Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nokia.com/nseries/2011/05/03/how-china-recycles-millions-of-cellphones-every-year/ <comment><USER2> It's a shame that most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this. Case in point, the town of Guiyu:

[http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_182214...](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_1822148,00.html) <http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php#>

(Don't get me wrong, responsible e-waste recycling is to be lauded and encouraged - it's all the more important because of places like Guiyu. I'm not too surprised Nokia choose to focus on one angle while not really mentioning the other one, though.)

<comment><USER2> _most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this_

Now I come to think about it, the original blog post shows 3 people working hot air desoldering stations without any visible ventilation, and with only one wearing a thin respirator. So it's probably not all that healthy for the workers even there. At least in the photos I've seen of Chinese electronics _assembly_ factories, the workers have extraction units for their soldering stations.

<comment><USER3> Do _de_ soldering stations actually generate enough fumes to be comparable to actual soldering? When I do hot-air rework, I rarely see any smoke at all, unless I have just put a lot of flux down.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, you might be right. My understanding is the bulk of (at least visible) fumes when soldering are from flux, but there are other fumes present. When you're not temperature controlled then you probably have other things melting and fuming up as well though, depending on how deft you are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Garbage sorters in HK isn't a sight I've 100% gotten used to. It is extremely common (somewhere around 1 every 2KM you walk - and those are just the ones you catch actually at a garbage). They are mostly after cardboard from what I've seen - or maybe that's just what they find the most of.

As a general rule, they are all old and don't look particularly healthy. But they are hard working. I feel equal measures of shame and pride in humanity when I see one. It's actually an emotional experience for me for some weird reason.

I wish I knew more about them. What they earn, how long they work, how the system works (they seem to have local drop off centers which all have floor scales - so it must be paid by weight, and then it gets shipped off from there by god knows who).

<comment><USER5> I've seen them too... on the one hand maybe they don't look as "healthy" as a Calvin Klein model. On the other hand, especially when watching the older ones -- they sure have kept their mobility and muscles in a working condition throughout the years doing what they do and they make me think of the majority of old folks back home whose bodies are often deteriorating and falling apart from NOT getting any physical exercise, from spending hours in front of the telly for years and from feeding themselves pure toxic junk food for decades. Well... it's a big world out there.

<comment><USER6> "especially when watching the older ones"

A relevant question would be how old they really are, though. Maybe they only look old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They are screwed when their middle-class gets big enough to cause inflation and labor is no longer cheap enough to abuse people like that.

They'll have to double the size of their prisons and use prison labor, and yet we'll keep buying.

</comment><comment><USER8> Everything is possible in China because of wage slavery [http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide- show-1-tech-...](http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech- apple-workers-forced-to-sign-no-suicide-pledge/20110504.htm)

<comment><USER9> The suicide rate amongst Foxconn workers is dramatically _lower_ than that of China overall.

Most of the population of China are peasant farmers, living in huts with no running water or electricity. A factory dormitory looks pretty unpleasant to us, but for most of the people living in them it's a big step up.

Do you have a better idea for how to lift 800,000,000 people out of poverty?

<comment><USER8> Evenly distribute $3 trillion forex to 800,000,000 people. [http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide- show-1-heres...](http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-heres- what-china-can-buy-with-3-trn-forex/20110504.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is fantastic. Disassembled all the way down to the capacitors... If these parts are resold and reused, I don't think anyone could hope for better, short of a way to decompose and reuse PCB, or at the very least harvest the copper.

<comment><USER10> Tbe only thing that worries me if that if these components are sold as new, that would be a bit unpleasant. Sure it's recycling, but it's dishonest. Of course, I'm not saying that the pictured establishments in particular should be suspected of any such deviousness (I don't know them at all).

Also, I really don't want to sound prejudiced, I've just read about fake components coming out of China sometimes, and it seems the step to fake "new" components isn't very far-fetched.

<comment><USER3> Well, you get what you pay for. Buy reputable brands through reputable dealers and pay a few extra cents for high quality parts, and you'll probably be ok.

<comment><USER11> "Probably" is the key word. Counterfieters do an awful good job at making themselves and the product look reputable, and China could use some work on trademark enforcement. cf. the many stories of "empty" big-name ICs from Chinese distributors.

<comment><USER3> It's all about the supply chain you use. Buy from an authorized reseller; they have a _vested_ interest in selling you the real thing.

Tangentially, notice the counterfeit IC's from China are mostly storage (unless something has changed that I wasn't aware of) The margins on faked storage are pretty good. The margins on SMT capacitors? I can buy authentic, extremely high quality capacitors on DigiKey for $0.07.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yay! Another variety of sweatshop. Those chips have to be worth, what, 0.02?

<comment><USER13> Arm cpus and flash memory chips are worth a bunch more than 0.02 and they are easy to reuse. I've desoldered a few myself for projects. I've even rescued the data on a flash chip by pulling it from the phone.

Its easy and well worth it even for me the rich westerner. I'm not sure how valuable a mixed bin of SM capacitors are, but I assure you, if they weren't making something from them, they wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER12> Their boss is making money, sure. They are getting paid something I suppose. I really have no idea whether its a sweatshop or not. But I get suspicious when people spend hours a day on activities of marginal utility.

<comment><USER2> Apparently some of these jobs can pay quite well: <http://shanghaiscrap.com/?p=6448>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someday, robots will be doing this with virtually everything tossed away. And they'll be taking apart our old landfills too.

<comment><USER8> <http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Recycle is nice until your electronic brakes fail because the manufacturer was sold these parts as new. Old HK saying "Only the con man is real."

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like Nokia palming off its RoHS obligations to a cottage economy which luckily for them seems to be thriving. You couldn't do this in Europe or America.

<comment><USER17> You are wrong..

Both co-founders of Apple were part-time employed in such adventures in the USA..Steve Jobs was in-fact a junk yard IC chip seller.

Even now there are still re-used chip sellers in the USA who do this in that they sort through used chips to find those to sell that are in demand.</comment></comment>


Florida Legislature Approves Bill for Year-Round Daylight Savings Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-07/florida-senate-oks-bill-for-year-round-daylight-saving-time <comment><USER2> Serious question - how would the software industry be able to reasonably respond to a change like this? I have to imagine there are a ton of critical systems being run that were written by software agencies that don't exist anymore.

Looks like it's still blocked on federal law which gives it some time, hopefully.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why wouldn't they just say "We observe _Atlantic Standard Time_ year-round" ?</comment>


New Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-a-plus/ <comment><USER2> Can't read the specs, but loverpi.com has up-powered versions - notably, with up to 4GB memory.

<comment><USER3> This only has 512MB it seems, which is odd because the other models have 1GB.

I didn't know stores sold Pi competitors with 4GB RAM. Do you know of any with pcie and 4+GB RAM? I'd love to have a board with enough SATA and RAM for a decent ZFS setup, and I think I can get a pcie expansion board with SATA to work.

<comment><USER4> The ROCKPro64 comes to mind. [https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454](https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good KVM for Mac/Linux Setup? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone using a KVM to switch between a mac and a linux?  Any recommendations? I'm hoping to find one using DVI.<p>I want to buy a mac mini for iPhone development but still use my linux for everyday computering. <comment><USER2> Some monitors have multiple inputs and you can use a cheap passive USB switch for the KM. I use this kind of setup since dual-link DVI KVMs are quite expensive. I also discovered that cheap USB KVMs are crap; the passive switch is more reliable.

</comment><comment><USER3> how about using vnc (terminal server client) ? it's free and no cable, although a bit slow (for example, high bandwidth anime) on wireless LAN

i normally control my mac mini powerpc in living room from my room wirelessly

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I could start with that and switch to KVM if it turns out to be too slow.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How To Market a Crypto Company? - <AUTHOR> https://BitBank.nz is a crypto live forecasting tool, we have a few customers  (all from HN) and good conversion rate but just aren't getting the traffic.
Does anyone know any good ways of reaching out/marketing to people in the crypto community?
What I have tried: facebook/google ads: seems too expensive right now, no conversions from these sources yet.
Blogging/commenting, Quora, Reddit, producthunt style sites. Still our tiny traffic is 80% HN 20% everything else
We have a referral program where users can earn .003btc (~10% of a purchase) so there's money to be made if anyone knows how but it has been surprisingly not been used.
If there any large engaged crypto community somewhere someone knows how to reach out to?
Thanks! - <USER2> <comment><AUTHOR> more things i have tried: various paid advertising companies, bitcoin ones seem to not work/provide scamy impressions, legit cones like twitter cost far too much e.g. $1.5 per click, Press release on cryptocoinnews that no one else picked up brought in 1 signup...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> no bites :'(</comment>


Rotten Tomatoes data points to the worst actress of all time - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2011/06/who-is-rotten-tomatoes-pick-as-worst-actress-of-all-time.html

<comment><USER2> pretty funny - i'd like to see the data cut by box office, since some people have consistently made terrible movies but those movies may have made a lot of money. of course, you'd get a bunch of random people who no one knows because they're so bad, but perhaps filtered by some minimum # of films and at least 1 box office hit.

it would also be interesting to see what filmmakers or actors consistently make critically reviled films, but those films do very well in the marketplace - in addition to m night (arguably), also the michael bays of the world.</comment>


Why open-plan offices get a bad rap - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/24/why-open-plan-offices-get-a-bad-rap <comment><USER2> It's not going to end, the article says why, too:

"To reduce costs, companies have attempted to cram in more people thus creating denser—and louder—environments."</comment>


Lost technologies - <AUTHOR> http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-lost-technologies.php

<comment><USER3> It is interesting how many things are "lost" due to missing meta-data.

Summary:

10\. Stradivari: leading hypothesis seems to be that the density of the particular wood used accounts for the sound.

9\. Nepenthe: most likely still used today, but historians are unable to pinpoint just what modern substance the Greeks were referring to

8\. Antikythera: true purpose is still not fully known

7\. Telharmonium: public's fascination with the device waned

6\. Library of Alexandria: contents burned sometime around the first or second century AD. Scholars are still uncertain just how the fire was started

5\. Damascus Steel: supply of ores needed for the special recipe for Damascus steel started running low, and sword makers were forced to develop other techniques

4\. Apollo/Gemini Space Program Technology: just because modern scientists have the parts doesn't mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did

3\. Silphium: scarcity, combined with an overwhelming demand, more than likely led to over harvesting, which drove the plant into extinction

2\. Roman Cement: recipe for concrete was lost during the descent into the Dark Ages

1\. Greek Fire: weapon's use seems to disappear after the decline of the Byzantine Empire, but just why still isn't known

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating that NASA are now having to reverse engineer existing spacecraft parts that they have lying around in junkyards, since they forewent the opportunity to document during development, apparently due delivery pressure and use of contractors.

<comment><USER4> Actually, when it came to the Saturn V rocket NASA deliberately destroyed the design documents in a "burn your boats" style to make the Space Shuttle the only way forward. Disbanded Wernher von Braun's team for good measure.

Which is a pity, seeing as how some of the details of the design of the first stage kerosene/LOX F-1 engines were said to be pretty well near magic (it had 7 years of teething problems according to Wikipedia).

On the other hand I know from an acquaintance that the NERVA developers including her father were gathered together no later than in the '80s so that their work could be adequately documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd add Vitrified Forts to that list: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrified_fort>

Fortresses built with stone walls that have been melted together - <USER2> on purpose.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is a bit off on one part. Damascus steel has in fact been reproduced, at least in part. (There's one southern blacksmith who did a demo on a documentary with a hydraulic press and his recreated Damascus blade cutting through cheap blades.)

One of the key reasons why the "recipe was lost" was that a part of the recipe resided in the hands of Indian suppliers of wootz. The Indian suppliers were managing to put trace amounts of vanadium into the steel, but then somehow changed their process so that this stopped. After that point, no one could make Damascus blades anymore.

Contrast this with Japanese swordsmiths, who maintain close relationships with their smelters. (Supplier relationships were supposed to be one of the keys to the modern Japanese economic success.)</comment>


How To Get On The Frontpage of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://alexstechthoughts.com/post/29406022580/how-to-get-on-the-frontpage-of-hackernews <comment><USER2> _you need to write something interesting_

Please do this and _only_ this.

 _Send the link...to at least 20 people from different locations that you know will upvote or submit it....Now you change the link...and send the frontpage to people when asking to upvote going forward. I would try to send to another 10 people._

Please don't do this.

Just let your submission speak for itself. When you game the system in any way at all, you're just fucking it up for everyone else. Trust the rest of us to upvote what we like and let the site continue to grow organically.

If you game the system for your own temporary satisfaction, you're turning what should be quality content for a demanding audience into a middle school popularity contest. In the long run, the site suffers and we all suffer.

Is slowly killing the golden goose worth that one day surge?

<comment><USER3> You've got to face the fact that the average person who creates web pages is clueless about how to get traffic. It's harder in 2012 than it's ever been -- and it's just going to get harder when Facebook and Twitter realize that it's a matter of life and death for them to stop giving web sites free traffic.

If you're going to be successful, you've got to be aggressive, but you don't want to be like all the people selling e-books and penis pills either.

My favorite tactic HN, lifted from reddit, is the headline that makes an absurd and overblown claim. If you can get a high clickthrough when people see the "new" page, that's a big help.

So far as voting rings go, it's hard for me to believe that HN isn't already strongly affected by them. I can think of so many second rate blogs that consistently make the front page. These aren't terrible content, but nothing special, and they don't deserve the level of attention they get.

The most obnoxious thing about HN is that when certain controversial topics come up (say there was a really provocative article on text editors) we see a surge of people writing "me too" blog posts and replies and then we get six or seven of those on the front page.

That's a hell of a lot worse than the occasional guy who spends his nights and weekends for six months developing a project who wants a little publicity on HN because he's completely shut out of TechCrunch because he's geographically challenged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Sending someone a direct link to your post results in an invalid upvote."

Is that true? When I share a story that I find interesting I send the direct link on identi.ca, twitter, and/or irc, and when I am the one who sumbitted the link I can see the upvote of people telling me that they have just upvoted. Has it always been a lucky coincidence? I can't think so.

Anyway, I think the only sure and valid way to get on the front page is to submit your (or others) stories only when you really think they are of interest for this particular community. This is what I do and it naturally works most of the time.

<comment><USER5> I am wondering the same thing. I have HN RSS in Google Reader. If I liked the post, I will click the comments link which takes me here. I will then upvote. Doesn't make a lot of sense if I have to go out to the front page and search for it (if its even there) to get the upvote to count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Three votes seems to be the lowest threshold to initially make it to the front page. Not sure on what sort of time frame or criteria is needed. Exception is the posts hiring for YC Startups which start up on the first page when initially posted.

New entries display in orange: <http://hn4d.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Posting in the IRC channel seems also like a good solution to get upvotes. But it feels still a bit odd that your post can't get on the front page on a normal way.

</comment><comment><USER8> I made it to the front page one time by doing something neat and hacker-y. It wasn't business oriented but I had fun.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, it worked!

<comment><AUTHOR> ;)</comment></comment>


Eventual Consistency and Transactions Working Together - topher-the-geek https://forum.treode.com/t/eventual-consistency-and-transactions-working-together/36

<comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me of Spanner with some changes.

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/spanner- osdi2012.pdf)

<comment> topher-the-geek TreodeDB a bit like Spanner, in as much as both offer transactions across datacenters. The implementations are very different. The way Treode uses Lamport clocks lets you use a simple rule to determine if your local cache satisfies application invariants. I'm not sure if Spanner's use of atomic clocks gets you a similar capability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Are there any other databases that can do what you're describing here?

<comment> emin-gun-sirer HyperDex provides scalable and high-performance transactions. While it is strongly (not eventually) consistent, the underlying technique we use to achieve atomicity of transactions is reminiscent of this approach.

On a related note, our experience is that a tightly implemented database can be much faster than a typical eventually consistent database. It would be great to see performance comparisons from TreodeDB.

<comment> topher-the-geek That's cool. Indeed, it does look like one could use HypderDex's transactions and cond_put to make something close the batch write described in this post.

However, I don't see the part about Lamport clocks in HyperDex's API. Maybe one could implement that in a layer on top. The technique in the post allows a client to know if the values in its cache satisfy application invariants, even invariants that relate multiple rows. The Lamport clocks are key to making that part work.

I would very much like to provide performance numbers, and Jepsen results, and more for TreodeDB. Along that line though, I'm looking for contributors (or even a co-founder). I've gotten it this far on my own, but I really need help.</comment></comment></comment>


Confirmed: Windows 7 preview coming tonight at D6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/confirmed_microsoft_windows_7_preview_coming_tonight_msft

<comment><USER2> What the hell is up with their version names? Once you go to random code names you can't go back to version numbers...</comment>


Montreal Neurological Institute going 'open' to accelerate science - <AUTHOR> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6271/329.full <comment><USER2> One way to deal with the "complexity of the problem" is to actually keep patentability and license out the patents to start-ups or established companies that can actually do something with them. I guess this would require more effort to match up/recruit the institution's patents (assuming they have any useful ones) to companies that might be interested. But economically, in terms of getting their research translated to the bench more quickly, this is an established model that might be more effective in the long-term.

Indeed, "Participation is voluntary, and researchers can pursue patents on their own, but MNI will not pay the fees or help with the paperwork." This basically shifts responsibility from the institution to the researcher; not sure how this is a good idea.

<comment><USER3> Patents and licenses seem like financial solutions, but aside from keeping people funded, how would they help with complexity? I suspect much of the complexity is in the basic science, and the "open science" approach is meant to make it easy for many people with fresh ideas to contribute.

<comment><USER2> If you read the article, the "complexity" refers to the lack of translation from bench to clinic. IP is the fundamental currency to attract investment to get scientific discoveries through the regulatory process. You can still have "open science" in the sense you are using this term and have patents; see CRISPR/Cas9 as a prime example.

<comment><USER3> I'd suggest reading a bit farther into the article:

"[Rouleau] says the kind of early-stage science that the institute does is not really worth protecting. "There is a fair amount of patenting by people at the institute, but the outcomes have not been very useful," he says, adding that the institute would rather provide data that others could use to develop patentable medicines. "It comes down to what is the reason for our existence? It's to accelerate science, not to make money."

I think the main point is that most scientific discoveries don't need to make it through some regulatory process, because they are knowledge (and not technology). I think CRISPR is a good example of something that _does_ benefit from that model, though.

<comment><USER2> There are many reasons for why the "outcomes have not been very useful," so there's not much point in speculating. Suffice it to say if patents have been filed in the past (i.e. some number of people thought their research was worth protecting) and researchers at a given institution are still allowed to file patents on their work, it makes no sense to take away the supporting resources that the institution is supposed to provide to help in filing patents.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to diminish the value of patents, but in this case, it's safe to say there is biological complexity limiting the translation to treatment. As someone working in this area, I wish there were more potentially patentable material...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is kind of exciting. I wonder if we'll be able to play with BigBrain:

[https://muhc.ca/newsroom/article/first-ever-3d-atlas- brain-b...](https://muhc.ca/newsroom/article/first-ever-3d-atlas-brain-brings- big-gains)

> They include freely providing all results, data, software, and algorithms;

Wait, what? That's unheard of in science. They're really all going to be publishing their source code? All of it?

The MNI already has quite a bit of free software, such as MINC:

[http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/MINC](http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/MINC)

But they really are going to publish everything else? That's amazing!

<comment><USER5> This is becoming a bit of a movement, without the underlying software to examine, scientific results cannot be fully verified independently, entropy makes the software conditions hard to replicate to repeat the exact experiments, so it's good to see a big name on board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It will be interesting to see how the open collaboration requirement works in practice. Presumably it only requires the external collaborators to agree to openness, and not their institutions.</comment>


Inside the Mind of a Billion-Dollar Acquirer - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/articles/201109/inside-the-mind-of-a-billion-dollar-acquirer.html?nav=featured

<comment><USER2> I talked to one of my friends in M&A @ one of the top tech companies the other day. I was surprised to hear that their target is a 55% success rate for companies they acquire. They want it to be slightly better than a coin toss, but not so high that they over-think any deals. Their logic is that it's okay to have 50 failed deals, as long as they're the guys who find the next YouTube/Hotmail/PayPal.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. I bet that companies require acquihires to have a higher percentage of success (where I presume success here means the team staying, since the product is often shut down in acquihires). I wonder what M&A people would think would be a good percentage for acquihires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a post/link I read here recently that discussed the earn-out issue in depth and it's really colored my thinking on it (BTW - if someone can remind me whose post it was or point me in the right direction, that'd be hugely appreciated). I think they nailed it.

Basically the idea was this: When you sell your business, you should be paid -- in cash -- for the value you've created. That's what a sale is, and that's what a sale should be.

An earn-out represents value that _is yet to be created_ \-- the future interaction between your business and the acquirer's business. There's nothing wrong with that inherently, but recognize that it's really just an incentive for what is to come, not payment for what was done.

Now, none of this is saying that you shouldn't accept a deal with an earn-out if that's what you've got in front of you. But you have to think about it differently --

If you built a business that you think is worth $100M and you sell it to BigCo for $100M, 50% of which is structured as an earn-out given revenue targets over 3 years - guess what....you didn't actually sell your business for $100M.

You sold your business for $50M and agreed to a $50M compensation package in your new job. And with that new job comes the uncertainty of what your new owners will do. They could, conceivably, decide to close your division and lay everyone off after 6 months - having absolutely nothing to do with you or your team (this happens in big companies).

So when the time comes, just make sure you have the right perspective about what price you're actually selling your company for.

</comment><comment><USER5> The other issue with the earn out, from the entrepreneur's point of view, is that you're providing the acquirer with effectively interest free financing for the earn out, while you're working on integrating. And there's nothing guaranteed in the earn out, and they're usually all-or-nothing structures (ie, get $0 if you hit 99% of target)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why would a business owner agree to an earn-out? That's like handing someone your equity and trying to earn it back from them over three years. I assume this is for acquisitions of unprofitable companies, otherwise traditional valuation methods could be used to determine the price. Buyer beware is a lot better system.

<comment><USER7> Beacause it takes risk away from the purchaser, making it (hypothetically) an easier sale and worth more money. Mergers are extremely susceptible in the first 12-24 months and can actually take down the parent company if mishandled.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but if they are told to meet a specific EBITDA, and the parent is charging expenses to the company, it would be in their interest to charge enough that the earn-out doesn't pay. If the parent gets to write checks with the company's money, then the earn-out goals should be on gross revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to have to deal with some of the earn-out problems discussed in this article... The part about corporate overhead was especially insightful to me, a good watch out. Thanks for posting.</comment>


Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datadive.net/which-topics-get-the-upvote-on-hacker-news/

<comment><USER2> For what it's worth: a scatter plot with lots of huge points, like the one you've drawn for "upvotes vs. comments", is pretty useless for drawing conclusions about the data. It tells you about the _support_ of the joint distribution (the region on which it's non-zero) but very little about its shape.

In particular, that graph could represent a fairly strong correlation (in the R^2 sense), or a fairly weak one, or anything in between. If you want to say something more quantitative about the data, you can do a linear regression and look at the coefficients and residuals.

<comment><USER3> When there's too much data for a scatter plot, a heat map will do nicely.

<comment><USER4> Or pass alpha=0.3 to the plotting function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> some interesting chains pop up from the data!!

      - google-microsoft-windows-video-browser-user-support-chrome
      - security-key-attack-password-hacker-encryption-network-secure
      - language-type-program-code-programmer-java-write-class
      - number-point-algorithm-value-example-result-set-problem
      - space-nasa-tesla-rocket-launch-start-china-nuclear
      - data-database-map-table-analysis-information-graph-model

</comment><comment><USER6> Some of the categories are quite surprising, for example: space-nasa-tesla- rocket-launch-star-CHINA-nuclear as space; ruby not as programming; com-http- www-EMACS-LIST-org-book-pdf as junk; Those seem very specific, or plain wrongly classified. Maybe you can show them individually, just as a big dump of generated graphs? No need to make another post about it though, but i'd like to see them in context. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're mixing up what topics are. The actual topics as generated by LDA are the concatenated word lists (actually distributions of all words in the corpus, of which i concatenate the top 8 words to generate a meaningful descriptor of the topic). So server-client-http-request-service-ruby- connection-user is one topic / word distribution, in which "ruby" happens to be 6th most probable word, likely because it appears a lot in posts on servers, web services etc. It does not mean ruby the word itself is classified to be server related. Same applies to the other examples you gave.

The categories/domains I simply assigned manually, to show how one could possibly interpret these word distributions that LDA generated.

<comment><USER7> I think you might want a new classification approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what you mean by a new classification approach. There is no classification here, since there are no labeled documents. This is purely unsupervised topic modelling. The topics are mathematical objects. How they are later named or grouped for better human readability is a subjective matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used a similar technology stack for categorizing bookmarks (boilerpipe + gensim lda). Interesting that we wound up choosing the same tools.

In the interest of reporting on failed experiments, I also tried a k-means analysis written in php. It was slow and worthless, I wouldn't recommend anyone else going down that road.

In terms of next steps, I've been trying to use the open source HLDA software from David M. Blei's group [0] to do hierarchical clustering to avoid having to decide on the number of topic parameters. Haven't gotten it to compile on my machine yet though.

[0] [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/topicmodeling.html](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/topicmodeling.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great analysis. You got me interested in the particular java libraries you use for content analysis.

so according to your analysis. this particular post won't be getting too many comments :P

<comment><USER10> Now I'm conscious of skewing the data by posting this comment...

I don't think the API is exposed but the aggregate up vote of comments with a post might be interesting. It's one thing to have a lot of comments, but measuring the quality of the discourse would worth knowing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised language wars didn't show up. It seems to me "X is better than Y" threads always get a lot of heat and light.

<comment><AUTHOR> The topic "language-type-program-code" is the 6th ranked topic out of 30 in terms of comments, so it's pretty high. Considering the error bars, it could possibly be even further up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could use some basic topic labels like "math" and "history" and "women's issues" (or "women in STEM" or something) and "culture."</comment>


Building a CustoMac: Buyer's Guide October 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/october/2016 <comment><USER2> I dearly wish that Apple would just go back to licensing their OS. I get the feeling, other than portables, they really don't want to make Macintoshes. Heck, even a $500[1] package would be fine. Put out a list of acceptable hardware like the old NeXT list[2].

I know they won't, but I still have dreams. I do wonder what was the real story when Steve Jobs made his public comments on clones[3] and what the price was they refused[4].

1) Lord knows I paid more for NeXTSTEP back in the day.

2) It was kinda fun to call a number and get a fax back with the list of hardware you could buy.

3) [https://youtu.be/a3MrpLyUOo8?t=34m41s](https://youtu.be/a3MrpLyUOo8?t=34m41s)

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

<comment><USER3> No Apple will never go back to licensing their OS. It nearly killed them after Power Computing went straight for Apple's profit margins instead of trying to entice new customers to the ecosystem.

The fact is that many of the innovations we come to appreciate Apple for come from their ownership of both the hardware and the software.

<comment><USER2> > The fact is that many of the innovations we come to appreciate Apple for > come from their ownership of both the hardware and the software.

Since they switched to Intel, what are these innovations that I cannot just buy? I see the new Touch Bar, but even that I can skip[1]. I really wonder what would be different?

I doubt they will ever go back, but Apple sure isn't doing a whole lot to satisfy my desktop love. What exactly on the Mac mini and Mac Pro cannot be bought by a third party?

1) The whole idea of something that make me move my eyes to the keyboard is unwelcome.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if you would count this as innovations, but magsafe, the glass trackpad still ahead of anything else and the full unibody enclosure in my mind are clear innovations that made a mac a much better alternative than the competition. I also think they were only possible because people are willing to pay a little more to get macOS, thus allowing Apple a higher price point to develop and include those features.

<comment><USER2> Neither of which helps the desktop computers. Hackintoshes aren't all about getting a cheaper computer these days. They are about buying current chips and higher memory. I'm now one of those willing to pay for macOS, but the hardware is a big downside to the OS experience.

For example, being limited to 16gb because of power consumption because they picked LPDDR3 memory instead of LPDDR4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I experimented with Hackkntoshes years ago. It was a fun toy, but overall not the best use of my time. Upgrades required effort even if they didn't outright break my system.

More importantly, Hackintosh requires custom kexts, at a minimum FakeSMC.kext. That kext is used to bypass Apple's hardware locks. Has it been audited? If so, can you trust that the installer you use to wedge the kext in actually uses the clean kext and not a rooted version that puts you at risk? What happens when you load that kext? Even if it isn't overtly trying to compromise your system, does it open security holes? Does it silently corrupt your disk due to a bug somewhere?

Let's say you're ok with all that. What happens when you make it big, and Apple decides to sue you for breaking the EULA of MacOS? I wouldn't base my business on it.

<comment><USER6> Base your business on it? No.

However I did put a Hackintosh into mission critical use for a bit. The machine was a ~$300 Dell Mini 9 which remains one of the all time easiest and most stable Hackintosh builds. To be fair it was a puny computer, but I upgraded mine with a larger SSD which made it pretty quick, and it was rock- solid stable. TBH I don't think it ever crashed or hang. And it was _tiny_.

I used this as my onstage computer for about a year running Reaktor and Sampletank. It took many falls. I never once had a problem with it. Its teensy size meant it could perch in a blank area on top of my keyboard.

However you're right about updates. They could be fatal and had to be well- researched and planned.

<comment><USER7> Why not get a refurbished MacBook Air 11"[1] which is guaranteed to work?

[1]: [http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbo...](http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_air/11)

<comment><USER8> Not the OP but I am a musician. You'd fill up an Air drive in minutes with audio files and samples, presumably.

<comment><USER6> OP here, the thing I was working on was only 64GB, so that wasn't it. The real reason was price and size. This was even smaller than an Air at less than 1/2 the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Alternative route is to build a VFIO capable computer and run OS X or whatever your heart desires in a VM with real hardware (read GPU) passed through.

You can even run several VMs with several GPUs at the same time. Essentially you can have 2+ computers at the price of one.

<comment><USER10> I use a configuration like this (with Proxmox) to send content to the various TVs in my house (HDMI over Cat 5e). 4 cheap GPUs in the machine allow for up to 4 VMs running OS X (my preferred OS for media) to simultaneously play HD content, run classic emulated games, web browsing, etc. (haven't bothered with UHD yet, and probably won't for a while).

Of course, a lot of HD content can run with very modest specs (as long as the codecs are accelerated on the GPU), but for occasional content that requires CPU decoding or players/sites that aren't yet supported on standalone devices (Apple TV, Roku, etc), it's a really nice solution. Plus, it keeps each TV very clean in terms of cables and hardware.

I've done hackintosh on bare metal in the past, but even if I were setting up a single-headed hackintosh now, I'd still go the VFIO route - it makes updates _much_ less stressful since you can quickly roll back to a snapshot if you break something.

<comment><USER11> Do you have this configuration by chance as a GIST on GitHub? There are KVM/Qemu configurations, but especially ProxMox would be nice

<comment><USER10> Kind of a late response, but here are the basics of my setup (maybe I'll publish some specifics in a gist at some point):

\- Hardware (which is dated now): Asus Z87 Pro with i7 4770, 16 GB Memory, 4x AMD Radeon 6450 cards (< $20/ea used)

\- Proxmox/host config: vfiobind the PCI device IDs for graphics cards on boot, slightly modified pve-q35.cfg (workaround for some OS X issues on q35), using fairly standard VM args for booting OS X

\- GPUs work fine after a standard OS X install, but to get audio working over HDMI, I needed a couple of edits to my DSDT (basically just inserting a GFX0 device with "hda-gfx" = "onboard-1", a standard HDAU device, and a DTGP device), and boot with the Enoch bootloader (this can be specified in the VM args to avoid having to install to disk). No extra kexts needed.

That's about it. Some of those things may no longer be necessary in the latest version of Proxmox (I haven't updated my base system in a while). Once I got things working, it's been completely stable for more than a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I built my current CustoMac, I selected an Gigabyte X99 chipset motherboard that supported an optional Thunderbolt2 expansion card. This was an important part in my decision making as I have a lot of peripheral video equipment that I need in day to day work. It worked, with the caveat that it was not plug-n-play. Devices were only detected at boot. Cool, I can handle that.

However, when I upgraded the OS to El Capitan, I needed to update the firwmare of the mobo. After upgrading the firmware, Gigabyte removed support for the Thunderbolt expansion card. Suddenly, I can no longer use any of those devices. I searched, but there was no mention of the loss of thunderbolt with the use of that firmware. I have seen online where others are also in the same Thunderboltless boat, even if they are running Windows.

Just and FYI to consider if anyone reading this thread is thinking of the CustoMac route. This isn't the Hackintosh community's issue for something they changed. It's the hardware vendor's decision.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this trend becomes popular every time Apple's product line becomes stale.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it's kind of a catch 22 as the product line has to stop innovating for these guides to stay relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone here actually made a custom mac? I thought Apple tried to stop this by preventing the OS from installing and you had to do some hacky stuff to get it to work?

<comment><USER15> Last year i7, 32gb ram.

You install via USB.

I seem to have to update my video card driver after an OS X update, but it takes less than 3 minutes.

I built it figuring worse-case scenario, I can slap Linux or Windows on it, and it will still be good hardware.

I spent more on the monitor than the system build.

If you do, I recommend purchasing the PCI-E adapter for the Apple Broadcom BCM94360CD card to have native wifi+bluetooth.

Very stable.

<comment><USER16> Any indication anywhere of the software noticing it's not running on official Apple hardware?

<comment><USER17> 1\. iMessage App uses hardware serial and usually doesn't work on Hackintoshes without copying a serial from another working Mac.

2\. DRM protected iTunes movies (the ones that don't work if you don't have a DRM capable monitor attached) won't play.

Those are the only two issues with Hackintoshes that can't be fixed by buying right hardware.

<comment><USER18> iMessage works just fine here, on two hackintosh systems, all I had to do was generate a unique serial, I did certainly not copy one from another Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was lucky to infact have the components that I built for my gaming computer also tick the boxes for a hackintosh build. I had a spare SSD that I was running arch on, so thought I'd give it a whirl. I use a MBP for work, and having a similar system to work on is quite nice (especially since it's great for labwork with 32GB of RAM).

It's been rock solid, and I want to write my own boxen so that I can mimic my MBP build

</comment><comment><USER20> I understand not wanting to pay the Apple tax, but I think what makes a desktop experience great is the whole package.

How hardware and software come together in an unified user experience.

This is why people talk about Spectrums, Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, Macs, and game consoles.

This is why hardly anyone talks about nice memorable experiences with PC clones.

<comment><USER21> Based on the comments of people doing this, the vast majority are far less motivated by saving money than by getting macOS on great hardware. It's a frustrating fact for those willing to pay that the Mac "Pro" is very far behind the bleeding edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why do people do this? Is it only for fun? I would think that any GNU/Linux system could provide similar or better tooling and most likely results in a less painful upgrade process.

<comment><USER23> Because of the software we use. Lightroom and MS Office (please don't suggest Libre Office is good enough, it's not for legal and accounting documented exchange, as I had many spreadsheets that were broken on LO).

<comment><USER22> As a Lightroom user, how do you think Darktable compares to it for amateur and semi-professional use cases? [http://www.darktable.org/](http://www.darktable.org/)

<comment><USER24> I've tried and liked it, but it seems that it isn't really meant to replicate Lightroom's cataloguing functionality. I tried importing the 20 or 25K photos I have, which Lightroom cruises through (I've met people with hundreds of thousands of photos in their catalogues) and Darktable gacks. That's on a relatively recent 5K iMac too, so I don't think hardware limitations are the problem.

Right now Darktable seems to be more of an editing tool and less of a cataloguing tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone built a Hackintosh laptop that works? Even one that booted into Linux (with proper sleep/hibernation support) to run an OSX VM using PCI passthru would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER26> Last time I tried this is it was a complete ballache to get iMessage working - I expect other services are similarly problematic. Is this still a problem?

<comment><USER27> I installed Sierra just a few days ago on an Intel server board (S5000XALR). I had to change a single setting in my bootloader (clover) to make all the services work (Admittedly, it did take a bit of googling to find that setting).

I think Intel boards are ideal because they are presumably quite similar in hardware to the Mac Pro motherboards. All my hardware (including GTX480) worked without any additional configuration.</comment></comment>


My Life With Tim - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/mylifewithtim

<comment><USER2> When I read such articles, or I see biographies where everyone started programming on their Atari when they were 6 years old, I wonder - was I the only one who started using a computer after they were 18? Are the majority of hackers people who grew up using computers, understanding them and being around them?

<comment><USER3> I touched my first computer at 19, but that was just one mandatory college class in programming, after which I never touched a computer for several years. I didn't become a programmer until I was 26 and even then, it was a chore I had to do as part of my regular job - it took me a while to actually like it. I had no interest in software until I was 28-29.

I am 40 now, and have had a fair bit of success in software (enough to be an occasional angel).

So don't worry - there are lots of slow learners like me!

<comment><USER4> So, what changed at 28-29? Was it the choice of programming language? The advent of the Internet?

<comment><USER3> I suppose that was when I got interested in starting a business. I realized software is one area where you don't need much capital. So I decided to fall in love with software ;)

To be honest, I hugely enjoyed it, though it was a kind of marriage of convenience at first.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, which prog. language did you start with?

<comment><USER3> C++ (which a colleague taught me)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was a fun essay. However it also contains one of the really annoying aspects of aaronsw's writings, when he calls DanC's "socially conservative politics" one of DanC's flaws.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought he was specifically speaking of extreme positions such as that of intelligent design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This guy's going to commit suicide someday, I sense it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Beautiful essay.</comment>


FoundationDB's Lesson: A Fast Key-Value Store Is Not Enough - <AUTHOR> http://voltdb.com/blog/foundationdbs-lesson-fast-key-value-store-not-enough <comment><USER2> The underlying organization of a database is not about what can be expressed in theory, it is about what can be expressed _efficiently_. Not only is there a very rich set of data structure designs that can be used with varying tradeoffs, but most sophisticated databases use an ecosystem of different, tightly interwoven data structures that smooth over the sharp corners that any single data structure has.

Efficient expressiveness follows from the relationships directly preserved in the organization. Generally from least-to-most expressive you have:

\- cardinality preserving (hash tables, most KV stores)

\- order preserving (LSM, btree, skiplist, space-filling curves*)

\- space preserving (space decomposition e.g. quad-tree, a zoo of exotics)

Competent implementation is progressively more complex, nuanced, and sophisticated as you go down the list, so most implementations reflect the comfort level of implementor. As you move down this stack, you can express things efficiently that will be very inefficient to express with a less expressive class of organization.

SQL was designed for databases built on order-preserving structures. While you can implement it on a KV store, it will never be as efficient as a database organized in the more expressive organization that SQL assumes.

KV stores are popular because they are relatively simple to design and implement, not because they are expressive. It is an architectural impedance mismatch to add query functionality that tacitly assumes a more expressive organization. It will never perform well against a database actually organized for the expressiveness of the query layer.

Any database can only do a few things really well. It is inherent in the tradeoffs. You can add mediocre support for a laundry list of other "good enough" capabilities but you never want to market and position your product around those mediocre capabilities.

<comment><USER3> That's a good breakdown.

In this case though FoundationDB's KV store was order preserving. The API supported (& efficiently implemented) ranged reads, not just individual get's.

Implementing layered architectures always looks good 'on paper' but the details often throw up performance issues that are hard to deal with without punching some holes in the abstractions.

In this case it seems that relatively few companies had a need for a massively scalable ordered KV store, and the whole SQL layer was an attempt to bridge the product to a wider audience. It would be fascinating to hear more of the story but I suspect that will never escape now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regarding SQLite using FoundationDB as k/v, I got inspired by that comment to do the same thing with Redis instead: [http://grisha.org/blog/2013/05/29/sqlite-db-stored-in-a- redi...](http://grisha.org/blog/2013/05/29/sqlite-db-stored-in-a-redis-hash/) (and it was quite slow too)

I'm curious though - databases typically store data in B-Trees which are blocks of equal size which works great for block storage. So isn't "block storage" essentially a key value store, where the key is the block number and the value is the block itself? _That_ I think is the proper way of using a key/value store as the database back-end. (And that's what I did in my SQLite/Redis experiment, BTW)

<comment><USER5> I think this may slightly improve the too-fine-granularity locking, and it might make full table scans a bit more efficient, but otherwise most of what I wrote in the post applies. In fact the metadata problem has gotten worse and you might have to move even more data around.

It would help if you could push down filter predicates to run locally inside Redis, but at that point you're already more than a key-value store. I wonder if you could do this using Lua?

<comment><USER6> I think you could, but at this point you're butting up against the event loop assumption: that most of the work is IO. If you do compute on the edges, you then want threads, and you're re-engineering redis (Edit: I should have read grandparent's link, where he does just this).

But the core idea of pushing predicates to edges seems reasonable. At one point, I built this sql engine that coordinated queries and pushed down queries to the edges. It assumed that each edge store implemented an iterator over all its values, with optional filtering and sorting (if not implemented on the edge store, then the engine/client would filter/sort). It works great, but I haven't yet published it for other reasons.

<comment><USER7> Hey, amateur here - but has anybody tried to do a database where your edge servers literally run jit code? Like, you'd define a predicate like an OpenCL kernel, as a small ball of code taking a predetermined set of constants or per-row variables, then presumably push this as LLVM bytecode and let the edges compile it into locally appropriate loops (probably with caching). Is the problem there that it would become hard to apply optimizations that depend on awareness of data structure at a higher-than-row level?

<comment><USER5> So there are plenty of systems that compile portions of a SQL plan to bytecode (LLVM or JVM) or machine code directly. Usually, the part you compile is the SQL plan and most importantly the predicate filters.

Common operations like networking, transaction management and even index walks (except the key comparisons) are already compiled to native code, so you don't need to go all in. You just optimize the stuff that needs it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, a previous competitor slamming them only after they're certain FoundationDB's gag order will prevent a rebuttal. Classy.

<comment><USER9> Correct me if I'm wrong, but what happened to FoundationDB smells like an acqui-hire par excellence. This article provides an interesting alternative to the "Apple bought this space age technology to keep it to themselves" narrative.

Seems like the guy knows what he's talking about as well, b/c surprise, he's working on a DB.

<comment><USER10> There's a third option: Apple had a need for a massive, distributed K/V store, and at their scale, it's cheaper to buy a company than a license.

<comment><USER11> [http://cassandra.apache.org/](http://cassandra.apache.org/)

I'm not sure why Apple would prefer FoundationDB to Cassandra for this usecase.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps because FoundationDB is ACID compliant?

<comment><USER5> So there is a point here. Apple is trying to compete with Google. Google has some amazing distributed systems, including Spanner, F1, MillWheel, etc... Apple has Cassandra and other OSS/COTS software. Not to ding Cassandra, but this is a problem for Apple. We've seen repeatedly that at huge scale, it often makes sense to own (or control) the software. See Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Now I don't think FDB (the product) is the answer, at least not in the short term. There are more problems scaling it to Apple's use case than there are working around Cassandra's lack of ACID.

So I'm convinced the value of FDB is the experience in the engineers' brains. Apple need brains to run Cassandra, but also to figure out if Cassandra is the right long term path. Build, buy, adapt? It takes veterans to make the right call.

<comment><USER13> Apple runs Cassandra at scale today. It underpins most of iTunes Match and last time I checked all your iCloud data was sharded and stored in Cassandra. They run one of the latest clusters in the world (at least the last time I spoke with Datastax). Cassandra is a pretty easy database to run and scale and Datastax is just down the road from them to help.

My guess is that FoundationDB is replacing their Teradata installation. Better to buy the company and invest heavily in it then let it not met it's full potential as a small startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Their SQL layer architecture is indeed chatty.

If I remember correctly they were doing/planing a lot of optimizations like:

1\. delaying requests a little on purpose to take more advantage of batch requests

2\. fancy techniques to improve join locality (based on Akibans previous work).

These two go hand-to-hand.

So in a good enough network (aka not any public cloud) it'd probably work reasonably well up to a point.

<comment><USER5> When I started VoltDB, Mike Stonebraker told me we had to be 10x faster than Oracle sitting on a RAM drive, or nobody would care. 5x wasn't interesting to him.

It seems like FDB-SQL was closer to 1x, with a much better replication story, but with huge limitations on the kinds of things you can do. ([https://foundationdb.com/layers/sql/documentation/Concepts/k...](https://foundationdb.com/layers/sql/documentation/Concepts/known.limitations.html))

So maybe you could push it to 2x or 3x with a few years of work, but other new systems with more SQL support and more customer traction are doing 10x and up today. It's a tough sell.

<comment><USER14> While I do agree with you I don't think anyone used foundation DB sonellly for its sql layer and if they did...

<comment><USER5> Right. I'm not being critical of the underlying KV tech. It seemed pretty impressive from what I know. My two points were: 1\. The SQL thing wasn't gonna work they way they went about it. 2\. Without SQL or some other powerful query tool, it's a less interesting product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think quite the contrary it can be quite enough and it should not be spoiled with an SQL engine.

In which case it is a bit silly and you get the worst of both world.</comment>


College degrees awarded per capita in the U.S.A. - <AUTHOR> http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/12/college-degrees-awarded-per-capita-in-the-usa/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious what the cause of the dip is in the 90's. Anyone have any ideas on what could've caused that? Price of school, societal trends, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> There have been several theories suggested on /r/dataisbeautiful -- come check it out: [http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/27ypq1/coll...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/27ypq1/college_degrees_awarded_per_capita_in_the_usa_oc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is eye-opening (in one chart):

[http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/all-degrees- pc...](http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/all-degrees-pc-over- time.png)

Master's degrees in particular stand out.</comment>


Ask HN: Which tech specialities will be in greatest demand this coming decade? - <AUTHOR>

Based upon your observations within the industry, which tech specialities do you believe will be in greatest demand this coming decade? (e.g. Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, Embedded Systems / IoT, etc.) Why? <comment><USER2> Machine learning and big data analysis. There are going to be more and more devices and apps spewing a firehouse of data, and someone needs to make sense of that data. More importantly, computers will need to make decisions based on that data.

<comment><USER3> Yes to that. Internet of things won't make any less data either :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A decade is a long time in the tech world.

Machine learning and big data are already getting a lot of interest but if you want to see trends, you can refer to companies like Google, Miscrosoft, and Facebook investing humungous amounts of capital on forms of Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality.

This has the potential to disrupt many industries if executed well and as a result, specialists in those fields will be in high demand.

</comment><comment><USER5> Full stack web development using Javascript frameworks on the frontend and backend.

</comment><comment><USER6> Formal verification skills for ASIC. Can't believe the IoT hype with the current software, if there will be an IoT it will be build on hardware.

</comment><comment><USER7> Quantum Computing

</comment><comment><USER8> Cognitive Biomimicry applied to extending human lifespan which will solve for extended space travel.</comment>


Do you know a tool which is online and provide these charts? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/retentio/statuses/201496322270969858 <comment><USER2> If you look at the other twitpic photos, you will see one talking about "BoomGraph". I have never heard of it, but it seems to sit on top of Raphael and produces these charts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I've checked boomgraph but I think they have not open sourced the cycle plot. And I don't know how get and manage these data. Maybe I should wait they launch the rocket!</comment></comment>


The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html <comment><USER2> OK so where are all the folks who always say regulation is bad, the free market self-corrects, and that insurance is the way to fix these kinds of problems? Because anything not already proven to be toxic isn't E.P.A. regulated, meaning tens of thousands of chemicals aren't regulated at all. The company knew it was bad 40 years ago, but nothing happened to prevent them from eventually getting it into the entire global environment, in everyone's blood, in all the water, and in animals everywhere. You can't get this kind of insurance. This should destroy the company and all of its incompetent shareholders (owners) who kept on ignorantly accepting dividends but not actually bothering to have the company run by ethical officers. We'd have to claw back profit from every shareholder for all time, pierce the corporate veil and take even more money from the shareholder in the form of a fine, and that still wouldn't be enough.

Free market doesn't need regulations. Right. Too much regulation. OK well maybe in some cases, certainly not in this one.</comment>


Also, the billion-dollar, one-person startup - <AUTHOR> http://also.roybahat.com/post/118275403241/one-person-billion-dollar-startup <comment><USER2> While this may become possible, it will _never_ be desirable or smart (outside of some far-off futuristic scenario involving AI and or robotics perhaps).

Humans must sleep; humans get sick; humans have families; humans need vacations; humans can only rationally work so many hours per day; humans have emergencies; etc. If you're running a billion dollar company, by yourself, you're doing something incredibly stupid.

Having 10 or 20 employees on a billion dollar startup? Maybe that will make sense, depending on the business in question (a photo start-up like Instagram is certainly an ideal candidate). The cost of having those employees is extraordinarily low in comparison to the value of the business, and the benefit they bring. It'd be the cost equivalent of forgoing storage backups on data worth $100 million, because the backups cost $100,000 per year.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope they mean something different than [https://xkcd.com/1060/](https://xkcd.com/1060/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Key functions outsorcing requires extremely smart, accurate and precise planning. One must be very talented and experienced in techincal requirements specifications composing and validating and analyzing feedback. Feedback not from clients but from outsorced staff.

And then will be feedback from customers...</comment>


What's the hidden secret of the review for ASIN B0069IY63Y? - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/robots.txt

<comment><USER2> I don't get it. The link points to www.amazon.com/robots.txt.

<comment><USER3> if you look in the file you'll see a Disallow entry for /product- reviews/B0069IY63Y.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> honeypot entry to ensure that crawlers are complying with robots.txt?</comment>


Why you should quit your job and crash the party - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagobusiness.com/section/blogs?blogID=ann-dwyer&plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&uid=16ea2629-7e90-46f0-a706-dd6152764513&plckPostId=Blog%3a16ea2629-7e90-46f0-a706-dd6152764513Post%3ad375b2d3-3777-413a-af3e-c22d8131e3d2&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest

<comment><USER2> Being from Chicago, reading this was great. But I was wondering:

"Mr. Leshner thought MelonCard wouldn't be able to put together a deal in Chicago nearly as fast: "Chicago moves slower. It takes seven meetings (to make a deal), and there's more of an old-school focus."

Why do you think this the case? Is it Chicago's financial background? Is it the Midwest thing? What keeps it from being one of the startup hubs? All the factors are here: Close to excellent universities, tons of money floating around, culture, etc. (maybe not so great weather). People used to say that it lacked a big, successful startup to act as an anchor, now we have Groupon. So what gives?

<comment><USER3> not much of a vc scene compared to SF/NY, weather sucks almost half the year, and chicago is generally underrated as a place to live for various reasons.

a lot of it is chicken and egg - the top talent doesn't see chicago as a place to go to achieve your startup dreams so they don't come here, and chicago won't be that place until people come here. groupon - meh. barely a tech company in my opinion, and (correct me if I'm wrong) smart, ambitious, top- notch coders aren't really banging down their door for a software engineering job.

that being said, lightbank now has plenty of money to spread around, and there is an incubator or two to get things going. can't do much about the weather though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the sure sign of a bubble when a finance guy can quit his job and be funded in six weeks. Awesome idea, but.. really?

<comment><USER5> The ingenious and tactful hustle read here only makes me want to work harder. Love how they crashed the party from a tweet all in the name of pitching Dave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> ""When the stars align, they align quickly,"

Not so fast. The toughest and most challenging alignment to get is paying customers. Everything else is easy in comparison</comment>


Siri says some weird things - <AUTHOR> http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/12/siri-weird-things-iphone-4s/

<comment><USER2> If anyone with 4S has some time, I'd like to know how Siri responds to:

        * Map from here to the nearest gas station
        * Map from here to the nearest gas station, avoid highways
        * Turn screen darker (or lower brightness)
        * Redial (last called number)
        * Turn off 3G when near home
        * Turn off Wifi when near work
        * Turn vibrate mode on when near work
        * Turn vibrate mode off after 6pm
        * Repeat song (when iPod is playing)
        * Open HackerNews (saved as bookmark)
        * Delete Safari cookies
        * Update AppStore apps
        * Which actor plays Ryan in The Office?
        * Alert me when battery has less than half charge

<comment><USER3> I don't have a 4S, but some of these screenshots already reveal some stunning limitations. For example "take a photo" doesn't seem to work (on a mobile phone, wtf?) and the proper response to "I think I just killed someone" should not be "oh did you?" but something more along the lines of "do you want me to call an ambulance".

On a side note, I believe Apple is making a fundamental mistake with Siri in not communicating its limitations more clearly (or at all). Sure, the marketing department probably wants to make announcements to the effect of "oh, this baby can do _anything_ " but soon customers will find out that's not the case and be thoroughly disappointed after the novelty factor wears off. Siri is a prime example of this shortsighted marketing move because its capabilities are murky and unknown by nature.

Putting out a clear bullet list of things it can do (like: make cal entries, notify, simple if-then logic, GPS data, Google lookup) would work much better in the long run.

<comment><USER4> The only real limitation you bring up is not being able to take a photo (I'd add reading email as well, not just texts). But there's no reason Siri has to maintain its current capabilities.

Have you read reviews of people struggling with limitations? Also, Siri offers a list of suggested tasks it can perform from the iPhone itself, based on the videos I've seen.

"Siri, on the other hand, feels limitless. It's fuzzy, and fuzzy on purpose. There's no way to tell what will work and what won't. You must explore. I found it extremely fun to explore Siri — primarily because so many of the things I tried actually worked." -Daring Fireball

Even if Gruber is an Apple fanboy, I would suspect people to react more like him than you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does the choice of being unable to call 911 seem strange to anyone else? I think the risk of occasional accidental calls [1] is nothing compared to emergency situations where the user is too panicked to operate the touchscreen, or blind, or [insert your own edge case here]. Or is this solely a legal restriction on emergency services?

[1] I once somehow butt-dialed 911 on my old dumbphone, which was embarrassing and terrifying. I awkwardly apologized and hung up, and there were no repercussions.

<comment><USER6> Don't know if it's like this everywhere, but here if you dial 911 they are obligated to dispatch a police officer to your location. Even if you say "sorry I meant to call 411" or whatever, or just hang up, I guess they think you might be in a situation where you somehow were able to get to the phone and call 911 but then can't talk about the emergency.

<comment><USER7> Where's here? I have never heard of this sort of policy.

Somewhat relevant: I have called 911 a few times to report near-emergencies (e.g., significant debris in the road, or extremely erratic driving; they forward me along)

<comment><USER8> Here in Australia, I recently was trying to get in touch with the non- emergency police number (I had seen 2 kids, one maybe 2 years old, the other 4 at most, playing alone, on the median strip of a dual carriageway road, with no one else in sight), via directory assist, but was redirected to 000 (Our emergency number), so I hung up, to try and get the direct number again. Within 5 seconds I was called back by emergency services, and asked to explain in detail what had happened, why I had hung up, and what the situation was.

The operator told me that, typically, they treat people hanging up at any stage during a 000 call extremely seriously, and will follow up, and will usually send officers out if the call is from a land line and they have an address, even if the caller says no officer is needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of playing around with Dr. Sbaitso when I was a kid. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso>

<comment><USER10> I got Dr. Sbaitso with my Creative sound card when I was little. I remember asking him all these questions about sex, then printing out the conversation. Then I panicked, thinking my parents would see it, and tore the papers up and hid them in our basement. Good times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Siri is going to be a great marketing machine for Apple. People will love to show it to their friends. And it all happens on the servers, so there's no end to Siri's incremental 'intelligence'.

<comment><USER12> _it all happens on the servers, so there's no end to Siri's incremental 'intelligence'._

This is why I'm amused, but not amazed. Siri presumably has an actual team of ghostwriters cranking out amusing answers to FAQs.

And I can't wait for someone who has read _The Diamond Age_ to concoct a version of Siri in which the responses are read aloud by _actual human actors_ , who are paid Mechanical-Turk style, rather than the synthesized voice. Though the effect might actually be ugly: the human intonation will come through, but probably too well, such that every few responses "Siri's" personality seems to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did the original Siri also do stuff like this?

I think it's a great move on the creators' part. Building silly stuff like that into Siri creates massive amounts of goodwill. That will make it much harder to really hate Siri when it – inevitably – screws up sometimes.

<comment><USER14> I never tried it this extensively, but it would tell jokes and such, certainly. I once tried "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" and it gave me a list of local lumberyards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Siri has to have some massive AI to know where to find weed and hookers. I can't imagine them building in that sort of functionality.

<comment><USER7> Haha :) Not sure if you're serious or not — and no disrespect either way — but thank you for the belly laugh!

<comment><USER15> Read the original link; Siri gave a seemingly relevant response to a query about wanting weed and recommended escort services to a query mentioning the term "horny".

<comment><USER7> I know...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As random as some of these seem, clearly Siri has amassed a ton of input data.

With the volume of people playing around with Siri I'll bet darn near every clever question has already been asked a dozen times.

Heck with that amount of data pouring in Apple could hire a team of comedy writers to just hit the daily top 1000 new questions.

Wonder how they are ranking the quality of the responses / satisfaction.

<comment><USER17> AFAIK, Siri internally asks these questions to Wolfram Alpha. And I am not sure if these questions are going into Apple's database. IMO, Wolfram Alpha is getting clever than Apple by this. :)

<comment><USER18> That's incorrect. Wolfram Alpha's responses are specifically marked as such and aren't nearly as entertaining.

<comment><USER19> <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+love%3F>

<comment><USER20> If you click 'assuming it's a phrase', Wolfram says: "A strong positive emotion of regard and affection, of the kind humans sometimes express towards one another and computational knowledge engines express towards the internet."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have the feeling that this will become a new meme and a few tumblr's will be created about it.

<comment><USER22> Damnyousiri.com/.net/.org were all bough last week sadly :'(

<comment><USER23> Siriously.com was also available the day of the announcement but now even the .net has been taken!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone knows if Siri can keep a todo list alongside with the calendar? That would be great, actually. "Siri, what's the three most important things I need to do today?"

Also, something I really need assistance with is to be aware of the time it will take me to get to the appointments I have. I always leave my office just a few minutes before I need to be somewhere, no matter if it's within walking distance or fifteen minutes by car. I'm like an infant in this regard. "Siri, let me know when I need to leave for my two o'clock appointment" would be great if it worked.

<comment><USER25> It can certainly add things to the to do list (including geolocation information - "Remind me to call my wife when I leave the office" is the much cited example).

<comment><USER24> Thanks, great! Is the semantics of a reminder and a todo the same, though? Perhaps it is. A to do list is a list of stuff you want to do at some point and mark as completed as you go along. You can probably emulate this with reminders, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Damn it, now I really want Siri.

Too bad I only have an iPhone 4. Pulling the original from the app store was kind of a dick move, Apple. (even though I understand the motivation)

</comment><comment><USER27> Today, a friend and I have been having fun using the Android version of Siri <http://speaktoit.com> (best one we tested).

It understands 90 to 95% of the conversation we spoke to it. Also, it understands 8th grade humor type words and reprimands you by saying things like, "Would you talk to your mother like that?"

Fun stuff for the 8th grader in all of us!

</comment><comment><USER28> This stuff is pretty immature, and indicative of it being something Apple didn't build internally. It makes Siri seem gimmicky and highlights the programmed nature of the responses (instead of being more AI-like, as I had hoped).

These answers serve no purpose, except for one's buddies to go "heh heh watch what happens when I tell it I'm drunk"

<comment><USER29> I see this as consistent with the Apple that shows a iPod Nano Mickey clock face that shows actual time on their website.

<http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are these responses real? My first reaction was "Funny, but I'm sure these are photoshopped".

</comment><comment><USER31> This has everything I've thought to ask Siri and more... I'm very impressed. I hope Apple plans on supporting and iterating Siri rather than forgetting about it like they occasionally seem to do...

</comment><comment><USER32> This is actually super awesome and makes me want to get Siri.

</comment><comment><USER33> These are far too entertaining to be Apple's decision. Either they were pre- existing, or a dev hid an easter egg.

Regardless, I hope they stay.

<comment><USER34> Voice recognition on the Mac has told jokes for years. No idea how far back, but definitely on Jaguar

<comment><USER15> I think it goes back to System 7.5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just an observation I've made, but isn't this almost identical to what WolframAlpha's goals are? With the exception of handling your own personal data, they both seem to work in the same ways: Understanding natural language and interpreting massive amounts of data in different ways. I'd be interested to see how they are different underneath.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't understand the Eliza one, am I missing something?

<comment><USER37> Eliza was the most fun you could have with the TRS-80 Model 1 you couldn't afford at the local Radio Shack (it was always the program running on the display model in my home town). I'd wander in, a relatively balanced teen thinking of the day a few months hence when I could actually afford a really expensive toy, and wind up leaving a borderline psychotic looking for a real, flesh-and-blood Rogerian therapist to smack but good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> how very un-apple, the original voice commands wouldn't even tell you the time

<comment><USER39> My iPhone 4 does.

"What time is it?" "The time is 9:14 PM."

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Spoiler alert.

I'm looking forward to poking around and finding some of these on my own.</comment>


Trump quits Paris climate accord, calling it a "bad deal" for the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-paris-20170601-story.html <comment><USER2> Besides the obvious concerns about the impact on the climate, I'm really surprised that Trump doesn't recognize (or prioritize) the economic costs to pulling out of the agreement.

A new axis between the EU and China could jeopardize US efforts to become a leader in the research, development, sales, and services of clean tech. As costs of clean technology naturally drop to be equal or less than fossil fuels (as is already happening), this will become a massive market that ultimately shrinks the size of the oil/gas and coal industries.

The decision to pull out of the agreement could have a large negative impact on the ability to attract leading researchers and funding, which then affects future jobs and US competitiveness in what will clearly be a massive growth industry. This will lead to job loss in oil and gas, with no commensurate increase in the jobs in replacement fields.

Trump seems to take a "public company-esque" view of governing: focus on short-term gains rather than long-term R&D and strategic planning to win the long game.

<comment><USER3> > Trump seems to take a "public company-esque" view of governing: focus on > short-term gains rather than long-term R&D and strategic planning to win the > long game.

Rational, if you view for governing as a tool of electoral politics rather than vice-versa.

<comment><USER4> I wish I could offer you more upvotes. Brilliant observation, perfectly said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At least 195 other countries are joining ( except Syria and Nicaragua ), even China is joining. US is now 1 of the three countries that doesn't join. What's at stake, at least an effort to change the future.

Missed opportunity for Trump / US, i think it also reflects the change that is happening between the US and it's current partners in a very fast pace.

PS. All the jobs that Trump is talking about in the mining industry, are all getting automated

<comment><USER6> Why would people have not heard of Nicaragua?

<comment><USER5> Actually, i had to look it up. But it's in Central America. So i ( from Europe), haven't heard anything from it ever, sorry

<comment><USER7> I think you can't extrapolate your lack of education or knowledge of basic geography to everyone else. I'm also from Europe and of course I knew Nicaragua.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Same topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463989)

</comment><comment><USER9> So much lost opportunity for the united states to become a leader in exporting new technology.

At least we have coal.

<comment><USER10> An industry that employees about as many people as the #18 fast food chain in the US.

<comment><USER11> That scratches the surface. There are a lot of railroad jobs and other sectors supporting coal as well.

<comment><USER10> Even if you add in all the transportation and power plant jobs, it's still only about the size of the #10 fast food chain. For example, Domino's Pizza (#8) employs more people than all of coal mining, transport and power generation combined plus another 90,000.</comment></comment></comment></comment>