitter.com/give-me-lots-of-pr0n does it first connect with twitter.com's port 80 and sends an unencrypted GET request with /give-me- lots-of-pr0n to receive redirect to [https://twitter.com/](https://twitter.com/)?

<comment><USER37> > When I write in browser twitter.com/give-me-lots-of-pr0n does it first > connect with twitter.com's port 80 and sends an unencrypted GET request with > /give-me-lots-of-pr0n to receive redirect to > [https://twitter.com/](https://twitter.com/)?

Probably not, in this case, because Twitter has implemented HSTS[1], and are[2] in a list that comes with your browser that specifies _never_ to connect to the site unencrypted. If they're in the browser list, your browser will never actually connect on port 80; it will silently redirect client-side to HTTPS.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security)

2\. [https://hstspreload.appspot.com/?domain=twitter.com](https://hstspreload.appspot.com/?domain=twitter.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Of course Comcast wants to do it. If it makes them more money, don't they have a duty to their shareholders to use that asset to generate profit?

It does bother me that privacy is turning into something for the wealthy.

I also think about how companies like Facebook gather an unbelievable amount of information about me and use that to generate $15 every 3 months (I'm in the US). I wish I could just pay $5 every month for an ad-free version.

<comment><USER39> _> If it makes them more money, don't they have a duty to their shareholders to use that asset to generate profit?_

Unless explicitly laid out in their corporate charter, no. There is no default effective fiduciary duty to do _anything_ related to profitability, be it "maximize" or otherwise.

This is one of the more pernicious myths about the idea of the corporation that needs to be killed.

<comment><USER40> >> here is no default effective fiduciary duty to do anything related to profitability, be it "maximize" or otherwise

I'm not entirely sure that's 100% true. I know the one thing I've seen before when "duty" to shareholders comes up: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co).

<comment><USER39> "Interests of shareholders" does not mean the same thing as "maximizing profits." For example, a forward-thinking Comcast executive could make the argument that the goodwill from not looking like creepy spying dudes hiding in your hedges outweighs the short-term increase in revenue.

<comment><USER41> That's exactly the same as maximizing profits.

<comment><USER39> That depends on where you're standing and what your timeframe is. Which, by itself, is enough to put the boot to the aforementioned pernicious lie: it's impossible to "maximize profit" for the shareholders, because the shareholders aren't unified in purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> VPN. Turn them into the dumb pipes they should be.

<comment><USER43> The challenge is, then your VPN endpoint has access to all of this data. So who's your trustworthy VPN endpoint?

<comment><USER44> Your own VPS, I guess.

<comment><USER8> Now you're just trusting the VPS provider.

<comment><USER45> At least you can pick between VPS providers. The only way to opt out of Comcast (generally) is to move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This wouldn't be that bad, except for the fact that they won't properly disclose it, and I bet the "non-discounted" plans either won't exist or will be extremely expensive

</comment><comment><USER47> What do you think Facebook and Google are doing...</comment>


Is It Ethical to Work on the Tesla Autopilot Software? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/bosepchuk/is-it-ethical-to-work-on-the-tesla-autopilot-software-4lhh <comment><USER2> I agree with the spirit of this article but it reads less persuasively due to filler material of little value to the argument. The gratuitous appeals to emotion ( _" Which car would you rather trust your children's lives to?"_ or _" [...]so they can cope with failure conditions without killing you_") don't help persuade me either.

After re-reading, I still don't quite understand the point of splitting up points 1 through 3. Point 1 easily could have read "Tesla assumes it will be able to make a provably safe level 3 autonomous vehicle in the next few years". The arguments under the respective 3 sections could easily fit under this one heading.

Point 5 - although a hurdle, I fail to see how this is the responsibility of Tesla. Tesla is selling a product. They aren't guaranteeing the right to use that product in your jurisdiction. I can buy fireworks, but I'm not allowed to use them in my jurisdiction. Is it the responsibility of the fireworks company to lobby my government? They might get some more sales if they do, sure, but they aren't by any means required to. Why is it Tesla's sole responsibility to make the legislative push for autonomous driving? Even if we do lay the responsibility, for whatever reason, at the feet of the companies making the products... Responsibility should also be on Waymo and the slew of other companies pursuing autonomous driving. I fail to see why Tesla is singled out as the ethical bad guy here for this point.

Point 6 and 7 exist for literally every company, ever. One has to assume that Tesla is a going concern, just like everything else, until they aren't. Not really fair to jam these two points onto the list.

The real zinger:

> _Of course, I have no first hand knowledge that anything unethical is > happening at Tesla. But suppose even half of what I 've presented here is > true. Is it ethical to work on the Tesla autopilot software?_

The spaghetti against the wall approach to arguing ethics is, if nothing else, a bold one.</comment>


NHS National Programme for IT to be scrapped - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/public-sector/3295104/nhs-national-programme-for-it-to-be-scrapped/

<comment><USER2> To be more accurate, the Care Records Service component of NPfIT is recommended for cancellation, but there are other parts of NPfIT that are delivering well (eg PACS)</comment>


Ask HN: Android dev blogs? - <AUTHOR>

I'm primarily a web developer but have been moving slowly into Android over the last year.  I have some great Java and Android resources -- they're readily available -- and follow a few blogs, like the official Google Android dev blog, but I think it'd be great to find some more Android app- or game-centric resources.
Do you follow any active Android-specific bloggers?  Are there watering holes frequented by these mythical beasts?  Are you in fact an Android?
I've read and revere O'Reilly's Programming Android and love Mario Zechner's Beginning Android Games as a reference on all sorts of game-related topics including efficiency and GC avoidance.  The indie game dev scene is awesome, but I seem to be missing out on the part that concentrates on Android... am I just a failure at the internet, or is this a segment that keeps to itself?
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.  Thank you! <comment><USER2> Romain Guy - <http://www.curious-creature.org/category/android/>

Tim Bray - <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/Android/>

Cyril Mottier - <http://android.cyrilmottier.com/>

CommonsWare (probably the top StackOverflow Android answerer) - <http://commonsware.com/blog/>

Android Developer Experts - <https://developers.google.com/experts/members/>

<comment><AUTHOR> These are great, thank you!</comment></comment>


Evaluating product potential - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ASKuisch/evaluating-product-potential-61b8dd21ac#.9v2lv5efd <comment><AUTHOR> Wrote this bit more as a way to structure my thoughts than anything else, but let me know what you think. Open to any suggestions for improvement.

<comment><USER2> Not bad. You have basically broken value down into 3 components. Ultimately it does not matter too much provided the total value offered is significant. Of course finding a niche with a high total value that is not already being occupied is hard.</comment></comment>


EA Makes a Lot Off Microtransactions, Particularly in Its Sports Games - <AUTHOR> http://thesurge.net/ea-makes-a-lot-off-microtransactions-particularly-in-its-sports-games/ <comment><USER2> I have no problem with the principle of microtransactions. However, when the transactions give other players an advantage in the game then it simply becomes pay-to-win -- which ruins games and communities. See: Payday 2

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but of course companies like EA do that purposely as it encourages players to make these purchases.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which password manager do you use? - <AUTHOR> I tested 1password which looks awesome, works perfectly, but I think in comparison to other cloud services (Netflix, Spotify, GitHub) they are relatively expensive. I definitely would prefer paying a one-time fee. I could also host a sync server on my own if there is some free software.
I tried LastPass but auto-filling has to be disabled for every single page which is really annoying. Besides, I don't like the button they are injecting. Compared to 1password the UX is really bad.
Can someone recommend a good password manager which works with Safari / Chrome / Firefox and iOS? <comment><USER2> I'm using 1Password. It's expensive but ultimately the peace of mind is really what I'm paying for. I treat it like insurance and forget about the bill. It works really well from my short experience (I only recently got it).

I use a combination of 1Password and Safari Keychain. 1Password for storing passwords/creditcards/sensitiveinfo in a multi-platform way, and the built in Safari Keychain on mac/iOS for the quick autofill functionality.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am using KeePass, works for my stack. However don't use it when using Mac or Linux it's a pain running with wine.

<comment><USER4> Consider using Keepassx. It's multiplatform. I don't see the Linux download but I've been using it on Ubuntu for years. Maybe I built it from sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I launch an app on my iPhone, none of the existing services (including 1Password) can fill in the password without the cooperation of the app vendor. This is insane. The companies that create and support mainstream operating systems such as iOS and Android need to step up and add password management as a core functionality.

</comment><comment><USER4> Keepassx. Master on my laptop, synced to my tablet and phone with Synchthing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Check out enpass. I've been recommending it for a while and people generally like it.

[https://www.enpass.io/](https://www.enpass.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! looks very promising. 10$ for iOS is definitely a reasonable price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For *nix check out [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Brain. Probably not the most secure but pretty safe from getting hacked or leaking.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use Firefox's saved passwords.

</comment><comment><USER10> My brain</comment>


Data Compressor from Scratch [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/data-compressor-from-scratch <comment><USER2> I highly recommend Destroy All Software if you're looking for resources for going from a beginner/intermediate level of coding ability to a more advanced level. Much of the material is organized around MVC web development and especially TDD, but there's a wide variety of transferable skills to be gained.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This screencast is temporarily free through 2017-07-19.

<comment><USER3> Looks like the free lunch is over already. It's still the 19th where I am and all I see is a "subscribe" overlay.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, that's fixed now. I accidentally had it cutting off at midnight UTC. I just pushed expiration out by another day (and it's now judged by Pacific time, and the page says that explicitly for good measure).

<comment><USER5> Very nice of you to fix this; is this a regular thing you do (freeing one video) ?

ps: as usual, your video (compression) was a joy to watch, you should be a Khan Academy partner, or host a university or be a mars overlord. Something like that

<comment><USER4> The code to make screencasts free has been in for a while, but I rarely used it with the computation series because most of them didn't make sense in isolation. These new ones do make sense alone, so I'll probably do this more.

I don't work with distributors at all because they tend to (a) want some level of control over content and/or the legal right to modify and reuse it, (b) offer unfavorable royalty rates, and (c) have mixed quality levels between the works they host. I like that DAS is a comparatively small body of work that people know by name and trust to be good.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I just wished more people got to enjoy your casts. It will happen eventually :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Manage web sockets from AWS Lambda using Fanout - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fanout/python-faas-grip <comment><AUTHOR> The chat example is running at ws://58d6587c.fanoutcdn.com/prod/chat if anyone wants to try it.

E.g. with wscat:

      wscat -c ws://58d6587c.fanoutcdn.com/prod/chat
      > hello
        < anonymous: hello

The backend is here: [https://9h8j7cy642.execute-api.us- west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/...](https://9h8j7cy642.execute-api.us- west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/chat)

You can try a direct request to see the backend's response:

      curl -i -H "Accept: application/websocket-events" -H "Content-Type: application/websocket-events" -d 'OPEN'$'\r'$'\n' https://9h8j7cy642.execute-api.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/chat

</comment><comment><USER2> I hadn't heard of Fanout before. I can't find any info about its global infrastructure - what regions does it serve?

It might be helpful in the new year. I'm developing a module for my app which uses websockets but I'm concerned about the performance for our clients in areas not served by AWS such as the UAE.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have servers in SF, London, and Singapore. [http://status.fanout.io](http://status.fanout.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting approach. We could really use a reverse-proxy-for-websockets thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice. The Websockets events as HTTP request response is similar to the architecture of Django Channels.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, splitting the session into a series of requests is a good way for Django Channels to rig things up, especially since Django itself doesn't support async yet.

We even have a library that works similarly: [https://github.com/fanout/django-grip](https://github.com/fanout/django-grip)

(goals are different though. maybe someday we'll see ASGI Django apps using GRIP at the same time :))</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Fast relevant qualifications for .Net/MVC? - <AUTHOR> We're an MVC/C#/.Net/MS SQL Server shop. We do corporate internal web development. Responsive design, Bootstrap/JQuery. Pretty generic stuff.
So the business has an odd pay bonus. If we earn a qualification that they consider helpful to our day work then we get a pay bump ($1Kish forever), if we do a harder tier of qualification then we get a larger bump ($1.5Kish forever). We have to pay for the qualifications ourselves.
The only one I know of is Microsoft's MCSD. I need alternatives. The concern/issue I have with Microsoft's MCSD is two fold:
- It is legitimately hard. Deals with obscure memorisation. Would take months per exam. Which is fine for learning, but bad when I am losing money every month it isn't done (literally almost $100/month). That's a lot of pressure.
- Due to the structure of the MCSD and work's pay thingy, I am rewarded only for the first exam ($1Kish) and third exam ($1.5Kish) but nothing for the middle exam. I'd like to find a two exam qualification where the second one is considered a fully realised qualification.
Assuming I didn't pay a cent for training and passed the first time, I am looking at $495 for the MCSD. That's do-able. But given the nature of the exams, they're almost designed to be failed. They bring up the most obscure parts of the most up to date spec for JavaScript/CSS/HTML/etc. Without Microsoft's official training materials you don't stand a chance, and frankly I don't feel that learning a spec in such intricate detail is a good use of my time (that's what Google is for).
I'd definitely consider qualifications only loosely related, like project management. It just has to be something I can sell to work as a legitimate value. <comment><USER2> Can't you ask management what to recommend? Is that not seen as taking initiative?</comment>