Ask HN: new top level domains? - <AUTHOR>

In a couple of months there are going to be 700 new TLD's. The first ones are already live. Yet, there is little or no discussion of this on HN and the blogosphere. Why? Isn't this a significant change of the internet? <comment><USER2> To get a glimpse of the impact of this new TLDs you can just look at how much ICANN charged the registrars 'cartel' to open up this new top level names: 185K for each name [1].

This, I suppose, means each registrar plan to make a little more than a few thousands for each domain extension if they want to be profitable. They know already it's not going to be a widespread phenomena, otherwise the greedy bunch running ICANN would've charged a lot more.

Still I don't understand why the internet top-level domain control is in the hands of a private and fake non-profit organization, instead of being directly controlled by an international, third party organism such as the United Nations or something similar.

[1] [http://www.techspot.com/news/47031-icann-selling-custom- top-...](http://www.techspot.com/news/47031-icann-selling-custom-top-level- domains-for-185000.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> very interesting, didn't know about the 185k. Why fake non-profit? I think the whole thing is quite a mess, and there is very little analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps. But consider the amount of Marketing dollars behind .com and your country's tld. Add to this multi-billion dollar businesses (Amazon, Google, Ebay etc) using existing tld's and one should question what impact new tld's will make. (Especially if you plan to invest in them)</comment>


Flowtron TTS does voice acting - <AUTHOR> https://news.developer.nvidia.com/flowtron-speech-synthesis-model/ <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the I AM AI video narrated by Flowtron: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf2S7OzFEg&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf2S7OzFEg&feature=youtu.be&t=150)</comment>


A hole in Facebooks armor. - <AUTHOR>

Lamebook links are now banned from Facebook, however as I notified lamebook earlier FB doesn't block their IP so a simple http://22.214.171.124 will work. I've got to say, Facebook needs to step down from the turret and stop gunning down innocent startups. <comment><USER2> Lamebook links have already been unblocked.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1932259>

<http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I posted in another thread that it was ironic Facebook would be against the re-purposing of _a_ facebook's info and photos, given that's exactly what Zuck did to create Facemash.

But honestly, one must sympathize with their desire to protect their brand. They don't need "their" photos to be the source material for the entire internet's memes and jokes. Let somebody with less at stake fill that niche.</comment>


Introducing Wikia Evolution  - <AUTHOR> http://search.wikia.com/blog/2008/08/06/introducing-wikia-evolution/

<comment><USER2> The first thought I had seeing that was "Man, that looks just like StumbleUpon." Probably not the best comparison to make.

<comment><USER3> Some of the methods are similar, although the goals are quite different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't find the story I read it in now, but I thought Google was working on a similar thing for Google search results

<comment><USER3> You might be referring to this, or a similar article:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future- of-s...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/)

And here's Wikia's reaction to that story:

[http://search.wikia.com/blog/2008/07/17/google-tries-to- copy...](http://search.wikia.com/blog/2008/07/17/google-tries-to-copy-wikia- search-but-misses-the-point/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that was the article</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to quickly switch to a programming lang that you won't code often? - <AUTHOR> Need suggestion from polyglot programmers, How do you quickly switch to a programming language that you won't code often?
I sometimes need to switch to few programming languages that I feel not proficient, But at times should do something with that like execute as a script, evaluate interview, manage/refer others code, find the treasure hidden in large code-base. For example, groovy, python, pl/sql, c# or typescript.
Do you have any tested technique to quickly recollect the entire language? hope few others would be in my situation!
Do you have any technique to come up to speed? <comment><USER2> Having a certain level of familiarity with it helps: functions and some level of syntax are easy to look up if you forgot them, but the "how it works" should be deep enough in your brain that it comes back once you look at code. The more languages you know, the easier it is to link knowledge to other examples and remember it better.

This is the one thing I find "cheat sheet" summaries of languages helpful for: really quickly refresh memory of syntax and/or common pitfalls. Along the same lines, quick access to documentation. Don't hesitate to write down your own if you trip over things repeatedly.

Have an execution environment ready since you can't as reliably reason about code. For many languages a REPL is a good start, a nice IDE with debugger helps too.

</comment><comment><USER3> The easier you learn the wastefull it is. I mean, brainfuck language can be more usefull than another c style programming language. stick to meanings not syntaxes.</comment>


Ask HN: SF vs. NYC? - <AUTHOR> My team is currently discussing a relocation to either San Fransisco or New York City in the next 2 months our so. We are a social network startup currently based out of Atlanta. ATL is a young growing city and we believe the media connections and partners here are great. However our reason for wanting to relocated is 2 things.
1. Talent is really hard to find here in Atlanta.
2. The network of investors in Atlanta aren't interested in our space.
I personally have lived in both locations. I find them both to be expensive but livable. I've also found that 3 months networking at these locations is 12 months in ATL. I'm interested to see what the HN community thinks. Any founders who have made the move that can share some wisdom would be great. <comment><USER2> > 1\. Talent is really hard to find here in Atlanta.

Finding talent will be even more difficult in NYC & SFO. Look where other people aren't looking. Jason Fried has a brilliant take on this > [http://www.inc.com/magazine/201607/jason-fried/tech- poaching...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201607/jason-fried/tech-poaching- talent-war.html)

> 2\. The network of investors in Atlanta aren't interested in our space.

ATL benefits from 2500+ daily flights -- there are potential investors all over the map. They don't care where you're based, as long as your model works.

Here's a solid list from 2013 of VC's interested in Social > [http://www.web- strategist.com/blog/2013/03/29/meet-the-inves...](http://www.web- strategist.com/blog/2013/03/29/meet-the-investors-of-social-networks-and- social-media/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Neither - I'd focus on staying in Atlanta where you can be a big fish in a smaller pond, rather than yet another startup in NYC or SF.

Several reasons: * More likely to get local press in Atlanta, because the "scene" is smaller, and you probably have connections through people you already know

* Cost of living is so much lower - you can get an incredible house in Atlanta for a much lower monthly payment than what you would end up renting in either one of those two cities.

* Talent may be hard to find in Atlanta (I can't speak to that) but plenty of people might be aging up-and-out in either NYC or SF - getting married and/or having kids, and now looking at exactly what kind of living situation they might get in those cities on a senior developer salary. Sure, they would most likely take a salary decrease for Georgia, but their dollar would stretch a lot further.

* One of the best airports in the country, on MARTA - easy to get anywhere in the country, as long as you really like Delta (or Southwest these days).

* Outside-the-bubble - Atlanta isn't a "tech-only" city, so unless you are building to flip, you should have better success staying grounded in ATL.

</comment><comment><USER4> When it comes to building a successful startup, you really should focus on just 2 things: 1) Build great product 2) Talk to customers 2.5) Iterate + repeat

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'networking' and what you expect to get from the said activity. You can just as easily raise money from SF/NY investors even if you are based in Atlanta - if you have a great product and good growth. If you are missing great product or good growth, you can't raise money even if you live in the investors' basement.

In terms of talent acquisition - that might be a legitimate reason. Keep in mind that (good) talent is also very very expensive in SF/NY. You are basically competing against the best companies in the world in terms of mission + compensation. So really ask yourself if you have what it takes to attract the best talent.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is from a guys perspective.

Pros

The Valley -

\- Great tech thinkers

\- Great engineers

\- Great companies

\- Great tech sector

\- Great VC scene

\- Great weather

\- Great nature

\- Great food

\- Great wine

\- Great tech startup culture

\- Great interface design scene

New York -

\- Great food

\- Great intellectuals

\- Great financial sector

\- Great fashion scene

\- Great media sector

\- Great energy

\- Great serendipity scene

\- Great industry spread

\- Great club scene

\- Notoriously beautiful woman (i.e. great dating scene)

Cons

\- The Valley -

\- Decentralized tech scene

\- Lots of driving needed

\- Lots and lots of "me too" startups (surprisingly many)

\- Horrible club scene

New York -

\- No real tech scene

\- Expensive

\- Lot's of conservative business

\- Extreme weather

In other words

Both The Valley and NYC are great places to be. In a perfect world you would spend half your time in The Valley and other half in NYC. How is it the saying go?

Live on the West Coast once but leave before it makes you too soft, live in New York one but leave before it makes you too hard.

Personally I think NYC is best for young people (<40) and the Valley is where I want to retire others might think the exact opposite.

</comment><comment><USER6> Man, every other comment is trying to talk you out of moving.

Atlanta is kind of like that Facebook friend who thinks she is a "model". Atlanta start-up scene believes it is hotter than it really is.

If I were you, I would rent a cheap house in SF for 2-3 months as a team, stay there and spend at least 50% of the time networking at meetups and pitching.

It will give you clarity in 3 months if you idea is sellable or not. If you get major breakthrough in 3 months, stay longer otherwise fly back home and start over with a new idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> If the OP really wants to get out of Atlanta, then maybe he should expand his pool of locations. What about Denver or Boulder, Colorado? Austin, Texas? Madison, Wisconsin?

Best cities/towns/etc (most correlated with experiencing an exit, rather than failing/floundering (shut down, or founded before 2004 + no exit/acquisition/IPO)) to create a startup: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988900)

Atlanta ranks 16th (which is pretty good), so if you were to decide to move, it would probably make sense to end up somewhere higher on the list.

Worst: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11988902)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would you move your start up to one of the most expensive places in the US? Especially if you don't have funding.

1)For talent perhaps you should consider a remote and distributed team. Its 2016, this is not uncommon and it can work quite well.

2)Why do you have to be in the same location as investors? You can set up appointments with VC folk over the course of a few days and fly out for that.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did the first half of my career in the Bay Area (>10 years) and am finishing it in NYC. Been in startups in both places. Here are the biggest differences I've noticed since moving to NY:

1\. Old money. In California, the VCs and Angels I met were mostly self-made; they had cashed-out of the dotcom boom, or recently been apart of an IPO. They were all 20 - 40 somethings. NY is very different. I had never been exposed to the "country club" / "summer house in Nantucket" / "trust fund" scene before. It definitely feels like a different planet sometimes. So if you're raising money, be prepared to have conversations with the type of people you might have thought didn't exist anymore.

2\. No echo-chamber. For the best and brightest in NYC, tech is often NOT the obvious choice. In many circles, going to the tech scene, (let alone the startup scene), is seen as odd. ("Why didn't you go into finance?" "Why didn't you go into law?" "Why aren't you a doctor yet?"). The greatest minds of the generation are becoming MOTUs (Masters of the Universe) at hedge funds and big banks. They're making a ridiculous amount of money, and really have no interest in this little tech thing we're doing. Talking about your startup in NYC feels odd sometimes. You're not praised or catered-to like you are in SF. Nobody really cares what you're doing, and nobody takes you that seriously until your run-rate is the hundreds of millions per year. It's a nice change in context actually. The SV echo chamber is gone.

Besides that (and NYC's insane weather), things are pretty much the same. Lots of talent, but it's expensive to hire. Lots of businesses, some good, some bad. Lots of VCs and Angels. Terrible rent, good food, etc.

Is it worth the move? Yes. Simply because when you move to NYC you may be seated at a cramped restaurant shoulder-to-shoulder with your next investor; and in SF you might see @sama walking down Market street. That kind of "right place at the right time" moments are more rare outside of those cities. Which coast you choose is entirely up to you; either way you're making a good move.

</comment><comment><USER7> You'll probably have better luck hiring someone and allowing them to work from wherever they are (telecommuting) than trying to descend into the chaos/noise/"dead end" that is San Francisco. New York may work, but why take on a higher cost of living for no reason?

</comment><comment><USER10> If you just move to SF or NYC, I am not sure if you'll get plugged into the network of investors immediately. Get plugged into a network takes time.

If you are doing a social network, what investors will want to see (no matter where they are from) is users (and retention rates of those users). Actually, if location matters for your product's user base, actually probably it's better to do it in a city that isn't SF or NYC. (since everyone else launch their location based networks in SF or NYC first, and so much competition, and users in SF and NYC tends to be more jaded.).

</comment><comment><USER11> Go where there are less competitors in your verticle.

</comment><comment><USER12> Come here to Bend, fly in to SF from time to time. It's not cheap here, but it's a nice place to live.</comment>


TSMC Details 5 nm - <AUTHOR> https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3398/tsmc-details-5-nm/ <comment><USER2> The thing that really jumped out at me was making the channel partially out of germanium. Velocity saturation has been a limiting factor in our tiny modern transistors for a while, playing its own minor part in the breakdown of Dennard scaling. The article didn't say if the increase applied equally to both electron mobility and hole mobility. Germanium tends to be better for both but I my materials science background isn't good enough for me to guess what it'll be in a Silicon/Germanium lattice. Temperature dependence is also an equally interesting question since Germanium tends to deal with high temperatures a bit better.

This won't help with leakage issues or the increasing importance of wire as opposed to transistor capacitance. But it does look like a nice little win.

Speaking of wires, is TSMC still using straight copper or are they thinking of incorporating cobalt? Or did Intel's experience with that scare them off?

EDIT: And speaking of cobalt again, I really hope they aren't being too ambitious with this and that being too innovative doesn't bit them the way it did with Intel at 10nm. Though the rumor mill isn't sure if it was the cobalt wires or the Contact Over Active Gate (COAG) that was their main problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The article didn't say if the increase applied equally to both electron > mobility and hole mobility.

Electron mobility is not high in silicon, but it has never been a "blocker" before. In fact, the utilisation of strained silicon has gone down from 40nm in later nodes.

Silicon however has truly terrible hole mobility, and the wider industry has just started to realise that they have lost many years to fruitless pursuit of high electron mobility, when the real blocker has always been a pFET.

It was very prudent of TSMC to quietly continue pFET RnD, despite industry's fixation of HEMTs and 3-5 devices.

p.s. 5N is a COAG process from what they have just said.

<comment><USER3> The amount of Ge and thus strain has increased every node. All to make hole mobility better.

No one in industry was confused about HEMTs, and the needs of pfets were well known.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The amount of Ge and thus strain has increased every node.

Not really from what I know. The compressive strained channel was dropped out for some FinFET designs, and I think tensile strained too in some because it was exploding litho layer count. Can you tell your source?

Compare the amount of money spent on truly moonshot material science like making 3-5 logic, and the amount of money spent on continuous improvement of pfet performance for mainstream applications.

<comment><USER3> From device cross sections and working at both IDMs and suppliers. And reading and visiting IEDM for a decade. You can keepmup with ost on semiwiki: but really, just work under the assumption that people in the field are not stupid and can do math.

Tensile strains has no litho impact, and counting layers in use was a job I had.

Who spent on 3-5? It got press coverage, but never was part of much logic research. It was a focus for power, laser, and led work.

Tsmc, Intel, applied, asm, and others spent vastly more on r&d than any government or academic work, and it isn't published.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll give you that. I haven't been involved with device and process development since around 2009, when I lost hope getting into process engineering.

So, were strained channels used with FinFETs on anything mainstream? I heard the news of number of foundries dropping straining at around the time of first finfets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 171.3 million transistors per mm^2 is mind boggling. Were Apple's A14 to have the same area as their A13 (98.48mm^2) and maintain that density throughout, you're looking at ~16+ billion transistors. Some comparisons:

\- Apple A13: 8.5 billion

\- Apple A12X: 10 billion (iPad Pro)

\- Nvidia Titan RTX: 18.6 billion

I wonder what kind of use cases are unlocked with 16 billion transistors in your pocket. This node might be the one that gets us to AR.

<comment><USER5> There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries.

The AR everyone imagines is much further away than most realize.

<comment><USER4> Agree, the popular idea of AR going around - wide FOV, fancy graphics, good occlusion of incoming light, tiny footprint - is unlikely for a long time due to optics. I think it's foolish to try to execute that vision now, and why I've always thought Magic Leap's 'do it all' approach was completely wrong (and demonstrated they didn't really have a clear vision for what would make AR mainstream). The only way to achieve that vision for AR is to increment toward it over a long time.

I see v1 as a simple narrow FOV heads up display in glasses frame with very focused use case around place based notifications and heads up information. No input at all, except Siri. Display only turns on when necessary. iPhone is used for input and config, much like Watch was initially.

Even getting to this v1 is going to be a huge challenge in such a small form factor, but a chip with this density will help with power budget. This node consumes 30% less power and fits in an even smaller space.

<comment><USER6> Siri-only input would make it a joke device. A device like that should be multi-input. Voice, mouse, keyboard, your watch, phone, ipad etc.

<comment><USER4> What I meant was input via the device itself. You can't expect people to press buttons on their glasses to get things done, that'd be a bad experience. The only other hands-free input method is gaze tracking, which would be great, but it may not make it into a v1 product.

Obviously there's input possibilities from other devices, and I mentioned iPhone. Unlikely mouse and keyboard input for a long time - AR's unique offering is freedom of movement, not being tethered to a desk.

Again, a v1 really has to be a minimal product that is first and foremost a heads-up display for a narrow set of use cases. Else it'll be too bulky or awkward - just look at the rest of the AR devices out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And Intel is now headed by someone with a 100% finance/business background. Intel is nipping at the heels of Boeing. Tens of billions of dollars in dividends and stock buybacks announced that should be going to saving their (and by proxy, the U.S.'s) manufacturing capability.

<comment><USER8> they have jim keller though

<comment><USER9> True, but it seems to me that he's been most successful at companies that are willing to place big bets on his team and put a lot of institutional weight behind him. His work at Apple, AMD, and Tesla all seem to point towards that conclusion. One wonders if an Intel that's less focused on hardware innovation will see the same effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title is kind of misleading.

> TSMC made every effort to avoid detailing the actual properties of that > channel (every related question was met with the tautology: "those who know, > know"). [...] We believe TSMC is employing a SiGe channel for the pMOS > devices

<comment><AUTHOR> There is only one known high mobility material availing to easy integration with silicon MOS process

None of InP, SiC, GaN, GaAs or other 3-5 materials been ever integrated with silicon in a fab setting for IC production.

And only one material out there makes sense to use specifically for pMOS production: high hole mobility is much rarer trait than high electron mobility.

<comment><USER11> Isn't MACOMs process GaN on Si, which is cheaper, but lousy thermal performance compared to GaN on SiC. I thought they were touting GaN integration with CMOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> GaN on Si is a thing from a completely different ballpark.

Here we talk about material integration per-device basis, not entire wafer surface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Our current estimates remain at 48 nm poly pitch and 30 nm metal pitch. > Those dimensions yield an estimated device density of 171.3 MTr/mm².

I just sized up 1mm between my fingers.

Um. _WOW._ Really. Wow.

<comment><USER13> For reference a 64-bit Pentium 4 core was (drum roll) 125Million transistors. And it was 100x bigger (112mm^2)

<comment><USER12> Wow at that too.

To be honest, one of the things I was considering when posting the GP was the sheer impossibility of leveling anything more precise than hand-wavy, drunk opinions about the end-to-end security state of _that much_ , well, entropy.

It's gotten almost like a bizarre version of inverted quicksand, where instead of it being bad because you're sinking into sand, it's bad because the sand is shrinking into nothingness from between your fingers.

The next few years are going to be VERY interesting, I think.

IIUC, OOo and branch prediction have kind of been the CPU engineering meal ticket workaround to "solving" the memory latency problem (IIUC), and now everyone apparently has to rethink that.

My favorite would be the "disappearance" of the A20 line though. As in, it's there, it's doing it's thing, but everyone collectively forgot it existed, and now everybody needs a microcode update and an SGX cert respin AGAIN.

And all this without access to specialized tooling (the kind that evolves over a decade, regardless of knowledge), AND the fact that we're (apparently?) only forgetting about (seemingly?) little things at this point. Haha...ha...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the other hand, I keep hearing people saying than nm is increasingly just a marketing number - and indeed, for all of Intel's difficulties I don't see too many chips beating Intel in single-threaded performance.

I say this as someone who bought a Ryzen-based system last year after significant research.

<comment><USER8> the transistors are actually getting smaller, that just doesn't lead to more clock rate any more

<comment><USER15> But less heat, which allows you to cram more stuff in a package, which _is_ a win !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm starting to (almost) feel sorry for Intel now.

<comment><USER17> And 3nm planned for 2022 . They are moving at an incredible pace. They will definitely hit a wall soon at this speed

<comment><AUTHOR> Which is their plan, as many people believe.

They want to drive the few competitors they have out of business quickly before that happens.

Hence them accelerating node transitions in spite of not being able to recover as much RnD money as they can.

Only really high margin products contend for <14nm node capacity, and nothing else.

For as long as they maintain such high pace, and wide lead over competition, competitors get nothing, while still having to spend the same astronomical sums on fab retooling.

<comment><USER18> Where are they getting the money? Are they that profitable or state sponsored?

<comment><USER19> Profitable.

Would be very profitable, if they had the income from their advanced processes without the R+D expense for those processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I remember reading a lot about a "brick wall" when they pushed towards EUV, how challenging it would be to reduce feature size further etc etc. But it seems they're moving along just fine. What happened?

</comment><comment><USER21> To put it into perspective, Coronavirus would just fit in 25 transistors long at this scale! However, to be fair, it has 30 kilobases where each base is 2.5nm X 0.3nm. So we still have some way to go...

</comment><comment><USER22> Game, set, match. it's over for Intel. They sat on their asses for too long and now are getting eaten by the previous underdogs.

This shift is great news for literally everyone except Intel's execs' bonus packages.

<comment><USER23> I don't understand callous contempful comments against Intel's manufacturing capabilities. There are incredible people making things possible fomr both sides in one of the most advanced manufacturing processes in the world. I've worked inside a fab and I can tell you that the industry is much more appreciative of each other's competitors than the outside fanboys who are largely pissed off at the executive decisions (lawsuits , etc).

This article is about TSMC's technical achievements and your comment has not added anything to the discussion, time and again I see this rooting for "underdog" behavior all too the same (just flipped the sides) from 2006. I wrote about it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22515546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22515546)

If you'd like to know what goes into shriking a process node from lithography standpoint, I implore you to watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gMdGrVteI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gMdGrVteI)

and be in complete utter awe... Tell me if they are "Sitting on their asses"?

<comment><USER24> Oh, please ~ Intel fucked up their 10nm process pretty hard, and they kept trying to fix it for years. They also had to keep pushing their roadmap back again and again for 10nm.

This is entirely due to Intel's awful management getting in the way. Intel's engineers might be clever, but with shitty management, that can all go to waste.

Intel's management have been sitting on their arses, more or less, when you consider the fact that they've really been dragging their feet in terms of progress.

AMD has made more progress in 3 years than Intel has made in 10...

Intel simply got too comfortable with their monopoly.

<comment><USER25> I know that Intel has major issues with 10nm, but I don't know exactly what went wrong.

Can you educate me?

I'm particularly interested in how management sabotaged the ability to get 10nm to work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who wants to do this experiment with me ? - <AUTHOR>

I've just started a little experiment on a site that I run, I'm allowing the users - any users - to switch off the ads if they want that.
That way the irritation goes to a minimum for those users that do not want ads, and for others they are now in some way 'opting in'.
I'm not trying to 'set a new standard' here just curious about how my experiment will play out.
This site has about 3M pageviews per month and scores terribly in the ECPM, about 12 cents.
What I'm mostly curious about is whether the impressions will go down and the ECPM up or if the impressions will go down and the ECPM will stay the same.
The first one I would call a success, the second a failure.
I'll let this run for a month to see what the effect is.
Is there anybody that wants to do the same thing ? <comment><USER2> wikihow did this a while ago (a year or two), you could ask them about their experiences: <http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Why-Hide-Ads>

<comment><USER3> Slashdot offers this as an option for high karma users also, which I think makes sense. If your site benefits from a small subset power-users, giving them perks to keep those users around and engaged will make the entire site better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you think you'd have any interest in trying a different ad network that would offer higher CPMs? I am actually pitching an idea at Atlanta Startup Weekend tonight and you'd be a perfect first customer :)

LMK so I can announce a first customer in my pitch (which is in a few minutes!!!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Next time you want to reach me 'right now' best call, I'm probably not in the same timezone as you are. But sure, if it would help you sign me up! I only do fairly low key advertising though.

Both my email and my cell number are in my sig.

In the interest of not influencing the experiment with a bunch of traffic from HN I'm not posting the site here.

<comment><USER4> Yeah after I posted I looked at your profile and realized you were probably sleeping :)

I'll touch base out-of-band.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001) - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ <comment><USER2> > Another common thing Architecture Astronauts like to do is invent some new > architecture and claim it solves something. Java, XML, Soap, XmlRpc, > Hailstorm, .NET, Jini, _oh lord I can't keep up._ And that's just in the > last 12 months!

I wonder what Joel would've said if he could've (in 2001, when this article was written) seen a decade and a half into the future and looked at the "oh- lord-I-can't-keep-up-is-my-middle-name" web development frameworks of the past decade and counting. The dust is nowhere close to settling yet!

<comment><USER3> It's pretty settled on React and Gatsby in my opinion.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I gracefully accept one offer over another within the same company? - <AUTHOR>

I happen to have two teams within the same software company making me offers for a summer internship, and the company has asked me to to choose which team I would like a formal offer from.  The teams do reasonably similar things, and I think they actually interact on occasion, despite the fact that this is a pretty large company.  This means that A) I can't really make a decision based on the actual work, since it's pretty similar; and B) I may end up interacting with the team I decline.
I think I know which team I'm going to go with.  One of the teams' managers got in touch with me right away, he seems to have a good attitude and sense of humor, and he put me in touch with a former intern who sent me a long and extremely positive e-mail about the team.  The other team's manager didn't get in touch with me for a couple days, and when he did I just didn't get the impression that he was excited about his work.  He didn't seem like he'd be as pleasant a boss as the first team's manager.
So my question is this: How do I present what is basically a personal decsion without it seeming...well, personal? <comment><USER2> I think the phrase "I think I'd fit better with team #1" is probably what you're looking for. When you get right down to it, "fit better with" just means "I made the decision based on personal factors", but the phrase implies that you're considering how said personal factors would influence your ability to do useful/good work... which is at least slightly deeper than merely picking the people you like the most.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I was kind of planning on saying something like that, but thought someone with more experience (either from my side or the manager's) might have a better suggestion. Oh well, I guess it's a good problem to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't worry about it. Manager #2 realizes you have choices to make, and won't take it personally. Just be cordial in your reply, like cperciva said.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.leansentry.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting product, considering trying it out. A few questions

1\. I gather from reading the How-it-works pages that the monitoring service is not invasive. How about the optional agent, how invasive is that and does it carry extra performance impact? I cant see anywhere explained what it does, and how much of the functionality that depends on it

2\. On your demo site, in one of the alerts you slow causes of slow queries. It says "SQL query "dbo.spSlowNumbers" caused slow responses on "/Profile/Save". How does your service know the name of the stored proc? Does it hook into SQL server calls or?

3\. Is it safe to install on a production webserver? Was thinking we would try it out on one of our 5 webservers.

4\. Is it easy to remove the monitoring service+agent again if we dont like it?

Thanks

<comment><USER3> Hi, founder here.

1\. You are absolutely right, the agent is an optional component. Without the agent, you get most of LeanSentry's monitoring features without having to install ANYTHING on your production servers.

2\. We know the name of the stored procedure/SQL query from monitoring ADO.NET activity externally via ETW, the high speed event tracing in windows. We do not actually connect to your SQL server for this.

3\. We worked hard to make sure LeanSentry is safe for production environments (thats what its for). We also designed it so it can be completely sandboxed in production. Most importantly, it will never load anything into your application directly, unlike debuggers or profilers, and has no chance of crashing your application.

The agent adds some deeper diagnostic capabilities, including SQL query/IIS module/REST call monitoring, CPU profiling, etc. It does have a bit more overhead since you have to install it on the actual production server, but we worked hard to make sure it keeps a low footprint (and even shuts itself down if something goes wrong causing higher utilization).

4\. You can remove the monitoring service and the agent anytime. We provide the configuration script for servers as a batch file so its easy to see the changes we make.

These are great questions - if you have more, hit us up on chat on our website!

Best, Mike

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few comments:

1\. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being thrown god knows where.

2\. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited. Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, nearly 100 IIS servers, MSMQ, NServiceBus, Routers, Switches, Disk array IO throughput. One tool to rule them all there.

3\. I doubt you could actually handle the load of a mid-large site where this would be valuable. What are your guarantees on that front?

Not wishing to trash your efforts, but that's how us architects see it and we're the guys with the credit cards :)

<comment><USER5> 1\. We use GA but this is still my main concern. This kind of data seems to sensitive to be hosted by someone else.

2\. There seems to be some SQL stuff in there - IO would be a nice addition though.

3\. This could be a problem. Let us host the app our self, and we might be able to handle it?

With that in mind, i would love to have this as a part of my daily toolset.

<comment><USER3> hi jolt,

I hear your sentiment re: hosting LeanSentry yourself. We actually started this way, but over time realized that in order to support our data processing and analysis needs, we needed to host this in our own data center. The majority of our customers didnt think twice - they just install it and done.

This model has been proven by New Relic as well - just look at their growth numbers over the last few years.

Certainly there will be people that are more concerned about security, and we get a fair share of them talking to us. The best we can say is, we've done everything we can to make LeanSentry safe (see my earlier comment) while still preserving the value we provide.

Best, Mike

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi there, Just a quick comment, we're using LeanSentry to monitor 50 servers and it's being great! We are a brazilian e-Learning SaaS solution provider and the information that we're getting is helping us polish our application and ensure our customers a great service level. We find new uses for it on a daily basis. Our Product manager, sales, developers CEO, CIO, CFO... everyone uses it as the information is "readable" to everyone, not just tech gurus... As you can set things up in matter of minutes it's definitely worth a try.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks cool, certainly seems to provide value above and beyond typical monitoring tools.

It would be great if there was a simple calculator on the pricing page, to give a really quick and rough estimate for how much we'd be paying, especially considering the volume discounts and prepay. E.g. 30 large Azure instances for one year. By my calculations that would work out to ~$2300/mo when prepaying for a year (ouch!).

<comment><USER3> Hi there wingspan, founder here.

We are making the pricing page more accessible, should be live later tonight.

Re: the pricing for 30 servers.

1\. If you use our Core plan, which gives you all our features except the automatic troubleshooters and expert insights, you will pay about $610/month on an annual plan.

2\. If you use the Advanced plan, that means you are finding enough value in us automatically resolving your problems and giving you proactive guidance. On that plan, you are paying 2295/month on an annual plan.

I know this might sounds like a lot, but its actually reasonably lower than some of our cheaper APM competitors. The bottom line though is, if you are professionally running a web application, this is chump change compared to the time this saves you:

\- If you are a 1 person shop with 5 servers lets say, you may be paying ~150/month. If we just saved you 3 hours this month, you paid for it already.

\- If you are a company with 30 servers, you probably have a lot more at stake in making sure your servers run well. But also, you probably employ several full time developers and ops people who manage your servers. You get my point I am sure.

This all depends on whether we are able to truly generate huge time savings in your work day by eliminating the time consuming investigations and troubleshooting. And thats exactly what we are shooting for!

We also have a promotion right now with a 20% off rate, free upgrade to our Advanced plan for 2 months, and great prepay and volume discounts. More pricing information here: <https://www.leansentry.com/Pricing>.

Best, Mike

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How would something like this compare to a product like New Relic?

<comment><USER3> Hi mijustin, founder here.

LeanSentry is somewhat similar to New Relic in that we provide server and application performance monitoring.

However, we are 100% focused on the Windows Server/IIS/ASP.NET stack (that's our background), and as a result provide deeper analysis and diagnostics for those applications.

Best, Mike

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Go Mike! I really like this product, can't wait to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good luck guys. Good choices for your UI/UX.</comment>


The Athletic Raises $20M to Fund Expansion - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-athletic-raises-20-million-to-fund-expansion-1520269215 <comment><AUTHOR> _" Mr. Mather and his co-founder, Adam Hansmann, have positioned the Athletic as a reader-supported, advertising-free alternative to traditional sports coverage, at a time when nationally recognized outlets like ESPN and Sports Illustrated have cut positions and had to rethink their approach to sports news."_

is a pretty interesting quote, that they are "reader supported". Given that they've now raised $30M, I wonder what their reader revenue looks like vs. VC money. I hope they have some success because the journalism market needs some success stories.</comment>


Natural image reconstruction from brain waves - <AUTHOR> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/787101v3.full <comment><USER2> I'm highly skeptical. I mean, a hash function that has four output states also maps _anything_ to one of those four states. That doesn't mean it's some next- level classifier.

The problem here is EEG. EEG bandwidth is not enough to capture that much information. There is far too much noise introduced by the skull and muscles. It's most likely physically impossible to do something like this with EEG.

What's likely happening here is that there's some large scale oscillations that are sufficiently unique to discern the images from each other. This does not mean they are reproducing the images. I am highly skeptical of the methods used here -- they are almost certainly flawed.

I, too, once had dreams of conquering the planet with EEG when I was a grad student. I quickly learned that physics makes this infeasible. Anyone who is serious about BMIs are studying invasive BMIs and how to make them as safe as possible. Going inside the brain is unavoidable, I'm afraid.

<comment><USER3> There is at least one 'affordable' fNIRS device coming to market that looks promising, [https://foc.us/fnirs-sensor/](https://foc.us/fnirs-sensor/) There's a paper somewhere on using machine learning to help identify signal, this one is specifically about pain, [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42098-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42098-w) Say for example you were making an insurance claim for neuropathic pain, this kind of information could be very important.

<comment><USER4> Instead, it will be repurposed for lie detectors and 'terrorist mindset detectors' in airports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This model is incredibly overfit.

Video: [https://youtu.be/nf-P3b2AnZw](https://youtu.be/nf-P3b2AnZw)

Watch how it has preconceived notions of these scenes. It frequently fails to reconstruct the correct scene from video, and it also turns completely blank input into one of the scenes it was trained on.

</comment><comment><USER6> Imagine the shitshow this will cause once law enforcement adopts this.

Currently eyewitness criminal sketches are still drawn by artist so they are naturally low fidelity.

That will change once you can generate a photo of a face (like [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/)) based on your brain waves.

This will be disastrous on so many levels. The eyewitness might not have a good sample of a minority race. The GAN dataset itself might also only be trained on celebrity faces so it doesn't know how to generate anything else (e.g., a teen).

But it will be deceptively high resolution so police will rely on it.

If you have a generic face your life is fucked.

<comment><USER7> OR they will just find out that this method can just as easily be producing a picture that someone who is good at visualizing just made up in their mind and is actually "looking at" in their mind's eye. This making this technique useless as a form of truth seeking machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My research group is doing the same thing but with music. Music may be more promising than images because of the Frequency Following Response -- a sort of direct resonance effect in the brain in response to sound.

We have 24 subjects listening to 12 songs in random order, with 128 channel EEG sampling at 1000hz. We can then label all these data points with the musical features at the time the data is collected.

We don't have a public repo yet, but we are sharing data.

</comment><comment><USER9> I dont think their model is working, and Im not sure it ever will. Simply reading brainwaves, a bi-product as I understand it, of the actual neuron activity, couldn't possibly give you an accurate result.

</comment><comment><USER10> The end results are much, much better than I thought they would be. Luckily, I think it would be easy to fool the training by thinking about a totally different image to the baseline one. Idk if that would stand up to rubber hose cryptanalysis, but there's got to be a way that can.

<comment><USER11> The end results show an overfit model. It's not predicting that specific input out of an option space of everything; it's essentially predicting that mode (out of the 4) and probably capturing things like "if brain's audio regions are active, it's a waterfall, because waterfalls are loud and trigger that".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read in some article some time about use of SQUIDs ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID)) to map activity of a single neuron non-invasively. There was a lot of hype at the time for brain-computer interfaces based on that, but then same as with many technologies that were "just 5 years away" those 5 years came and went with no deliverables expected.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a great movie called _Until The End Of The World_ that centers on this kind of technology. Once the scientists get it to work, they realize that they can record and play back their dreams, and they become addicted to watching them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Lena source image resulting in some other random woman "reconstruction" = model over fitted AF. Put a dead fist and it will continue generating "reconstructions".

</comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to see that the reconstructed Lenna has the high quality reconstruction, but of a generic woman.

<comment><USER16> See the figure title:

> an original face image replaced by an image sample due to publication policy

<comment><USER15> Ah, I was having difficulty reading the text due to formatting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d-d What would a world look like where all thoughts are public?

<comment><USER17> * a LOT more weird porns

* we do not need passwords

* eventually, human will be more empathetic

* new educational system

<comment><USER18> > * we do not need passwords

Probably the opposite. All passwords are machine generated/stored. Everyone uses an HSM.</comment></comment></comment>


Josh Whedon's Writing Tips - Reads Like a Start-Up Manual - <AUTHOR> http://onceuponasketch.com/2012/11/joss-whedons-top-10-writing-tips/?goback=.gde_3264612_member_187149108

<comment><USER2> How many times do I have to say this? _Do not type in your title -- copy it from the article_.

Your title: "Josh Whedon's Writing Tips --- Reads Like a Start-Up Manual"

The actual title: "Joss Whedon's Top 10 Writing Tips"

The man's name is "Joss Whedon".

Oh, one more thing -- did I forget to mention that the man's name is "Joss Whedon"?

Oh, one more thing. Did I forget to mention that you should never type your titles, because _you will get it wrong_.</comment>


Huawei Sues U.S. as a 'Last Resort' Over What It Calls an Unfair Ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/business/huawei-united-states-trade-lawsuit.html <comment><USER2> > "The actual and intended effect of these prohibitions is to bar Huawei from > significant segments of the U.S. market for telecommunications equipment and > services, thereby inflicting immediate and ongoing economic, competitive, > and reputational harms on Huawei," the company's lawyers wrote in the suit.

This is incredulously ironic coming from a Chinese company. China, who sets up just about every barrier imaginable to foreign companies. Do they also lobby the Chinese government in favor of easing restrictions on those foreign businesses? I'm not saying we should follow their lead or really commenting on the merits at all, but I just find these times to be quite strange & humorous indeed.

<comment><USER3> You are confusing Chinese companies with Chinese government. In most areas, whatever restrictions/laws on foreign businesses, are also put on Chinese companies (private). Most foreign companies lost Chinese market due to fierce competition from local counterparts, not any imaginable barrier. Back in 2000s, Chinese government even gave green light when Huawei tried to sell [ref] itself to Motorola, but only been turned down by the American side, and in the past few months Huawei ascends from nowhere to the #1 target of US spy agencies. See the irony?

edit ref: [https://www.ft.com/content/fa8e7ab4-3905-11e9-b856-5404d3811...](https://www.ft.com/content/fa8e7ab4-3905-11e9-b856-5404d3811663)

<comment><USER4> They are the same thing. You don't do business in China without playing ball with the state.

<comment><USER5> Don't you think that Huawei couldn't do business in US because it couldn't play the ball with the US government? LOL

<comment><USER4> Change their entire business model and act as a trojan horse for the US government? No that won't fly in the US (yes I'm aware of NSLs, there's a significant difference in degrees).

In China that's standard procedure. Party says you switch up everything you're doing for their whims you do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it me or has Huawei only appeared in media the last few months? All my years of reading HN, etc. and no recollection until recent controvery. Feels like they've managed to stir many waters in record time. For a company founded in 1987, what gave?

<comment><USER7> Huawei, and the Chinese industry in general is at the forefront of 5G coming soon, and the West is mad that China can be more advanced than them and scared that all the equipment we use for deploying 5G is from them and, consequently, full of (not backdoors) spying capabilities.

As someone whose country isn't part of five eyes, the hypocrisy makes me quietly laugh.

(Edit: updated for less gratuitous accusations)

<comment><USER8> The issue is not back doors in my opinion. It's more that the US is expecting 5G to be big (really big) and they don't want to world relying on China for their infrastructure. It's bad for (America's) national security and it gives China too much clout.

<comment><USER9> Sadly the five eyes couldn't proof a single backdoor in Huawei products while the history of backdoors in US hardware is quite well documented.

If the five eyes hadn't shown time and time again, that they don't give a damn about the laws and rights of other democratic nations, and quite definitly use "security" as a token for industrial spionage, I might show more support.

But please show more than some fiction in which Huwawei has backdoors nobody managed to proof just yet.

Yeah they _could_. But _do_ they?

<comment><USER10> The issue isn't current back doors as you are trying to shift the conversation towards, it is about future Chinese government ordered back doors. I mean you'd have to be in a special dumb category to insert back doors today with all the coverage

<comment><USER9> If you are outside the Five Eyes, you are left with the choice between US products (with a documented history of spying also on democratic nations) and Chinese products, which potentially in the future could also be host for government backdoors.

This means the choice is only about who gets your trade secrets, with a bit more favour for huawei because they didn't do it yet.

It is so easy from an US perspective to say "Take our product, we are the good ones" and conviniently ignoring that people tasked with building a infrastructure that isn't beeing spied on have a hard time choosing here.

This would be easier if US products were actually trustworthy and there wasn't a history of ignoring the rights of allied nations and court ordered backdoors. Why would I care if the backdoor was ordered by the chinese government or the US government? Both proofed they don't really care about the rights of foreign citizen and both have aspirations to become or stay an empire.

The US damaged itself with it's undemocratic spying practices and the final bill for it is not there yet. That beeing said I'd love to pay a bit more for a good product I can trust, but the US is not the place for such a product.

<comment><USER11> Aren't there European competitors for some/most of the stack like Nokia, Ericsson, as well Japanese?

<comment><USER12> Yes.. in fact none of the companies providing 5g infrastructure are American.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How come nobody talks about the NSA or other US secret agencies to spy on people while simultaneously dissing Huawei for "allegedly" building backdoors to spy on the public?

Help.me.understand...

<comment><USER12> None of the 5g infrastructure providers are American. The choice isn't between Huawei and an American company.. it's between Huawei and a European or Japanese company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is unbelievable that Huawei can do this in US and pretty much in any democratic country. The reverse is absolutely not true. The Chinese government has used every tool at its disposal to make life miserable for foreign competitors - see Google's exit, AWS, Apple, Uber and countless other companies were / are still being harassed. When was the last time a foreign company won a court case in China against its local competitor and Chinese government took any adverse action against the local company?

<comment><USER15> So do you want us all to sink to their level, or actually be the democratic countries we pretend to be?

<comment><USER9> What would be the most american answer to this question?

<comment><USER16> Whatever makes the most money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And I believe westerners could start a class action on Huawei as well</comment>


Ask HN: Best place for promotional t-shirts, etc? - <AUTHOR>

Looking to do an initial small order (2-8 shirts), and it would be nice to offer coffee mugs, etc. down the line.<p>CafePress, or somewhere else?  FWIW, I found CafePress' interface confusing. <comment><USER2> Acmeprints.com or brandxstore.com

</comment><comment><USER3> www.customink.com ?</comment>


Elixir 0.9.0 released. Reducers inspired by Clojure's Reducers on the Erlang VM - <AUTHOR> http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2013/05/23/elixir-v0-9-0-released

<comment><USER2> Just a note: we are still researching and working on the fold mechanisms (for actual parallel execution of the reducers). Since it is easy to run distributed software in the Erlang VM, we are also evaluating the best ways to have distributed strategies built-in. But the foundation is already there.</comment>


PHP Projects – Naresh I Technologies - <AUTHOR> http://nareshit.in/php-projects/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here you can find the no. of projects based on PHP and here is a chance to download PHP Projects material too...</comment>


Design Patterns in the JDK - <AUTHOR> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/03/design-patterns-in-jdk.html

<comment><USER2> Seems very interesting to inexperienced programmers such as myself.

Does anyone know of a similar collection of implementations of architectural patterns?

<comment><USER3> check out the GoF book

also, people have put together various collections of server side or 'enterprise' patterns. And the various 'pet store' implementations will be sprinkled liberally with them

<comment><USER4> > check out the GoF book

Oh dear God, that's the _last_ thing he should do. That book is so incredibly dull. It makes Death Valley look like a lush rain forest.

Might I suggest _Head First Design Patterns_ [1] as a good introductory alternative that won't sap his will to live.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/First-Design-Patterns-Elisabeth- Freema...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Design-Patterns-Elisabeth- Freeman/dp/0596007124/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299447954&sr=1-10)

<comment><USER2> Thank you to both of you. I own and have read both - I agree they are excellent. My question was however not concerning design patterns, but architectural patterns, such as MVC, Blackboard or a layering. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_pattern>

I found the collection of concrete examples/applications of design patterns interesting, and wondered if anyone knew of a similar collection of examples/application of common architectural patterns.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bad News for Egg Lovers - <AUTHOR> https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/03/eggs-cholesterol/ <comment><USER2> These studies are notorious for being worthless. Very few people can remember what they ate the previous day, much less the prior year. In addition even if the data is recorded correctly, it can barely show a correlation, much less a connection between a diet and a given outcome.

"Diet data were collected using food frequency questionnaires or by taking a diet history. Each participant was asked a long list of what they'd eaten for the previous year or month. The data were collected during a single visit.The study had up to 31 years of follow up (median: 17.5 years), during which 5,400 cardiovascular events and 6,132 all-cause deaths were diagnosed."

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugh not this again. This isn't news. Cholesterol levels are largely genetic not dietary. The vast, vast majority of cholesterol in your body is synthesized by your body.

There are far more interesting papers linking the health effects associated with cholesterol to its role in virus lifecycle. The levels aren't relevant so much as what's happening in association therewith.

Dietary studies are largely worthless IMO due to confounding factors.

</comment><comment> toper-centage How is this news?</comment>


Show HN: Elementree, Create Web UIs with Proxy Observables and Template Literals - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elementreejs/elementree <comment><AUTHOR> Why did you create Elementree?

Elementree is really just an exercise in constraint. I am tired of spending my time in front-end framework documentation. I wanted something that didn't rely on odd templating syntax, proprietary data shapes, multitudes of library imports. Therefore I needed to create something where the entirety of the library could be held in my head, which I might note, hasn't had a memory upgrade in some time. I wanted a library to celebrate the code of the problem domain as opposed to the framework.

Why local view state?

Local state jives with my brain. I have never been fearful of encapsulating state with an object and subsequently mutating that state. I understand the pitfalls and I do my best to work around them when they present themselves. I view local state vs a system like flux/redux a lot like I view procedural vs functional programming. My brain works better with recipes than mathematics, just like it works better with state mutations than reducers.

Why Proxies?

Proxies gives Elementree objects the appearance of everyday JavaScript objects and yet perform specific semantics when mutated. This is just another case of doing my best to decrease the API foot-print, making the entire library easier to process and quickly be productive with.

Why not use a templating engine like lit-html?

I was exceptionally excited about lit-html when I originally saw it. But over time additional 'syntax' has made its way into the library for things like boolean attributes and event listeners. Don't get me wrong, the people working on that project have a whole lot more time and brains than I do, so I am sure it is for good reason. But I went with nanohtml because it didn't do anything special. It makes all Elementree's template look just like HTML with interpolated values. It is the right tool to meet the design goals of Elementree.</comment>


Ancient Viruses Buried in DNA - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-dna-genome.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-5&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Credit H.G. Wells:

> By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, > and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians > ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

<comment><USER3> Other species have chalked up a lot more deaths than that.

<comment><USER4> But they don't write about it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read 'Darwin's Radio' by Greg Bear.

</comment><comment><USER6> First heard of this from Frank Ryans book Virolution. It explains a lot of what had been termed junk DNA previously.

<comment><USER7> I've not heard of that book before but will have to check it out. Did it happen to mention any of the experimental research done showing that removal of 'junk DNA' makes organisms (microorganisms anyway) less capable of adapting to environmental change? As I remember it, some researchers took a bacteria (probably e. coli, that's usually the easiest to do this sort of thing with but I'm not certain) and separated out two populations. In one they let it be, and in the other they stripped out all 'junk' DNA that didn't play a role in protein synthesis. Then they introduced harsh conditions to both (I think something like high acidity or low availability of food or something like that) and while the 'junky' population adapted relatively quickly, the 'pure' population quickly died off and wasn't able to gain beneficial mutations quickly enough to survive.

<comment><USER8> And there is another line of thought.

Bacteria's pay dearly for each extra bit of DNA they carry, since the energy cost of DNA replication is linear with respect to the length.

Bacteria's with less DNA can replicate more quickly and thus outcompete other bacterias.

The fact that after so many generations they still carry that "junk" which they pay for suggests it really is useful in one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So can genes transfer between species via viruses? Is that why our features are similar to pigs?

<comment><USER10> As has been answered before, we know for a fact that gene transfer exists between species, we just do not know for sure how it happens (as it is certainly a very rare event). Potential candidates are extracellular RNAs, intracellular bacteria as vehicle and last but not least transfer via virusses.

On the other hand, our features are not particular similar to pigs, its just that pigs are similar sized mamalian omnivors (ergo similar inner organs) and can be bred well.

<comment><USER11> I suspect a close examination of the pig's genome would also be a remarkably multifaceted demonstration of the DNA evidence for evolution.

Two minute introduction: life is largely built out of proteins, which are chains of amino acids (small organic molecules) which "fold" into interesting shapes and interact with each other in interesting ways. Our DNA is a set of blueprints for making a suite of proteins that builds us.

One of the curiosities in our DNA is that multiple sequences can code for the same amino acid in a protein. It doesn't matter how it's coded in your DNA, the protein still functions the same way. So one piece of evidence in favor of evolution is that most organisms share a common DNA sequence for common proteins, even though there are potentially millions (or more!) of different sequences which would code for the same protein.

So if humans and pigs have evolved any of the same proteins since they diverged millions of years ago, you should also expect them to be coded for in "more different" ways than if they were evolved in a common ancestor.

(You wouldn't expect the coding for the proteins to be completely different, since they probably evolved from a protein shared by the common ancestors.)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for that explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought these foreign viruses become part of our DNA which we pass down from generation to generation.

It isn't buried in our dna rather inserted into it and become part of our dna.

</comment><comment><USER14> I read a previous article years ago that argued certain traits (mental illness, risk-taking, etc.) could be the result of viruses that successfully joined the human genome via the reproductive organs.

This area of study could end up pretty interesting.

<comment><USER15> I don't think it makes a difference though if the genetic changes happen via happenstance (cosmic radiation, etc) or via infiltration due to viruses, etc, does it? Isn't it all one and the same to evolution?

<comment><USER16> I don't think it is the same. Virus DNA has the purpose of making more Virus, it has function and structure, not just overwriting with randomness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> DNA is the world's oldest blockchain

<comment><USER18> DNA is the opposite of immutable

<comment><USER19> Does your DNA change day to day?

<comment><USER20> According to Wikipedia, "In human cells, both normal metabolic activities and environmental factors such as radiation can cause DNA damage, resulting in as many as 1 million individual molecular lesions per cell per day."

There are mechanisms to repair this damage, but they don't always work. Sometimes the result is cancer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ <comment><USER2> For those who want real journalism, here is the original story:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all)

It's much better than Forbes' click-bait re-packaging of it, by the way.

<comment><USER3> And one of the most interesting parts isn't even mentioned in the Forbes article: on page 8, Duhigg has a great description of how he hacked his own brain to reprogram an unwanted routine. (Well, he probably wouldn't describe it that way.)

<comment><USER4> How Duhigg hacked his brain to reprogram an unwanted routine:

1\. Identify the habit's reward.

Ex: going to a cafeteria to eat a cookie could be to satisfy hunger, get a burst of energy, take a break from work, socialize, etc.

2\. Identify the habit's cue.

Ex: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action.

3\. To shift the routine, replace the habit, but maintain the cue and reward.

Ex: If you eat a cookie everyday around 3:30 as a way of taking a break to socialize, stay current with office gossip and talk to friends, then continue taking a break at 3:30, but instead of hitting the cafeteria, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to. This way, the benefits of the habit are being preserved (taking a break and socializing), but the unwanted aspects are being replaced.

Of course, these examples are lifted directly from the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A fie on on Forbes for slapping a click-baiting headline on another publication's professional reporting and hard work.

It's one thing to tweet about it, but to reprint numerous chunks of the original article? Wrapped in your own ads? How is this journalistically sound?

<comment><USER6> It makes me hold my nose too, but I think in twenty years this "rewrapping" method will be a staple in J-school textbooks.

<comment><USER7> In 20 years? That's what the Internet is today. 90% of stories are based on an interesting article the author read, and rewrote as a blog entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe it's because I live on the internet and think there's 1024 meters in a kilometer, but I didn't find this surprising or worrisome in the least. I would expect all large stores to perform data-mining, that data is valuable.

<comment><USER9> Not to mention there seems to be an implicit value judgement here. All fathers are deeply connected with their children, and know their darkest secrets, all the time!

The reality is plenty of parents are very uninvolved in their childrens' lives.

<comment><USER10> Kids get pregnant even when the parents are very involved. The reproductive imperative will be served, like water seeking its own level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the creepy feeling comes in that you don't realize the merchant is profiling you. At least not until they tip their hand a little too much (like sending you an entire booklet of nothing but maternity stuff).

You get a Safeway club card and you know full well that they're tracking you, because you hand them the card every shopping trip. Or you use Amazon or Netflix, where customers really _want_ to be tracked -- the tracking and data mining are part of the draw, because they have such good suggestion engines.

I had LASIK a few years back and bought dry eye drops from Target - a lot of them, over six months time. Then my eyes healed and I quit buying it. A month later I get a coupon generated by a Target cash register for Systane drops, the exact brand I used to buy. I guess they thought I started buying them at Walgreens instead?

It was only when they gave me a coupon for a specific brand and product, that most of the population would likely not buy on a typical weekly shopping trip, that I realized all my purchases were being tracked and linked by my credit card number.

All that time before then, their prediction engine was selecting coupons for completely unrelated products, and I was using the coupons not even thinking about it.

<comment><USER12> Amazon's been annoying me lately because it somehow got convinced that I'm a 30 year old woman and won't stop showing me dresses and jewelry on the front page, neither of which I have ever bought. What can you even do when their core profile of you is completely off-base?

Amazon at least lets you fine-tune a little bit, but not enough to say, "no you're completely wrong" short of starting over with a new account. Which is a lot harder with physical stores...

<comment><USER13> Check out <http://www.amazon.com/gp/history/> and <https://www.amazon.com/gp/yourstore/iyr> where you can delete stuff that Amazon knows; this may fix recommendation problems.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for both of those links -- and for scaring the crap out of me when I clicked the second one and got to the bottom of the page.

"1 - 15 of 534"

Five hundred and thirty-four purchases. Like having a cattle prod jammed into the back of my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And then we have Wal-Mart...

> "We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security > company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could > link video footage with customers paying for their purchases," Albrecht > said. "Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers > paying, say, for a pack of gum. At the time, it struck me as unbelievably > outlandish because of the amount of data storage required."

<http://cryptome.org/eyeball/walmart/walmart-birds.htm>

In general, an isolated video is not interesting.

It becomes more interesting and potentially scary once you have a digital, searchable, analyzable history of video customer transactions.

Reduce leakage/theft:

If a cashier has been already flagged and the customer matches up in the network of cashier's friends (Facebook?), possibly in conjunction with another theft deterrent system, be able for managers to watch in real time a potential leakage event (where they don't scan certain items).

Hyper-targeted marketing:

(New) wedding ring detected. Commence deluge of in-kind marketing partnerships with Home Depot, maybe even Crate & Barrel.

Customer over the past three months has been showing signs of possible pregnancy relative to their baseline body mass index. Somehow, non creepily, market to them via 3rd party mailing lists who had no idea how you learned she was expecting or more subtly by changing the default landing homepage of walmart.com to reflect more future mother when her cookie is detected.

Kids. If the kids seem hyperactive in the overhead view, email coupons for toys that appeal to ADD-type kids.

Over the last year of transactions, customer's head has been exhibiting signs of male pattern baldness. Send them targeted coupons for hats to see if they think its something they need to cover up.

<comment><USER16> The most worrisome thing of this, to me, is that it may increase differences between groups in society. Imagine a refinement where a shop splits the 'just pregnant' group into a 'looking for abortion' and a 'looking forward to having a child' group. Sending them targeted adverts based on that prediction may/will make that prediction come true (and that is the 'accidental effect' case. Think of what a racist shopkeeper/data miner could do)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> NYTimes article that this one is referencing: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp)

<comment><USER18> And the corresponding HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598558>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm really surprised Target thought this was a good idea. I'm 7 weeks pregnant, and keeping it quiet enough that I made a fake account just to post this. Most women don't tell anyone outside of close family until the first trimester has passed, largely due to the number of things that could go wrong.

I'd find it creepy and invasive to get something physical in the mail with private medical information.

<comment><USER20> _I'd find it creepy and invasive to get something physical in the mail with private medical information._

It's not private medical information. It's an analysis of your _public_ actions. All the coupons say is that many people that bought the things you did are pregnant. It doesn't say that you are pregnant.

<comment><USER21> If purchases are public, where can I get the data so I can build my map of the economy?

<comment><USER7> You have a pocket full of credit cards, debit cards, and loyalty point cards. Every air mile you get is paid for by someone selling your purchase history to another company for marketing purposes.

It's not public for anyone to grab. You have to pay for access to the data. But if you can pay, you can get the data.

<comment><USER21> Data that can be had for a price, but not by anybody, is usually called "proprietary", not "public".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My friends and I used to do a Safeway card swap party once in a while to avoid exactly this.

Everyone would throw their Safeway card into a pile and then randomly select one to keep.

Not even we knew who's card we had.

<comment><USER23> It'd be even better to figure out the details of their targeting algorithms and swap cards intelligently. If it looks like you used to be a strong (brand/store) customer and then stopped, they'll give you worthwhile coupons.

<comment><USER24> This is why they send coupons in the post to the card owner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In some situations, this sort of thing isn't just creepy - it's incredibly fucked up.

My mother gave birth a while ago, and sadly, the child only lived for two months. But for months after his death, we received a LOT of coupons - "20% off diapers for your bundle of joy," etc. It was a sensitive time, and checking the mail often led to tears. After reading this article, thinking back - Target ads. I specifically remember giant, full-paged ads for nothing but baby items from Target.

edit for type, it's =/= isn't

<comment><USER26> Just wait until an adult dies. You get tons of mail in their name. Some of it even tries to sell them life insurance.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I've had this more or less happen to me.

A telemarketer from the bank I used to be with called me on the day of my brother's funeral to try and sell me life insurance.

Terribly bad timing as at the time I was waiting for the car to pick my mother and myself up to lay him to rest.

I'd like to say I handled it well, but I didn't. I vaguely recall some hefty swearing on my part the next day as I closed my account with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _"We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you're following the law, you can do things where people get queasy."_

That's what everyone should take out of this article. Even though doing something is technically legal, it doesn't mean you or your startup/company should be doing it. Always take into account what your customer base will feel.

</comment><comment><USER29> So the Forbes article does little but paraphrase the NYT article, and then includes the typical array of Facebook and Twitter "Share This!" links at the bottom.

Aren't they just contributing to the very thing they're trying to scare you about? Pick a side.

</comment><comment><USER30> An interesting aspect of this story that no one's mentioned yet is that collecting this sort of information about a minor is illegal under COPPA [0] when it happens online. It should have been apparent for some time now that customer/user tracking and the accompanying privacy issues apply offline as much as online, but our laws have not caught up.

Legislation like COPPA that proscribes behavior/activities solely online will only become more obviously non-sensical as the line between online and offline activities continues to blur.

0\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childrens_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act)

<comment><USER31> COPPA applies to children under 13 years of age, not minors who are under 18 years of age.

<comment><USER30> You're right. (Though I will add that there has been recent discussion of raising COPPA's age limit. [0]) But regardless of the age of the girl who is the subject of this article, my general point still stands.

0\. [https://www.privacyassociation.org/publications/subcommittee...](https://www.privacyassociation.org/publications/subcommittee_hosts_proposed_coppa_changes_debate)

<comment><USER32> COPPA basically made it illegal for people under 13 to be on the Internet. (Not that they weren't anyway, but it's the precedent and expectation that counts.) Making this situation _worse_ doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea.

The "Minors aren't people." meme ranks somewhere at the top of my list of annoying beliefs.

<comment><USER30> No, COPPA doesn't basically make it illegal for children under thirteen to be on the Internet. It doesn't restrict what children under thirteen can do in any way. COPPA restricts what _websites_ can do–they can't collect certain information about users without asking whether they're over thirteen.

Sure, you can make a case that we shouldn't burden the web with these sorts of rules. Or that we shouldn't have to differentiate between adults and young children. (You'll lose that argument.) That's not my point. My point is that legislation that differentiates between online and offline activities—and the information we collect about them—will become increasingly nonsensical as online and offline activities become less distinct.

When COPPA was passed in 1998, Target wasn't data-mining customers' purchase histories. Only websites were doing that sort of thing (or so the story went). Fast forward to today and offline activities (what you buy at the grocery store, where and when you get on the bus) are now being tracked in the same way that online activities have been for the last decade. Whatever limits you believe should (or shouldn't) be placed on tracking these activities, it's apparent that customer/user privacy is no longer an "online" issue. There will be no "online" issues in the future because the distinction between online and offline is quickly disappearing.

<comment><USER32> That point makes more sense. Yes, I think that in the future privacy laws that try to differentiate between the "Digital world" and "Reality" will find the lines too blurry to draw. Were already there and were not even close to the mountains peak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm surprised no-one has mentioned 'cryptonomicon' and detachment 2702 so far. Basically, Target are doing the same thing, i.e. planting information to mask statistically significant results.

</comment><comment><USER34> O ye scared of the inevitable future ... Future generations will look back at these writings and smile gently at the past where people were afraid of such things as individually personalized targeted marketing, just as we smile back today at the ignorant masses afraid of steam locomotives, vaccines and the like, way back when.

</comment><comment><USER35> Reading the linked NYTimes article, I found the most interesting component to be that Target's goal wasn't just trying to sell diapers, but rather trying to get customers to form buying habits. Pregnancy just happens to be a very vulnerable time for consumers to start new shopping routines, and that's why it received so much analytic focus.

It's a travesty that Forbes glosses over this point. The data mining isn't too surprising, and a habit of shopping at Target is what keeps making them money long after the baby has been born.

</comment><comment><USER36> this is one of the reasons I've been finding myself paying with cash more and more. While this seems fairly benign at first glance its becoming rather disturbing how much data is being collected and analyzed about consumers. In some ways I'm for stricter privacy laws like those in the EU.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it's benign now, do you see it becoming not benign? I'm fine with it, and I don't see it going in a direction that makes me uncomfortable.

I knew Target and other stores were tracking me with my credit card, I noticed it specifically with Target too. At one retail chain I made my first purchase there with a debit card, almost immediately I started getting discount cards in the mail. I can't say for sure how they correlated me to my physical address, but I can guess. They were part of a larger company with other chains, one of which I purchased something from online, using the same debit card.

People seem spooked out by Target using credit cards to track people, what about not using credit cards? Safeway uses Club Cards, and they to it totally in the open by giving people "Just for U" coupons on things they buy (I used two of them yesterday). I'm not at all bothered that Safeway gives me a coupon on the exact laundry detergent I always buy, I think it's pretty nice of them.

<comment><USER37> It is not benign, now or ever. It is the ultimate discrimination tool, targeted on our private actions and not on broad categories like "petit- bourgeoise".

Yeah, it's all fun and games if shops do it and they apply it to baby powder coupons. But the invasion of privacy and the private dossiers Target or Visa or Facebook are building on every one of us can be used in other contexts.

Is this person likely to engage in extreme sports? Hike his health insurance quota 5x because he is a "risk" to profits.

Does this job applicant fit a union sympathiser profile? Deny him the job, on the "pure" economic reason that he is a risk to our bottom line profits.

I'd much rather ensure that this kind of data collection and targeting is illegal across the board. I'm ready to sacrifice the coupon industry, thank you very much.

<comment><USER38> What is wrong with those scenarios? It sounds like you are proposing that instead of using this information, people should ignore it and make bad decisions.

<comment><USER36> They shouldn't be allowed to use it. Who really wants to live in a 'fishbowl' world where every corporate entity and government organization can have full access to every minute detail of your life. It opens the door for rampant discrimination

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think I finally understand the etymology of their company name. I'd be willing to bet that insurers are or will use people's buying activity as one input of insurance premiums. With someone's credit card activity they could ascertain massive amounts of information about their lifestyle. Everything from how late they stay out, to how early they get up, to what types of food they eat, and what activities like drinking and smoking they partake in. Heck, Mint could do that for most of its users.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To make this more HN-centric, here's a question:

If you are a developer, and you feel uncomfortable with this sort a tracking, would you work for a company developing or maintaining software or infrastructure that does this sort of customer analysis?

It seems to me that some of the most interesting companies to work for are doing data mining like this. I would guess a large percentage of Hadoop installs are doing analytics on customer data. Are you ethnically opposed to data mining?

</comment><comment><USER40> This story, along with much of the content produced by Forbes are in violation of Hacker News Guidelines [1].

While these are simply guiding principles, they are an important measure of what is permitted within the community.

[1] <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

</comment><comment><USER41> The New York Times article this was taken from was submitted earlier to HN, but only shows up for me when I go directly to news.ycombinator.com. It does not show up the RSS feed on Google Reader.

What determines what HN submissions show up in the RSS fed?

</comment><comment><USER42> Is it actually legal to track customers by their credit card numbers, or do anything with them other than use them to complete monetary transactions? Should it be?

</comment><comment><USER43> This will make a great class action suit against Target. After all, when did you give them permission to start tracking your purchases when you use a credit card? We worry about online privacy at Google or other companies this is worse. It is not as if you are using one of those cards at the grocery store where you agree to allow them to track your buying habits.

<comment><USER29> If it's not illegal, and you're on _their_ private property, then I think there's nothing a lawsuit can do. Get the laws changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why does a high school kid have a credit card? Without that unique identifier, they can't datamine.

<comment><USER44> Teenagers probably have a bank account. If not a credit card, then it's likely a debit card from a bank.

But really, why not have a credit card? If she's not building debt, I don't see a problem with having one.

<comment><USER36> In the U.S. it is illegal to offer credit to anyone under the age of 18 as they cannot legally enter into contracts. It would be a huge liability for a credit card company as the contract for credit (and thus right to request repayment) would essentially never be valid, although presumably they could go after the person's legal guardians for payment.

<comment><USER45> Isn't it possible to use a 'family' card---that is your parents credit line but the card has your name on it?

<comment><USER36> yes, this is, however the underage person can't be held liable for charges, basically its the parent's card but they authorized the child to use it (its not supposed to count for the child's credit score either but they usually put it on anyways)

<comment><USER46> But that _would_ solve the issue of tracking issue by giving her a personal card to use?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wonder whether this anecdote (about the manager and the angry father) is actually true.

If the manager did not actually know about the ad campaign, how did the anecdote make its way to the reporter?

It sounds borderline "too juicy to be true". That one anecdote makes the story.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's hard to draw a line on where privacy gets crossed, but this seems like it. Hard to imagine that Target doesn't lose a customer for life when their pregnancy gets prematurely outed.

<comment><USER49> Sure, but how many customers for life do they GAIN? That's how they are looking at it, as long as the net result is an increase in business, it's a good strategy.

I'm not saying I am on one side or the other, but every 'targeted' campaign will have some fallout, you just have to make sure it's a small enough number.

<comment><USER48> Fair point. Normally the downside is just a stamp when the coupon gets pitched. Here it's more. but it's still a cost benefit analysis like anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> In cases like these, parents are usually the last to find out...

</comment><comment><USER51> >So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons.

I love that logic. Woah, our customers are getting creeped out by this. Guess we gotta creep harder.

<comment><USER52> People get creeped out by more and more things nowdays. I don't want to taunt the "If you don't do anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide" phrase, but the truth is that privacy is an illusion; most privacy one can get comes from that literaly no one cares about this 'private stuff' of the individual - at least not enough to try and learn it.

As the technology gets better, it's becoming increasingly difficult to lie, and to live a fake life. Every thing one does leaves a trace in the physical world, a trace that one can't remove. From air vibrations to people talking to behaviour patterns, the trace is there, and year after year we get better and better at amplifying those signals and extracting information. One can not lie and hope it will remain undiscovered forever. In a healthy society this would be a Good Thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Creepy as hell. This is why I pay cash.

They can keep their "redcard" for tracking everyone's data.

(I also have a dozen amazon accounts for different stuff)

</comment><comment><USER10> For pregnancy and other medical discoveries, I wonder if a case could be made for HIPPA violations.

</comment><comment><USER54> I just wonder which data-mining-software company paid Forbes to copy this from NYT.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I relocate for a better job? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I am a web developer from an area of the United States on the East Coast that is very limited as far as available web developer jobs. I am employed, and have been for the past 2 years. My pay is decent considering the low cost-of-living, but well below the national average for the work I do. I am an expert with PHP (OO), MySQL, jQuery, of course HTML & CSS. Also others, but I'm trying to keep this short.
I am a single guy in his mid-20's, and I would love to relocate almost anywhere in the United States for a PHP Developer position. I have found hundreds of jobs, but most of them say locals only and never reply. By the way, back in 2007 I did receive an offer of employment and fully paid relocation to Seattle, WA after an application I was working on for a local company was sold to a Seattle based company, but couldn't accept because I was married at the time and the wife didn't agree.
I'm okay with not receiving relocation benefits if I find the right job, but it would be nice to receive at least some sort of assistance in the moving process. Either way, I'm not really sure how to go about landing a job in a place I can't drive to.
- THE QUESTION -
Have you ever landed a job or even a face-to-face interview for an opportunity that required relocation? Do you have any tips on how I can do the same? Would it be unreasonable for me to negotiate the prospective employer to pay all or part of the price for a plane ticket for an interview? Lastly, I'm searching in various places including Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Boston, Richmond, do you know of other cities with plentiful jobs in web development that I should consider?
Thanks for any help, and I hope this post hasn't ended up being way too long for anyone to read.
[edit] Would anyone recommend moving before being offered a job? If I don't find something by early next year, I was thinking of just picking a city to move to without a job, and then trying to find one after moving, but most people tell me that it would be stupid to leave my current job without having something else lined up first. [/edit] <comment><USER2> I grew up in the DC area and moved to SF for a couple of years when a company hired me out there. They ended up paying for the move, the airfare for the interview, etc.

My advice: don't worry about the move, worry about finding a company you love. They'll inevitably ask you about relocating during the screening/interview and you'll simply say "yes."

In my case, I was looking for an employer prior to moving (so they'd pay for my wife and I to move there).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I think it makes sense, and I agree that I should focus on the job and not the move. I will add, I had a phone interview with a large website/company for finding used/new cars, and it sounded like the perfect opportunity (California), but in the phone interview I was told that they don't offer relocation because there are so many talented people in the area, they have no reason to pay to relocate someone there. This kind of rubbed me the wrong way, mainly because I am very passionate about my work, and I felt this position was perfect for me. I'm hoping this kind of attitude isn't the norm - I equate this to telling a current employee they are "replaceable."

<comment><USER3> _I'm hoping this kind of attitude isn't the norm - I equate this to telling a current employee they are "replaceable."_

Employees are replaceable; so are jobs. The important thing is to remember where you are in the process.

Take a look at what you wrote: _it sounded like the perfect opportunity_ , _I felt this position was perfect for me_. Remember that they person on the other end of the phone is not interested in if the position is perfect for you-- he's interested in if you are perfect for the position.

If I were you, I'd make sure that I was sending out a vibe of "this is how I can solve your problems", not "what can you do for me?" If you can convince them you are the best guy for the job, getting the relocation paid won't be a problem-- trust me. I've hired employees from far-off countries, at great expense and hassle with visas, because I felt they were the right person to do the job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. I don't want to come off as arrogant. Going forward I will be more constructive as far as explaining what I can do for the company and what problems I could solve, rather than just saying "I feel I'm a perfect fit" like I have been saying. I really appreciate the help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should be able to find companies that will relocate you. Look on the Joel on Software and 37 signals job boards perhaps. Perhaps focus on jobs in SF?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't checked either of those, so I definitely will now, thanks. SF is on my short list. I really like the idea of going there, but a friend who has worked all over the west coast says I should try outside CA first, and go there if nothing else comes first. I hate just going off one person's opinion which is part of the reason I am asking these questions.</comment></comment>