Bitcoin Surpasses $4,000 Due to Strong Japanese Demand - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-surpasses-4000-due-to-strong-japanese-demand-cnbc <comment><USER3> still kicking myself in hindsight for dismissing this in early 2011 as something that would flop, oh well, hindsight and all that.

<comment><USER4> It's worth remembering it still could flop, although I think that's becoming less likely.

Bitcoin and other cryptos really depend on government opinion of them. The main reason cryptos have been reaching new highs over the last few months is because some governments are making moves to legitimise them.

However, I think as cryptos become more popular governments will have to question their use case. The problem is it's really hard to say what they're actually useful for other than for some shady uses such as tax avoidance and black market transactions. Of course - as many advocates are pointing out - they could be used as a replacement for the US dollar and other state run currencies, but then we must recognise they'll be a direct threat to our worldwide central banking systems, and then we must question why governments would tolerate that?

If the US and/or EU started pushing back against cryptos because of these reasons they would likely crash.

I actually think too many companies accepting bitcoin could be a very bad thing in the long run. No government is going want to see a significant proportion of their economy's transactions being made in cryptos for obvious reasons.

Bitcoin's only hope (in my opinion) is to be seen as a kind of Gold 2.0 - <USER2> more convenient store of value, which would wouldn't risk dilution through inflation and is also more secure from geopolitical risks.

But even then you have to question if it's really a better store of value than gold. Sure, the Bitcoin network is pretty safe, but its value will always come with far more risks than something as fundamental as gold.

I think people are really over hyping Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies right now. I have a few friends who have poured thousands of pounds into bitcoin and various alt-coins with zero research over the last few weeks. It all feels very similar to the dotcom bubble to me. People keep saying this is the future without much reasoning and are then validated by people who don't know any better investing thousands purely from speculation which continue to raise the price and continues to validate the incorrect assumptions of others.

If you don't believe me just go ask someone you know why they invested in cryptocurrencies. I guarantee they'll say something like, "because it's the future", or even worse, "because it has gone up by X in X amount of time".

But who knows. My fears could be completely wrong. Perhaps everyone is right and bitcoin will be the currency to replace all currencies and the US, EU, and China will just let that happen as the cost of all the tools centralised banking provides. Or perhaps for some reasons it will just remain as a significant competitor to worldwide currencies and governments won't mind that despite the costs and risks. It's just my two cents.</comment></comment>


Effective immediately Sheprd child transport service will cease operations - <AUTHOR> https://www.sheprd.com <comment><USER2> I empathize with the CEO who wrote this. Heartbreaking in many ways to let go and shut down when it seems so close to making it to profitable status.

I was an early employee of a venture funded start-up that also had to face up to the fact that it was running out of money and series B wasn't going to happen because investors had gotten spooked.

I know nothing about this start-up other than what I just read, but if the founder and early employees are on HN and reading this comment, know that you have my respect for everything you accomplished, for the seemingly straightforward way you are communicating the shutdown.

May you find your next venture or steps in life equally as rewarding in the process but more profitable in the outcome.</comment>


Show HN: CodeceptJS hits 1.0, with end to end tests for web and mobile - <AUTHOR> http://codecept.io/changelog/ <comment><USER2> Love it ! Hope I can help much more now!</comment>


Global Infrastructure Partners Gets Big Returns In Sleepy Sector - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/global-infrastructure-partners-gets-big-returns-in-sleepy-sector <comment><USER2> For those of you thinking, "I'd like to take a crack at running an airport" or think you'd be able to do better, there's a game that just got through Steam Greenlight and that will be releasing soon which will allow you to do exactly that.

Obviously it's "dumbed down", but it still tries to stay realistic & uses a 'systems-based' logical approach for gameplay; the total operation is basically just the sum of all the different inter-dependent systems and how they relate to eachother, how failures cascade, etc...

[http://www.simairport.com/](http://www.simairport.com/)

Disclaimer: I'm involved in the project.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to go outside the bounds of what a typical international airport looks like today? E.g. no security screenings so people can pretty much just walk on the plane like it's a train station?

That would mean you don't need space for restaurants, or lots of space for people to pool as they're waiting past security.

It would be very interesting to experiment with changes like that and see how it would look.

Edit: There's now an entire discussion downthread about how airports did and didn't look like before 9/11.

That misses the point of what I'm asking, which I'll rephrase. I'm asking as a simulation game, how customizable is this? E.g. in in SimCity 2000 it initially looks like you can do anything, but really you can't design something that doesn't look & function either like an American suburb or car- centric Los Angeles. There's no way to construct something that looks & functions remotely like the city of Venice in SimCity.

Similarly in this game, can you really design your own airport that works anyway you want from scratch? Or are you just placing all the pieces in your typical international airport in different places on the board, while the NPCs walk in some pre-determined route from parking, to checkin, to security etc.

There's nothing that appears in the very brief trailer that suggests that it isn't highly constrained in the same way SimCity is. But I'd love to know if that's really the case.

<comment><USER4> >That would mean you don't need space for restaurants

Restaurants existed in airports long before 9/11\. People arrive early because missing flights costs you hundreds of dollars. Security adds maybe 20 mins to the process.

<comment><USER5> That just means that people should be able to turn up and get on any flight without pre-booking.

I'm going to guess that pre-booking is some sort of way to maximize revenue or minimize wasted empty seats.

<comment><USER6> There's already a frustrating degree of uncertainty as to when (if ever) showing up at the airport will actually yield a seat towards your destination. Adding the uncertainty of other people's demand and even more highly variable waits in line sounds like hell.

I'd much rather cope with the Christmas rush by booking months early than by waiting at the airport for days.

<comment><USER5> I can at least imagine a system where (a) planes aren't assigned to destinations until the last minute and (b) more planes are made available at the obvious times of the year (holidays and so on). That might yield a very flexible turn-up-and-go system.

However I've never run an airport so I can also imagine that there are important factors that I don't even know about that make this unworkable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real story here is capital in the form of private equity. Engineering is a commodity, it can be bought, there are tons of great engineers in the world. Getting access to capital to take these big bets requires some serious clout, influence, and connections that the average joe doesn't have. Check out the background of ANY private equity firm, it's full of very wealthy people from Ivy League schools (Skull & Bones anyone?).

These guys create a firm, pitch their friends to get a seed fund off the ground and then start fundraising from larger institutions. They then hire some real talent and they are off to the races. Not everyone makes it, but the ones who do are featured as geniuses on Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. Survivorship bias for sure. Most Hedge Funds and Private Equity firms don't do well, similar to any start-up.

<comment><USER8> What are the returns of the competitors' infrastructure funds compared to GIP?

If everyone (including GIP) has modest (much less than the historic 24% of GIP) returns, then we might think the opportunity was simply about untapped inefficiency, and that any team with the massive capital + reasonable human talent would have had the same results as GIP in the past decade.

If GIP continues to outperform vs the competition even as the space gets crowded, we could consider their human talent to be a differentiator.

If all the infrastructure funds are doing great, even in a world of high competition, then again we can consider the access to capital and access to the counterparty stakeholders to make the deal happen to be the differentiator, not the operational or engineering talent of any firm.

Personally I'm willing to believe that operational experience at massive scale is much rarer than simply "great engineering talent" at the individual contributor level, but am open to be proven wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Outgoing baggage jumped out as a major trouble spot; Stanley went to > investigate,

Does it really take an "engineer" to find a trouble-spot and fix it ? Why do you need a billion-dollar fund to grab engineering talent to do what the highly-paid leaders of, say, airports, are already _supposed to_ be doing ? If they can't figure it out, isn't there a whole industry of consultancy firms that send "analysts" through your organization to do the same thing?

If this sector is so profitable, will it cause the same crisis that privatization of hospitals did to healthcare ? Say "Global Infrastructure Partners" expands and "buys" JFK, ATL, LAX, just like private healthcare bought all the hospitals. Now they can start jacking up their landing fees (each year) until air travel becomes unaffordable. What's to stop them from turning this into the ultimate regulatory capture ?

<comment><USER10> Yes, that.

Actually, I find it obscene that governments that can borrow at basically 2% per annum or less are not engaging in these projects, and instead leave 24% returns on the table for the private sector.

Call me a Keynesian all you want, but yes - the austerity stance in the last decade (after the GFC) (particularly in Europe, due to Germany, but also in the US) was a huge mistake.

<comment><USER11> Because governments aren't set up to do things efficiently and can never capture the 24% return. Going back to the 19th US where government ran and backed enterprises were outperformed over and over sector by sector by private enterprise. Not losing your job for bad investments is a bad incentive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Most of his recruits speak a language familiar to engineers but foreign to > anybody else: Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean. Woodburn is prone to fall into such > jargon. "Anyone who's been to an airport can say that it's operating at > maybe Two Sigma," he marvels. "That's making a mistake 30 percent of the > time."

Two sigma corresponds with a 95% confidence interval, while one sigma is a 68% confidence interval which he is presumably referring to.

I don't want to detract too much from the work that these people did, which I think is actually very cool, but it worries me that their head of engineering can't discuss really simple statistics correctly...

Edit: words mean nothing, see replies

<comment><USER13> For whatever reason, the "Six Sigma" techniques/ideas aren't using "Two Sigma" to refer to ±2σ, instead they're referring to the width of the band around the mean.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma#Sigma_levels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma#Sigma_levels)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, and it's apparently also shifted down by 1.5 sigma.

<comment><USER14> That's apparently based on Motorola's data regarding process drift.

> Motorola has determined, through years of process and data collection, that > processes vary and drift over time – what they call the Long-Term Dynamic > Mean Variation. This variation typically falls between 1.4 and 1.6.

[https://www.isixsigma.com/new-to-six-sigma/dmaic/15-sigma- pr...](https://www.isixsigma.com/new-to-six-sigma/dmaic/15-sigma-process- shift/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're interested in infrastructure or business backend improvements like the ones described in the article but:

\- are at a smaller and more local scale that don't attract attention from the likes of GIP \- the process improvements are around information flow between applications instead of physical flow

I am really interested in talking to you whatever the domain may be.

An example I've learned of recently:

Garbage truck routing in NYC is grossly inefficient. The routing used to be centralized under a single contractor with rumored tentacles into organized crime. Due to changes in contracting regulations, NYC garbage collection is now includes a mix of independent contractors. This results in multiple trucks visiting the same street on the same night.

This is inefficient in the following ways: \- cost of garbage transportation \- noise pollution \- localized pollution from truck emissions \- CO2 emissions from inefficient route planning

I'm fairly certain efficient routing for this is a solved computational / information systems problem and the source of the issue is a lack of coordination. I'm trying to dig in with the Department of Sanitation to see who the different players are.

<comment><USER16> Sure. I'm currently interested in discovering inefficiencies in airline revenue management. My hypothesis is that a non-trivial amount of the spend that airlines make is inefficient and based on factors that aren't as relevant today as they were 30 years ago during the proliferation of global distribution and revenue management systems.

i want to see an airline that is run by software engineers with aviation experience that rolls its own GDS and revenue management system; one that can scale well beyond its years and can operate on clusters of cheap compute.

my hypothesis is that current airline operations are band-aids on top of protocols and runbooks that were developed around the initiation of the jet age, and fear and fearfully low margins has held back massive amounts of innovation that keep prices higher than they should be.

(and yes, i understand that aircraft are expensive to buy and maintain)

<comment><USER17> Ha, I used to work for a large, Asian airline. They had that cool system used to calculate the pricing of ticket in real-time.

No one really knew how it worked, it was built 20 years ago, and no one was allowed near it for fear of breaking it. Therefore, instead of tuning the algorithm, the analyst added their own (mostly arbitrary) rules on top of the system's calculation.

It reminded me of that conversation in Asimov's Foundation, where some guy goes to some planet and is afraid to see everyone using technology, having lost all the knowledge of how it actually works and how to maintain it, therefore seeing it as some kind of magic.

This was in 2015.

<comment><USER16> Right. Airlines are extremely ripe for disruption. Much of their operations are outdated and inefficient for today's consumer. When was the last time you saw an airline run a massive social media campaign?

To be fair, airlines wouldn't exist without governmental intervention (aircraft and airport usage is expensive, but the market wants rock-bottom pricing), so this makes innovation tricky. Which is exactly why I'm so interested in this space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great story, but how do you get into this kind of "deal"?

I believe that most engineer would be able to come up with a reasonable way to manage an airport, maybe with more dumps that our heroes, but still I believe that most of us will be able to dig themselves out of the problem.

But then, how do you get into it?

You need tons of money and wealthy/powerful people that trust you, how do you get that trust?

<comment><USER19> When we fix software, we know that full rewrites are bad ideas, and that the way to success is to make easy changes until finally you end up with a better product. This is true because failing, for any amount of time, is a terrible outcome. However, when it comes to moving upward for bigger opportunities, the opposite is true: Little is gained by very slow grinding.

Wondering how to get all wealthy people to trust you is the wrong question: What you want is ONE wealthy person to trust you. 300 failed pitches don't matter. You just want to succeed once.

Therefore, my strategy is to aim as high as you can, be ok with a bunch of failures, and once you have success, consider whether you can use it to aim even higher, now that you have established a higher baseline. It's better to have one resounding success an 50 failures at convincing people that never failing, but aiming way too low.

<comment><USER18> That is a great point!

I do agree that shooting for the stars is the way to go, but I still find it difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In 2009 and 2010, I worked for a similar private equity fund that also raised a billion dollars to invest into infrastructure and real assets.

A few random things I learned:

* While a billion dollars may seem like a lot of money, it's actually fairly small in the infrastructure world where you are building massive projects like airports and power plants.

* For that reason, our fund focused on higher-risk, smaller projects in the developing world, which made it a tough sell to the cautious pension and endowment type investors who invest in infra.

* The secret to doing well is deal access. We were always envious of GIP because they had an incredible network.

<comment><USER8> Guess it's always about dealflow, be it PE or VC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My biggest takeaway from this is - people skilled in industrial processes aren't already in very high positions in Airports!?

<comment><USER22> I think the bigger takeaway is that at a lot of big companies, the processes and management is horrible but it still makes a _ton_ of money. These guys buy things that aren't optimized and squeeze all that money out. I think the most interesting thing would be to look back at one of these investments 5 or 10 years after they exit and watch the improvements slip away and the companies end up in trouble.

I think this is why people are dislike big government (me included, but necessary for some critical things) because there is no incentive to optimize. Quite actually, that is punished. Don't spend all your money one year and your budget gets slashed even though you may need that in a few years to upgrade equipment. The more layers of organization you add, the more managers you have who see their job as self-preservation. It looks like these guys run very very flat.

<comment><USER23> Well, less government leads to privatization of crucial infrastructure (airports, hospitals, banks, etc). Which still siphon government money, only now that money doesn't go to public good or government employees, but to private coffers, with no need to compete (regardless of "free market" hurr durr) since it's infrastructure and can not be allowed to fail.

That government can be inefficient is an efficiency problem.

That private actors basically "steal" taxpayer money is a lobby/regulatory problem.

Government does have some blame for the former, but you can't simultaneously regulate wall street (for example) and still blame the government for being in bed with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Quote: Anyone who's been to an airport can say that it's operating at maybe Two Sigma," he marvels. "That's making a mistake 30 percent of the time."

Is that really what two sigma performance means? That sounds more like one sigma worth of failures.

<comment><USER25> The sigma level in industry traditionally refers to the 'bandwidth', not the distance from the mean, so what you are thinking as 1 sigma is actually 2 sigma.

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

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > What Happens When Two Bankers and an Engineer Get a Billion Dollars?

To quote Willy Wonka, "They lived happily ever after."

<comment><USER27> Pfff. I'm working on my second billion!

I gave up on my first...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Surprisingly enjoyable article. Would love to have a crack at designing ways to have a better airport experience - can't say Gatwick feels like a great product yet

</comment><comment><USER29> Now I want to know what that 1930's airfield optimization book is....

I bet graycat knows, care to chime in? Anyone else have a guess?

</comment><comment><USER30> One of the things I think this story highlights is just how much gain there can be in looking at unsexy things that nobody cares about but everybody needs. I know quite a few startups that are really good at doing that -- no noise, but they're quietly humming away at essential problems that sneak under the surface.

<comment><USER31> I think the best startups look to solve a non-it problem, and I think there are still a lot of them out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like Theme Park from Bullfrog!

</comment><comment><USER33> Crony capitalism at its finest.</comment>


Ask HN: My non-savvy friends are telling me to buy stocks. Is a crisis coming? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,<p>To me it seems like everyone is suddenly talking about stocks, like how the US markets are at a all time high yet I hear my friends who do have any interest in stocks and don't follow the market saying that they are buying in to ride along to the top just because. And it is starting to ring some bells in my head because that situation was very familiar in 2007. Are you guys leaving the markets now or making any preparations for a potential crisis? <comment><USER2> As of a few years I've been building/maintaining 15-20% liquid assets that just keep pace with inflation. I'll lose a few percent of growth every year I'm wrong, and I will be wrong most years.

I know what it costs me to be wrong. I don't know what the profit is when I'm right.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are not day trading, buy good companies with good fundamentals and ride out any lows if there is a dip in the market. Good companies will recover they always do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes that's what I'm doing as well in this bull situation

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've rearranged my portfolio. Now I mostly focus on smaller cap companies. The stakes are lower but the overall risks and returns are higher.

</comment><comment><USER5> This could have been written at any point in the last 5 years. Don't try to time the market, it's a fool's game.</comment>


Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago - mh-cx http://www.dw.com/en/konrad-zuse-and-the-digital-revolution-he-started-with-the-z3-computer-75-years-ago/a-19249238 <comment><AUTHOR> Also of interest are some of his other innovations:

\- Plankalkuel, by some criteria the first high-level programming language [1].

\- Digital physics [2]. I have no idea if this is taken seriously by physicists.

\- First chess program, predating Wiener, Shannon and Turing [3].

\- First implementation of floating point numbers [4].

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

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History)

<comment><USER2> Amazing work.

>The original notation was two dimensional. (!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good to see Zuse on HN. It's possible to go and see his machines in Germany and I highly recommend it. This is a "forgotten" part of computing history because of WWII and deserves the light of day.

<comment> mh-cx Agree. The Z3 is exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich:

[http://www.deutsches- museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/...](http://www.deutsches- museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/computers/universal-computers/)

Here's the Z3 in action (German only, try subtitles):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI)

<comment><USER4> I can highly recommend a visit there. Not only you can see an original Z4 and a replica of the Z3, but also lot's of more science and history related exhibitions. Don't miss the Enigma!

<comment><USER5> Among the more impressive specimens, you can also see an A4 rocket (better known as V2).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere.

Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing _and_ Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.

<comment><USER7> As can be seen on Wikipedia: [1] vs. [2] - the English version of "computer science" does not mention Zuse. Time to change?

Similarly, the German version of "Computer" mentions Zuse 20 times [3]; the English version starts describing the Z2 [4].

Quite fascinating how Wikipedia is written through the local lense.

[1] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderne...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderner_Rechenmaschinen)

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

[3] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical)

<comment><USER8> Excellent catch! I love Wikipedia with all their faults but probably we need not so difficult to build tools to recognize anomalies between Wikipedia cultures... sorry, languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, Zuse's development were indeed important, but the Zuse Z3 had in important limitation that the article doesn't mention, which leads some people to not count it as "first": The Z3 was largely not Turing complete.

This is because the Z3 had no conditional branching. In 1998 it was shown that the Z3 actually didn't need conditional branching, and it was Turing complete but only because it is possible to unroll conditional statements into a version where both branches are evaluated and then the result of one is cancelled. However, at the time of the Z3's development and use, this wasn't known.

So while the Z3 is indeed an important early computer, it shares a significant discontinuity with modern computing that reflects the time. The Z3 was not intended as a "computer" in the modern sense, it was more of a calculating machine that could perform repeat arithmetic more quickly. It was never intended for the more complex roles we use computers in today.

A lot of people don't count the Z3 as the first programmable digital computer because of this limitation. If you disqualify it for that reason, the title probably goes to the British Colossus the next year.

Obviously Zuse did develop conditional branching (such as in his language Plankalkül), but that was years later and by then it had already been done by others. To Zuse's credit, he probably would have gotten to it much faster had he not had a real problem with allied bombing destroying his work.

A major takeaway from this is that assigning titles like "first" and "inventor of computing" is quite silly. Computer science developed very, very quickly, with many of it key developments made by multiple people in parallel. We are largely familiar with what happened in the West for sociopolitical reasons, but similar work was done in Germany and the Soviet Union, often successfully. However, calling Zuse the inventor of computer science is as uncharitable to Turing as the reverse is to Zuse, both had their successes and failures.

When I give talks on computer history, I often like to say things like "Steve Jobs, inventor of the Computer" to elicit a laugh. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes people don't realize that it's a joke.

</comment><comment><USER10> Minor trivia - one of the TRON: Legacy writers confirmed to me on Twitter that the character "Zuse" was indeed named in honor of the gentleman in question.

</comment><comment><USER11> "And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have."

Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer design that has been employed since "Baby" ran its first program just before lunch on June 21, 1948, including an approach to fast random memory accesses. This approach was novel, based on CRTs used in radar. Most everything else -- design-wise -- was from the Moore School Lectures of 1946. And the really inspirational part of those was from the work on the ENIAC.

The missing piece that needs to be more generally appreciated is how the early work on practical, general-purpose computers was quietly done in England while the Americans were squabbling over who was first.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is a very important piece of history left out of this article and comments. The Nazis hired IBM to do the bulk of their computing. They may have used the Z3, but my uderstanding is that they didn't use it, though since it had such a narrowly specified field of use they could have used it and IBM wouldn't have known the difference. But the fact is that IBM supplied, at the very least, the vast majority of computer tech for the Nazis.

I'd be very interested in a detailed comparison between whatever IBM was using at the time, the capabilities of the Z3, and whether it could have been modified to do the types of work IBM did. IBM's primary notoriety about all this is that they helped the Nazis to locate members of groups to be exterminated, but I expect that was a small part of what they did for the Nazis. But no IBM execs faced the Nuremburg Tribunals.

Also, I think Zuse at least somewhat well known in the U.S. The most basic computer books I have seen all have something about him. The information is available and common in the U.S. in elementary computer books like they use to teach schoolkids what computers are. I've read a fair amount of stuff about him in elementary school computer texts that I got in thrift stores and like that. The basic information about who he was and what he did is commonly available. Details are less common, so when I saw the post I immediately checked it out, whereas I more commonly open up pages in new tabs and read them after I've done my shopping through the feed. But the reason I recognized the name of the man and the machine is because of elementary school books that I picked up in a thrift store in 99.

<comment><USER13> I was under the impression that once the war broke out, IBM in Germany was cut off from the rest of the company, and the support provided to the German government that was so controversial was from the severed German appendage of IBM rather than something that IBM proper directed or profited from (sort of like how Coca-Cola's facilities in Germany turned into Fanta, which ironically made its way back to America after the war).

Is this not true? That's not to say that non-German former IBM employees who offered assistance in Nazi Germany shouldn't be considered Nazi collaborators, but I never thought of their actions as reflecting on IBM as a whole or IBM's leadership at the time.

Of course IBM made a decision to do business with the Nazi government prior to the war, but public perceptions of the Nazis in America were very different in the '30s, partially because the Nazis weren't nearly as well-understood then as now. Hitler was Life Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were known to be admirers.

None of this is to excuse anyone's delusions about Hitler or the Nazis, or to excuse those who helped them. I just never thought it was 100% appropriate to tar IBM with that particular brush. Or am I missing vital information (very possible)?

<comment><USER12> The missing vital information is this: IBM Berlin would not have been cut off until the U.S. entered the war. The war broke out years before, and the human rights abuses began years before that. IBM absolutely knew what was up for years by the time the U.S. manipulated Hitler into declaring war on us after Pearl Harbor (That's a whole story in itself involving a Nazi spy who was serving in the U.S. Congress). They were worse than Nazi collaborators; they didn't have to worry about being shot if they didn't do what they were told. The news reports about the holocaust were largely discounted; even Jews didn't believe them, but IBM had access to inside information and would have known why Hitler was so obsessed with census data. They had to know that the news reports were true. Not to say that the plight of the various groups the final solution was applied to would have been significantly different if IBM hadn't been involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Throwing a mention of Atanosoff at Iowa State university in here, who's contributions were significant, but little known.

</comment><comment><USER15> The history of computing is filled with so many names, and odd or tangled stories, this is one that I was un-aware of, and is super interesting.

If you like these strange connections you should go and read about the Jacquard loom, that was using punch cards to control the patterns produced! It can be argued that "programmability" came before general purpose computing...

</comment><comment><USER16> Someone mentioned the V2 here. Interesting contrast between post-war careers of Von Brown and Zuse.

</comment><comment><USER17> Konrad Who?

<comment><USER18> The person who invented the computer. Which somehow no US school teaches about.

He also developed a very awesome high-level language very early on.

<comment><USER19> Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.

<comment> mh-cx Was it Turing complete? Because Zuse's Z3 was.

I'm not saying though, that this is a criteria for calling any machine a computer. But it's probably what sets Zuse's achievement apart.

UPDATE: I've just learned that Babbage's language was also Turing complete. So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.

<comment><USER20> Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing- complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;)

Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.

<comment><USER21> Slight difference - da Vinci's tanks and helicopters wouldn't actually have worked, whereas the Analytical Engine absolutely would have.

<comment><USER20> "Absolutely would have worked" is probably the closest you can get to modern software development ;)

Or more seriously put: It's a concept for a machine with 55k moving parts and powered by a steam engine. "Would work" is probably a bold statement considering how far off theoretical designs always are from the engineering reality, by all experience.

<comment><USER19> [http://plan28.org/](http://plan28.org/)

<comment><USER20> "We have been pecking away at Babbage's original design drawings for some while now and have found with regret that we are unable to reverse engineer a coherent and consistent understanding of the Analytical Engine from the mechanical drawings alone. "

[http://blog.plan28.org/2016/05/spring-2016-report-to- compute...](http://blog.plan28.org/2016/05/spring-2016-report-to- computer.html)

If you read further, it becomes pretty clear that it's more or less a theoretical idea. A great one though, granted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Q&A Website for Feedback, Memes, Jokes, Info, and Help - <AUTHOR> Link: https://whatifhq.com Sign Up is Free and you can provide feedback if you like. <comment><USER2> Is the name a play on [https://what-if.xkcd.com/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/)?

What does the HQ mean?

Why should one use this site over the thousands of other sites for Q&A's? (askReddit/Quora/stack).</comment>


An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/an-overview-of-gradient-descent-optimization-algorithms <comment><USER2> Blog spam pass through to the original: [http://sebastianruder.com/optimizing- gradient-descent/](http://sebastianruder.com/optimizing-gradient-descent/)

Useful reference, 6 months old.

Side note, anybody aware of any implementations of the "learning to learn gradient descent by gradient descent" work [0]? I'd love to boost my training time, but I'm worried implementing it myself will just result in an additional set of hyperparameters to tune.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474)

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to swap the link on this post? That's kind of silly that they just copy the original post. Understanding different optimizers and why they work is important though, especially since often people will just use them without considering what they're actually doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't see mention of conjugate gradients, Newton iteration, or quasi Newton.

And I saw no mention of constraints.

<comment><USER2> This is primarily in regard to deep neural nets, where second-order methods are too expensive (O(p^2) in parameters, where p is on the order of millions).

I'm not sure conjugate gradient methods are used much, due to the non- convexity of the merit functions, and hard constraints aren't used much either.

<comment><USER5> quasi newton methods are not square in the dimension of the problem (think limited memory L-BFGS), and can be run in linear time. In my experience, however, they're 2-3 times slower than regular methods like ADAM.</comment></comment></comment>


A New Approach to Databases — Simulating 10Ks of Spaceships on my laptop - <AUTHOR> http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/post/44146699200/spaceships <comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doubling the performance of the simulation from a dual-core to a quad-core processor doesn't necessarily mean you have "linear scalability" unless you can demonstrate the trend continues as more cores are used (e.g. 8-, 16-, and 32-cores).

I think the ideal way to demonstrate this kind of claims while eliminating the effect of other factors such as memory performance is to use a beefy server with many cores (let's say N >= 16), and adjust your benchmark to use 1, 2, 3, ..., N cores, then plot the line to see if it's really linear.

Two dots make a line in geometry, but you need more dots to project the trend.

Time to spawn an EC2 Cluster Compute Eight Extra instance!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right, but we'll do that as part of the next step, when we show scaling beyond a single machine. Big servers, and more than one.

<comment><USER2> Cool! This looks very interesting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems like the author considers 10K spaceships a lot. That is something like 1MB of of data. Not that much, even for a single core.

Also, there should be multiple phases like, first everybody shoots, then everybody is hit, then blast force is applied. Otherwise there might be an unfair advantage for some spaceships, which can destroy their opponent, before it had the chance to return fire.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't sound like a lot if it is processed linearly. However, 10,000 reader/writers on a single shared resource is a lot.

Naive implementations would have a single global lock on the resource, resulting in lots of contention. They appear to be saying that by converting to callbacks, they are able to determine which transactions will interfere with each other and limit the contention to just those portions. Deadlock would be a serious possibility here, same as in regular databases.

The size of the data is largely unimportant for this problem, it's the contention that's the issue.

If the spaceships didn't have to interact through the global state then you could have sharding. You can change the problem by adding "planetary systems", and saying that ships in one system can't interact with another. Instant shard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. That's the whole point: shards are a solution that imposes constraints on the application, meaning it's not really a solution.

Also, SpaceBase guarantees no deadlocks.

<comment><USER4> According to the documentation, it does this by preventing callbacks from initiating transactions on the same SpaceBase store?

:) :) :) Isn't that a constraint on the application? :) :) :)

I think I'm going to have to look at the demo and see how a shot which triggers an explosion then does the query to perform the push of the surrounding ships.

I would expect something like:

      Ship A:
         Query(origin+direction+range, callback Shot())

      Shot()
         if Exploding
           Delete
           Query(origin, range, callback Boom())

      Boom()
         Update location

Except that's not allowed?

An AOE which causes cascades of death would be cool to see too.

Nifty idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess we must have missed all the places in the documentation where this is mentioned. As you see in the code, this limitation is no longer in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "But if the new Moore's law gives us exponential core-number growth, to exploit those cores we need to grow the number of shards exponentially as well, meaning we're placing and exponential number of constraints on an application that probably only needs to accommodate a linearly increasing number of users, and that's bad."

I'm no expert on parallel programming, but isn't this sloppy thinking? Like the implication is that we must have an exponential increase in cores in order to accommodate a linear number of users...

More generally is anything about this approach really novel? Databases can already run transactions and queries asynchronously. Any language that supports concurrent programming can take advantage of this, even if the database isn't issuing a callback. And ruling out concurrent languages that are capable of implementing this approach, but include some language features the authors don't like seems like a side issue.

Not just trying to snark... if someone can explain what I'm missing I'm open to it!

<comment><AUTHOR> > Like the implication is that we must have an exponential increase in cores > in order to accommodate a linear number of users...

As the article says, you can just ignore those extra cores. But, if you want to do cooler stuff with your data you'd better use them, and if so, sharding is a dead-end.

> More generally is anything about this approach really novel?

I said it's a repurposing of an old idea, that of the old RDMSs where the application was the database. The idea is not about concurrent transactions but about uniting the application and the database and letting the database run and parallelize the application's logic, and be the engine of scaling. I think most people see the database simply as a data storage component, and try to make it fast and scalable enough. We say, let the database run the application.

> And ruling out concurrent languages that are capable of implementing this > approach...

I haven't ruled out any language. In fact, the demo is in Java, which certainly doesn't qualify. Any language can do this. I only said that in order to go forward, in order for the common programmer to take advantage of modern hardware, we must use languages built specifically for modern hardware. I've named two that I think fit the bill, but if other languages end up becoming the language for the new age - it's all the same.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your response. I think I understand your point re: cores, although I wouldn't have used the argument quoted above, instead I would just make the point in your response - we have all these cores, gotta use them.

Since I found some things to nitpick I want to say I definitely like the approach you are coming at this from -- in terms of how you apparently view sharding, NoSQL, database as a processing engine, etc.

But I still think you are presenting it as something novel (just look at the title) when what you are really doing is promoting a long-established but sorely neglected philosophy... a _good_ philosophy, which needs to be promoted. The novel aspect seems to be supporting callbacks in your Spacebase product, which isn't particularly essential to this philosophy.

Thanks for the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think callbacks are absolutely essential. How else is the db supposed to schedule and run your business logic?

<comment><USER5> Okay I have been thinking about your response for a while...

Database engines already possess sophisticated scheduling logic for query processing. We are constantly taking advantage of that, in different ways, when we delegate to the database.

And even though we are supposed to have all these business layers and whatnot, I think centralizing logic in a DB is a pretty common practice.

So I have been asking myself, is there a significant functional difference between the db doing a callback to the program, versus other methods of interacting with that built-in scheduling engine?

My supposition is that in the absence of such a capability, one could always get mostly (or fully) equivalent behavior by some combination of

(A) having the app fire queries (and consume their results) asynchronously

(B) giving queries some other means of initiating a response, e.g. writing to a table that acts as a message queue.

To me it seems like such a transformation wouldn't even change the balance of code between app vs DB all that much, it would just change the calling mechanism, and maybe you need these couple of extra modules to manage your query submissions and asynchronously dequeue stuff.

So I admit this qualifies as more than syntactic sugar, but not sure goes much beyond that. Of course, many prized language features don't go beyond that at all; and calling/concurrency idioms are important.

I like the idea of centralizing logic in the DB and I can see how your approach allows this in a much more elegant and straightforward manner. So I think I get it. Whether it's a totally new architecture, I dunno...

I come out of this thinking if there was a way to improve your article it would perhaps be to avoid the claim that this is allowing us to take advantage of database to "schedule and run" whatever business logic is implemented in the db via the highly optimized query processing facilities. All programs effectively do that in their use of the database, which is why the scheduling capabilities exist in advance of your approach.

The core thread of what you are doing/advocating, as I understand it, is something like this. (a) Centralize business logic in the DB. (b) Stop being ashamed of it. (c) Support calling conventions that make it easier.

If you made the argument that way, I would have seen it as a slam dunk. And I would expect that to be a controversial argument on HN.

Interested in your thoughts.

(BTW, I bet one could do these sorts of callbacks using the relatively recent capability of SQL Server to run Stored Procedures written in .NET.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, well, you summarize most of my points but one: the importance of callbacks is not just in the database triggering application actions (as would be done with asynchronous queries or the message bus you mention), but by scheduling application code to run on appropriate CPU cores.

Our ultimate goal isn't to make a new programming model for its own aesthetic (or non-aesthetic) sake, but in order to take advantage of multiple cores -- namely, for the sake of performance. So the database does not "control" the application -- it actually parallelizes it.

And as for SQL server, yes, I guess it's a similar concept but a different kind of database. I advocate that the database should be part of the application; they should be sharing the same heap in the same process, and only then should the applications let the database "drive". That is why I also don't quite agree with your wording of "centralizing logic in the DB" because the DB and the application are one; certainly the DB is not more (or less) centralized than the app. Once you get that, there is no point in being ashamed of it. Just like you let your web-app container parallelize your presentation layer, you let the database parallelize your business logic. In both cases the middleware shares the same process as the app, and the leap of faith required isn't big at all.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your response! I think it addressed my comments well.

It does make me think about the fact that _almost_ every major DB today runs out of process and that the market seems to have selected this pretty definitively. It seems like only recently some products are running in-process for performance reasons. But if I understand the trade offs here, only a single application can run in-process with the db. Also the db is not protected from crashing when the app crashes. But this is the 1990's explanation... any thoughts on how that applies to your situation?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _almost_ every major DB today runs out of process and that the market seems > to have selected this pretty definitively.

True. That's why I've tried to show the performance to be gained by letting the DB become integrated with the app. This is a result of the DB having just the right kind of knowledge about the relationships among domain objects to allow it to parallelize business logic.

> But if I understand the trade offs here, only a single application can run > in-process with the db. Also the db is not protected from crashing when the > app crashes.

Well, if the application and DB are one, so what? Note that we're only talking about OLTP DBs here. I don't see much of a reason for analytics DBs to be unified with the app. How often do you need more than one app working with the same OLTP data?

However, if you absolutely must, there is no reason why the in-process DB shouldn't store its data in shared memory, thus allowing other DB instances to access the information. There are ways to ensure that if one app crashes the memory is left in a consistent state.

<comment><USER5> >> How often do you need more than one app working with the same OLTP data?

If you are running a modern web startup, it's probably not an issue. But in a typical business... often IMO. And it was one of the original use cases that drove the adoption of databases in the first place.

Would be interested in seeing you blog about the last sentence of your last reply.

Thanks for engaging my comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OT: your overlay that appears at the top of the screen if you scroll down far enough means that when you click a footnote you can't actually see the footnote without scrolling up a little.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm confused. Is the author trying to convince me to give up the expressivity, portability, and readability of my Python app-layer codebase for the performance gains to be had by writing my logic in stored procedures?

Having moved one codebase _OUT_ of T-SQL stored functions and onto Django's ORM, I can say that this article does not have me convinced the way forward is to move the code back _INTO_ the DB. If my data model is going to be dictating my development toolset, it better be giving me some amazing performance gains _and_ be as good as the toolset I've come to enjoy in a post-ruby-on-rails- world.

What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to give up anything. These "stored procedures" are not what you think they are, and neither is the database. The idea is that the db and the application become one - not that you have to program in plsql or something. You could continue to use python or ruby.

And yes, the performance gains are amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT, but would you like some constructive criticism on usability of the article? The lack of contrast made it difficult to read for me; clicking on a footnote scrolls in such a way that the footnote text is hidden by the header; and having a link that says "Discuss on Hacker News" and _also_ a comment section under the article sends a mixed message.

</comment><comment><USER9> What are the pricing options for spacebase? I can't seem to find them

<comment><USER10> email us at firstname.lastname@example.com and we'd be happy to give you the details.

<comment><USER11> Ugh, maybe i'm the only one that hates this but if I have to spend time/effort just to get a price for something it's already off the table as a choice.

This makes it seem like it's either too high priced and you know it or the pricing scheme is too complicated and should be simplified.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, we actually kinda hate it, too :)

It's just that as a young startup, it's very important for us to learn about our customers. At this stage, it might be beneficial for us to offer you a fantastic deal if we think we there is much to gain by the partnership. Also, learning about the problems our customers face is more important to us than sheer sales volume at this stage. That's why we want you to talk to us. But we're sorry for the inconvenience.

<comment><USER12> I work freelance. When someone wants a price from me, they want a number. It might not be the number they want to hear. It might not be an accurate number. A lot of the time, it won't be the actual number used, and it will probably not have any relation to the final invoice. There are an infinity of reasons why you might not give someone a number when they ask for a price, and they're all irrelevant.

It's okay to qualify the number. "Ten million dollars, but order now and..."

If you'll note, your customer just said the same thing I did. Listen to him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem sounds not dissimilar to hydrodynamic simulations, for which people have been using MPI for >20 years. I'm curious why you didn't use it. Can you speak to this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because our purpose was not to show how fast a simulation can run. We haven't tried to come up with a new approach to simulations. We've tried to present a new approach to databases, and show an example where a _naive implementation_ with the right database can have decent performance.

Also, the very same code would work if actions were triggered by a network request rather than by a main loop. We don't assume anything about how the spaceships are coordinated. If you coordinate them to run in lockstep, you could get better performance. But, again, we've tried to show the viability of the naive implementation, where nothing is assumed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is "Real time spatial database" just a fancy word for another distributed, in- memory datastore? There are many implementations of distributed data structures, and many are used for in-memory analytics. I realize spacebase also minimizes remote lookups/puts in the average case. I just want to understand the "spatial" aspect they try to integrate into their product.

<comment><USER15> The spatial aspect comes from the ability to efficiently answer queries such as "what is set of objects within the following cube?" , etc. Look up R-Trees if you're curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm no database expert but won't the limitations of scaling across machines largely limit the benefits of this system?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not -- if you're using the right data structure, that is. I've written about the theoretical performance here, [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/8/20/the-performance- of...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/8/20/the-performance-of- distributed-data-structures-running-on-a.html), and pretty soon we'll publish some empirical results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this type of approach might push programming language developers to integrate databases into the language itself beyond just giving the programmers a interface for the database.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is more a UI/theme issue than anything else, but clicking a footnote places that citation behind the sticky header/search bar in FF17

</comment><comment><USER19> >First, this means using a programming language built for concurrency. At present, there are two such languages in wide(ish) use: Erlang[2] and Clojure.

How exactly does clojure qualify while go and haskell do not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, Haskell qualifies, it's just not in wide(ish) use yet. Also, I don't know whether it supports mutable concurrent constructs (as Clojure does with refs and STM). Without those you don't have concurrent writes.

As for Go, it allows sharing of mutable state, and so does not prevent races and does not make it clear when modifications to said mutable state are visible. It supports concurrency well but is not built around it.

<comment><USER20> The RedMonk ranking from September 2012 [1] seems to contradict your statement about Haskell prevalence. Note, it edges out Erlang on both metrics.

[1] [http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/09/12/language- rankings-9-12...](http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/09/12/language- rankings-9-12/)

<comment><USER21> What is RedMonk, and how is their ranking less B.S. than rankings according to Netcraft?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> .</comment>


5 programming problems every Software Engineer should be able to solve - <AUTHOR> https://blog.svpino.com/2015/05/07/five-programming-problems-every-software-engineer-should-be-able-to-solve-in-less-than-1-hour

<comment><USER2> Doesn't it say a lot that the author himself gave a wrong solution to the 4th problem at first? Does he think he's a failed Software Engineer? (I wouldn't) ... because he does say on the 5th problem's solutions that he wouldn't consider anyone that wouldn't find a correct solution to those exercises.

</comment><comment><USER3> For software engineering problems, it surprises me that he puts #5 after #4. For #5, it is almost immediately clear that brute-forcing it will work (there are 3^8 solutions to place pluses, minuses, and 'nothings' between those nine digits. That is 81^2, way less than 10000)

#4, on the other hand, may have an input with a million integers that would probably make that Java solution, with all its toString calls _and_ string concatenations inside the comparison function that will get called in the ballpark of a billion times, slow down to a crawl.

That's why the proposed solution to #4 is not that of a software _engineer_. An engineer would convert those integers to strings only once. He might keep the concatenations around because they aren't shown to be problematic yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually disagree.

I could do this problems fairly easily, but #4 and #5 are harder than they look.

Are you working in Python or Ruby and are good at managing your emotions during interviews -- then you'ld do good. (or might do good).

I would guess there are a number of "qualified" entry level programmers who would struggle to get these done in an hour, especially if you are talking about front end developers or something that is more verbose like Java.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's not a bad list to weed out the cheats, though perhaps #4 and #5 weed a bit too wide. I solved #4 a couple weeks ago after a friend of mine who interviewed for Google was asked exactly this (he didn't whine, and eventually got a working solution), and it did take me the better part of an hour fixing up the edge cases.

</comment><comment><USER6> I took a chance and wrote a solution in Python.. in less than an hour. [https://gist.github.com/agrison/1a27a50c22a7f46df17c](https://gist.github.com/agrison/1a27a50c22a7f46df17c)

Next step is to print that and show my boss what a privilege it is for him to have me in his team :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is my go at #4. It took me more time than I would like to admit :)

[http://play.golang.org/p/CTZahLt7g1](http://play.golang.org/p/CTZahLt7g1)

</comment><comment><USER8> #4 and #5 are definitively harder than they look.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice read. Not sure I agree with this.</comment>


Free Weather API with no limits - <AUTHOR> https://www.mashape.com/george-vustrey/weather#documentation <comment><USER2> I'm curious where George Vustrey (the publisher) is getting the weather data? Is it compiled from publicly available sources? Or is he just re-packaging somebody else's API?</comment>


The Future of Human Data Interaction - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/visualization

<comment><USER2> Bret is releasing the next video in this series on the 28th of May.

<http://worrydream.com/#!/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable>

</comment><comment><USER3> Could someone please explain to me why these tools are not commercially available?

This is the desktop version of the app Bret Victor created: <http://vimeo.com/64895205>

The tools would make my live so much easier, I can not start to express how much science needs this. Why did no startup jump on implementing them, like "Light Table" [1]? Alternatively, why did Victor not release it commercially? He would not get rich, but I guess he does not need to earn money anymore. His tools could benefit humanity, from cancer research to safer cars.

I really wonder, what the reason is why Mr. Victor never published any of his tools. It makes me sad to see such genius applications and all I can do is look at them.

[1] [http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table--- a-new-...](http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-ide- concept/)

EDIT: Thank you @williamcotton for watching the summary (I didn't) Mr. Victor mentioned he will make it available on github, his account is: <https://github.com/worrydream> This is great news.

<comment><USER4> HCI guy here, who gave a fair share of demos at conferences etc. to illustrate new concepts. Those demos are usually held together with duct tape, and would require TREMENDOUS work to turn into production ready apps.

Additionally, HCI researchers (group in which I'll include Bret Victor, even though he doesn't publish at the main conferences etc., sadly) are more interested in creating those examples to illustrate their research, but not in building commercial stuff (which is a very different type of work).

I actually was at Victor's talk "Stop Drawing Dead Fish", and at the end an audience member asked if he could release it. He said that if he released it, no one would get any use out of it, because it was really built only with that talk in mind. (which, of course, is not surprising– that's the nature of his work)

> ' He would not get rich, but I guess he does not need to earn money > anymore.'

You're greatly overestimating things here, my friend :)

<comment><USER5> I'm sure Bret would call himself a designer rather than an HCI researcher, and its true that many HCI researchers sneak design ideas into HCI conferences (Are we designers? Are we scientists? Let's just through in some pointless vigor in what is otherwise a good design paper!). Sorry, this is just one of my pet peeves, and its a problem we have in my own field (PL) also.

I agree most of our prototypes are held together by duct tape and do not represent ideas that are ready to go into production. The paper/idea is the artifact, not the prototype/demo, which exists to promote the idea. Ten years from now (more or less) the best ideas will be integrated into products by some entrepreneur who has the tenacity to make it all work for reals. E.g. we hope this happens with LightTable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is another example from Microsoft - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KSZuHGTcC8>

Logically we should be seeing higher and higher levels of abstraction or languages, but unfortunately the process to get there is extremely messy...

Just take a look at asm.js or NoSQL. 10 years ago I used to work in C and when things like asm.js come out it makes me shake my head and wonder about progress.

It is not fair to call it going backward, as it really is a fix (on top of fixes on top of fixes...) trying to solve the eternal problem of incompatibly. And many of todays beautiful apps are built on an unholy amount of such fixes. But that gives me hope.

Evolution is a highly messy and inefficient process but we will get to Bret Victor style interfaces soon enough...after wading through a whole lot of shit.

<comment><USER7> That demo from Microsoft is nothing at all like Victor's demo; it seems to be a drawing-based interface to make the kinds of canned charts one can do in products like Excel.

<comment><USER5> Let's try another Microsoft research demo:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Xyoh-G6DE>

Actually, I have older stuff from 2007 with videos embedded in a paper (I need to extract the videos to youtube):

<http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/179365/mcdirmid07live.pdf>

Its a long journey from here to there.</comment></comment></comment>


Internet Security is a Failure - <AUTHOR> http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2010/04/11/internet-security-is-a-failure/

<comment><USER2> I agree with pretty much everything you said. Current OSes, protocols, and practices all conspire to destroy any guarantee of complete security.

But 99% of the time for 99% of people, a complete guarantee of security is overkill. With a few exceptions, as long as breaches are quickly discovered and fixed, the damage is relatively minor. Stolen credit card? Report it to your card company. Charges are blocked and you get a new card. Website vandalized? Shut it down, clone the disks on any compromised machines (for postmortem examination), restore from backups, blah blah blah standard panic procedures.

In areas where security and reliability _really_ matter (basically: medical devices and avionics software on planes that carry people), software is _expensive_. Certain software development processes are required by law (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-2167> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B> ). Greatly increasing the costs to create and use software kills new ideas in the womb. It becomes impractical for startups or small groups to build stuff.

So is Internet security a failure? Yes. But really, I'm glad we're not so risk-averse as to paralyze ourselves with more draconian measures.

<comment><USER3> "Complete guarantee of security" is not just overkill, it's impossible. Security is about risk management -- and your examples illustrate that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's all about defense in depth. Local root exploits are part of why I run my stuff chrooted on an OpenBSD system. It's not perfect, but it's pretty much the best you're going to do. Still, you can't just stop there.

Having a one-time-password setup (SecureID, for example) to a cental "admin" system that can access the remote servers directly is one layer of defense against certain workstation compromises. Using properly-configured RBAC (or better, Mandatory Access Control) with separation of duties and remote logging gives security staff tools to enforce and analyze policies and incidents.

I'm not saying it's possible to be 99% secure. To that end, I suppose Security is a "failure" ( _rolleyes_ ) and as was mentioned before: you don't need 99% security, but you certainly should be able to go back and look at that other 1% after the fact.

The truth is that you really don't see security's boundaries when it's working properly. You can tell when it's getting in the way, but security is truly the most visible when it fails.

</comment><comment><USER5> Internet security, like any kind of security can never be absolute (as is pointed out in a couple of comments).

So it's really a question of achieving whatever level of security is practicable in relation to its costs in time, money and energy and as for the rest...

Well read David Brin's novel "Earth" as well as his work on transparency.

The war against an Orwellian world may be better won by making EVERYBODY a potential 'big brother'... which gives no oppressor an edge.

Not sure how it'll work out, but I'd rather have everyone on a level playing field.

Should put quite a crimp in hypocrisy though... which is already happening.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the only way that computer software is going to get radically more secure is if software creators can be sued for negligence if they create secure software.

This would mean a fairly big change in the process by which software is created, but if OpenBSD can do it why do commercial companies still have problems.

Do I think this will happen? No. Will security improve much with out it? Google Chrome has some decent mechanisms and Windows 7 appears to be better, but without some kind of government legislation or regulation designed to protect John Q. Citizen, I doubt much of substance will actually happen.

<comment><USER7> I'm not at all convinced regulation is the answer. We have financial regulators but did they prevent the sub-prime crisis? No. Bad stuff will always happen, especially if people stand to profit from it (c.f. botnets).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two complaints with the linked "local root kernel exploit":

1) The linked page says that it's a local DoS bug. Being subject to denial-of- service from local users is hardly critical.

2) Even if it were, as the link text seems to imply, a local privilege escalation vulnerability, it is my understanding that that sort of vulnerability is generally not considered critical, because an attacker needs to have compromised a local account to use them. Of course, if you're a shared hosting service, I suppose you might beg to differ, depending on how you're set up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry if you didn't like that specific link -- I am happy to provide others:

      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/36901
      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33412
      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/33412
      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37806
      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34405
      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37036
      http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/37806

those were just from 2 minutes of googling, and only ones for 2009.

Regarding your second point, security is all about having multiple layers, but the truth is the effectiveness of having code run in non-root users is a useless precaution in this day and age.

My point is that people always talk about their great uptime on their servers, without realizing how insanely insecure modern kernels and operating systems are -- unless you are upgrading every month, there is most likely a well known local privilege escalation vulnerability on your machine.

Once they have root, hackers can do all kinds of fun things, like replacing your SSH binary and logging all your passwords. As Luke mentions above, if a sysadmin's workstation is ever hacked into, the implications can quickly become immense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two key points here:

firstly there is pretty much nothing you can do to stop a determined attacker. All the trust based security in the world will break down at some point because, ultimately, computers are complex things.

Secondly the rant about law enforcement is partially bull. The major problem is catching and prosecuting hackers is involved, expensive, usually cross border and difficult to convict. How do we solve those problems? I really don't know.</comment>


Uber Hires Former Google Search Chief Amit Singhal as SVP of Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/20/uber-hires-former-google-search-chief-amit-singhal-as-svp-of-engineering/ <comment><USER2> I'm really confused on what to think about Uber. My personal thinking/logic is really bearish on them, similar to the post on the front page yesterday [1]. However, I keep seeing extremely smart/accomplished people joining it which makes me second guess my intuition.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437414)

<comment><USER3> Uber has done nearly everything right. I think its main vulnerability is that its laborers are a fickle bunch and Uber hasn't done enough to inspire any loyalty. All Uber drivers I talk to alternate between Uber and Lyft and exploit any promotions or incentives either firm offers.

Uber has the opportunity to revolutionize not just logistics but also on- demand employment, but has lagged in the latter, leaving the door wide open for Lyft and other services that carve out a big niche of Uber's market.

I think Uber should immediately offer the following services to its drivers:

\- Tax planning, withholding even if it's 1099 income or if the driver has other sources of income.

\- Matching IRA contributions with one year vesting.

\- healthcare subsidy

\- continuing education, or some way to level up in life by driving with Uber.

\- Some incentive for being a loyal, exceptional driver.

\- Car financing/leasing/sharing and insurance packages tailored at would-be Uber drivers who don't own a vehicle.

I know that more and more of these sorts of ideas are being tried by both Uber and Lyft, but investors need to realize that the workforce is being trained to be opportunistic and disloyal.

Many of the drivers I've interviewed (during my ride) despise Uber the corporation or boast about their fair weather support. Many reflect back on how Uber used to be better for drivers, etc.

Uber's main battles have been fought with regulators and with Lyft, but now the best strategy is figuring out how to become the Uber of on-demand employment.

<comment><USER4> > I think Uber should immediately offer the following services to its drivers:

The taxi industry pioneered the 'independent contractor' business model. Some of the services you suggest cross the line between 'contractor' and 'employee', especially 'healthcare subsidy'.

The owner/operator whom I drove for says that the company only provides liability insurance (to cover the cab company's liability) as a part of her contract with the cab company. If she wanted collision coverage, she had to buy that separately, because insurance == employment.

When I signed up I was told that I should buy my own worker's compensation policy, but I never did this.

Most people don't want 'on demand' employment, they want stability. Because of outsourcing and automation, the economy doesn't need as many workers anymore. Uber's business model is entirely dependent on this phenomenon.

Drivers -- taxi drivers, 'rideshare drivers', trucking drivers, etc -- would benefit from a union. Arizona is not a union-friendly state; I don't know if taxi drivers elsewhere have unions.

<comment><USER5> _Most people don 't want 'on demand' employment, they want stability. Because of outsourcing and automation, the economy doesn't need as many workers anymore. Uber's business model is entirely dependent on this phenomenon._

Do you see this phenomenon going away anytime soon? My grandparents' generation worked at a single company for life. My parents switched companies maybe 3 times in their careers. I have worked for 9 companies in the last 12 years. The trend has been toward shorter and shorter stints, with less and less benefits. My daughter's generation probably won't remember a time where people spent years working for companies, and it will seem natural to string together a series of gigs and odd jobs.

<comment><USER4> > Do you see this phenomenon going away anytime soon?

The economic paradigm has to change. I think something will shift, eventually.

Searching for 'john gatto livelihood' just now brought up this link:

[http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/john_taylor_gatto.htm...](http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/john_taylor_gatto.html) \- John Taylor Gatto (1991 New York State Teacher of the Year) Interview By Jerry Brown, March 25, 1997

It's probably worth reading the whole thing, but if you're pressed for time just search for '[break]', and read his take on two groups who have been able to implement mostly 'independent livelihoods' for virtually all of their members.

> My grandparents' generation worked at a single company for life.

And their grandparents were probably much more independent.

> it will seem natural to string together a series of gigs and odd jobs.

"You see that house on the hill? If you work hard enough, some day I'll live there." (This was not said by Travis Kalashnikov).

'Gigs and odd jobs' are not the path towards a fulfilling life.

Edit: My friend recently pointed out to me that I value _freedom_ more than anything else, which is why I stuck with taxi driving for so long... But the whole time I was working on something bigger...

<comment><USER5> _And their grandparents were probably much more independent._

My grandparents' grandparents were slaves. On my dad's side in North Carolina, on my mom's side in the Caribbean. Not too much independence there.

<comment><USER4> "Oh." Thanks for letting me know - it's an antidote for my being overly confident/arrogant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a number of things that have happened in the organic search area of Google that seem to suggest a declining interest in quality organic results.

There's Matt Cutts' long leave of absence, his departure, and the announcement that he's not really being replaced. A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc). Amit's original reason for departure was "his next journey will involve philanthropy"..that seems to have changed.

My guess is that two things are driving the declining interest...

a) The marketshare battle is done. Google won. No competition.

b) Their various initiatives to push organic results down the fold (more ads, knowledge graph, various widgets, and so forth) has made the quality of the organic results not as important. Good enough is the target.

<comment><USER7> I'd add another item

c) "Search" is changing towards giving information rather than to websites.

Think Siri/Cortana/Alexa. Even Google tries to give you an answer rather than a website.

Also information is moving from "spread thin" websites to social graphs and more centralised locations

<comment><USER8> That was Amit's doing, actually. Around 2012, with the success of Knowledge Panels and the acquisition of Metaweb (FreeBase), he decreed that search would become a "conversational answer engine", devoted toward getting you the answer to your question as quickly as possible. The Hummingbird ranking update was part of that - it made it much more effective to phrase your query as a question rather than a bunch of keywords. Also renewed integration of Google Now into search, expanded Knowledge Panels, cards on mobile search, bigger investments in voice search, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This statement -- _"Those computer science challenges for a computer science geek are just intriguing – you give a geek a puzzle, they can't drop it; they need to solve the puzzle. That's how it felt to me."_

When I've been asked what keeps me going this is it, I really like interesting puzzles and I'm sitting there stuck trying to solve it.

It also says a bit about what Uber thinks their big problems are (or where their value add will be). I was expecting them to go with someone more operations focused like Urs Hoezle.

<comment><USER10> A good example of the engineer's puzzle-solving mindset is ice-nine in Vonnegut's _Cat 's Cradle_. Hoenikker didn't particularly care about the Marines, mud, or the general's problem with it. He just thought it made for a good puzzle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amit joining Uber after a year's break coincides with the common "1 year no- solicitation" clause in employment contracts. I wonder if we are about to see some top people in Google get poached. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

<comment><USER12> Hope so. I guess last exodus was in 2012 when top people like Marissa Mayer and her reports got poached.

<comment><USER13> > Marissa Mayer and her reports got poached

Looks like Google dodged a bullet there.

<comment><USER14> Dunno, I think Yahoo! was basically unfixable. I mean, what would you have done differently? They just had too much dead wood, including the brand name.

<comment><USER15> Yahoo! became a holding company for Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan. The search and online services are just window dressing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kevin Thompson, another VP from Google also joined Uber very recently [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinthompsontech](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinthompsontech)

</comment><comment><USER17> have people considered this may eventually lead to Google acquiring Uber? There is the advising CEO Travis Kalanick bit in there.

<comment><USER18> Relatedly, I booked an Uber last night from within the Google Maps app on my phone, and the entire experience was in-app -- route selection, driver pick-up tracking, in-ride tracking, and drop-off confirmation. That's a whole lot tighter integration than I've seen in the past. The rumor-monger in me wants to read all sorts of acquisition talks into that level of product integration.

(Which is great for another reason -- I don't give Uber access to my location when I'm not using the app, and the Uber team has apparently decided to basically brick their own app for users like me. But hooray, Google Maps is now a functional replacement for the Uber client!)

<comment><USER19> You can book Lyft as well - both are pretty solid experiences.

<comment><USER20> No? That just links out to the Lyft app. Booking an Uber in Google Maps no longer leaves the app at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to see Uber get into mapping. Besides Uber's core business that everyone focuses on, they've got a self-driving cars program that's halfway off the ground and they do food deliver through UberEATS. In either case, they've got a vested interest in making sure high-quality mapping data is available—higher quality than what Google provides.

Given their deals with tons of local businesses through UberEATS, they've got operating hours and location data that's fresher than what anyone else can provide on the scale that they're operating on. Would be nice to see them improving the OSM dataset and partner with e.g. Maps.me.

<comment><USER21> "they've got a self-driving cars program that's halfway off the ground"

In the sense that a working model airplane gives me a space program that's halfway off the ground.

And why would they improve OSM at all? Actually collecting and _cleaning_ mapping data is not cheap. There's no incentive in contributing to OSM, it doesn't build a moat, it doesn't further their access to markets,...

<comment><USER10> > And why would they improve OSM at all?

It's in their business interests to make sure their fleet and their delivery drivers have accurate mapping info. Is there something unclear about the way I worded this in the comment you responded to?

<comment><USER21> There obviously is something unclear, yes. Having accurate mapping info and improving OSM are two separate things. I asked about the latter. If that data were actually crucial to Uber's business, what possible rationale could they have to share it for free?

But while we're on mapping data - I don't think "higher quality" data is in any way crucial to their business. (Owning the data so there's no dependency on third parties is another question). Uber's routing is accurate enough to work reliably.[1] What does higher quality buy them?

From where I stand, you're proposing that a company that's already bleeding money like it's going out of style should spend a ton of money, on building technology they have little experience with, to collect data that is of dubious value to them, to then give it away freely.

I get that you'd like OSM improved, but I really don't think Uber will be the one to do it.

[1] Based on purely anecdotal reports from my friends and my own experiences, the usual case for misrouting is Uber drivers not paying attention to the map, or thinking they know better than the map.

<comment><USER10> > If that data were actually crucial to Uber's business, what possible > rationale could they have to share it for free?

I'd understand if this were 1987 and you were asking this question. But it's not, and even Microsoft is on the public collaboration bandwagon.

We begin by recognizing that if you want to get into mapping and not pay out the nose for it, then OSM is your starting point. From there, it follows that we defer to the lessons of the last two decades which show that when given the choice between either maintaining a private fork or upstreaming, then upstreaming is overwhelmingly the best thing to do, even from a position of pure self-interest.

I hardly think their competitive edge hinges on high quality mapping data at the exclusion of others. Accurate mapping data is an enabler for them to _go faster, do better_ , for the things they are doing now. If that means drivers are making 3 deliveries per hour instead of 2, then the proposition holds true. Or if someone can be picked up/dropped off at the curb in front of their building, rather than the clubhouse bearing the street number for their sprawling apartment complex, then the proposition holds true.

> data that is of dubious value to them, to then give it away freely.

No. My position is precisely that they do have a business interest in this kind of data. I've said as much. This is the third time now.

And it's not as if Uber themselves don't already have similar initiatives to release their datasets. They've had a program for the last ~two years for sharing trip data, and two weeks ago they put a public face on their "Uber Movement" initiative to make it more widely available. And that's a dataset that's even more proprietary—there are tons of people in the mapping game, but almost nobody besides arguably Google has access to trip-level data at the scale that Uber has and is chosing to give away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The no-driver Uber arguments as profitable future it is crazy stuff, in my opinion. Could be as simple as Uber being a bubble? How much will take until that bubble bursts?

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think this is going to change anything though. He is just one person.

<comment><USER24> A single person in a high role in the company can completely change the culture, the product focus, the attitude towards customer support, etc.

The CEO is just one person, the President is just one person, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is just one person, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's a pattern among very senior googlers. When they get bored of working, they go to other companies to semi-retire. I'm almost certain this is not going to be any different.

<comment><USER26> Not sure Uber is the semi-retire kind of place for this sort of thing. They have a reputation for working people hard.

<comment><USER25> People, sure. But he's not "people".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here is Singhal declaring this on his personal website: [http://singhal.info/home/](http://singhal.info/home/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Btw - What are the responsibilities of SVP of engineering?

<comment><USER29> senior vice president usually is a people management type person, in charge of people, processes, and product (3 p's as they say in management lingo), in other words, hire and retain the best people, introduce proper workflows to make things more efficient, and make sure they're generating kick ass products on time, with high quality.

this is often times can be confused with a cto's role, but i believe a cto's role is more independent, has less organizational obligations, in other words, manages much less people, at least at large companies. a cto's main role is to work more with customers, partners, evangelize products, and think about the longer term vision of the technology, this could be internal technology, like datacenters, to things like the next 5 year's software products.

at small companies, i think you'll find cto's also doing the job of a svp along with marketing, sales, support, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why would a person worth billions work for someone else?

<comment><USER31> Is he worth billions?

<comment><USER32> He's clearly worth enough to not have to work for anyone, many times over.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, joining Google before IPO would be pretty lucrative.

What I don't understand is the multitude of students who _STILL_ want to join Google, even though they will likely be munging data from one format to another, for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "The destiny of search is to become that 'Star Trek' computer and that's what we are building..." -Amit Singhal

Laugh.

</comment><comment><USER35> Uber is a middle man that takes money from existing and potential cab drivers' pockets, puts it into their own, and artificially reduces consumer costs.

Cab _companies_ aren't innocent bystanders, but the drivers generally are. But All Hail Uber anyways, I guess.</comment>


Tesla Plunges, Wiping Out Tweet-Fueled Rally in Just Two Days - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/tesla-plunges-wiping-out-tweet-fueled-rally-in-just-two-days <comment><USER2> Why say "in just two days"? The rally took two days; the plunge took two days. It was perfectly symmetric.

</comment><comment><USER3> Investigations tend to have that ability.</comment>


Ask HN: How many of the interns at your company are community college students? - <AUTHOR> I am currently an intern at a large tech company with over 2000+ additional interns. I was recruited from a top school last year but previously attended a community college before I transferred to said top school. What is most apparent between the two types of schools is the disparity in the professional opportunities/recruiting offers that occur at them. My company has refused to tell me how many of the current interns are community college students and I suspect that is because the number is very small. So now I am curious if this is the norm. Suffice it to say, I have serious concerns about the already narrow pipelines of access that are maintained via alumni and donors when it comes to recruiting. <comment><USER2> 0

As a personal anecdote:

Community college where I grew up was basically an extended high school. The quality of everything from the instructors to the students to the material being taught was extraordinarily sub-par compared to the college I went to (admittedly, a top 10 CS school). Perhaps it was lower quality than even the high school I went to.

I know because I took a couple of community college courses in high school (and over college summers) for some easy college credit to transfer out to my 4-yr university.

There were a few shining stars who had no other option but to go to community college (they would later transfer out). However, the vast majority were people who were largely uninterested in learning but knew enough to know that they need more credentials than "high school graduate" to have a shot at a career.

It's unfortunate but that was the reality in my hometown.

</comment><comment><USER3> 0, but only because all of our interns are juniors and seniors (or grad students). In our area, CCs top out at the sophomore level. I would say the vast majority of our interns come from the local, 4 year state schools. We're generally not importing kids from "Top Schools". There's a good chance a good portion of our interns did indeed attend a CC at one time; that's a very common path to a 4 year degree here.

<comment><USER4> I think this answers the question pretty comprehensively. There are a lower amount of sophomore interns, and you only really go to a CC for 2 years or maybe 3 for the cost savings aspect, so you don't see many CC interns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have numbers but I'd bet 0. I think it's more a process issue though, and there might be opportunities.

My understanding is that big companies spend a ton of money in events at top schools, where they collect a pool of candidates for internship. This is already a big work and fills the pipeline with enough candidates, so they don't have to search further.

In principle, this doesn't prevent a student in a community college from applying, but getting into the process at the right time might be cumbersome. In addition, the probability of success is low, just looking at the number of applications vs positions.

I think there might be a big opportunity, however, in aggregating pool of candidates, and for example get paid from the companies to acccess these resumes. A sort of niche linkedin for internship.

Does anyone have numbers on how much a big tech company spend to attend to a school for recruiting interns?</comment>