The curse of being a gifted child - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/the-curse-of-giftedness/article1797492/singlepage/#articlecontent

<comment><USER3> My father was in on way academic. With no qualifications to his name he spent most of his life as a manual labourer and slowly worked his way up to be a Head Green Keeper at a municipal golf course via grave digger and truck driver.

While at the golf course he hired a PHd Physicist to cut grass and do odd jobs. It wasn't his choice. As a state enterprise he was obliged to hire a certain number of 'disabled' people.

Over a few years this wretched physicist slowly revealed how he was pushed through school and university early and was woo'ed to the city of london to do financial modelling and how by the age of 25 with mountains of cash his brain literally shut down.

He was rebooted in hospital diagnosed with depression and put on to the incapacity benefit list and a charity helped him into work via the local authorities.

He told my father that his greatest pleasure was seeing the stripes on the golf course after he'd freshly cut the fairway. He envied my father because he had worked his way from nothing to something where as he had the whole world at his feet, there was nothing to work for, it just came.

After two years at the golf course he stopped turning up for work, he stopped turning up for anything, he'd committed suicide.

This greatly effected me as a child who achieved academic success with (seemingly) little or no effort. A little bit of struggle makes any prize more valuable.

My ever pragmatic Dad said "he cut the grass straight and didn't piss in the tractor cab, he was a good man".

</comment><comment><USER4> It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. My mother designs curriculum for gifted education, and over the years I've seen that part of the difficulty in raising a gifted child to being a healthy, successful adult is knowing what to do with them.

Richard Feynman was building complex electronic booby traps in his room when he was seven. Before turning ten he had nearly burned down his house with a homemade transformer in his ad hoc laboratory. Most parents would see him as a problem that needed to be fixed, or be so confused that he'd end up being ignored. Many parents can't see the world from the perspective of a gifted child, realizing how slow school seems, how frustrating their peers might be. Many parents wouldn't consider sending their kid to math camp, or Robot One, or having them apprentice for an electronics engineer. Since the adults wouldn't consider it fun, it doesn't occur to them, unless they're very close with their child, that their kid might love a month doing advanced math, or learning physics early.

I believe that gifted kids are fragile. They need strong reinforcement at home telling them to do what makes them happy, whether the other kids dream of being scientists, or a cellists, or a astrophysicists, or not. Since smart kids are also very aware of themselves, they're also very sensitive to the expectations of their parents and teachers. A lifetime of being told how exceptional you are can lead to severe depression if you wind up simply average. Someone with those kind of expectations lumped on them can even become very successful and still spend the remainder of their life lamenting the potential they had, judging themselves for not becoming a first chair, first rate, phd everything.

<comment><USER5> > It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households > where they're the smartest by far.

I'd also point out that it's also predictable and will continue to be true for a very strong reason: reversion to the mean. It's not going to change, which makes measures like designing a good curriculum or at least having camps and programs all the more important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My giftedness worked against me in one way, in that I often understood things so quickly that I never learned to figure anything out. Especially in grade school, if I didn't get something by just reading it once, I had no idea what to do. I got panicky, as I felt like my powers were vanishing. I don't think I even _knew_ that I was supposed to take concepts apart, or try different approaches. I didn't know there were strategies to figuring things out. And I had no confidence in my ability to do so.

This article about highly-intelligent who lack confidence in their abilities may be of interest:

<http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/>

<comment><USER7> It comes as a shock when you actually have to work at something, doesn't it.

Now I know how to work. I wish I could do university again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I went to a private liberal arts college at 11 and completed a BS in math, physics, and computer science at 16. However, I also wrote for the student newspaper, competed on speech team, and went to the local high school's prom with my high school friends.

This, I think, kept me grounded. Yet when I went off to graduate school in pure mathematics, I was frozen. Whereas in my undergraduate years, I effortlessly comprehended the analysis and group theory flung at me, I learned in my first-year of graduate school that had been child's play. Study and work was now required. I failed again and again and it was painful (graduate students are not supposed to get B's).

Everything had come instantly to me in the past, so that almost no study was necessary. Things did not work this way in grad school, and I've been learning the work ethic for the past three years.

Yet my idiot brain still can't help but think "Noam Elkies' discovery about supersingular elliptic curves got him a doctorate when he was 20! Drin'feld proved the GL_2 case of the Langlands conjectures for the function field case when he 19, for chrissakes. What are _you_ doing, dumbass?"

I'm still not sure how I turned out, or am turning out. I am a TA and have a high rating on ratemyprofessors.com, so at least my students like me. I'm learning salsa and hold weekly classic movie nights for my group of friends.

Just for shits and giggles, when one of my best friends from high school (who is a manager at Wendy's) suggested "you should be good at more than just academics, you should be good with girls, man," I dove into the world of game (not the tricks part, the improving yourself as a man and "naturally" charismatic being portion). Hilariously, that same friend now thinks of me less as a "genius" and more as a "womanizer"!

I am not and will never be as intelligent as the ideal my parents and childhood friends and teachers half-jokingly imposed when suggesting I will win four Nobel prizes before the age of 20. For those following a similar path, neither will you. So the trick is to take the cliche advice, stop agonizing over credentials and success, and just live life; learn some salsa, fall in love, do a startup, and backpack through Europe.

<comment><USER9> Where would you start out these days in the "world of game"? I also got an undergrad degree in math essentially without trying and have had some rough periods making it to adulthood without any work ethic but I think I've recovered and have built up a pretty successful programming career.

However, I have absolutely no ability to attract women and have experienced nothing but rejection for the last couple of years, and I may be beyond what game can fix. My problem is social awkwardness and it's the kind that runs all the way down - with people I am very comfortable with I am still very quiet, inarticulate, and don't have much ability to do conversational improvisation. Being in extremely good physical shape didn't make a difference and I've done Salsa too, where I'm literally always the last person women pick when they're all asked to partner up. I've done a year on internet personals with only rejection, and the same with speed dating - typical results would be me checking off 15/25 girls as yes and getting zero matches. I'm extremely non- picky with women. Everyone I meet likes me, but for sexual interest? Forget it. I'd love to be exactly the person I want, and socialize with women the way I would with men (i.e. just not giving a shit and saying what I want to) but this obviously isn't working for me! So gaming the evo-psychology system seems to be one of the few possibilities left.

<comment><USER8> It was one of the hardest things I've ever learned, surprisingly. My path took about two years and was reading up as much as I could, then doing "field work" for a few weeks, then alternating back to theory. After a while it all starts clicking.

Read all the archives of Roissy, Assanova, RooshV, PaulTheKing, KrauserPUA, ApproachAnxiety.com. Pay especial attention to the videos posted on Krauser's site and try to imitate his body language, vocal tone, and everything to the dot. It doesn't mean you can't have your own personality, but it helps you get that "dominance." Go overboard on the aggressiveness in the early phases. Learn perfect posture and don't apologize for a week. Buy Diesel jeans that make your ass look good. Find a style. Get a good haircut.

For you, the easiest "field work" path would be day game. Start by saying "hi" to everyone that passes by. People will look at you funny, but do it until you don't care anymore. Grab a camera and ask 100 people if you can take a picture with them ("it's for a bet, I need 100 pictures of me with a stranger"). Walk up to girls that are sitting and tell them they're cute and you had to say hi. Do the same but with walking girls. Get phone numbers. Stop caring about phone numbers and go for instant dates (get a coffee 10 minutes into the conversation). Make plans for second dates. You will get flakes. Keep reading and keep trying.

Note: If you read anything by LoveSystems or other commercial guys, know that it may be good as a beginner but it probably won't get you laid (especially Jeremy Soul's stuff). Go for bloggers and free material. If you can find Chopan's posts from fastseduction.com, they are gold. Lines and routines are useful as you're learning, but don't rely on them as you grow.

Go to attractionforums's sections on day game and read through past high-voted posts. Read Jon117's journal. Read _Natural Game_ by Gambler (email me for a PDF).

As you're reading all of this, know that field work is always more important, but reading is easy and field work is hard, so while you're making up excuses and being a chickenshit at least use that time to keep reading.

Like I said, it's not easy. I probably put more effort into this than most undergraduates put into their degree.

Extra Credit: For shits and giggles, try the apocalypse opener until you don't get a negative reaction (when it works, you feel like Neo from the Matrix--and when it fails, I've had girls say "I...I can't...I'm sorry! :(" in an apologizing tone after I asked them, without any prior convo, "What are you doing later? Do you want to come home with me?" in an assertive manner.)

Extra Credit 2: Read all important high-commented topics on attractionforums's Online Game section. Set up an OkCupid account and try it with their suggestions. Online game worked so well for me that I had to check my inbox several times a day as I'd send out 20 messages and 15 would reply. It became too much of a hassle as I struggled to keep track of who was who and usually ended up on a date with girls that were much uglier or boring than their profile suggested. But it's fun to try.

<comment><USER10> My God dude--don't do this Game/PUA type stuff.

Want to have some luck with women? Get involved in social activities (volunteering, book clubs, etc.), don't be a recluse, and never forget how awesome you are. The rest falls into place. Just be yourself and don't think too much.

This pick-up artist stuff is cliche, ineffective, and, worst of all, misanthropic. These people have a worldview that revolves around control and domination, and that's not a healthy mental state.

<comment><USER9> > The rest falls into place.

You're just lucky to have some natural attraction then I guess. I'm extremely confident in myself and sure of myself and women don't give a fuck. I do opera singing and salsa dancing and go to the gym regularly, am in outstanding shape, and am not even that shy any more. I've been on internet dating for two years and have tried speed dating a couple of times and can make friends with almost any man but have achieved precisely jack shit with women.

Trust me, if I had any choice at this point - any choice - other than trying to learn skills in gaming women's minds I'd be doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Above all, I believe that gifted children need good parenting. It seems to be a common theme with young achievers that they burn out quickly and become disillusioned or full of reject. It's always disturbing to see 12 year old pop stars on TV whose parents have chosen to keep the kids out of school, 14 year old college freshmen and other "prodigies".

I could not be happier that my parents did not let me skip grades. There was a kid in my class who was three years younger than everybody else in the grade in high school and needless to say he could not associate with us at all, and it's not like we didn't try.

Sure, I could have finished studies a little earlier, but the defining moments of my teenage years are those spent with my friends, not what the rest of society would deem as worthy achievements.

</comment><comment><USER12> Everything in this article applies to non-"gifted" children as well. They also get enormously pressured to get better grades, are overscheduled, forced into music lessons, come from broken homes, have crappy parents, get picked on for any number of reasons, are sensitive, etc., etc.

You could just as easily write a narrative about Joe Average, who didn't have things come easily to him, who struggled, who was never told "you can accomplish anything!", whose parents said, "yeah, we don't expect great things from him", who envied all the gifted kids and their opportunities and their parents who believed in them.

The biggest problem with being gifted is the sense of entitlement that comes with it. That you shouldn't have to suffer like the rest of the plebeians because you are _special_ , or that all your problems are the result of your _special curse_.

It's just another part of the general case of "mismatch between reality and your unrealistic expectations".

At some point _everyone_ is faced with the challenge of throwing off the yokes of other people's expectations and conditioning and finding their own way.

</comment><comment><USER13> I found being a bright child had as many problems as benefits, but none due to pressure from parents or myself.

School work seemed insanely easy, to the point that I made no effort and still did well. At my (private) school in the UK, twice a term we were given report cards, and for each subject we were given A1-E5 (letters for attainment, numbers for effort). In nearly every subject I would get A5. In my GCSEs I did no revision, was up until 6am before every exam, and still aced them.

At that point I realised how bored I was. Since the age of 7 I had assumed I would end up studying music at university (for a few years aged 13-15 I changed that plan to be a CS degree), but at 16 I decided to drop out of school because I couldn't face another two insanely boring years before getting into real education.

The four years since then have been amazing, I got into an amazing company that sent me around the world until I got tired of travelling too much, and that has let me pretty much change my job description whenever I fancied doing something new. I'd love to go to university some day and get the degree in music that I've wanted since I was 7, but I'm not in any rush.

The biggest thing for me was that I was never taught to learn anything through school. Luckily I was musical, which taught me great discipline (recordings and concert tours aged 10-13), and atheltic (was once a really good footballer, though in the last few years I've become _very_ lazy and put on an awful lot of weight). That, combined with making my way in the business world, has taught me what may friends had to learn in school: how to actually work on something and improve at it.

<comment><USER14> I'm always curious how this 'make no effort and still get As' thing works. At what point does the information enter your head?

-before you ever cover it in class?

-when the teacher explains it once?

-when the teacher re-explains it?

-when you do your homework assignments?

-when you casually read over the notes just before the exam?

-when you read the exam questions and infer what they need to know?

I'm genuinely curious. I've always personally suspected that peoples biggest problem (me included) is not paying attention in class, or being unable to do so, or the teaching moving too fast for them. I figure if you're really attentive enough, revision wouldn't be so necessary. Watching advanced lecture courses on YouTube where I can rewind any confusing parts and refer to other sources if need be, has been a more efficient learning process for me.

<comment><USER15> For me it was usually "when the teacher explains it once", occasionally "before you ever cover it in class" if it was a subject I was interested in beforehand. I rarely did homework assignments and never took notes.

There's also an interesting thing you can do with standardized tests, where you infer the answer from the questions and the other answers given. Standardized test authors are actually really predictable: they usually think of multiple choice options based on common error patterns, so if you look at the answers and think "Well, those two are off by one, and those two have factors that are off by one, and those two are what you get if you add instead of multiply", you can triangulate between them and come up with the right answer even if you don't understand the question.

Actually, I once did an experiment to try and quantify this effect. Throughout high school, a bunch of my classmates would say, "You're not really smart, you're just a good test taker." So I figured I'd take the AP Comparative Government without ever having taken the class or done any self-study. Just a half hour of reading a test-prep book over breakfast. I _knew_ I didn't know anything about the subject, so any score I got could be solely attributable to test-taking skills.

I got a 3 on it, which is a passing grade for many colleges. I got a 5 (the highest) on the tests that I actually _did_ know the subject area, so it wasn't all test-taking.

It was funny though - the AP Comp Gov is a big multiple-choice section followed by 4 essay tests, and I obviously didn't know the subject, so I'd have to bullshit the essays. So I did the multiple choice through a combination of looking for patterns in the answers and using my common-sense knowledge of foreign governments that I'd picked up from newspapers. And then I used the questions they'd asked in the multiple choice section as talking points for the essay. Basically, I was using the test itself to answer the questions on the test.

<comment><USER16> People in school would comment on how well I did on all the various standardized tests, and my response was "It's easy, the answer is always right there on the page."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think I turned out reasonably well, I was known to be a child prodigy, and my parents never pressured me in any way to outperform. (To such a degree that my maternal grandmother was the one who bought me the Childcraft books that formed a large part of my childhood.)

Not sure that was _optimal_ , but it's a data point.

</comment><comment><USER18> Having been formerly labeled a gifted child, I'm not sure they really exist. I'm not sure the child _has_ something different -- rather s/he _does_ something different.

I was definitely very intelligent by IQ tests, but it seems to me that what I really had as a child was focus. Arbitrary tasks -- ones that I set for myself, as well as the ones the world does -- were met with the total commitment that adults usually reserve for wartime. So of course I advanced more quickly.

As for why I had such focus, that's complicated and probably varies from person to person. But did anyone else feel that way?

</comment><comment><USER19> I was labeled gifted, but I also seriously lacked coordination. My handwriting was and is truly awful, and any "project" that involved construction came out a mess, no matter how much time I put into it. Sometime around middle school I was diagnosed with ADHD.

As a result, I grew up with the message that I was "smart but lazy" and "if only you would apply yourself then..." Teachers always assumed I did a rush job on everything (which before I got ADHD medication was often true). Parents saw grades that were good but not what I was capable of.

That sort of message can haunt you.

On a related note, Gladwell (in one of his books, I forget which) wrote about how people who were picked to be great successes based on childhood IQ scores wound up all over the map; but very few were great successes (most wound up as moderately successful professionals, IIRC)

<comment><USER20> I think expecting gifted kids to be successful, and putting a bunch of effort into such, is a mismatch.

It's pretty well known that perseverance (perhaps being a jerk too) is much more important than high IQ for becoming rich and powerful.

High IQ is much better for coming up with deep ideas, being creative, etc. Not characteristics that necessarily correspond with our standard definition of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wasn't gifted but I was quite bright, having the third highest IQ out of the fifty or so pupils in the two fifth grade classes. I was doing very well at school but my teacher didn't like me for some reason so he kept accusing me of cheating. He told the entire class on many occasions not to have anything to do with me. From that, I learned to dumb myself down and not do so well at school.

</comment><comment><USER22> If there's one thing I can suggest to any prospective or current parent, it's that if you child is smart, clever or exceptional in any field, just love them. Love them with all your heart and soul.

I was a 'gifted' kid, and by many standards people would say that I had a good childhood, but I didn't. My childhood was a mixture of pressure, bullying and failure (i.e. getting A's instead of A*'s). My parents did the best they could, but as Philip Larkin said, "They fuck you up, your parents do".

So please. If you have a 'gifted' or 'talented' child, let them know that you love them no matter what, that they don't always have to come first, and that happiness is more important that intelligence.

<comment><USER23> It's probably best to love the mediocre and stupid children as well.

<comment><USER22> I couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Stanford psych professor Carol Dweck has research and written extensively on how your adoption of either a "growth" mindset - achievement is largely work- based - or "fixed" mindset - achievement is largely gift-based - is largely determinative of the long-term success of those to whom things seem to come without effort younger in life.

[https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi- bin/drupalm/cdw...](https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi- bin/drupalm/cdweck)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck>

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote something about this a few years ago:

[http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth- mind...](http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset- which-one-are-you/)

I think it's a very important concept to teach children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> From the article "A gifted child is just one who has advanced beyond his or her peers; it takes drive, application, perseverance and insight to turn that potential into exceptional adult success."

It's worth saying that again. "A gifted child is just one who has advanced beyond his or her peers". It's not a big deal so don't make a big deal about it. Praise shouldn't be the response to gifted-ness, but rather asking him/her "What do you want to do?"

Learning that the best motivation is internal, not external, is an essential need in our early educational system.

</comment><comment><USER8> A child that learns ideas young might not understand them as deeply as a similarly-intelligent adult that learns them when he is 20. Although the vast majority of such adults will not understand the ideas as well as the child, the simple fact that there are many more adults studying such things than gifted children means the pioneers and important researchers in the field are statistically unlikely to be prodigies.

</comment><comment><USER26> I grew up with this as well. My 'solution' was to chart my own course. While i've never (yet) achieved huge success in the traditional manner, I continue to learn, grow and push myself.

The problem, as I see it, comes from the expectations of parents, teachers, etc. While they may mean well, their guidance tends to be too conventional. They want to fit you into the System, just in a slightly different role.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Terman found his answers in his longitudinal study on gifted children called > Genetic Studies of Genius which had five volumes The children in this study > were called "Termites". The volumes reviewed the follow-ups Terman did > throughout their lives. The fifth volume was a 35 year follow-up...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman>

<comment><USER28> A better book than any of the books from the Terman study about the Termites is Joel Shurkin's Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992). (ISBN 978-0316788908)

[http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/books/bk-1247_1_lewis...](http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/books/bk-1247_1_lewis- terman/2)

Joel Shurkin worked for the Stanford News Service as a science writer, and was the first independent researcher to have access to the Terman Study files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A while back, I wrote an essay on the subject...

[http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright- and-...](http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-young/)

</comment><comment><USER30> "Gifted", like the word "Genius", pales in importance to hard work and tenacity.

Give me one child with average IQ and a lasting obsession with one or more subjects, and another child with a "gifted" IQ and a bad work ethic and fleeting interests, and we'll see who's more accomplished at 40.

</comment><comment><USER31> People just need to know the techniques of pressure management. When I was raised, my parents taught me always to be humble. There are always people better, smarter than you. I got my PhD from UCLA and happened to know this guy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao> He was a full professor at 24 and teaching people much older than him and he was the winner of fields medal. So, if u have too much pressure, think twice that somewhere, someone is more intelligent. And I am sure just like all other records, someday, someone will break it.

</comment><comment><USER32> _For 36 years, Dr. Freeman has studied a group of 210 British children - <USER2> gifted, most not. In her new book, Gifted Lives, she concluded that, of the 20 identified as gifted, only six went on to adult lives that matched the potential of their early promise (one is a successful opera singer; another runs a hedge fund.)_

I would think that 6 out of 20 is statistically significantly higher than any control group of their peers.

Sure, that means 14 of 20 didn't, but how many of the 190 not identified as gifted went on to similar levels of achievement? For parity, the answer would be 57. I'd wager the actual answer is no more than 1, with the most likely answer being 0.

It's not that being labelled as gifted as a pre-teen is some kind of express ticket punch to fame, fortune and Easy Street. How could it be? You've only spent 8 maybe 9 years not soiling yourself at that point.

There will be strife and challenge along the way, and not everyone will rise above those challenges, for a variety of internal or external reasons. I'd still prefer to be in the 20 rather than the 190. (Background: in a US program run by Johns Hopkins(SMPY-CTY), I was so identified @11, and while, in the subsequent 28 years, I may not have become an opera singer or run a hedge fund, I've done OK. I'll also observe that some of my past was very easy, other portions were fairly difficult. I could have achieved more, but I could also have acheived way, way less.)

</comment><comment><USER33> One curse of gifted children is that their work life is significantly more "regular" than their academic achievements. Even if they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. there will be plenty of people with the exact same title - many of whom were not similarly gifted.

I imagine there's quite a bit of worry that they should be doing something greater.

</comment><comment><USER34> This sort of labeling is harmful because it is at best a diversion. Focus on what's important -- financial independence.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, and otherwise eschewing standard definitions of success if it doesn't fit my interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How _do_ you know if someone is truly gifted when they are in that gray area? In some cases it's clearly visible, but how do we judge? What parameters are observed? Precocity? Attention to detail? Creativity?

What are the parameters behind something like this?

<comment><USER36> I'm the parent of "gifted" children, and found that the tests these days are pretty objective, focusing on identifying traits in order to optimize the curriculum for all students. In spite of different capabilities, kids in an age group are emotional peers, and keeping them together is an important goal. Therefore, it's important not to view the process as stigmatizing or as a popularity contest. Different kids have different needs, and parents who desperately want their children to be labeled as "gifted" risk ignoring the true nature of their children, possibly doing more harm than good. I've found it expedient to treat "giftedness" as another learning disorder, or at the very least, a special need, which helps to keep my parental ego out of the equation.

For example, one of the key traits for identifying the gifted kids is the ability to learn without repetition. They absorb and retain information instantly, and often become bored or restless if they aren't continually challenged. You might be surprised to learn that among the gifted children are often kids with behavioral problems or full-blown ADHD. But it makes sense when you realize that the symptoms can flare up while the teacher is repeating lessons for students who need it, leaving the others to their own devices.

Some gifted kids are well-rounded, while others display traits that make them gifted in specific areas (excellent pattern-recognition and large vocabularies can be indicators). A good program will identify these traits and tailor an approach that works best for the individual. It may sound complicated, but I've seen it handled effectively in my children's public school, so it's definitely attainable.

<comment><USER35> Your answer helped me realize that being gifted is just a part of the equation. A child's emotional, physical and other needs are important too. It's as if there is a distortion in the lens with which people view such kids, resigning them to one-dimensional caricatures, while losing out the essence of who they are.

Thank you for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> One wonders, what exactly makes a person "superhuman"? What if you're just 5% better than the mean? 10%?

Does the label "human" encompass all of the variations? Does an IQ in the top 1-2% of a nation make somebody "superhuman"?

(I originally wrote an overly long post full of personal anecdotes recalling the pain of being smart and different, but thought these questions added more).

<comment><USER38> IQ may not be even real, after all. Just a statistical artefact.</comment></comment>


Olive: Professional open-source non-linear video editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/olive-editor/olive <comment><USER2> previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18838227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18838227)

<comment><USER3> Also a bit at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984430)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're more interested in the "free" than the "open source" part, Davinci Resolve has a free version which seems very powerful, and Avid offer Media Composer First. I think the main restriction vs. the paid versions is maximum output resolution. I don't know a great deal about video editing but have used Davinci for a few tasks and once I got my head round the basics, was quite impressed.

Just thought I'd mention these as they might be useful alternatives for some people as they are widely used in the industry so there is a lot of tutorial content etc. available. This looks really cool and is an impressive open source project though!

<comment><USER5> The free Resolve version is _ridicolously powerful_ for it being freeware. BMD has been adding features and improving the package at a pace that is imho truly unprecedented in the industry.

The full version (notable features are a proprietary GPU-based h.264 codec and support for framerates beyond 60 Hz and resolutions beyond 4K (the free version does 4K) is still only 300 bucks or so.

<comment><USER4> That's really cool, I didn't realise the free version did 4K! As with most of these specialist types of applications (thinking of music software, with which I am more familiar), the GUI and concepts can take quite a lot of getting used to as they are so specialised, but Resolve actually seems reasonably user friendly for doing simple edits. No idea how to use all the Fusion stuff, etc, but seems really powerful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had never heard the term "non-linear video editor". Apparently it means that the original files aren't edited (instead, the project points to sections of the original media): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- linear_editing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- linear_editing_system)

This is how all video editing software I've ever used works. Are there any video editors that aren't non-linear? Seems a bit unnecessary to mention.

<comment><USER7> IIRC films used to be edited by manually splicing the master _physical_ film. This altered the original master copy. The development of non-linear video editing revolutionized the industry, starting with Avid and proceeding to the Amiga toaster and now to the marvels of magic that we can literally carry in our phones.

<comment><USER8> While it would be possible to edit a film using the original camera reel, this is generally not a good idea because (1) most motion pictures are captured on negative film and (2) the repeated cuts, splices, and general handling of the film that happens during edit will inevitably damage it.

The solution to both problems is to produce a workprint from the camera negative and edit with that. This inverts the negative image and gives you a copy that you can play with freely.

Watching someone editing on a Steenbeck [0], you will quickly see the importance of not editing the camera negative directly.

Once the edit decisions are finalized, the original camera negative is carefully cut and spliced to match the workprint, and a pristine "answer print" is struck from the edited camera negative. Traditionally, this is also where color timing is done—the printer lights can be configured to balance different shots and scenes as the answer print is being made.

The final release prints are usually third-generation copies (if you don't count the camera negative as a copy)—(1) a handful of interpositives are made from the original camera negative following the exact procedure used to make the answer print, then (2) internegatives are struck from the interpositives, and (3) a large number of release prints can be struck from the internegatives.

A notable exception to this was the release of Dunkirk (2017). The 37 IMAX screens in the world [1] that were exhibiting a 15-perf 70mm film print were actually showing a first-generation copy struck directly from the original camera negative.

(All that said, it is possible to shoot on reversal film, which is positive out of the camera, and can be edited and projected directly. Also, I've never edited a film like this myself and likely got a few things wrong—so take this with a grain of salt.)

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUxbfiZ_-9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUxbfiZ_-9Y) [1] [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/imax-melbourne-is-the- onl...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/imax-melbourne-is-the-only-place- you-can-watch-dunkirk-in-top-quality/)

<comment><USER9> > it is possible to shoot on reversal film, which is positive out of the > camera, and can be edited and projected directly. Also, I've never edited a > film like this myself

I took a film production class in which we shot and edited negativeless 16mm film. Tape held together the splices when they were screened the day after editing, never had a problem. 25+ years later, my guess is they'd fall apart if you tried to project them. I didn't pay to get a VHS transfer made then so they'll probably never be seen again; no great loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So there's kdenlive, shotcut and now this (maybe more). I hope some of them would merge together so there'd be more ppl to maintain it and add functionality.

<comment><USER11> Yeah the problem isn't even that there aren't FOSS video editors there just aren't any ones that could actually replace the video editor I use for my job. There's probably a dozen semi-usable video editors out there but I wish there was something I could get myself to use as more than just novelty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're a hobbyist or just want something open-source to play with, this might be acceptable.

If you want a real professional-quality NLE on Linux, there's Davinci Resolve. In the commercial world, it's more known for its color-grading features, but it's a decent editor as well.

If you're an _actual_ professional (you edit video for money), you're going to be on a Mac or PC and using Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, or MAYBE Final Cut Pro (but probably not).

<comment><USER13> There are professionals using FCP.

<comment><USER12> Sure, hence the "maybe". More and more, though, it's Premiere or Media Composer (although more Adobe except for high end commercial editing where Avid has always had a foothold).

And more and more Mac video editors are switching to PC to get higher clock speeds and better GPUs for dealing with 4K, 5k, and 8k footage faster for less $$$. It will be VERY interesting to see how that trend plays out once the new Mac Pro is released.

<comment><USER13> Agree, I'm quite looking forward to see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was quite excited when I read the headline as the number of video editors are pretty limited for Linux. However, I was disappointed when I visited the website to read that it is still is alpha.

Can a product claim to be professional when it is still in alpha?

By the way, congrats on launching!

<comment><USER15> > Can a product claim to be professional when it is still in alpha?

"Professional" distinguishes the target audience and use cases; a professional NLE video editor that isn't done yet is different from a lightweight personal video editor that's close to feature-complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What will Olive offer than you won't be able to get from Blender with the 2.80 UI overhaul?

<comment><USER17> Standard workflow features targeted towards video editing, hopefully.

I use Blender for all of my video editing, but that's _despite_ the Blender video editing UI, not because of it. The Blender devs are very clear that video editing is not a focus for them, and it's only recently that Blender got a maintainer for the video editor.

3-point editing, a core part of most NLE workflows, is just not a thing in Blender. Things like transforming (move, rotate, scale) a video clip, adjusting clip speed, etc. are awkward, glitchy, incomplete, or all of the above.

Blender is crazy powerful, but it's definitely a Venn-diagram relation to dedicated NLE software, not a superset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The screenshots look nice. This is a segment Open Source has traditionally lagged so it's very cool to see new entrants.

I was really excited a while back for the OpenShot rewrite, but one thing I never liked was the new (iirc similar to the old) UI. I can't exactly pinpoint what, it just had more of a "Windows Movie Maker" style UI, and it wasn't my cup of tea. This UI, though, looks pretty nice imo.

I'm curious to dig in and see where this project is headed. Would be amazing to see an opensource NLE working towards hardware acceleration and supporting huge resolutions well, but I'll also take an open source mid-tier video editing tool with a nice UI and be perfectly content.

</comment><comment><USER19> Kinda off-topic, but not entirely - are there some articles and perhaps even reference code for how to get from standard color correction controls (like RGB curves, or HSL color wheels, etc.) - into a LUT?

Use case is just curiosity... was dabbling with applying a LUT to images and thought it'd be nice to create my own with controls as opposed to downloading one pre-baked or using commercial software to export one.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Even if Olive is missing something you need, come back in a month or two and it's possible it will have been implemented." \-- I'll just tell that to my client.

</comment><comment><USER21> The main site[0] has some more information.

It's still considered alpha-quality, but claims to be rapidly evolving. From the screenshots, it looks like it's already fairly capable. I wonder if it could be a useful alternative to Kdenlive.

[0] [https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/](https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a tremendous effort, but it won't get me to switch from the very reasonably priced Adobe Premiere. For one thing, Adobe Premiere can encode and transcode many, many times faster with GPU and Intel AVX-512 support.

<comment><USER23> Open source is not trying to win your "business" by competing on features. Open source is about choice.

If you want a feature added, you have the ability to do it yourself or pay someone (possibly the core developers) to do it directly. Contrast to asking a company like Adobe, where you represent maybe 0.0000002% of Adobe's revenue (based on $20/mo vs $9 billion), what do you think the chances are they'll listen to your input?

If Adobe (or someone who buys them in the future) decides to change their pricing model, or drastically change their product, you have no choice, or you're stuck on an old version (if it still runs), or you just can't open any old projects anymore. With open source, that type of thing rarely happens and when it does, it generally leads to forks (and you can always fork it yourself).

It's really about flexibility, balancing risk, and ultimately, being able to get done what you're trying to get done. Even if you don't use it, the competition generally pushes _everyone_ to keep improving.

<comment><USER24> Yo competition is great but it's disingenuous, even borderline delusional, to suggest a video editing outfit to hire developers to fix up an open source project instead of using a paid one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't it a bit too early to call this "professional"?

<comment><USER26> Some video editors seek to be the right tool for amateurs wanting to make simple edits.

What I take away from "professional" in this context is that it targets professional workflows and capabilities.

<comment><USER25> It's only a target at this point. This tool doesn't seem to be currently used by professionals in a professional setting so it is not a professional tool. It may become one, one day, and I which them the best, but it is not.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsbtv.com/news/breaking-news/amazon-cargo-plane-crashes-in-texas-3-dead/924509495 <comment><USER2> I have gained such respect for the FAA and the NTSB in that _every_ crash is followed up with a root cause analysis that all other industries should be in awe of.

When this is all over, we'll know exactly what went wrong. We'll see the FAA issue guidance or rule changes that will ensure it doesn't happen again. And then we'll somehow see an even further reduction in airline crashes.

I hope that in a few more years, as more companies join the industry, we may see a similar pattern start to evolve in the space launch industry.

<comment><USER3> Imagine if we did that with software generally.

Every time there's a data breach, an agency would investigate with the same thoroughness they do in aviation.

Then, National Geographic could have a spin off show called _Data Breach Investigation_ (their aviation show is called _Air Crash Investigation_ in the UK, I think it's called different things in different Countries.)

A man can dream...

<comment><USER4> Honestly that sounds like hell. I sure as hell didn't become a developer so I could get thrown in jail for buggy code. Building software is something no one really knows how to do and we are still at the infancy of our field. I don't think it would be fair to impose the same standards thst real engineers have on such a nascent and choatic field.

<comment><USER5> > _I sure as hell didn't become a developer so I could get thrown in jail for > buggy code..._

You'd better stay away from any company that requires FDA approval. Believe it or not, every change is signed. _By you_. By the FDA compliance person. Etc etc. I'll give you two guesses as to how they decide who goes to prison if God forbid something in the software is shown to have caused a fatality? Or, worse, a series of fatalities?

That sort of regulation happens even in the software industry. It just depends on the purpose of the software.

<comment><USER6> >I'll give you two guesses as to how they decide who goes to prison if God forbid something in the software is shown to have caused a fatality?

Would you mind just telling us instead? Thanks.

<comment><USER7> See IEC 62304:2006 ([https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html](https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html)) and the related standards which govern the formal processes which medical device software must meet for FDA and CE approval (as well as other national standards).

The whole process from requirements, specifications, high and low level design, implementation, validation and verification and the rest of the lifecycle requires stringent oversight, including documentation and signoffs. The signatures on those documents have legal meaning and accountability for the engineers who did the analysis and review at each stage.

<comment><USER8> Look at this from an economics perspective, do people in this sort of positions get paid more than comparable positions in other fields? I'd never heard of legal liability for software engineers. Has anyone ever been convicted or otherwise been held accountable when there was a failure?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Boeing 767 crashes or emergencies are extremely rare: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Accidents_and_inciden...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_767)

Most are related to human intervention such as terrorism, pilot error, fuel error and only a very small amount are mechanical errors. Of the 12 problems, only 5 were mechanical error. I wonder what the cause of this will be.

<comment><USER10> Those numbers are outrageous on their own. But what's even more amazing is that not all emergencies result in crashes. Air Canada Flight 143 _ran out of fuel halfway into the journey_ and there were no fatalities! They literally glided to a motor track. That's so incredible a modern movie would have trouble getting its audience to suspend disbelief for it.

<comment><USER11> The cause analysis of how they ended up with half a tank of fuel is crazy. The crew loading the fuel mistook lbs for kg. The plane's fuel indicators were faulty and required a manual procedure before takeoff. The engineer communicated that to a pilot and the pilot misunderstood. That pilot relayed his misunderstanding to the next pilot and that next pilot misunderstood the misunderstanding. And then that next pilot misunderstood the checklist indicating whether it was legal to fly with the non-functioning fuel gauge. And the flight engineer didn't catch the lbs/kg mistake. Then during a brief stopover in Ottawa, the captain thought to re-measure the fuel with the floatstick, but still used the incorrect conversion factor.

<comment><USER12> I wonder how many lives are lost each year (not just in aviation but globally) because the US refuses to convert to the metric system.

<comment><USER13> > _I wonder how many lives are lost each year (not just in aviation but > globally) because the US refuses to convert to the metric system._

Keep in mind that the U.S. is not the only place where measures are mixed. If anything, British people end up using _more_ measures than Americans. Here in Canada, we have a lot of things read out in both, because of the immense sticking power of customary measures.

U.S. organizations are actively encouraged and (for the most part) fully allowed to adopt SI measures, but it's not like switching road sides, where everything makes sense after you hear "drive on the right now".

Keep in mind that powered flight was basically entirely developed by Americans and pre-SI Brits, and already had more than fifty years of history by the time either pioneering country adopted SI in any significant way. It should not surprise you in the slightest that an American plane expected to hear fuel mass given as weight in pounds; in fact, it should astonish you that anyone is trying to measure it in kilograms in North America.

<comment><USER12> I'm British, so you don't need to explain using mixed systems, however in any kind of academic, engineering or scientific contexts metric units are used almost exclusively. Yes, people still refer to height in feet and inches a lot, and we'll drink a pint (a real pint! None of your mini-pints!), but that does change over time. For example older people will use stone and pounds for their weight but being younger the doc doesn't bother telling me my weight in anything but kilograms so I don't even know my weight except in Kg.

Even in Britain, in almost all engineering contexts, SI units would be assumed. Your point about Americans assuming imperial units is precisely wwhy it's so dangerous that metrification hasn't happened there.

If the US went metric, then there would no longer be any need to assume anything but metric anywhere, and it would be safer for it.

Yes, there's a long standing tradition, but it only takes a couple of generations to completely change, and that would likely be hastened by being the last large country to do so and having a large cultural footprint on the rest of the world.

If the US did convert to metric, in 3 or 4 generations the whole world would be metric, and there wouldn't be any "wrong assumptions", and it is making bad assumptions that lead to preventable failures.

If China can manage to go metric, the US can too.

<comment><USER13> > _however in any kind of academic, engineering or scientific contexts metric > units are used almost exclusively_

This is true in the United States as well, but fueling a commercial airplane is not an academic, scientific, or even an engineering exercise. It is as routine and pedestrian as refueling a bus.

> _Your point about Americans assuming imperial units is precisely wwhy it 's > so dangerous that metrification hasn't happened there._

Or maybe it's an argument for why "metrification" is itself dangerous. The problem is the transition, not being on either side of the fence. It seems to me that the only safe mode of transition is first to dual readout, and only then to SI-exclusive.

Don't get me wrong, I like SI units, I use them every day, and I don't long to spend any time multiplying and dividing by irregular fractions; I just don't like the dismissive "shoulda been metric" rhetoric that floats around everywhere; as though you can just stop selling letter paper and force everyone to use A-series compatible envelopes, and convert the clean (if baroque) markings on the paper products to bizarre decimal fractions of a g/m² without any empathy for the old guard.

Some people care about how Britain still drives on the wrong side of the road, but that doesn't mean they should berate you every time a drunk roadtripping Frenchman turns out into oncoming traffic.

<comment><USER14> A British bus will be refuelled in litres, which I think was the point.

> as though you can just stop selling letter paper and force everyone to use > A-series compatible envelopes, and convert the clean (if baroque) markings > on the paper products to bizarre decimal fractions of a g/m² without any > empathy for the old guard.

The first part was done in Britain in the 1950s, but with the weights rounded to convenient metric numbers.

<comment><USER15> > A British bus will be refuelled in litres, which I think was the point.

Refuelled in litres, but with efficiency measured in miles per gallon. It's kind of a mess.

<comment><USER16> Miles per US gallon or miles per imperial gallon?

<comment><USER17> The latter, miles per UK gallon. Watch out for that, because if you don't know better, you'll read about some car in the UK and wonder why it has such astounding fuel economy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For reliable updates and objective information, as always, consult avherald. For this accident: [http://avherald.com/h?article=4c497c3c&opt=0](http://avherald.com/h?article=4c497c3c&opt=0)

<comment><USER19> Airliners.net is usually interesting to follow as well. Mostly pilots posting: [https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1416323](https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1416323)

<comment><USER19> The FlightRadar image in that thread is pretty telling: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0HZO8GX4AAvxAL.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0HZO8GX4AAvxAL.jpg)

The last readout they were at an altitude of 1325ft, with a vertical descent of 29504 feet per minute (~335mph). So that reading was (probably) roughly 2-3 seconds before hitting the ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's the ATC chatter around it: [http://archive- server.liveatc.net/kiah/KIAH-App-Feb-23-2019-...](http://archive- server.liveatc.net/kiah/KIAH-App-Feb-23-2019-1830Z.mp3)

<comment><USER10> For those unfamiliar (like myself), what is this?

<comment><USER19> Air traffic control. You hear them talking to, then losing contact with the flight. They refer to the flight mostly as "591 Heavy", though you'll also hear "3591".

There's several references. Around 27:09 you can hear them talk about looking for a lost aircraft.

<comment><USER10> Oh cool, thanks. I didn't realize this chatter is public.

<comment><USER20> Aircraft communication, including ATC, is mostly done using plain old VHF radio. You can buy a decent handheld air band radio for $200. Ancient technology, but it works well enough.

<comment><USER21> True, works well enough, and also it's a disaster waiting to happen for very obvious cybersecurity reasons

<comment><USER22> I'm not finding those reasons to be as obvious as you, perhaps you could elaborate.

<comment><USER23> What's stopping someone from impersonating ATC?

If I understand correctly, a foggy day + "cleared for takeoff" is all that's needed for a malicious actor to kill hundreds of people

<comment><USER24> > If I understand correctly, a foggy day + "cleared for takeoff" is all that's > needed for a malicious actor to kill hundreds of people

Only if the real ATC really, _really_ drops the ball.

It's happened a few times, and leads to an immediate "who the _fuck_ was that on this frequency?", and that's likely to result in the pilots in the area treating it like a comms outage.

See [https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/44279/what- prev...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/44279/what-prevents- someone-from-hijacking-a-radio-frequency-mid-air)

<comment><USER23> It clearly hasn't become too much of a problem yet, but I feel pretty concerned that, given my understanding, it appears there's only one layer of defense against this type of attack. The response requires 1) the ATC to figure out what happened, 2) the ATC to promptly cancel the takeoff clearance, and 3) the pilot receiving+responding to the cancelled clearance with enough time.

Too many things in that chain can go wrong, especially so given this would all need to happen in just a few seconds. A sophisticated attacker might even be able to jam the signal right after they give the fake clearance or (not entirely certain this is possible) use a highly directional transmitter that would allow the targeted plane to receive the message but not others.

I'm definitely not an expert in this area, so I wouldn't be surprised if I missed something, but if I didn't, this appears to be an astonishingly large vulnerability.

<comment><USER25> It's just simply something that isn't as big of a deal as you're thinking. Hell, we have problems today with idiots on frequency that are technically qualified to be there but are gumming up the works.

When was the last time you authenticated that construction worker directing traffic on the ground?

Pilots fly without a control tower all the time. They're also the final authority to the safe operation of that aircraft. If anything is amiss, we'll do something else. Maybe that'll mean contacting a different facility on a different frequency, or declare lost comms via transponder and go to our filed alternate while things are worked out.

Try listening to LiveATC for an uncontrolled field on a nice weekend day. (Or even a towered airport like KCMA on a Saturday at noon.) It's controlled chaos and yet we all make it work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's terrible, and it could have easily been worse had the crash happened closer to Houston.

</comment><comment><USER27> VASAviation (Youtuber that publishes ATC recordings and plots them on a map with weather) for this incident:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cn58iVuzBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cn58iVuzBY) [2mins30]

</comment><comment><USER28> On Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Air_Flight_3591](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Air_Flight_3591)

</comment><comment><USER29> I can't comment on the cause, but it reminds me of a UPS cargo plane fire in Dubai. Lithium batteries can't be extinguished using oxygen-deprivation methods. It is typically the kind of goods that are shipped by plane by mistake.

It was featured in an Air Crash Investigation episode named "Fatal Delivery". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6)

</comment><comment><USER30> AVHerald [http://avherald.com/h?article=4c497c3c&opt=0](http://avherald.com/h?article=4c497c3c&opt=0)

<comment><USER31> Interesting link, thank you. They mention that the debris is spread out over three miles of shallow water. I don't know anything about aviation, but it seems like this would suggest that the plane broke apart above ground.

<comment><USER32> How did you get that from the link? I read 'eyewitnesses report it going in nose first'.

<comment><USER31> In one of the yellow highlighted sections

 _The crash scene extends over a distance of 3 miles in shallow waters up to 5 feet deep._

<comment><USER33> Given the velocity of impact, it's not unusual for an intact plane to literally explode into tiny pieces upon impact, that continue traveling for quite some distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> ATC recording: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cn58iVuzBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cn58iVuzBY)

</comment><comment><USER35> I was surprised to learn Amazon has it's own planes. I always assumed that cargo planes carried cargo from a variety of companies.

<comment><USER36> Amazon doesn't own them, Atlas Air owns and operates them for Amazon. Groups like American Airlines Cargo and Emirates Cargo do have mixed loads though, but these Prime jets are more akin to UPS and FedEx jets that serve a single user.

<comment><USER35> Interesting fact, thanks for sharing.

When I lived near a major cargo airport for Fedex, I often got Prime stuff delivered via Fed Ex, which I assumed was intermingled. I didn't realize Amazon also had it's own literal fleet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Was really strange seeing this last night on the news, I was only about 20 miles away. Very curious what the cause was.

</comment><comment><USER38> i thought the domain was webtv.com for a second. (WebTV was how my paternal grandparents used the Internet.)

</comment><comment><USER39> Hopefully they have a contingency plan to keep those Prime parcels on time.

Edit: They must have contingency plans for such scenarios. That's part of the job. But I think that it is not possible to keep to the initial schedule, so I'm guessing that the plan is to re-despatch ASAP to minimise delays while displaying the standard "delayed-apologises" to customers.

<comment><USER40> Are people downvoting because they think you're being heartless? Is this not a valid concern that businesses have to deal with even in the midst of dealing with the tragic loss of life?

<comment><USER41> This is not a valid concern. The cost of refunding all the packages will be trivial compared to the cost of the plane, Amazon will apologize to the customers and refund or offer replacement, no special contingency plan needed.

<comment><USER39> Total loss of shipment is a valid concern in the supply chain and transport industries...

Remember also that the total loss of the plane impacts more that this single flight. Like airlines, I am sure it had an utilisation schedule, and now it's gone so they'll have to account for that.

That's why they do have contingency plans... And that's why they develop them with a cool head. Because when disaster strikes people tend to get emotional.

Edit: Wikipedia says that Amazon Air operates 39 planes. Sudden loss of one has to have an impact that has to be planned.

<comment><USER41> Sudden loss of one is unlikely enough that they probably don't have a specific plan ahead of time.

<comment><USER42> Sudden loss due to crash = unlikely (fortunately)

Grounded for unknown timespan due to some kind of severe damage = does happen from time to time (good thing, because otherwise, crashes would become more likely...)

Since the effect on the logistics chain is identical (at least apart from that single shipment in question), you just use the contingency plan for the latter when the former happens. And for the latter, you MUST have a plan.

<comment><USER41> The plan there involves sending the same cargo through another plane or similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Tragic. I wonder if this will reach the national news media. Also, I am curious as to what caused it.

<comment><USER44> I'm in Europe and have read about this in local news sites since hours so I wonder why you think it will not reach US national news

<comment><USER45> This is the front page on US CNN right now.

[https://i.imgur.com/FqitEhc.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FqitEhc.jpg)

And they typically elevate stories based on reader interest, so the fact that it's so thoroughly minimized (to the right, in red) shows how little anyone cares relative to the other stories.

<comment><USER39> Let's be realistic here, this is not (national) front page news.

<comment><USER46> It's the first cargo plane crash with fatalities in 6 years. [0] Since this type of aircraft also carries passengers it's big news.

Commercial air travel in the US has a pretty enviable track record. As far as I am aware, outside of the fluke accident that killed one passenger last year when a piece of the engine went through the fuselage, the last fatalities were in 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407. [1]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_to_com...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_to_commercial_cargo_aircraft#2019)

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

<comment><USER47> Asiana Air 214 had 3 deaths in 2013. Pilot botched the landing and struck the tail on a seawall at San Francisco. Back portion of fuselage was ripped off, ejecting a handful of passengers and crew.

For US-based carriers, you are correct. Ignoring international carriers operating in the US strikes me as slightly disingenuous (though lots of people do it), as the international carriers should be subject to most of the same regulations as US carriers (when operating in the US). And as a consumer, I'm as likely to be on BA, KLM, or somebody else as I am United when flying internationally.

<comment><USER46> It's harder to enforce regulation at the same level as for a domestic carrier. How easy is it to track the quality of pilot training, or aircraft maintenance parts half a world away?

<comment><USER48> _It 's harder to enforce regulation at the same level as for a domestic carrier. How easy is it to track the quality of pilot training, or aircraft maintenance parts half a world away? _

Not that much harder, you still need FAA approval to fly in the United States. For instance, Air India has run afoul of the FAA in the past and most Indonesian airlines have been banned from EU airspace at one time or another. Currently VietJet (I think) is working to get FAA approval to fly in the US.

The problem is that it's inappropriate to say "your lack of safety culture is a problem" before there are deaths. Korean Air had to hire submit to a bunch of training by Delta Airlines after a series of wrecks. It's not a particularly uncommon opinion to look at the culture of deference and respect for elders/seniors you see in East Asia as being detrimental to safety. I agree. The Asiana wreck showed this (there were three people in the cockpit, two of whom called for a go around, the other one ignored the calls). KLM showed what happens when you're unwilling to question a senior officer back in the 70s in Tenerife.

<comment><USER46> In theory the regulation is the same. By "enforcing" I meant making sure the practice matches the theory.

I remember finding out that if a pilot has a "conflict of personality" with another pilot they can just check a box on a form and they never end up on the same crew. This was after one difficult pilot bullied his young co-pilot until the latter made an error (failed to read the altitude) that cost the lives of all people on the plane.

The rule likely applies to every airline flying in the US. But actually enforcing it is a lot harder to enforce half way around the globe or somewhere where that safety culture you mention is different. There's a chance the punitive measures are also applied differently, where in the US someone might go to prison for failing to properly apply regulation.

<comment><USER48> > In theory the regulation is the same.

It's not though. Canada, for instance, has far more lax work time limits on its pilots. Guess who else has had problems at SFO? If you guessed Air Canada you'd be correct. There are plenty of regulations that are different for foreign carriers operating on American soil (it probably comes down to mutually agreed ICAO rules).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> More articles

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6737937/Atlas- Air-c...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6737937/Atlas-Air-cargo- jet-operating-Amazon-Prime-Air-reportedly-crashed-approach-Houston-Texas.html)

Last photo [https://twitter.com/AirlineFlyer/status/1099397894589816832](https://twitter.com/AirlineFlyer/status/1099397894589816832)

</comment><comment> Max-20 The crew already had 2 overnight flights before could be fatigue and simple mistakes during bad weather.

<comment><USER50> Do you think you could leave the speculation about cause and fault to the authorities? People have died and you're confident enough to start attributing blame with essentially zero information? Appalling.

<comment><USER51> Granted, citations were needed for the post you're hammering. (I can't find anything online either way, re sleep loss in this accident.) But the author might not be speculating about the sleep loss, insiders sometimes comment here, in which case there won't be citations.

That sleep loss contributes to accidents and is therefore relevant to the discussion (if true) is in no way speculative: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=accident+sleep+los...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=accident+sleep+loss)

<comment><USER52> And this is why HN has the rules about "general news" it has.

Discussion of specific issues is interesting, but they're better discussed in extra threads instead of as speculations on a case nothing concrete is known about.

<comment><USER51> I need you to disambiguate. What do you identify as an irrelevant "specific issue" in this thread?

<comment><USER52> I haven't called anything "irrelevant". But without anything actually known, comments can basically only reiterate generic points about plane crashes or suggest random possible reasons, which predictably leads to discussions on how it's irresponsible to speculate or suggest specific (now dead) people misbehaved without evidence. It doesn't make for good content, and the fact alone that the crash happened isn't a good topic for HN.

This specific subthread starts with either speculation or unsourced claims of lack of sleep: That alone is an interesting topic of discussion, but better placed on a submission about a specific case where this is known to have been a factor, or some general article about it, not here.

<comment><USER51> My point is that we don't know whether the poster was speculating. I would be happy with a citations for all comments rule, but it's not in place now. The comment had details, wasn't general speculation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jolla CEO: You will soon be able turn your Android device into a Sailfish device - <AUTHOR> http://www.talouselama.fi/nakoislehti/jolla%20ceo%20you%20will%20soon%20be%20able%20turn%20your%20android%20device%20into%20a%20sailfish%20device/a2218386 <comment><USER3> Good, Google is beginning to really frustrate me. Why can't I cut and paste from the description box on a Youtube video? Serving up a totally broken Google images page to Firefox for Android may be Firefox's fault but they should test with other browsers. It has a totally broken permissions model, notably for location access which after struggling with its nagging for a year I just gave up and now Facebook et al are all dialing in my location constantly. It has totally broken control over background apps waking up as well.

You are just a consumer on Android. The founders call Google 'the third half of your brain', and when you use Android you realise you don't control that third half, it's controlled for advertising purposes (with access granted or taken for various government agencies). Ubuntu, Jolla or Firefox need to succeed on mobile because Android is actually worse than Windows 95, XP etc for user customisation and freedom. That's stock on a Nexus too, the custom versions from handset manufacturers are a whole different train wreck.

<comment><USER4> Oh man the Samsung version is the epitome of a train wreck. At some point, without my knowledge, NFL Mobile got installed on my phone and now every time I try to open a link, it completely ignores my preferences and asks me what program to open it with, one of which is NFL Mobile. It's just so nonsensical it's laughable. Nonstock Android is worse than Windows vendor bloatware.

<comment><USER5> This. I regret buying a Samsung S4 because it is loaded with so much crap. First, Google preloads their crap onto it, then Samsung preloads their crap ontop of that. THEN, AT&T decides that it should also provide you with messaging apps etc, so it preloads it crap ontop of that too.

I am re-asked every god damn day if I want to connect the Samsung whatever the fuck (tm) to Facebook, and I refuse, EVERY DAY. I have no words.

The marketers/business guys won, and the result is an utter trainwreck.

The sad thing is that even though the S4 is super powerful, basic tasks like opening up the contacts list or recent messages, still load sluggish!

Not sure if I like Jolla, but I just need to dump this Android bloatware fast.

<comment><USER6> Installing a custom rom like Cyanogenmod or AOKP would likely solve a lot of your problems. Both are available for your device and require little more work than establishing root, installing safe strap (or another recovery depending on whether your bootloader is locked or not), and then installing the rom. You'll still need to download and install the Google Apps package if you want access to the app store, but it cuts down on a lot of the bloat and adds a lot of useful features.

<comment><USER7> Here's a problem: I'm looking for a phone that can do T-Mobile wifi calling, which means I need a T-Mobile phone and a T-Mobile ROM, and I'm struggling to find a T-Mobile phone that has the least amount of crapware on it. If you use T-Mobile wifi calling, you can't flash a new ROM.

<comment><USER6> Is there any particular reason it has to be T-Mobile Wi-Fi calling? There are lots of free apps that let you do Wi-Fi calling through Google Voice (so you can still use your current number).

<comment><USER7> I want it to be seamless. I don't want people to have to call one number if I'm on wifi and another if I'm on 4G. I want to be able to make an outbound call and not worry about if it's 4G or wifi. I want to be able to send and receive text messages just like normal.

I want wifi to be just like a cell tower. Are there other apps that can do that (and that aren't a nightmare to set up?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone keeps looking to Sailfish as a FOSS alternative to Android. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but the "swipe UI" in Sailfish is proprietary. As for the rest of the OS, it's just Mer (ie. a fork of MeeGo). As AOSP is a fully functional OS even without Google's proprietary bits, I'd say Android is still the better bet. If you are that dedicated, you can use pure AOSP and load all your apps onto the SD card and simply install with the package manager. It's as easy as installing .debs on a Debian based distro or installing from .dmg on a Mac.

I think the big takeaway from this is that _Mer_ will be compatible with a bunch more Android devices. This means you can then install Plasma Active on top of it, and have a pure FOSS mobile OS that actually performs well (Plasma Active seems to run quite slick on the first gen Nexus 7 anyways).

</comment><comment><USER9> I've already decided looking at 4.4 that I will do as much as possible to avoid Android for my next phone. I am interested in Jolla, but not as convinced about them being truly open as Mozilla is etc, they need to convince me better of their real motives and philosophy. Google have become very clear, now that they have decided to close almost everything on Android, no more SMS app, Google Now baked into the launcher, everything is G+ now, gallery app is on deathwatch. I feel like a peasant to Google, while they battle with the OEMs, Samsung, carriers, social networks etc they simply force feed their services down users throats, there is little point having an Android phone if you do not want to live 100% Google. Google are acting as feudal lords, they command us the peasants to do their bidding. Well I am moving out, I left iOS for a reason, I want my freedom.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious how Android's choice of default applications implies less "freedom". Don't like SMS being folded into Hangouts? Use Handcent--it's better anyway. Will the Gallery app disappear? Use QuickPic--it's better anyway. Don't like the new launcher? There's Nova and Apex and Smart and a dozen other really good choices. (They're better anyway, too!)

And if that's not enough for you, sure, go try something else, but the dramatics don't really help make your case.

<comment><USER11> You have a different idea of "freedom" than we do

The problem is not bundling in closed-source applications... the problem is removing (and thus stopping development) of the previously-default open source applications

Are Nova, Apex and Smart OSS? I looked at their web pages, but I don't see any link to the sources

basically: you still have freedom 0 (and possibly freedom 2, if you're willing to go against the EULA)... but, concerning freedom 1 and freedom 3, Android (as in AOSP) is stuck to something like version "4.*"

<comment><USER10> Yes, I do have a very different definition than you do, which is what makes your almost-begging-the-question rhetorical adoption of the implicit redefinition of freedom as Those Enumerated By Richard Stallman...well, kind of funny. On the other hand, I will enjoy my freedom to use software without concerns of ideological purity because I have alternatives if I don't like them.

Nothing stops you from writing your own to-your-specifications launcher or SMS client or email client atop the openly-licensed Android stack (and leverage having an actually useful, widely-supported phone). People might even use your GNU-gold-starred alternative if it's more than barely functional, though the track record of said gold-starred software with regards to UX doesn't fill me with optimism. But I do wish you luck.

<comment><USER11> Actually, I'm nowhere "ideologically pure" as you think I am.

I'm still using my google-sanctioned stock android, and I routinely use some sort of closed source software...

My point was more like: I'm using google-android now, out of convenience, but I stopped strictly seeing Android releases[1] as improvements (and thus I _might_ refrain to use KitKat... if I'll move to a google-less cyanogenmod or to Ubuntu or Jolla I still don't know)

Also, My intention was not to be rhetoric: I just found Stallman definitions of freedom useful in this context to understand what some people are complaining about

[1] as in "Android used on Nexus", compared to AOSP

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting section on China:

> "There is no such culture in these parts of the world [Finland], but there > are people that are installing new operating systems on their devices. In > China it is mainstream. About half of the smartphone buyers are upgrading > their older or cheaper devices with a better version of Android."

> "For us it is a possibility to distribute our operating system especially in > China. There are websites that already distribute [OS] software and the > Chinese customers are doing it so we don't have to teach them. We just have > to get Sailfish to those websites – and to make sure that Sailfish will run > on different kind of Android devices."

Half of all smartphone buyers are flashing their devices with new operating systems? That seems astonishing.

<comment><USER13> I know quite a few of these people and most of them say that when they do that it feels like they're using a totally new phone, without much cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Android is so widespread due its nature as the QNX of the mobile world. A manufacturer gets it for free and then can add shit on to it.

The vast majority of users chose a cheap smartphone, not Android explicitly. Samsung and others do not even mention Android anymore, that for specsheets like the processor being used. China has this large number of Android devices which are non-Google, no Play Store, no Google Now, nothing.

Now Jolla comes in and acts as an alternative to Android. For whom? End users? 99% don't give a shit. Like asking which fuel injection systems your car uses.

So what does Jolla offer to manufacturers to choose it over Android? Even less restrictions than the open Android? Less cost? If so, it can't be price - <USER2> they adapt the OS for specific hardware for free as well?

Android compatibility. You want a KILLER feature? iOS compatibility. Enable devs to simply copy over their code and run their shit on Jolla.

<comment><USER15> iOS compatibility is not impossible, but it is much harder, and would require a budget, shooting from the hip, 5X more and 2X the time to arrive at something end-users would find usable. You would have to do something like OpenStep, except with iOS APIs.

With Android you can use the AOSP bits.

<comment><USER16> Not to mention that iOS compatibility would make a HUGE legal target for Apple

<comment><USER15> That risk is similar to what Xamarin faced, and evidently they were fund-able.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the best news I've read all month! I really hope they make the process easy. As an ex-Nokia user I've never been the biggest fan of Google's android monoculture and big brother approach to my privacy. I'd be interested to see how sailfish compares to android in terms of resource utilisation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd love that. I have some older devices sitting around and totally would install Sailfish on it and try it out!

</comment><comment><USER15> I think Jolla has the best chance among the new entrants in mobile OSs, but I think this is a fairly minor issue. You can run Ubuntu touch on many Android devices, too. It's more important for Ubuntu because they don't have their own handset or an OEM launch partner.

I would rather have a Jolla handset.

</comment><comment><USER19> He doesn't address the obvious question: Why? Why for the end user? Why for Jolla?

<comment><USER20> People reflashing devices is not "all users", and that leaves open a few possibilities.

For users, a far better user interface (still prefer the user interface of the N9 over android one), a new app ecosystem (work most android apps, plus jolla native/meego/mer ones, maybe will be a compatibility layer to run ubuntu touch/tizen ones, and as it is based on qt/qml, probably will be easy to port BB10 ones too. And of course, ports of linux apps in general (the N900 had a lot of them)

For Jolla is, of course, improving installed base, enabling people to try, or even improve the OS, and generate a critical mass of developers and fans that will make the rest of potential users to see with good eyes the phones with jolla built in.

Remember, part of android success was that people was able to install cyanogenmod in their old windows phones. If this is more efficient than android giving new life to old android phones could give enough visibility to the new OS.

<comment><USER21> > Remember, part of android success was that people was able to install > cyanogenmod in their old windows phones.

Not really, no. Only a tiny fraction of Android users even know what cyanogen mod is, let alone install it on their phone.

That's not at all what made Android successful.

<comment><USER22> He's referring to the beginning, were geeks were still important for android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The only thing that will save Jolla is a time machine.

Its important to note that most of us don't like Google for moral rather then practical reasons. The best strategy might be to upstream Android to the Linux kernel and and develop a userland clone.

<comment><USER24> Jolla is a pretty small company so selling relatively overpriced phones just with the appeal of a different OS to a very small market might be profitable. At least it's a saner strategy than them trying to go against Google ":D"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Firefox OS aims to be open, targeting the whole world including developing countries. (Where there's still growth)

Jolla is Nordic people trying desperately to maintain a mobile industry. (Targeting existing consumers, who are well catered for)

I know which I'm developing for.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yes! Good. I'd be worried if they didn't.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maemo, Moblin, LiMo, Bada, MeeGo, mer, Tizen, Tizen NG, Nemo Mobile, Sailfish OS...

This is tragic.

All this effort gone into endless, pointless rebranding and new website designs instead of new code.

<comment><USER28> What's tizen-ng ? note android did not design it's own kernel they just rebranded it :)

<comment><USER29> Android (Google) did not rebrand the kernel, they just don't mention it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to fake laptop connection via USB - <AUTHOR> Hope we have some USB professionals here. I have an external audio sound are device that is USB powered and needs to be connected to PC/Mac/tablet for it to power up. The device has a built in mixer that offers direct monitoring, I've audio goes from input ports directly to outputs (skipping the PC). I would like to make the device work as a standalone mixer without the need to connect to a PC. I've connected the device to a USB wall socket/charger but the device doesn't power up. I suspect that the reason is that the USB charger only sends 5V power but not the data steam (to pin 2 and 3, as presumably PC does).
Does anyone know if it's possible to hack the USB cable or USB wall charger to make the audio device think it's connected to a laptop? Or phrased differently, what does the device see when it's connected to PC vs a wall charger? <comment><USER2> The device will see power, but very little else. USB chargers could leave the two data pins floating, tied together, or exhibiting various resistances between pins. Depending on what it's supposedly built for charging.

Here's a link to start you off with.

[http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/123172/what-i...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/123172/what- is-the-ideal-way-to-handle-data-pins-d-and-d-on-a-usb-power-adapter-to-be)

Most usb devices will look for data before thinking about initialising.

Hard way to solve your problem: If you wanted to power it up and set it up for a certain configuration without a PC, you'd probably be best off starting to sniff the usb bus and possibly play back the results (YMMV) with an arduino or similar.

You'd need something along the lines of a bus pirate to do all that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_Pirate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_Pirate)

Less Hard Way: Or if you're a software person, you could just sniff the usb bus of a virtual machine, but I imagine that you may miss certain bits of handshaking, then program an arduino or similar appropriately

Easier way: If the device has linux drivers you could hunt down a raspberry pi zero (or a regular one, or beagle bone or any number of other ARM linux boards) and just drive it from that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Buy AQVOX USB Low-Noise Linear Power Supply Type-B Male to Female [https://www.amazon.co.uk/AQVOX-Low-Noise-Linear-Supply- Type-...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/AQVOX-Low-Noise-Linear-Supply- Type-B/dp/B00AVWO2AG)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hope this is what u r looking 4! :-)

[http://www.aqvox.de/usb-power_en.html](http://www.aqvox.de/usb-power_en.html)</comment>


5 years into development, our music mapping A.I:s are finally out. - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/euNHMBu9cjI

<comment><USER2> You can make machines listen to music by abusing technology you stole from the future, and that's a fact you can't hide.

How about making dogs listen to music then?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bqZFp7dWbg>

Not to mention the deaf, dumb and blind who just keep on pretending .. ♩♬♬

</comment><comment><USER3> This one did the opposite of what you guys do. [http://gizmodo.com/5945103/this-instrument-translates-the- so...](http://gizmodo.com/5945103/this-instrument-translates-the-sound-of- objects)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Questions? Feedback? Comments? I'm all ears. -Teemu, entrepeneur.</comment>


Reviewing host companies - Which one is more secure? - <AUTHOR> http://fseek.me/2010/09/reviewing-host-companies-which-one-is-more-secure/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hint: Rackspace lost badly (21% of the sites they hosted got blacklisted in the last 90 days). Netsol won with only 1% of sites blacklisted...

<comment><USER2> The vast majority of websites that are inadvertently serving malware have been compromised through the website itself, which can happen totally independently of the web server software or the host.

About the best the host can do is have a reasonable IP blacklist, but even that doesn't stop nearly enough attackers. (My little mail server, hosting only around a dozen accounts, is currently averaging 14 new SSH bans per day for example.)

The only thing that a "secure" host guarantees is that a compromised website can not lead to a compromised server; attempting to measure that by checking the number of malware-hosting websites at a service provider is the wrong way to go about it.

All that said, if you want a "secure" host without spending a lot of money, your best compromise would be an OpenBSD VPS, and then either spend a lot of time learning how to set it up correctly (and maintain it), or have someone do it for you.

Having NetSol and GoDaddy on a list of potentially "secure" hosts is hilarious.

edit: I'd recommend checking the Sucuri Blog (<http://blog.sucuri.net/>) for an idea of who's been compromised and how they've responded. Sucuri's pretty good at keeping track of all this stuff.

<comment><USER3> I kinda agree with you, but when you see 21% at Rackspace, it shows that something odd is going on there (taking out hosting-specific attacks, the % should be the same everywhere).

<comment><USER2> Heh! I just added a link to your blog as a recommendation, before seeing your reply.

My guess is that more of the stuff at Rackspace is being admin'd by customers who don't know what they're doing, versus the managed shared hosting at other places.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to hire way better programmers/designers than yourself/your team is - <AUTHOR> Pretty straightforward question and I'm actually asking myself this pretty often. How do you hire people that are better? <comment><USER2> There would seem to be at least two independent problems here:

1\. How can you recognize that someone is actually a better programmer than you are, as opposed to someone who can bullshit beyond your ability to detect it? (It may be easier to detect that someone is a _worse_ programmer than you are.)

2\. Once you've found someone who you're convinced is a better programmer, how do you convince them to join a company where they'd be the most skilled programmer (and thus have nobody to learn from)? You might need to offer them extra compensation and a better job title than they'd be able to get elsewhere.

Also, I'd question whether you can actually rank programmers on a linear scale of better/worse. The best programmer I ever hired was better than me in some ways (could build complex systems faster than I could) but worse than me in other ways (the systems he built were less maintainable).

I don't really have good answers to these questions, but hopefully this might clarify some of the issues and help get the conversation going.

<comment><USER3> > 1\. How can you recognize that someone is actually a better programmer than > you are, as opposed to someone who can bullshit beyond your ability to > detect it? (It may be easier to detect that someone is a worse programmer > than you are.)

This question comes up a lot, and I'm not sure that it's really as hard of a problem as it's often made out to be. Especially if you're having a candidate write algorithmic code on a whiteboard, I think there are ways that you could judge whether they're better than you:

1\. They solve your problem faster than you did (the first time). Of course this assumes you have a novel problem (i.e. they haven't practiced it before), etc.

2\. They solve your problem and in the process of doing so teach you something unique. Maybe their solution is faster or simpler than yours. Maybe they catch some corner case you didn't see.

Another way to look at this is that if you make up your own (difficult) interview question, and then use it repeatedly, you will eventually become an expert on it. As you watch other people solve it, you'll learn various tricks for solving it, and will see it from many different angles. You'll also become aware of common pitfalls.

So when someone walks in the door and has never seen your problem before in their life, you have them at a disadvantage. Now if they give a solution that's as good or better than yours, what does that mean? It could just be that they're solved similar problems before, but maybe they're better than you.

This approach does assume that you are good enough to create a novel question, which in and of itself is a difficult thing to do...

[EDIT] One thing I left out is that while I believe it's possible to say "this candidate is probably better than me," there's an upper bound on your ability to see exactly how much better they are. In other words, it might be difficult to tell the difference between someone moderately better than you and someone vastly better than you.

<comment><USER4> "This question comes up a lot, and I'm not sure that it's really as hard of a problem as it's often made out to be."

The speed or novelty of a solution to an interviewers pet problem provides no insight at all into how the candidate will perform on the job.

At my last company we would re-interview a sample of our staff using the same interview questions we were going to ask externals in order to gauge the quality of the questions. Pet problems provided the least value out of all the interview techniques we tried.

"In other words, it might be difficult to tell the difference between someone moderately better than you and someone vastly better than you."

It is very difficult to determine if somebody is better, and how much better they are, than you when you are close in skill level.

On the other hand if somebody is 5x better than you it is easy to determine. You are right though in that it is impossible to tell the difference between somebody who is 5x better than you and 10x better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another problem I wrestle with is how to hire someone with skills way outside your own skillset and outside anyone else's skillset in the company. For instance I'm in a situation where I can tell the people that have set up the infrastructure are not capable of doing it right because the infrastructure stinks by any outside measure. But without knowledge of how to do it myself, how am I supposed to hire anyone better?

<comment><USER6> Here are a few things I would try:

a) Gain enough knowledge to make a more informed hiring decision. You don't typically need as much knowledge as you think.

b) Find someone who is knowledgable about the role and ask for help. If you know a company with a great infrastructure person, it is very likely that he would be willing to help filter out a few candidates for your company. At the very least he could explain what he does on an average day and what he looks for in a candidate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Common, dramatized problem. Hiring can be only occasionally perfect.

"Will burns the proof. Lambeau tries to save it.

LAMBEAU: You're right, Will. I can't do this proof. But you can, and when it comes to that it's only about ... it's just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I'm one of them.

WILL: Sorry.

LAMBEAU: Yeah, so am I. Most days I wish I never met you. Because then I could sleep at night, and I wouldn't have to walk around with the knowledge that there's someone like you out there ... . And I didn't have to watch you throw it all away ..."

[http://www.qedcat.com/moviemath/GoodWill.htm](http://www.qedcat.com/moviemath/GoodWill.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> once you actually find someone, make sure they have the authority to set (or help set) policy for your team.

Otherwise they'll be spending their time fixing up everybody elses code forever or get bored and leave.

<comment><USER9> My current situation. Struggling to find any other employer that recognises me as a reasonably good programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> easy, give them a $1 million salary</comment>


If sub-domain ends in a hyphen then wild-card certificate is rejected - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283508 <comment><AUTHOR> I came across this while building the ASP.NET Core Library and Framework Support matrix ([https://anclafs.com](https://anclafs.com)).

One of the contributors has a hyphen suffix on their GitHub name so their pages site has that as a sub-domain. The *.github.io cert is rejected in Firefox.

Try [https://ah-.github.io/rdkafka-dotnet](https://ah-.github.io/rdkafka- dotnet) versus [http://ah-.github.io/rdkafka- dotnet](http://ah-.github.io/rdkafka-dotnet) in FF47. Obviously a pain if you have the HTTPS everywhere add-on.</comment>


Anyone notices how the new iMac implements Dell XPS solutions? - <AUTHOR> These are the new iMacs, 24 and 27 inch:
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MNED2B/A&step=config#
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac?product=MNE02B/A&step=config#
And this is the not-so-new Dell XPS laptop:
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd
Can you find Wally on these pictures? ;) <comment><USER2> Dell Inside™</comment>