What to do when your non-technical boss is just plain wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.articulateventures.com/cultural-communications-2/what-to-do-when-your-non-technical-boss-is-just-plain-wrong/ <comment><USER4> A comment on the first comment of the article: "This last part reminds me of something recently. Because management needs to feel like they have control over what's going on, as a technical person, you should do the right thing, but only 90% when you show it to them and make the 10% that is miss quite obvious. The reason is so that when you present it to them, they can point out the missing piece of the project and feel like they have contributed."

I hate this. I hate having to play these games and tricks. I want to work with people that are aware of [psychology and] how much time is wasted having to do such things. However, I realize most people don't know nor care about psychology and so I am the one that should adjust knowing the things I do. It just sucks because I still struggle with it.

<comment><USER5> These are no more 'games and tricks' than having to expend more energy walking uphill than downhill is a game or trick.

I am horrible at inter-office politics. I want so badly for things to be "efficient" - but it is always efficient for me. My boss has me print hard copies of email and put them in a physical folder AND has me copy the email as a PDF and sstore it in a sub folder of the project folder. Mind-blowingly inefficient on so many levels. But it's his way, and it's his firm. And I fought him on it, and so many other things, for so long, really fought with both of us screaming, I have poisoned the well. He won't ever trust me because I handled our conflicts so poorly in the past. He's allowed to handle them poorly - he pays my salary.

<comment><USER6> Putting in intentional errors so someone else can catch them and think they contributed... that IS 'games and tricks'. Whereas your example (sending things in an inefficient way) is just a matter of accommodating someone else's way of working.

Accommodation is a good idea, game-playing may work in the short run, but it does not build long-term trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's some good advice in there, given with a horribly wrong intention.

The good advice is to repeat the manager's argument, the way you understood it. However, if you do it to "loosen them up" and make them "more willing to work with you", then you're doing it for the wrong reason.

The right reason is to verify whether you understood them correctly. Maybe they meant to say something else. Maybe the did something else and you misunderstood. Maybe they said exactly what they meant and you understood it perfectly, but there's more to it. For example, they might have a perfectly practical non-technical reason for their argument.

Here's an example from my own experience: at one point, a manager argued that we should do something that would risk defeating the very purpose of a rather big and complex software we've developed, by allowing a group of future users to circumvent certain of its restrictions that are meant to make sure their stuff can be used on more than one target platform. I pointed out this risk and argued vehemently against it. The manager explained that the cost of migrating their existing work to our software, while maintaining those restrictions, would drive the cost of the whole project to 150% (or higher) of what the project would cost if we allowed users to do what he proposed. That certainly complicated the whole equation, even though his argument was still "technologically horrible".

TL;DR: When non-technical managers disagree with you, it might be because they have a need to assert their power and be respected by their subordinates, but that's a conclusion you should draw only if you've made a reasonable attempt to discard the alternatives. If you do happen to have a manager that behaves that way consistently, then maybe you should consider changing the manager and/or the company, instead of wasting your time and energy by trying to manipulate them.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. If you're using a tactic to get your way and with the assumption that you are the expert (and the other person is wrong) then you are missing out. In my experience, the best solutions came _after_ those discussions where you get the other party to explain their motivations. The result was always better than I could have come up with myself.

When in a position of authority, I had the opposite problem: I often couldn't get people to disagree with me. This made it impossible to get to that discussion. (Maybe my ideas really were perfect, but I doubt it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good article. The part about figuring out your boss' motivations is the best part.

This is really the key to any interaction with another human being whether we're talking about speaking to an overseas technical support person, your boss, your mom, or your partner.

0\. Realize your non-technical boss isn't some cartoonish, mustache-twirling villian with a fetish for poor technical solutions. He or she is picking them for a reason, possibly a misguided reason.

1\. Figure out their motivations. Tricky, because most people are unwilling or unable to articulate what they want, even to themselves. Generally, your boss probably just wants things to run smoothly, make money, and look good to _their_ boss. If they're choosing poor technical solutions, it's because they (correctly or mistakenly) believe those poor technical solutions are the best way to get to #2.

2\. Figure out how both your goals and theirs can be met.

3\. Communicate #2 to them.

None of those steps are easy, even though there are any a few of them. But it can be done. I'm not always successful at it, but here's an example of a time I did it right.

My boss employed ahem, "affordable" contractors who were basically "Dreamweaver jockeys" - they constantly sent us tangled 1990s-style HTML that I essentially had to re-write from scratch, taking me longer than it would than if I'd simply done it from scratch.

Instead of just telling him how that was a poor technical idea, I took the time to sit with him and show him (in a text editor) the difference between modern HTML5 and the horrible Dreamweaver spew, and how much more quickly I could change the modern code in order to respond to client requests. His eyes lit up at that point, because I was solving a real challenge he had - <USER2> responsive to change requests.

The icing on the cake was when I showed him some of the online galleries where we could purchase pre-made, high-quality HTML templates. Not only were they better-designed than the crap our contractors were sending us, they were easy to work with and were a fraction of the cost.

So I didn't just say, "Dreamweaver sucks! Everybody knows that!"[1] I demonstrated the wins a technically cleaner solution would give him.

______

[1] I realize it's probably possible to just use Dreamweaver in a disciplined way, and create very clean markup with it if you wish. No offense to anybody making good stuff with it.

<comment><USER10> | Realize your non-technical boss isn't some cartoonish, mustache-twirling villian with a fetish for poor technical solutions. He or she is picking them for a reason, possibly a misguided reason.

I believe Hanlon's Razor applies here:

| Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

<comment><USER11> Also, it's probably better to think of one's boss's choices as due to ignorance rather than stupidity. The former is something you can help correct, and the latter is a poisonous (and usually incorrect) opinion which will often taint your feelings (and actions) towards them.

edit: How do I do italicized/blockquoted text? I've seen it done, but haven't found docs on how.

<comment><USER12> You can add italics by putting asterisks around your words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just change your mindset. If you are an expert in your technical domain, what is obviously wrong for you may be difficult to grasp to a non technical. Imagine that your boss is very smart but that all you says looks like a foreign language to him. Maybe, the boss is smart enough to learn your domain in order to communicate with you, but the more obvious solution is to find an interpret.

Find someone who will translate your technical point into something that your boss will understand. Or improve your capacity to convince non-technical people.

In my first job, I had to convince a boss of how to fix some performances issues in database. He did not understood anything and organized a small meeting with someone he trusted a lot and who was more technical. This third person was really helpful to answer all the questions of the boss because I had difficulties to explain what was obvious for me.

<comment><USER14> This works with good bosses and after awhile you become the technical person that they trust.

Unfortunately, a lot of bosses are mediocre and no amount of explaining, even if you're really good at it, will reach them because it's all about ego for them.

Or they believe some nonsense falsehood they heard on the internet. And the internet is always right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Everyone has interests- why do they want to believe what they believe?"

One of the most common mistakes most people make when they're evaluating someone else's actions is to refuse to give them the benefit of the doubt and to overly assign negative drivers.

Assuming that managers are power hungry and desperate to be in control is the equivalent of assuming that the only reason a programmer would select a particular technology is that it would look good on their resume. Both of those _can_ be true, but far more commonly they're not.

Neither managers nor programmers are generally stupid and they're not generally malicious. Most managers aren't even power hungry. Like most people they want to do a decent job they can be proud of, be surrounded by decent, contented people and customers, and be reasonably rewarded for what they do. If you assume any of these things to be false you're going to be wrong considerably more often that you're right.

What is also common between programmers and managers is that they are constrained by a range of factors and often have very limited control over the constraints placed upon them. Managers have managers. They're answerable to directors, to customers, to shareholders and to suppliers. As a rule the larger the organisation the more complex the web of constraints and constrainers becomes (hence why large organisations tend to react so slowly).

The thing to understand is what these constraints are. They're rarely technical, they're far more commonly budgetary or time based. When your boss says no he almost certainly isn't saying "no, it's a bad idea, I know better", he's saying "no, I can't do this without damaging / risking something else".

So work out what the limiting factors are and try and work with him within those. Often that will mean taking a longer term view - getting something changed within a period of weeks or months is often massively more difficult than if you set yourself a longer time frame. Short term commitments (deliveries, revenue over the next couple of months) are often close to immovable, things over a longer time scale are often more flexible.

One of the things bosses are often bad at is talking about the business to programmers. Partly this is because programmers aren't always interested, but a lot of it is habit. If everyone knows what the targets, deadlines and schedules are, then they're in a better position to work within them.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't really fancy negotiating with somebody that is objectively wrong and in a higher position than me. Instead I will move the ground that they stand on.

The best game to play in this instance is to gain favour with their boss and anybody actively competing with them while passively disagreeing with them. You must passively disagree with them because the aim is to form a situation where you re-inforce their political opponents while appearing to be neutral - eventually they will come to you for support, and at this point they will be pliable. Something which will also help you gain authority is giving certain good ideas to other people whose interests will be in fighting your battles, however this is dangerous and you must make sure that they feel indebted to you.

If you don't want to kowtow to an idiot or beat them at their own game then simply quit and leave them to their mediocrity. There are likely to be a few places around where people will listen and use advice.

Edit: I obviously prefer just joining somewhere else without these kinds of insecure personalities, but my point was that political battles shouldn't be played in the light. You need to wear a cloak, you need to gather forces, and you need to resist the urge to slide the dagger in _until others ask you to._

<comment><USER17> This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I've seen quite a few people use this approach in an attempt to get their boss's job, irrespective of the boss's performance in their position. In general, I think that fighting your boss only leads to a draw, almost never to a win.

<comment><USER16> It can work though.

It's a long-shot to try and get your bosses job though. Aim higher or sideways.

This is a better method than others in the thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The practical bit:

"Instead, a technical expert could offer chances for the boss to save face when they are caught suggesting something that is a bad idea."

Which I think is a very smart technique with respect to all negotiations!

</comment><comment><USER19> Regardless of the technological background of your manager this type of conflict arises when there is power struggle. Good managers will take advice and evaluate it giving their opinions/knowledge to arrive at the best decision available. Bad managers will seek opportunity to step over you to either appear bigger/better or to push you down.

I've seen cases of both and am glad I'm now working under the former but as for the bad managers, at times they just simply don't know any better. Its part of their personality to be commanding and feel that taking advice from others is weakness. Its extremely difficult to work with them because in order to have your thoughts considered you need to wrap them in a way that allows the strong-headed individual believe it was their idea in the first place; robbing you of any credit you may deserve.

<comment><USER14> Good managers will not have a fetish for making decisions, but will, instead, ask you questions that reveal the motivation for their concern about a given technical solution, such as, "I've been told that we need to do X, and that Y solution does X, how does your solution handle the X requirement?" Where X could be a business requirement or a need that some other team in the company has.

A good boss will bring his concerns forward and give you the opportunity to address them, and if you tell him this is a better solution for the X issue, then he'll trust you to do it and give you approval.

If it turns out that your solution was worse for X, then when he has to be more careful in the future, he can remind you that X didn't get met last time and that is why he's not sure about this time. You then have to prove it or shape up.

It's all about building trust-- with GOOD bosses.

The problem is, good bosses are maybe %30. To many of them are simply people who were promoted to management because they are ambitious and good at playing politics and in a lot of companies their incompetence (eg: knowing nothing about software despite managing programmers) is seen as an advantage (that was the case at Amazon where my boss had trouble operating excel and his background was in criminal justice.)

Hell, I once worked for an educational software company that higher ex- kindergarten teachers to manage programmers. They knew nothing, but they had been trained that "young ones" (eg us 20-30 year old artists and programmers) were not to be trusted.... we even got scolded once for stepping out of the office to have a conversation! It was a company run like a kindergarten class!

Trying to explain technology in both of these examples to profoundly technology illiterate people was taken as "back talking". What they heard from some cousin (or once, I kid you not "bill gate's investment group might make an investment, so we need to get rid of our linux mail and file server and replace it with windows") .... was always more compelling than what their employees, who actually knew the situation, would tell them.

I think their incompetence fed a need to put their foot down.

In both cases the team collapsed as all the talent walked out the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I couldn't shake my knee-jerk response to this title: "Get a technical boss"

<comment><USER21> Well, one problem is that if you promote someone who is good technically to be a manager they can quickly lose track of what is sensible from a current technical perspective - knowledge of specifics of technologies can have a very short half life (say a year or so).

<comment><USER22> As a programmer doing more and more managerial work (but thankfully not 100% of the time yet), I try to keep my knowledge up-to-date by working on side projects. May not be the perfect solution but it sure helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You know the downside of all that? You can only put so much in your brain and learn so much things at once. So while you are in creasing your skills in inter-personal communication, bargaining and psychology, you are just losing your edge on the technical side. The more you're becoming able to convince people, the less your idea has a probability to be enlightened.

When you've crossed the whole spectrum and all your brain is focused on bargaining, congratulation, you're the clueless non-technical boss.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm always surprised that communication skills never seem to get any focus at companies like Google, Twitter, etc. where constant learning is promoted. Outside of managers, no one seems to be taught any of these skills that make entire companies operate smoother.

There definitely is some stigma about these sorts of tactics being manipulative or political, but I would compare it to learning how to write effectively - it's an optimization that improves clarity and is really a lifelong skill.

</comment><comment><USER25> get rid of managers - see Fred George and Programmer Anarchy

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk-CF7klLdA>

<comment><USER26> More people really need to watch this. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's good advice, but it's focusing on the wrong problem. Rather than knowing how to solve difficult conflict it's far better to create a type of relationship between boss and subordinates where difficult conflicts are solved routinely and without drama. Resolving conflicts is a part of it, but a more important part is making sure you and your party have shared context all along.

</comment><comment><USER28> Explain him with a language that he will understand.

</comment><comment><USER29> As a contractor/freelancer/consultant, when my technical or non-technical client is wrong, I explain this to them and do my best to persuade them to do it my way. If they insist on doing it anyway then that's what I do.

They're going to pay me anyway. If it turns out later that their solution is unworkable, they'll probably pay me again.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another approach that can work in big organizations: make sure that your boss knows that, if they ignore your advice, the responsibility for the decision is theirs, not yours. In a C.Y.A. organization this is often enough. Be sure to have written proof -- when it hits the fan, people tend to have selective memory.

</comment><comment><USER30> We usually refer ours to a Dilbert strip that defines the exact problem. Fortunately he has a sense of humor :)

<comment><USER31> Lucky you! Your boss is self-aware, confident in his role and trusts you - <USER3> key cornerstones to respectful negotiation. Make sure you reciprocate.

<comment><USER30> He's none of Been - he just knows when he's beaten :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "What to do when your non-technical boss is just plain wrong?"

Call it another typical day at the office. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> just like with children, you need to let them know that they're wrong. more importantly, exactly like with children, you need to let them make their own mistake.

</comment><comment><USER34> Fire him.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the fundamental problem is that non-technical people end up in positions of power and then feel they need to assert their decision making power or they will lose it. In fact, in my experience, it becomes an article of faith with some of them that the technical people are being short sighted in some way, and thus going with "industry standard practices" (eg: currently popular buzzwords) is superior to the "indulgent" suggestions of the technical person.

I worry that today's generation of hackers have cottoned to the need to start companies so that they can do great work, rather than being forced into mediocrity by non-technical middle "managers"... only to turn around and be hampered by non-technical investors making absurd demands. (Maybe VC meddling has declined precipitously in the last 5 years or so, I hope so.)

In my experience at many startups a few VCs mostly left us alone, but most VCs forced decisions on us that were bad decisions, often bad market decisions, but many of them bad technology decisions Just one example: "You're getting $4M in funding but you have to spend $2M of it on this other portfolio companies product that claims to do what you need." Even though that other product didn't actually do what we needed, targeted something else entirely, but the VC was not technical so he didn't understand this. It was akin to "javascript, java, whatever". This decision set us back 2 years and ultimately cut the exit return by about %90 of what it would have been (given the value of similar companies at the stage we were when we sold, even one year earlier.) Did the VC learn his lesson? Of course not, he never heard (or was willing to hear) that it was a mistake and due to liquidation preferences and other double dipping, they made out great. The employees, however, lost out.</comment>


Show HN: Tool that searches your cloud apps (Trello, Slack, JIRA) in one shot - <AUTHOR> https://getctx.io <comment><USER2> Tried signing up but it crashed. Was able to create a team but then got a broken page at [https://app.getctx.io/account/auth](https://app.getctx.io/account/auth)

Working on something in similar space, so I'm curious to see what you've built!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jacob, That should be fixed now - I've emailed you directly to discuss :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder / author here.

 _tl;dr_ \- I spend too long trying to find that email I know I have around here somewhere. Or was it a Slack message?! Coulda been a Trello ticket... so I built something that helps.

CTX - [https://getctx.io](https://getctx.io) \- is my side project, which I've recently launched.

It lets you sign up with a couple of clicks, invite your team members and index your;

      - Slack messages
      - Trello tickets
      - GitHub (issues and markdown)
      - JIRA issues
      - Google Drive files
      - emails (that you send to your unique inbound address)
      - and more integrations in development.

The target market is people like me - working in smallish teams or mid-sized digital companies. The kind of places where you use a bunch of SaaS tools to store collaborate on things, but it's easy to lose track of what you've stored.

Right now it has a couple of plans for different sized teams, - and free trials.

It's been live for a couple weeks now and I have a small amount of traction, so I thought now was as good a time as any to talk in public and see what kind of feedback I get. Gulp.</comment>


OpenBSD needs your help - call for donations - <AUTHOR> http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20090909074926

<comment><USER2> Just to show how good OpenBSD's manuals are, look at those:

<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=strncpy>

<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=malloc>

They don't just explain what strncpy & malloc do. They also explain how to use these functions correctly and securely. With examples.

Compare that to glibc's manuals (pretty typical of what you can find under Linux):

<http://linux.die.net/man/3/malloc>

<http://linux.die.net/man/3/strncpy>

Clearly OpenBSD folks care.

<comment><USER3> Hah, check out that malloc page for OpenBSD for how you configure malloc globally (to e.g. enable debugging): you create a /etc/malloc.conf which is a _symbolic link_ to a non-existant file the name of which determines options, e.g. "G<" to enable extra malloc debugging and half the cache size!

<comment><USER4> This debugging method seems like an ugly hack. Why not use a plain text file that could be read when the program (or the computer) starts with options written in human-readable form?

Assuming it is a short file, it would require only one block read (the block pointed to by the directory entry). The broken symlink method may be faster (one less disk read, a lot less parsing overhead) but is much less human- friendly. And the added speed would only be meaningful if the file got checked more often than at program start.

<comment><USER5> _Why not use a plain text file that could be read when the program (or the computer) starts with options written in human-readable form?_

Reading a symlink is one system call. Reading a file is three or more system calls. There is an overhead cost for each system call -- and if you're going to be doing something for almost every process, you might as well be as efficient as possible.

<comment><USER4> Except that if you were using a text file, you use different flags or turn it on or off on a per executable file basis checked on process start and would not have to re-parse the symlink every time you malloc something.

<comment><USER5> The symlink is only checked when malloc is first called.

<comment><USER4> Then why parsing a human-readable file that could, conceivably, activate a much richer debugging option-set is such a huge overhead as to make the symlink way a better option? Is the setting system-wide or process-wide?

Sorry, but I just can't see why it would be a better option.

<comment><USER6> It's checked when malloc initializes, so the startup cost for a more complex method would have to be paid by _nearly every process system-wide_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My play machine runs OpenBSD. I can't say enough good things about it. If you want a (very) secure machine which runs on a slew of different platforms, has an awesome package tree, and a solid developer base of pragmatic and opinionated unix nerds... look no further.

</comment><comment><USER8> OpenBSD is a fine operating system. In the words of Neal Stephenson: "Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

<comment><USER9> And just like a tank it has no ESP, ABS etc. OpenBSD forces you to do to many things by hand, instead of automating them as much as possible (just like some Linux distros).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Buy the CD, install it on an old machine and play with it over a weekend. OpenBSD has some unique and fantastic features.. everything from PF (its firewall) to spamd (Spam trapping daemon).

It's also nice to use a finely crafted piece of software that doesn't feel like it has been bolted together haphazardly (like your typical Linux distro).

<comment><USER4> I am somewhat offended by that. I run Ubuntu on my really serious computers and I hardly feel it was haphazardly bolted together.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't take it personally. Ubuntu made a specific effort to improve the Linux end-user experience, and they've pretty much succeeded. In the process, their rapid rise to popularity has pushed a bunch of the other distributions into making their systems more homogenized, so Linux has really gotten a lot better for the end-user in the last decade.

That said, OpenBSD is probably the most organized project out of all open source projects close to the same size and scope. They release like clockwork, they do not (or try not to) rush new features out just so they can make the next release, and there really is an uncompromising drive for perfection.

I would love to contribute code to the project, but I have to be honest: though I'm by no means a slouch programmer, those guys seriously outclass me, and I'd be completely out-of-my-league.

Having perused bits of Linux source from time to time, I don't feel that's so much the case outside of OpenBSD.

<comment><USER6> You can also contribute by donating, buying CDs, porting (or helping to test ports), answering questions on the mailing lists or IRC, etc.

<http://openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#Support>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great to see this post on Hacker News by the way.

I think the OpenBSD project encompasses a lot of the values that a majority of the users on this site would agree with.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't use OpenBSD - but I plan to some day, and I really like their attitude. Specifically, it is very refreshing to see a piece of software where "Quality is the #1 goal, it takes a back seat to NOTHING else."

<comment><USER2> I use OpenBSD at home for my router and my desktop. I don't plan to go back to Linux anytime soon. OpenBSD is robust, well documented, and simple.

On the other hand it lacks many _fancy_ features. For example it filesystem is somewhat dated compared to ZFS or BFS. But that's the price to pay to get a stable, secure, and well polished operating-system.

PS: OpenBSD's manuals are awesome.

<comment><USER12> OpenBSD might be doing better than some others, but it's not flawless in the security arena:

<http://openbsd.org/security.html#43>

<comment><USER13> Most linuxes are pretty good these days about security, there was a time when it seemed like every redhat version came out of the box with a remotely exploitable hole.

But Ubuntu is locked down by default now. And their security responsiveness seems pretty good.

<comment><USER14> Yeah. There were some bad days with default linux installs circa 1998 or so (Red Hat 6.0 was a disaster, IIRC), but everyone learned their lesson and in fact linux distros have been extraordinarily proactive about security since. Witness Red Hat with SELinux, FORTIFY_SOURCE, ExecShield, etc...

One of the ironies is that the "only two remote holes in the default install" bit, while impressive compared to, say, Microsoft, is still two more than Red Hat and Ubuntu have shipped over the same period. (Disclosure: that's from memory. I'd have to look up dates on remote exploits to be sure.)

<comment><USER15> _is still two more than Red Hat and Ubuntu have shipped over the same period._

it's 2 remote holes in 11 years. ubuntu wasn't even around 5 years ago.

<comment><USER14> I guess I was counting since the first hole in 2002. Have there been any in common linux distros since then? OpenBSD got caught once.

But even so: Ubuntu has had zero remote holes in the default install in 5 years. I'm getting hung up on a divide by zero bug somewhere, but I _think_ that works out better if you want to be pedantic about this stuff, no? :)

Seriously: it's a dumb marketing slogan, and it means next to nothing. In point of fact over the last 6-7 years OpenBSD doesn't have a particularly distinguished security record according to their own metric. It's better than Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't want to be killed for asking this (I probably will get buried in seconds), but it's a legitimate question: isn't this precisely the reason why GPL is such a nice license for new projects?

If, say, vendor A, gave US$ 1 million to the OpenBSD project, vendor B could pick the improvements and incorporate in their own proprietary products for no cost, creating a competitive advantage unless the improvements are so narrow they only apply to A's products. If, however, vendor A donated the same amount to a GPL-licensed project, vendor B could not take unilateral benefit from the money invested and would have to either use the improvements from within another GPL-like product or not at all, effectively negating any competitive advantage it could acquire from A's investment.

I think the AT&T legal imbroglio had little to do to the comparative success of the GNU/Linux system.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been procrastinating on my first OpenBSD install, and this pushed me over the edge. I just bought the CD set, and I'll have a go at it this weekend (or maybe next weekend).

<comment><USER17> If you can dedicated an entire disk to OpenBSD the installation is amazingly simple; I highly recommend going that route.

<comment><USER6> The spartan text-based install is also remarkably fast. Once you've done the installation a few times, it's possible to get the whole system up and running in five minutes.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't have even half of anaconda's features and it installs only a few packages. No wonder that it's so fast.

<comment><USER6> > It doesn't have even half of anaconda's features and it installs only a few > packages.

That's often a good thing. For headless installs, a Python and GTK-based install doesn't cut it.

"pkg_add pkgname" fetches a package and its dependencies once you choose a mirror, anyway, and using text files rather than menus to configure the system means you can keep your configuration in VC, configure a typical system by just applying patches, etc.

<comment><USER9> Anaconda has a text mode install, so GTK+ is not always used. But I do agree, that it can't be used on resource constrained systems.

> using text files rather than menus to configure the system means you can > keep your configuration in VC, configure a typical system What > configuration? We were talking about installers and anaconda can use > kickstart files to automate the installation. And of course they can be kept > in a VCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think I worked with Theo in 1981. Smart, nasty.

<comment><USER19> When he was 13? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt>

<comment><USER4> Last time I exchanged messages with him he certainly looked like 13.

The other day we were talking about the need for social skills in large projects mostly because of CK's message exchange on LKML about BFS. Theo is a very clever guy and does some truly outstanding work, but I would not like to work with him on anything important. I love what I do and I have no need to get burned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> what's refreshing is that each OpenBSD release has its own theme, song and artworks

it seems they really are having fun !!!</comment>


A new day for Google Calendar - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-new-day-for-google-calendar.html <comment><USER2> I'd be happy if they stopped trying to be fancy and just covered usability basics like supporting the browser back button. I can't even count the number of times I've hit back on an event screen expecting to get to my calendar view and left the calendar site entirely. Yes, there's a fancy JavaScript button that works that I could take ten times longer to trigger, but that's not good practice to force users to use your internal JS only navigation solution.

<comment><USER3> 1\. The post is referring to a new Android app, not the web UI.

2\. The situation you're talking about has existed since... well, it's been there for the last 3 years I've been using Google Calendar. I, too, would like a working back button, but the web UI is effectively set in stone.

<comment><USER4> The back button issue in the web UI was fixed recently.

<comment><USER3> You've blown my mind. I feel like I was hitting the back button from an event detail and landing on the New Tab page very recently. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I loved the "meaningful animation"[1] for location pin after you create an event. At first I thought Material Design is a lot of buzz words with not much innovation but when I read the docs I realized they put a lot of thoughts behind it.

[1] [http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful- trans...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful- transitions.html)

<comment><USER6> Their assists animation looks interesting, but I will wait to judge until I can actually try it. The Apple calendar _looks_ great, but feels really clunky to add and edit events. (Especially on a Mac!)

For pure usability, I haven't found a calendar program that beats MS Outlook running on Windows.

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate on what you mean by "clunky"? I haven't noticed any issues adding or editing events, in either OS X or iOS's Calendar apps.

Also note that Yosemite added event suggestions when adding new events to the OS X Calendar app (but I don't believe iOS added anything like that for the iOS app). I haven't had a chance to experiment with it yet (since I primarily do event entry in iOS), but it looks pretty straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Adding events from emails is nice, but I'd love to be able to add an event from taking a picture of a poster or a flyer. I see ads for concerts, rallies, art exhibits, and so on whenever I'm walking around town or visiting the local library. I'd love to just snap a picture and have the details uploaded to my calendar.

<comment><USER9> A QR code should be sufficient.

<comment><USER8> But this requires every poster creator to add an ugly QR code. Plus, QR codes just take you to a website and then you have to add info to your calendar manually. Bonus points if they support .ics but that's rare.

<comment><USER10> No, you can create a QR code that encodes a calendar event. See example: [http://imgur.com/117Jn9D](http://imgur.com/117Jn9D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wrote my senior thesis on a calendar assistant that achieves much of the functionality mentioned here (recommending times/places, auto updates, etc) and lost so much motivation just to the sheer amount of integration between parties/services required to solve this problem. There has been a lot of work in the academic space on optimizing calendar/email functions but its challenging to implement across so many email providers/clients. I'm glad Google is taking a step in this direction, I'm not confident many startups would be able to solve this problem effectively.

<comment><USER12> One thing that helps is if you can convince email senders to put in custom markup with the required metadata:

[https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/highlights](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/highlights)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I won't lie, I'm starting to become a google fanboy again thanks to the beautiful google material design experience. Hats off to the team behind this new calendar app.

<comment><USER14> It's interesting how, as Apple's design sensibility gets more and more questionable with the recent changes to iOS and OSX, google appears to be _finally_ paying due respect to good design and really putting the work in. And it's paying off, big time.

<comment><USER15> In the sense that it's annoying a lot of Android users, it certainly is paying off.

What the current Android leadership simply don't understand is that there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS, not because they couldn't afford it. iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening, since if people wanted the iOS experience they might as well get the real thing.

Design fascism works when you're in a niche, but will never be mass market. Windows Phone is similarly lauded in design circles but mysteriously fails to sell, and this is why. The crowds praising all these "improvements" are the sort of people that actually thought Windows Mobile was not only tolerable, but a good idea.

My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch, and they aren't too concerned about existing users, but the side effect of this is that all of the major smartphone OSs have reached the same level of out-of- touch ness that we had prior to the original iPhone coming along.

<comment><USER16> What exactly don't you like about the new design direction? You mentioned people wanting to switch because of Lollipop/material/"design facism", but I'm not sure why.

<comment><USER15> Almost everything. The colours, the flatness, the overreliance on animation to reveal cues that have been hidden by removing too many of the useful aspects of colours and depth.

Material design is a company led attempt to create a fad a la Metro. They'll keep trying for about 18 months before they create a new one where it's back to bevels again. Just don't expect any of the non-Google apps to follow it, in the same way that all previous efforts went wrong.

Incidentally the number of U-turns by Google on this stuff is incredible. We were previously told explicitly not to attempt doing physical analogues of motion etc. as those didn't map to the app navigation model . . . but now that's exactly what they want.

What really grates though is just how the developer experience for all this stuff seems to be going backwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Finally. I feel like the current Calendar app has been stuck in 2009. It looks like this new one is actually designed for use on small screens.

<comment><USER18> Calendars on mobile phones are a hard design problem. We're used to large calendars the size of well... a wall calendar. Try making that 3" wide and you can't show all the days and information and you either (1) make things too small (GS4 Cal app) or (2) make it a swipe fest. This is probably the reason they didn't address the design previously.

<comment><USER19> It's not like it's not a widely addressed problem - look at FantastiCal and other calendar apps - lots of very cool design ideas to deal with the limited space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My employer (German) just banned all Google products (except search) for work- related things, due to privacy issues. Reading Google's latest terms-and- conditions, this move is somewhat understandable, given the strong privacy laws that German companies and institutions have to follow.

On the other hand, I guess that scanning a large amount of emails is the precise thing that allows them to offer robust email-to-event conversion. But I wish that this sort of thing would work locally (on the cellphone or computer in question), not on a remote server somewhere.

<comment><USER21> It will be interesting to see if in years to come we'll look at Germany's policy as overly cautious and a net loss or extraordinarily prescient.

I'm genuinely on the fence on this one. I'm rather cavalier on privacy issues (at least where they affect my own person) and quite happy with the goodies I receive in return. However I sometimes wonder how I'll feel with the benefit of hindsight.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I meet quite a few people talking about moving their tech infrastructure away from US controlled cloud services. I may live in a bubble, but it would be interesting to see some data on intentions in EU companies about this.

<comment><USER15> Not just in the EU - I hear this a lot in Canada too. My use of their services was even considered a red flag on a recent consulting gig.

Another odd case I ran into is parents trying to prevent their children getting into the Google ecosystem until they're mid-teen level. This is manifesting in resistance to their education stuff being adopted by schools.

<comment><USER22> I used to think that it was important to protect data from being stored in the US .... until the NSA leaks and the realisation that Canada is a Five Eyes member rendered it effectively moot. Now I'm simply more worried about theft or spying by non-government third-parties -- the security in place rather than the laws that apply to the service provider. But that's just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What a terrible advert. I couldn't focus on the features being demoed because they were on screen so fleetingly and the background scenes were so distracting.

They're trying to imitate Apple's adverts but completely blow it by showing overcomplicated interactions.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager

Nominative determinism in action folks

<comment><USER25> What? No, Google renames all its senior employees according to their function now.

<comment><USER26> I wonder if he's related to Jennifer Government ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government))...

<comment><USER27> A guy at my uni graduated this year with an electrical engineering degree. His name is literally Zeus Engineer... (proof: [http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of- auck...](http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of- auckland/zeus_engineer/633748/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems I do not really have to hope my vendor will provide an Android update for my phone, as Google distributes most cool new stuff using the app ecosystem. As with Inbox, I think Google is finally generating sufficient pressure on developers and businesses to use meta-data for their mails and websites. I appreciate that. If their text parser for stuff like locations and times works for non-english texts, I'll be a super happy user!

<comment><USER29> The flip-side to this is that the Android versions of these apps aren't getting anymore love. Messages is now Hangouts, Browser is now Chrome, Calender is now GCal. I heard that the Gmail app is going to start allowing Yahoo email accounts too. Android is much more locked down than it once was.

<comment><USER30> Except AOSP Email was updated in Lollipop, as was Messenger.

<comment><USER22> And there's a browser app again in L too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unfortunately web version has not been updated.

<comment><USER32> Not sure if this applies, but I got the web version of Inbox about 2 days after I installed the Inbox app on my phone. Ideally they'll release the web version soon after as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When will google's calendar app have CalDav.

It shocks me that the default calendar for android does not interoperate with any calendar server except gmail's (unless you can shoe-horn events in with a separate caldav app.)

<comment><USER34> Their calendar on the web can both import and export iCalendar feeds. I'm not sure about automatically writing back updates though.

<comment><USER33> The Gmail Web Calendar has many good features I agree.

But, the Android Calendar would be much better if it would work with other calendar servers besides Gmail. If google called the Android Calendar the Gmail Calendar App, it would be more appropriate. But, this current default android calendar app doesn't use the CalDav protocol and only works with the gmail calendar. This is very peculiar behavior and not what I'd expect from google.

<comment><USER35> I've got a number of .ical calendars added to the web interface, and all of them both appear on my phone, and get updated without me going to the web interface. I'm not sure if my device retrieves them, or whether google's servers do it for me (probably the latter). It would be handy to have a full calendar app though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I watched the video twice and I still can't figure out what the changes are about because I kept getting distracted by all the stuff happening in the background.

Even after I purposely tried to focus on the device UI, I couldn't process all of it in any coherent way. Please don't make promo videos that leave me with no sense of the product you are trying to demo.

</comment><comment><USER37> So first we have a new Gmail app, and now a new Google Calendar app. What's the roadmap here?

Is Google going to roll out new versions of their other apps? Do they plan to maintain both apps in parallel, and for how long? Is this just an experiment or do they plan to convert all users to the new apps eventually?

<comment><USER38> I'm betting that this has something to do with deprecating GWT and supporting AngularJS.

<comment><USER39> Putting aside the fact that GWT 3.0 is about to come out... neither Gmail nor Google Calendar even use GWT. Like the overwhelming majority of Google's real- world web apps, they're primarily based on Closure Tools. GWT is only used in a handful of places these days, the most significant being Google Maps (assuming they didn't remove that during the last rewrite).

Despite being famously "backed by Google", I'm not sure about how many real- world Google properties actually use Angular yet. Most actual Google web apps still very much revolve around a technology stack from 5 years ago. Do as I say, not as I do...

Regardless, what does the JavaScript library for their web apps have to do with their native mobile apps?

<comment><USER40> Inbox is about 70% GWT code, 30% Closure.

The new Calendar uses the same architecture as Inbox, read into that what you will.

Google Sheets uses GWT in much the same way as Inbox.

Then there's AdWords, Google Shopping Expression, Flights, Hotels, Android Play Console, Google Wallet, Google Groups, and a bunch of new apps coming up.

There are 3,000 engineers internally using GWT, and we record 150,000 monthly active unique users hitting our SDK update servers. Last time I checked, about 20,000 unique domains use GWT.

Apple (iAds Workspace), Amazon (AWS Console), Nike, etc use GWT.

Google Maps has never used GWT, although there were internal prototypes.

As to what this has to do with native mobile apps, it has a lot.

We have built separate Hybrid apps. Hybrid not in the sense of PhoneGap, but in the sense that we mix native code and cross-compiled Java together.

Inbox has a core set of client side (non-UI) logic representing about 70% of the code base. This is written in Java.

GWT is used to cross-compile this code into a library for the Web, it is type- annotated with JsDoc, and then the remaining UI code is done with Closure. This gives us cross-language type-checking and optimization (Closure will flag as error if JS->Java or Java->JS calls are wrong)

j2objc is used to cross-compile the shared code into Objective-C for iOS. The remaining portion (UI critical code) is done with traditional XCode toolchain.

For GWT Users who are interested, I am giving a deeper presentation on GMail's Inbox architecture at this year's GWT.create conference ([http://gwtcreate.com/](http://gwtcreate.com/)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm a little worried that this is introducing a new vector for spam. I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are).

Frankly, I want my calendar to be a private calendar. I don't want to share it, or receive invites through it, or auto-add events just because I got an email. I'm still happy to have the sync capability, because I use a smartphone, but aside from that I really have no use cases which require my calendar to be online at all.

Admittedly, this may just be a case where Google's interests are not aligned with my own. If so, are there (real, viable) alternatives?

<comment><USER42> >I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are).

Fortunately you can turn this off in the Google Calendar settings. This way they only get added to your calendar if you accept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Looking forward to iOS app. Already store all contacts and calendar on Google servers, might as well use their app.

</comment><comment><USER44> Still doesn't have a month view with legible event labels?

Not sure why they can't do this, the default Calendar app that ships with Samsung phones pulls it off beautifully.

</comment><comment><USER45> One thing I dearly miss from when Google Calendar first came out was the ability to type in text to create an event.

Eg - Typing "Dinner tomorrow at 7:30pm at Foobar restaurant" would automatically create an event with the correct lexical components.

It looks like they're finally reintroducing this back.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've been using and (for the most part) promoting Android ever since the G1... but after 2.x the rate of UI change has, in my opinion, been terrible from a usability experience.

Pretty much all software (whether that's apps, websites, programming languages, or anything else) past a certain complexity has quirks. Getting used to the quirks is part of learning the software.

 _Massively changing large swathes of your built-in software is bad for users!_ I get that it'd be suicide to say "OK, permanent feature freeze... now," but big changes to the UI on apps that are (to many normal users) fundamental to using Android break the user's understanding of their use, often amounting to months of acclimation down the drain.

It's very frustrating.

<comment><USER47> I too have been using Android since the G1 (I still have it for testing on!) and I would agree that the introduction of new paradigms/ways of interacting with apps (seemingly introduced every I/O every year) is frustrating.

The hamburger menu is in fashion. Then it isn't. Swiping from the left is, then it isn't. All of the examples in their design spec of how NOT to do things was precisely what they did on 2.x.

I know you have to be seen to be "innovating" for attention-deficit new phone buyers, but living in a world of constantly shifting sands just means it's hard to see from all the dust blowing around in your face.

<comment><USER48> I don't see it the same way - Android's been behind the other smartphone operating systems in UI quality, and has had to iterate quickly in 2.x, 4.x and 5 in order to catch up. As they reach a point where Android has as good or better user interface as the competition (I think they're close to that now), the rate of change will most likely slow down.

<comment><USER49> Also, it's a kind of new field for ergonomics and usability so all these changes (both hardware and software-wise) are something to be expected.

<comment><USER47> Whilst true to some extent, it isn't as new as we think. Window Mobile has been around for a very very long time and Palm OS preceded it with usable Palm Pilot devices.

<comment><USER49> Although it's not obvious, I guess popularity as a lot to do with ergonomics and usability and their evolution so something will only continue to be pushed forward if there's enough people to actually use it. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud why something which has been on the market for such a long time only recently has seen such a crazy amount of innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wonder if it works for domain accounts. Most things don't seem to for some time.

<comment><USER51> Given that it is now more than 2 years since Gmail cards were released for Google Now, and there's still no sign of them arriving for Apps accounts... I'd say no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Finally, a calendar app for ios. The current options are terrible across the board.

<comment><USER53> Yes! I am super excited about this. I currently use the mobile website as an app on the home screen and the experience is not great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> And another reason to switch to Android.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is there any 3rd party product that can sync gmail with apple's calendar?

I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do.

Any recommendations?

<comment><USER56> I don't think you need any 3rd party products. I use an iPhone, an Android phone for work and use a Macbook Pro and my main calendar is my Gmail Google calendar which syncs among all 3 devices without any 3rd party software. I guess you may just need to know how to set it up on iOS and Mac products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> personnally i can't stand calendar views that do not show empty stretches of time - it is important info to me if i DON'T have anything coming up in the next two hours.

i can see this at a glance in classic calendars. i cannot in this agenda/stream view.

yay, progress.

<comment><USER58> Agreed - that's what I'm checking on the majority of the time myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Good grief, they sure are desperate to turn their most useful apps into activity streams. The day I have to scroll past an ad to check an appointment is the day I stop using Calendar.

</comment><comment><USER60> How does one use the task component of google calendar on an iOS device? How are google keep's tasks integrated with my google calendar?

</comment><comment><USER61> But you still cannot post simple HTML or RTF into the web version..

</comment><comment><USER62> cute video. I have no idea what the new calendar does.

</comment><comment><USER63> Still no support for Windows app store it looks like.

<comment><USER64> Not sure why this is downvoted. I would like to see Google to support Windows Store. Offering the best possible cross-platform support ist definately not evil.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could that be explained or described mathematically - <AUTHOR> on a 2 kilometer long promenade i meet the only 4 people - 2 couples which come from opposite directions - just when i want to overtake the couple in front of me (so that all 5 of us meet at the same spot), otherwise the promenade remains empty for the rest of the walk/ride.
or if i go by bike a 4 kilometer long street, the probability that two cars from different directions pass each other exactly in one of the 3 tight spots seems excessively high while the chance that i do not meet any other cars during this ride is also very high.
i pay attention to it for about 3.5 years since it happens to me as good as daily, too often in my opinion to be able to explain it statistically (and also too often to explain it with selective perception).
is there a name for it, how could that be explained or described mathematically? <comment><USER2> Cherry-picking fallacy? You have to perform an experiment controlled by an outside person otherwise you fall victim of a cognitive bias.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on if you're asking if each question is solvable or if you're looking to determine the parameters for the solution (btw with the currently available information in those questions I don't believe it's possible to get a distinct answer - but maybe a multidimensional probability distribution of correct values)

</comment><comment><USER4> Possibly traffic lights. The cars more often start their journey in the street at the beginning of a green cycle.</comment>


Silk Road 2 loses $2.7m in bitcoins in alleged hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26187725 <comment><USER2> Front page yesterday.</comment>


Pittsburgh's AlphaLab incubator applications open - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphalab.org

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently part of the first cycle of this program. AlphaLab has some benefits over YC:

      * includes office space
      * more money for less equity
      * longer program
      * cheaper city to live in

<comment><USER2> I've been a bit curious on how serious the "stay in Pennsylvania" part is. Are they heavily enforcing it, hasn't really been an issue, etc?

I'm guessing for the HN crowd here, not being able to head West after something like this might be a downer.

Pittsburgh is a nice place around the CMU/Pitt/etc. area. Can't really speak for the rest of the city as I didn't really get around much while at school there.

<comment><AUTHOR> From <http://www.alphalab.org/about.aspx>:

        Funding

        Innovation Works will invest $25,000 in each AlphaLab company in
        return for 3% of the common stock of the company. This funding
        should support company operations during the AlphaLab program. As
        Innovation Works utilizes funds from the Commonwealth of
        Pennsylvania, each company receiving funding is expected to
        maintain a significant presence in Pennsylvania after the
        program.

and from <http://www.alphalab.org/faqs.aspx>:

        14) Do we have to stay in Pittsburgh after the program ends?

        Companies are expected to remain in Pittsburgh after the end of the
        AlphaLab program. Our goal is to help you build a successful
        technology company and to add to the critical mass of flourishing tech
        companies in the Pittsburgh region. We believe that Pittsburgh is a
        great place to build a company and after your experience at AlphaLab
        we are confident that you will agree.

As I understand it, the state money imposes the condition that companies stay in PA. It's been a long time since I looked at our contract/agreement, but I think the technical details for this round were (roughly) that companies must maintain a "significant presence" in PA for at least 5 years after receiving the money. If a company fails to maintain this "significant presence" they must return the $25,000 invested, but IW retains their 3% equity in the company. So, I'd say they're pretty serious, but if it were essential for your company to cut ties with PA at some point it wouldn't be the end of the world.

I don't get around that much myself, but can add: The AlphaLab office space is on the South Side, which is the big "night life" area, with a bunch of bars, clubs, restaurants, and for some reason a tattoo parlor on every other block (maybe drunk people are more likely to spontaneously get tattoos?). Overall Pittsburgh kind of reminds of Portland, OR, since it's green, cheap, and has a big river (two actually) running through the downtown. It's also supposed to rain a lot like Portland, but that hasn't started yet ...

<comment><USER3> _It's also supposed to rain a lot like Portland, but that hasn't started yet ..._

Don't worry, it will. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The page cannot be displayed

Explanation: There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed. Try the following:

Refresh page: Search for the page again by clicking the Refresh button. The timeout may have occurred due to Internet congestion. Check spelling: Check that you typed the Web page address correctly. The address may have been mistyped. Access from a link: If there is a link to the page you are looking for, try accessing the page from that link. Technical Information (for support personnel)

Error Code: 403 Forbidden. The server denied the specified Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Contact the server administrator. (12202)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone else speak to the merits of AlphaLab? This is the first I have heard of them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Alphab works closely with its companies to help them with their business strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I forgot to list this, but it's significant.

* each team gets a one-on-one meeting with the AlphaLab team every week, and when something urgent comes up they can usually make time for another meeting or discuss it on the spot.

* between the AlphaLab program advisors and Innovation Works (the parent company) there are a bunch of experienced business people and entrepreneurs to get advice from and network with.

Together these people have helped us with all sorts of stuff, from developing business documents like executive summaries and seeking further investment to setting up focus groups to test and discuss our product.

I don't have experience with YC's program first hand, but anecdotally AlphaLab blows YC away in terms of amount hands on business help you get. Makes sense when the program only includes six start ups and is backed by a mature investment firm. For teams like ours with a lot of technical experience but very little business experience this seems pretty important.</comment></comment>


Strongest earthquake in years rattles Southern California - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquake-california-shake-quake-20190704-story.html <comment><USER2> Note that this quake was not on the San Andreas - it was in the Eastern California Shear Zone, a separate fault system near Death Valley. The epicenter was about 125 miles away from LA, and almost closer to Las Vegas (which also felt this quake). The limited damage was largely because it was far away from any populated areas - the nearest cities are Ridgecrest (pop 27,000) and Trona (pop < 2000).

<comment><USER3> Also the area used be have some volcanic activity which is now limited to hot springs and geothermal plants. But you can still see a lot of lava fields when you drive there.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I felt this (near Caltech, Pasadena). I spent the entire duration trying to figure out what was shaking my desk.

I hope this doesn't trigger anything larger. Does anybody know if this was close enough to the fault line to possibly affect anything?

EDIT: I see they have updated the article to a 1 in 20 chance.

[1] [https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/) [2] [https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443095...](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443095/map)

<comment><USER5> I was only a few miles away in San Gabriel and did not feel a thing; I wonder if the SGV blocked any of the waves.

Wish I had come to campus early today to feel that one.

<comment><USER6> For anyone wondering, SGV refers to the San Gabriel Valley. (Correct me if I got it wrong.)

<comment><USER7> You got it right! (Though Pasadena is also in the SGV.)

I felt it in South Pasadena, but it was very gentle; would have been easy to miss if I hadn't been sitting still when it happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Only 10 percent of California's 7 million plus homeowners have earthquake insurance – and the number has dropped by more than half since the deadly quake" (2014)

You can get an estimate for an earthquake insurance policy with the California Earthquake Authority.

[1] [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/why-do-so-few- ca...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/why-do-so-few-california- homeowners-have-earthquake-insurance-n227711) [2] [https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/](https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/)

<comment><USER8> I'm not clear how a CEA policy makes financial sense for a standard single- family, owner-occupied house. The only affordable plans have massive deductibles and only partial cost coverage. If "the big one" hits, it's likely that:

(a) CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway.

(b) The whole community will be ruined so assuming all of my family is still alive we'd best move somewhere else anyway (and a rebuild or undamaged house wouldn't sell).

(c) Some kind of government bailout or community help program will be available.

For smaller earthquakes, it's likely I'd either fail to meet my deductible or be unable to pay the non-covered portion (which has to be paid out first before they'll begin to pay for further repairs).

Am I wrong, or is there something I'm missing? I wish this weren't the case.

<comment><USER9> > CEA will quickly run out of money and I won't be covered anyway.

I don't understand why insurance companies can run out of money whenever they need to pay claims. I'm sure they _know_ they're going to go under, why can't they get insurance on themselves?

<comment><USER10> What's the incentive to purchase insurance? It will reduce their profits. If you are an executive of a company offering earthquake insurance, better to just keeps profits high now, make a high salary, and when the big quake hits, declare bankruptcy and walk away.

<comment><USER11> they're much more sophisticated than that. they'll do things like say the damage was caused by wind, not water. they'll influence forecasters to call it a "super-storm" instead of a hurricane, and for an earthquake, something equally creative:

\- the building was defective/you didn't have it inspected by our experts, so maybe the foundation already had cracks from the last EQ, in that case we can't pay the claim

\- insurance only covers up to 5.0/6.0

\- although it was reported as a 7.5, you live 4 miles away from the epicenter, meaning the EQ was likely below a 6.0, in which case your policy doesn't kick in/we'll only pay 30% of your claim

\- the EQ cracked a water main/gas line, and most of the damage to your house is from the flood/fire, which isn't covered under EQ policy. try suing the insurance of the utility company.

\- we determined that fracking is likely the cause of this quake, in which case it's manmade and not covered. you can sue the oil company though.

\- we checked the seismometer and we dispute the USGS reporting that it was a 6.0/7.0/8.0/our geologist has published research saying that current methods of measuring earthquakes are in question. so although we don't need correct science to collect your premium, we do need perfect science to pay any claims. Or if you settle now, we'll pay 40% of your coverage or else you can try to sue us and maybe get paid 10 years from now

\- we don't cover the specific region where all the earthquake damage occurred/that requires a different policy

\- we only cover incidental/secondary damage, like clocks falling off the wall (which, of course, you must have a receipt for and will be paid minus depreciation and deductible). your policy doesn't cover utility line damage, structural damage, or earth-moving damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Huh, we also just had a 5.8 magnitude one off the coast of BC, Canada [0] around 9:30 PM last night.

[0] [http://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/recent/2019/2019070...](http://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/recent/2019/20190704.0430/index- en.php)

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a few articles that go into a loosely defined faulting area dubbed the Walker Lane[1][2][3] in which it's theorized that the East Pacific Rise (a rift), under the Gulf of California, may be expanding directly north. I know some geologists were surprised at first at the 7.4 Landers earthquake in 1994, and the article goes into that the Walker Lane seems to follow US 395, so I wonder if this is just a continuing extension of geologic activity associated with it.

[1] [https://volcanohotspot.wordpress.com/2018/09/21/splitting- no...](https://volcanohotspot.wordpress.com/2018/09/21/splitting-north- america-the-walker-lane-part-1-the-tectonics/)

[2] [https://www.wired.com/story/walker-lane-move-over-san- andrea...](https://www.wired.com/story/walker-lane-move-over-san-andreas- fault/)

[3] [http://www.bldgblog.com/2019/04/walker- lane/](http://www.bldgblog.com/2019/04/walker-lane/)

<comment><USER14> That was fascinating. Thanks for those links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like we're woefully underprepared for earthquakes. It feels like pushing away technical debt on a societal scale.

<comment><USER16> I think the lack of damage from this shows a high degree of preparation. This same earthquake 50 years ago would have likely been much worse.

<comment><USER17> I was in Los Gatos for the epicenter of the 89 quake that was 6.7 I believe. It was pretty bad. It looks like this was handled much better.

<comment><USER18> 6.7 is a lot stronger than a 6.4 though, as well.

<comment><USER19> If we are splitting hair, a 6.4 can technically be more dangerous compared to a 6.7 if the waves and the oscillation of the building coincide and amplify.

<comment><USER20> The Richter Scale is 10 x per full point. A 6.7 should be 4 times the strength of a 6.4

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's a nice USGS predictive graph of earthquake 6.7+ probability for California from 10 years ago, posted on HN a few years ago: [https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3027/fs2008-3027.pdf](https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2008/3027/fs2008-3027.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER22> I didn't feel it in West LA but my cat became extremely spooked. He was in an ultra hunting mode, flat to the ground and scanning the room. I never seen him act like this especially for this duration. He wouldn't eat treats or respond to anything.

I wonder if it was just the vibration of the ground or if there's some other factor alerting him.

<comment><USER23> I felt it pretty clearly in West LA. My dog decided to roll onto her back to get a massage out of the earthquake.

<comment><USER24> Got to love the difference between cats and dogs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm pretty sure much of SF (marina, south beach, mid soma) are partially built on landfills are considered "liquification zones" by the city.

<comment><USER26> I think the term you're looking for is "liquefaction map" \- I only know this term because we're exposed to the risk here in Charleston, S.C.: [https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/15/18311670/earthquake-map- cali...](https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/15/18311670/earthquake-map-california- geological-survey-liquefaction)

<comment><USER27> That is scary to me. Should it be scary to me? In regards to liquefaction zones and earthquakes? I mean, i recently built a fence and the moisture in the ground made me conscientious of liquefaction when tamping for my gravel and posts, how does this play out for SF in an earthquake?

<comment><USER28> You're probably looking for the "Liquefaction Hazard Maps" page for the Bay Area: [https://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/urban/sfbay/liquefaction...](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/urban/sfbay/liquefaction/sfbay/)

Disclaimer: I am a geologist, but I'm not a P.G., hence all that I say on this topic is bullshit. p.s., Does your conference have beer? If it doesn't, I'm not going. I mean, I'll be so happy when AGU rolls around, because, man, I'm _thirsty_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Luckily, this was far from population centers - epicenter about 10 miles from Ridgecrest, a town of 30,000 people just south of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, and just east of US 395, about 80 miles east of Bakersfield.

Informative USGS links include:

[https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183...](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183/executive)

Select "View Neaby Seismicity" to see the 47+ recent quakes in this area.

<comment><USER30> It was pretty close to Trona. Having driven through Trona, life sucks in Trona and today it sucked a lot worse.

Lots of shaking here in the greater LA foothills, but no damage (though this house does have earthquake insurance).

<comment><USER20> Ah Trona. Not much out there to be honest. Here's what the view from Trona Pinnacles looks like: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/LrML8TsBbZoW79t1A](https://photos.app.goo.gl/LrML8TsBbZoW79t1A)

<comment><USER31> Could be Mars

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So it was apparently widely felt but Ridgecrest-China Lake, where it seems to have been felt the most, is not very close to the major populations. You can see this from cgoecknerwald's second link showing the locale of one of the major aftershocks.

[1] [https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443095...](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443095/map) to save slight scrolling

</comment><comment><USER33> 6.4 magnitude it is a lot. I hope there are no injured

</comment><comment><USER34> Hope everyone is fine. Is it actually a good thing? I mean at least the prob of larger quake declines with it.

</comment><comment><USER35> In 2010 there was a 7.2 centered 30 miles south of the socal border that caused $1B of damage on both sides.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Baja_California_earthqu...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Baja_California_earthquake)

</comment><comment><USER36> >Gallegos said that the dried chiles hanging from a hook on her kitchen wall were all shaking. "It was surreal."

was this really the best anecdote they could find to include in the story?

<comment><USER37> I don't know, but anyway... If you happen to be under dried chiles when they shake, be sure to keep your eyes closed because the pain could make an earthquake much more pleasant. Been there done that, and that pain lasted hours... ouch!

On a more serious note, the anecdote might suggest that the earthquake produced very high frequency oscillations. Dried plants are relatively light and stiff so that a larger but slow displacement might be harder to spot by looking at them, but they could be much better at transmitting fast oscillations.

<comment><USER38> > Been there done that, and that pain lasted hours... ouch!

What an unusual form of earthquake injury!

<comment><USER37> Well, a fault was involved, although not a geological one:)

Read as: don't pick dried chiles directly from below, or at least close the damn eyes...

<comment><USER38> Oh, I see! I thought you meant that you'd actually experienced getting chili pepper in your eyes _during an earthquake_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The new early warning system did not trigger in L.A. Authorities said the projected damages wasnt big enough. The warning system is supposed to give seconds to tens of seconds of warning to turn off equipment and seek cover.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not the submitter's fault, but I'm pretty sure the title is inaccurate

<comment><USER41> It's not. The last earthquake with a higher magnitude in California occurred in 2010. The title is just phrased wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I saw a picture of a pinot that fell off a shelf and broke.

<comment><USER43> Try an entire liquor store: [https://twitter.com/zomo_abd/status/1146843583988658176/vide...](https://twitter.com/zomo_abd/status/1146843583988658176/video/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> We heard, but did not feel, this near Pacifica

</comment><comment><USER45> Woke me up this morning, pretty wild

</comment><comment><USER46> Lucky in middle nowhere</comment>


The Five P's of Product Management - <AUTHOR> https://reeve.blog/blog/five-p-framework/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks — author here! Hope this is useful. Had some great discussion on HN with my last article; always happy to debate!</comment>


2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_E._coli_outbreak

<comment><USER2> Is there something of interest outside of general news I am missing?</comment>


Google's Project Ara brings Blocks modular smartwatch - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkdigit.com/Wearable-Devices/Googles-Project-Ara-brings-Blocks-modular-smartwatch_20380.html

<comment><USER2> This is the project which made Google a real engineer company. Project Ara a great initiative by Google but as of now they are focused on Smartphone not smartwatch as far as news are concerned, Google came up with Android wearable os not the kit for smartwatch as they came up with for smartphone.</comment>


NASA's Mars rover finds key traces of water - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/2011/12/10/nasas-mars-rover-finds-key-traces-of-water-40094623/

<comment><USER2> This is an incredible achievement.

The "key traces of water" is awe inspiring in itself. However, what is more impressive is that Opportunity is still chugging along 7 years longer than predicted and making these discoveries. Unfortunately, NASA is pretty bad at displaying successes and explaining why it is important.

The press release: [http://marsrover.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20111207a.h...](http://marsrover.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20111207a.html)

<comment><USER3> I used to kid people that Spirit and Opportunity's longevity were themselves a problem.

They were built in an era of faster, better, cheaper and at the beginning of that time, the theory was that it was better to have more spacecraft even if some failed than to build expensive too big to tail projects that consumed the entire budgets.

That Spirit and Opportunity went far beyond their 90 day requirements was a indication of overengineering, and wouldn't it have been better to have had 20, or 40 Spirits and Opportunities launched, even if 1/2 of them failed?

(Now their longevity could be, not because of gross over-engineering but because the minimum engineering required to bring them to 90 - 120 days naturally makes a 5-10 year lifespan easy....)

We seem to have since gone back to wanting huge, too big, we're too afraid to let them fail projects.

I haven't followed it closely, but I am saddened that apparently Curiosity is a one off, and not part of a dual, triple, twenty member fleet. It could also be that I am just unaware of NASA's planned follow on to Curiosity.

<comment><USER4> The problem with faster better cheaper is programs are cut until just before they become irrelevant. If you want to send 20 identical robots someone is going to come along and say, what's the harm if we only send 1/2 that. But they will do the same thing if you only want to send 10. Sending 2 is vary defensible because 'you want some redundancy' but funding is not appropriated based on bang for the buck.

PS: ITER is a great example of this. Initially the goal was to test a full scale power plant with turbines etc. But, they kept cutting until it was exactly on the threshold between useful and toy without generating any power whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone in the know please comment on the prospects for bacterial life on Mars?

I know nothing about biology or astronomy, but the case for life on Mars seems extremely good. I'm basing this on:

* Repeated offhand comments by Neil deGrasse Tyson (admittedly not a scientific source)

* Articles in popular newspapers about "Mars Farts" (I haven't read any scientific publications on the topic)

* Relatively recent (2009) reports about AL84001 (again, as understood by a layman)

What are the accepted scientific opinions about those last two items?

<comment><USER6> > astrology

Astronomy is the correct word here. Astrology is horoscopes and the like.

<comment><USER5> Whoops, fixed that. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


My email made me miserable. So I decided to build my own email app from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/02/email_overload_building_my_own_email_app_to_reach_inbox_zero.html?wpsrc=sp_all_native_by-section

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty impressive achievement for a casual programmer. I really didn't expect a working product at the end of it. I enjoyed the article, too.

By focusing just on his own needs, the author created a nice, lightweight implementation of an organizational feature I've seen hinted at in heavyweight clients like Outlook. I can easily see how a team of professional programmers trying to create this for a market would fail, where one motivated amateur* got the job done.

I'd use a thick client version of this, with his keyboard shortcuts, Project view, and easily accessible attachments.

*in its non-pejorative sense.</comment>


InboxSDK for Gmail hits 2.5M end users - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/14/with-2-5m-end-users-streak-looks-to-build-a-development-kit-for-the-gmail-platform/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious - what are the most popular use cases you see leveraging the SDK?

<comment><AUTHOR> We see 3 big types of customers:

1) Consumer companies who want to integrate their product into gmail (for a better UX and better for retention). The use cases here mainly revolve around sending and receiving rich content (i.e. gifs from giphy or dropbox preview links, etc).

2) Enterprise companies who want their users to have easy access to the data right inside Gmail alongside emails. Typically, this is a CRM (like Streak) or a hiring tool (that shows candidate history right next to the emails from them)

3) Internal Only tools - typically tools that help internal users with daily workflow automation.</comment></comment>


Children of parents with bipolar disorder have detectable neutral abnormalities - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2697854 <comment><USER2> Title says "neutral", but I think the poster meant to write "neural".</comment>


Eden (YC S15), On-Demand Tech Help, Switches from Contractors to W2 Employees - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/eden-offering-on-demand-tech-help-switches-from-contractors-to-w2-employees/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> 20% more is high, I think, unless they are including health insurance in that 20%, in which case it's low, or unless they are going through a body shop/hr outsorcing scam. Workers comp is pretty minimal for tech workers (though... these people drive to on-site? that could drive up workers comp rates) and the employer side of the payroll taxes are 7.5% Yeah, you've gotta pay someone to figure it out, but that's a job that scales pretty well.

That said, it's an interesting move, I think one we'll see more of. I mean, you provide the end-client a _lot_ more peace of mind if you actually have all the required insurance. That's what I think is so weird about most of the housecleaning "agencies" \- most of them 1099 their cleaners... meaning that nobody has worker's comp covering the cleaners, which is a iffy situation for everyone involved.

<comment><USER3> Not to forget about companies offering warehouse movers for businesses as 1099. That's pretty much criminal.

On health insurance, to be precise the cost is $0.10/hour if a worker reaches a precise threshold in weekly hours, so far below 20%.

<comment><USER4> $0.10/hour? You think health insurance for a 2000 hour/year worker is $200?

I think it is closer to $2-$3 per hour.

<comment><USER2> It's hard to turn in to a hourly cost, because the coverage is binary; an employee works enough hours to be covered or not, and the cost of health insurance for the worker depends mostly on the worker's age, not on how much they work.

Of course, we're talking usually like $500 or so a month, varying dramatically on age and quality of the plan, so in no case is it gonna be anywhere near $0.10 per hour.

Workers comp can usually be broken down to a per-hour cost; and for, say, an underpaid computer nerd, $0.10 per hour is a minimally realistic workers comp cost, so maybe that's what parent was talking about.

<comment><USER3> ACA is 0.10 an hour. If the worker works long enough s/he apply for Medicare. If you want you can offer additional benefits. This is obviously not true for full time employees.

<comment><USER2> > ACA is 0.10 an hour. If the worker works long enough s/he apply for > Medicare. If you want you can offer additional benefits. This is obviously > not true for full time employees.

Again, I don't think this is true, at least not from an employer's perspective. The prices I am familiar with are about the same through an affordable care act exchange, and the (monthly) prices are the same for hourly and exempt employees.

I... know very little about medicare, but I was under the impression that you had to be very poor to qualify, and that it didn't have a lot to do with how much you worked. It's possible that there's a government program for the poor that will give you health insurance for $0.10 an hour, but as far as I know, that's not something available to employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am happy to see Eden following the path of BlueCrew and switching to a W2 model. This is the future of the on-demand economy. Customers should be aware the hiring a misclassified 1099 worker is illegal and risky

</comment><comment><USER5> Light the way!

</comment><comment><USER6> In other news, Bubba's Seafood Restaurant in Kalamazoo today announced that it will be complying with all food safety regulations, including the Kalamazoo County Sanitary Code.

Bubba Smith, proprietor, explained his company's innovative decision to follow the law. "If you ordered a shrimp cocktail at Bubba's for your parent or grandparent, these are precious people. You'd want to know that the food was being prepared properly and that the kitchen staff wasn't exposing your family to trace amounts of fecal matter because they didn't wash their hands properly."

Smith says he was also inspired by startups in the San Francisco Bay Area, which have been trailblazers in abiding by long-standing state, local and federal laws that have traditionally been ignored by less innovative companies. "These startups really show that it pays to do the right thing right from the beginning and not just to do it because of the threat of fines and lawsuits."</comment>


Science beyond individual understanding - <AUTHOR> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=465 <comment><USER2> Overall a very interesting article. Still this line made me chuckle:

"And it would disastrous if erroneous results were to have a major impact on public policy."

This is probably one of the most routine occurrences in creating public policy. Maybe only superseded by misunderstanding scientific results (erroneous or not).

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking of things like the Y2K debacle (not really scientists who made the call there, of course). Or imagine the global cooling scare in the 1970s had had a major impact on public policy.

<comment><USER3> In what way was y2k a public policy issue?

And was the "debacle" the bug itself or the over-reaction to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> A very incomplete summary of the public policy aspect: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K#Government_responses>

You can find far more by Googling around. A large number of countries seemed to have mobilized resources, in many cases quite significant.

As to your second question, I was thinking about the over-reaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting idea, but I don't think the problem he posits is new. Everything is done along a chain of trust. Even current researchers don't reproduce every experiment that led up to their current body of knowledge. No one has ever understood the _entire_ chain of reasoning. More to the point, mistaken ideas have always infected lots of people, this was the impetus for science in the first place. This will resolve itself in the usual way- people rely on the results, the results turn out to be wrong, and we search for more answers.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how long until the trust chain is automated? As long as the results proceed along the lines of logical deduction and statistics, it can be machine understandable.

<comment> a-priori "As long as the results proceed along the lines of logical deduction and statistics, it can be machine understandable."

Gödel might have a few things to say about that.

<comment><USER5> He's fine with logical deduction from a given set of axioms.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard: A Mother Jones Investigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer <comment><USER2> Long read (~36K words), but really worth it.</comment>


Epic Rap Battles, Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njos57IJf-0&feature=youtu.be

<comment><USER2> Awesome. That was funny as....

Thanks for the share.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you define an early adopter?  - <AUTHOR>

In Steve Blank's post http://steveblank.com/2010/03/04/perfection-by-subtraction-the-minimum-feature-set/ He talks about a minimum feature set, and validating customers based on their willingness to purchase it. Early adopters.<p>Do you think of an early adopter as a "novelty seeking person" or as an individual that may identify with certain new products and want to use them before they're popular? <comment><USER2> There's actually a really good book on this: _Diffusion of Innovations_ by Rogers, <http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0743222091/>

The book places adopters into 5 categories, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

The innovators are the few that have the means and risk-tolerance to constantly try out new ideas. The book estimates that about 2.5% of the adopters fall into this category.

The early adopters are the next to adopt. They kind of serve as liaisons between the innovators and the rest of the world. The book estimates them at 13.5% of adopters.

The early majority are the people that pay attention to what the early adopters are doing. They make up about 34%.

The other two categories are uninteresting.

To illustrate, HN would be the innovators, Lifehacker the early adopters, and Lifehacker's audience would be the early majority.

There are various characteristics of early vs. late adopters. Most of them are as you would expect. Early adopters have more education, higher social status, more empathy, less dogmatism, more optimism, more social connections, etc.

I highly recommend the book. It's aimed towards sociologists, but I didn't have too much trouble, and I'm certainly not sociologically inclined.

</comment><comment><USER3> A person whose itch you are scratching that doesn't mind all the rough edges and missing features.</comment>


The Long-Awaited 'Theory of Everything' - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/this-classic-physics-experiment-could-finally-reveal-the-long-awaited-theory-of-everything <comment><USER2> You know, when you are explaining a scientific idea to someone, you know they got it when they say "ok, that makes sense."

But with the double slit experiment, you know they got it when they say "But that doesn't make sense!"</comment>


Artificial Intelligence - is it really possible in this way ? - <AUTHOR>

I´m a graduate student of Computer Science from Brazil and i´m studying Artificial Intelligence, and i´m loving it. Before i start the course, i was working in my self "intelligent machine" without any knowledge of formal AI.
I see, there´s a lot of research made at last decades, but i don´t think they (the AI researchers) are even close from something that we can call Intelligence.
My point is ... is it possible to create intelligence without life ? Intelligence from a dead "system", like softwares ?
Intelligence is critically connected to existence ... so how can we create intelligence without creating a living artificial organism before ?
What you think, am i flying ? <comment><USER2> That's literally the billion dollar question. Even the simplest functional 'seed AI' would be a major technological shock.

There are lots of people betting vast sums of money on the answer being 'yes'.

Maybe the question is not so much if it is possible but if it is possible with current technology and if not in what century we'll be technologically advanced enough to really make this work.

It would certainly take some of the fun out of programming, programming would become teaching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your answer.

And yes, a lot of people are trying to recreate intelligence without life ... the problem is ... intelligence is a function of living beings. You don´t see, on nature, intelligent rocks,for instance. But you do see intelligent insects, like bees.

So first of all, i think we need to create some kind of rudimentary life and then develop intelligence on it.

DNA is the base of life. There´s patterns, a language behind the DNA ... so i do think we can use "programming" to create structures like the DNA to form artificial beings.

So i think it´s really possible to create life (artificial) and intelligence (rudimentary) with our current technologies, but we cant do that with our current paradoxes , our way to do things. We need new forms of think, we need to start thinking like gods, not like humans. Sorry by the poor enlgish.

<comment><USER3> Why does intelligence have to be a function of living being?

If intelligence is a matter of the kinds of mental activities someone/something is able to perform, what activities require DNA?

<comment><AUTHOR> "If intelligence is a matter of the kinds of mental activities someone/something is able to perform, what activities require DNA?"

DNA structures are like algorithms. The DNA is the information that tell our cells (and cells is the most basic unit of life, most important too) how to do things. So everything requires DNA ...

Life is not something inside you and me. Life is something present at each cell of our body. It´s not just the brain that can die, our finger, our foot, our skin ... everything can die. We are the combination of all this, we are not only our brains like Artificial Intelligence tend to think. Everything is interconnected to perform life. Including intelligence. Intelligence don´t exist for itself, it exists for the living being.

Look, i´m nothing and i just have very basic knowledge of AI, i´m much more a philosopher than a researcher. But, i´m trying to bring new points in order to find new ways to do things. So i´m just trying to bring up new points, not the final truth.

<comment><USER2> I think you're falling prey to having limited knowledge about a field and then expanding on that knowledge thinking that what you think must be new because you didn't know it before.

Probably the best course of action if you want to advance the field of AI is to first get current with the the field, _then_ start thinking up new stuff, preferably in concert with other people in the field to keep you on the right track. It's rare that an outsider with limited knowledge of a field can suddenly make some fairly obvious contribution that those in the field had overlooked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice jacquesm, i´m going to study everything deep before asking new questions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>