Unknown Tveon Claims Video-Compression Breakthrough of 4K/UHD at Under 2Mbps - <AUTHOR> http://www.v-net.tv/unknown-tveon-claims-video-compression-breakthrough-delivering-4kuhd-at-under-2mbps-1080p-at-sub <comment><USER2> Am I the only one sniffing it?

is Adam Clark their main engineer by any chance? did they license technology from Adams Platform? or was it Madison Priest's Zekko Corp?

Same for that V-Nova perseus, those two are obvious scams.

EDIT: HOLY SHIT, just read whole article to the end and :

"The company's senior development team comprises: Adam Clarke"

haha, Adam Clark , probably the very same Adam's Platform Technology (2004) "transfer a 1.3 gigbyte video file to a 1.4 megabyte floppy disk." one

[http://web.archive.org/web/19990430015742/http://www.theage....](http://web.archive.org/web/19990430015742/http://www.theage.com.au/daily/980519/infotech/infotech1.html)

[http://compressionscams.blogspot.com/](http://compressionscams.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER3> Is he a troll? If so why does no one say anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can encode any resolution at any bitrate.

But low bitrates usually don't look too good ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Using middle-out obviously...

</comment><comment><USER5> RODFL

Adams Platform was capable of transferring a link to play any hidden file on the local hard disk :) I would recommending finding and reading the patents - funniest thing I have read in ages - particularly the Audio one...

I so hope this is the same Adam - The lack of substance would certainly indicate thus...

</comment><comment> sky-t They already lunched their compression technology for security market under name "senturix"

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Presumably we have entropy measures for some "standard" videos. Presumably the coding efficiency falls below those measures.

Isn't this fairly easy to disprove?

<comment><USER2> It is impossible to disprove, because scammers are clever and do not release ANYTHING, it is top secret IP stuff you see.

Take V-Nova Perseus for example, their website popped into existence on April 1 (no joke), and 99% of mentions on the web are on PR reprint spam sites, sketchy technology blogs that also popped into existence at the same time, or by anonymous Romanian/Hungarian posters (doom9 forum).

The most technical writeup by someone you could call industry standard body claims "better compression than jpeg2000 at h264 picture quality", because we all encode HD content in jpeg2000 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another patent-encumbered video compression algorithm.</comment>


Like Siri? Sonalight Brings Powerful Texting-By-Voice To Android - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/like-siri-sonalight-brings-powerful-texting-by-voice-to-android

<comment><USER2> Seems a little sneaky/dishonest of you to not mention the 20 incoming(EDIT: should read compose) sms limit for the app, without paying $20/year.

Here is the copy from the android market: <https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sonalight>

Text by Voice allows you to safely text while you drive entirely through voice. There's no need to touch or look at the screen at all. Text by Voice will automatically read incoming text messages aloud and give you a chance to respond. You can also set an auto responder for incoming text messages, and have Text by Voice start automatically when you start driving. Text by Voice lets you compose texts on the fly. It runs in the background so you can use other apps at the same time. Drive more safely with Text by Voice. Search Keywords Text by Voice, TextbyVoice, Voice Recognition, Speech Recognition, Hands Free, Speech, Text, SMS, Drive, Driving, Text While Driving, Sonalight, Sonalite, Sonilight, Sonilite, Sonolight, Sonolight, Sonarlight, Sonarlite, sona soni sono sonar light lite text by voice textbyvoice Email email@example.com PHONE SPECIFIC NOTES: -Tested fully with no problems on Motorola Droid, Motorola Droid 2, HTC Evo, HTC Droid Incredible, HTC Droid Incredible 2, Nexus S, and T-Mobile G2 -Samsung Galaxy S microphone has lower quality audio

<comment><AUTHOR> The limit is only for composing a text. You can receive an unlimited number of texts. Did you get the impression that you could send unlimited texts for free? (serious question- it's not our intention at all)

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I definitely meant to write 'composing' not 'incoming'.

That is really the impression I got as it's not mentioned anywhere in your description. I was wondering what your monetization scheme would have been. I predict that you will open this up to unlimited texts and charge for other actions.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're going to be more flexible with our monetization in the next few weeks. $20/year for unlimited was a last minute addition to the launch so that we could get feedback like this. We don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into one model just yet. Opening it up for unlimited sending and charging for other actions is definitely on the table.

<comment><USER2> My other piece of advise is that I would stay far away from being compared to Siri. You will by definition always lose, as you are not processing contextual statements. Just bill this is a (big)improvement on Google Voice Actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Like Siri? Here's something that's nothing like it.

<comment><USER4> Exactly... voice recognition for texting != conversational artificial intelligent assistant. The frustrating thing is that my viewing their website gave them some amount of ad revenue. I want that money going to accurate reporting and insightful blogging.

<comment><USER5> I feel like the article was quite accurate--a slightly sensational title, but "Texting-by-Voice" is qualified right there in the title.

Given the timing of this app, it's comparison to Siri seems to be quite relevant.

<comment><USER6> Not when their common thread is a single feature, voice.

Like red trucks? Here's a red bicycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is this better than google voice commands?

<comment><USER2> Touchless interaction. Google Voice Actions requires you to interact with the phone via touch in most instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OMG. Android is the new Linux and iOS new Windows. So jumping the ship to iPhone asap

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We just launched. Would love HN's feedback (critical or otherwise).

<comment><USER9> Your app is nice, but it's nothing like Siri.

My dumb phone is an '07 Motorola Razr on Verizon's OS (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR#Verizon_Wireless_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR#Verizon_Wireless_version)). It has a button on the side that I press and a computerized voice says "Say a command:" and lists the options:

        1. Call <Name> <Loc>
        2. Call <Number>
        3. Send Text <Name or #>
        4. Send Picture <Name or #>
        5. Lookup <Name>
        6. Go to <App>
        7. Check <Item>

It only understands these 7 commands. The voice processing wouldn't be good enough to compose a text message, #3 just sets that up for you to key in, but it's doing the job on a 50 MHz single-core ARM9 CPU instead of uploading it to a server somewhere. I have no beliefs that the above task is anything like Siri.

Siri is not about turning speech into text. That's been done already, everyone else has a button on their phone that does this, and you're offering them this familiar (and often broken or bad) functionality in an app for Android (Note: I'm not implying that your app is broken or bad). As long as your app is like what people are used to, you'll have a hard time of sales. Once you cross over to the functionality of the well-marketed and Apple-branded Siri, you'll do much better. Based on the description of your features, you're not there yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our sense is that people don't want to use speech for everything ever, they'd much rather use their hands and eyes when they're available. We're laser focused on texting while driving right now, it's the one big use case for voice commands.

We've done a lot of user testing and have found the biggest problem with voice products now is that people try them twice or three times, and when they don't work they decide to give up on using that product. No one wants to spend time learning a user interface. So we've optimized our product for the first time user experience for texting. We're offering what voice what Dropbox did for cloud storage. There's nothing novel technology wise per se, only that the product is optimized for ease-of-use.

With regards to Siri, we're interested to see how it'll perform once it gets released into the wild.

<comment><USER10> _We're laser focused on texting while driving right now, it's the one big use case for voice commands._

Regardless of whether your app is same/better/worse than Siri, please please please don't pursue a use case around texting while driving.

I'll skip my rant about the fact that texting while driving is dangerous even if you remove the keyboard input (you still gotta read the reply messages @ 65mph).

 _(EDIT: Ok, I see that your app will read texts too. Still doesn't negate the following:)_

The issue you face is that as a second-class citizen app (ie not Google or the device manufacturer) on my phone, here is my workflow to text while driving using your app:

1) I decide I want to text

2) While driving, I have to feel my way around my phone to press the fiddly "power" button at the top of the handset (let's assume it is in a cradle)

3) Oh, but wait I have screen-wipe security enabled, so I now got to dance my finger across the screen - again, while doing 75mph _(yes, I like to drive fast up the 280)_

4) Ok so now I'm in. But damn, I'm at the home screen. I got to find your app - we'll assume I put it on the backdrop of the home screen. I press it and wait for the app to load.

This all assumes that I put your app in a primary positon on my phone, that I wasn't already in another app and so I had to press the home button, that the home screen wasn't on a different 'pane' then the one your app icon is on, and that your app starts recording voice commands as soon as I open it up.

Sorry, but that's still A LOT of steps, is dangerous, may not be legal in California due to it being more then one button and makes a lot of assumptions.

Google and the handset manufactures, who give themselves first-class citizen access, have the advantage because they can add extra buttons for one-press access. They can also use private APIs to potentially remove the screen lock (although that has other issues associated with it). Apple, when they integrate Siri into iPhone 4S, will presumably have similar advantages.

Sorry, I'm all for the little guy and the 3rd party ecosystem - but I'm also for safety. As a driver (and motorcycle rider) I really fear people using tools like yours while driving.

For that reason, I'm sorry, but I really hope your app is a failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> We agree with you completely, we are very much for safety.

We are against people touching their phones while driving (it's illegal in most states) and designed our product specifically so you don't have to touch your phone.

It auto starts up when it detects you've begun driving via your speed from GPS (go to Settings in the app to enable the auto start up). We also designed this GPS detection to not suck battery life (it will take about 1% of your battery every hour).

It works on phones even if the phone is in the passenger seat next to you- you just have to make sure to talk loudly enough.

It will even pick up your voice if your phone is in your pocket (again, just speak loudly enough) and you can hear it talk back to you.

No touching your phone or taking it out of your pocket required.

edit: also, no need to downvote this guy, it was an honest misunderstanding.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for your answer - it does sound like you've tried hard to overcome the issues and I'm sorry I've not yet tried your app.

How does this work if I have my phone set to turn off after x mins of activity and/or screen lock?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have the "turn-on when driving" setting enabled, then our app will acquire a CPU wake-lock that keeps it running (this is not a big drain on the battery, about 1% per hour). Every three minutes we'll poll the GPS to see if you're driving and then start the application up if GPS indicates your speed is above 10mph. When it starts up it'll also notify you that it started up by speaking aloud to you.

If your phone is entirely off (and not just sleeped/screen locked) then there's nothing we can do about that... :)

Also if you have more questions, start a new comment thread in this post- the reply timeout makes replying super slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> buff-a voice recognition != voice comprehension

</comment><comment><USER11> am using "voice on the go" service for 2 years now. it always was a part of their service (text by voice)</comment>


The 50% discount code for "Angular 2 Development with TypeScript" is mlfain - <AUTHOR> https://www.manning.com/books/angular-2-development-with-typescript <comment><USER2> I don't get it. Ang2 is in alpha. I mean the next big thing to drop is Angular Connect [https://github.com/angular/angular/milestones](https://github.com/angular/angular/milestones) and one of the key parts of Ang2 is the ng-upgrade which nobody has started yet [https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/3517](https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/3517)

So I don't get how people are releasing books on Ang 2 without at least a beta in release out there.</comment>


The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@synopsi/the-gender-wage-gap-in-silicon-valley-f32229dcf935 <comment><USER2> Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." \- this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.

How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc.

It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - [http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number- of-F...](http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-Female- Engineers-by-500-in-One-Year).

<comment><USER3> "How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants?"

Yeah, and do you know what the best and easiest way to make a workplace more attractive to women is?

It is to have other women in the workplace!

I know many women who are unwilling to even apply to a company if they know they would be the first or only woman on the team.

It is a chicken and egg problem. Until his company is able to get SOME women working there, it is going to be extremely difficult to attract them in the first place.

Because of this it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize hiring women if your team is extremely imbalanced.

<comment><USER2> Agree with you up until the very last sentence. It does _not_ make business sense to break the law (and gender discrimination is a real thing a company can get sued over). No matter how tempting, you can't magically wish the problem away and say "I'll hire 5 women, then 10 people of color, then a couple of LGBT folks, then I won't have any diversity problems". It doesn't work that way.

Yes, it is a chicken and egg problem. Yes, the first couple of hires will be difficult to make. But if you don't have the framework in place to actually _support_ these women once they join the workplace, guess what, even if you luck out into making those hires, they won't be sticking around. It's not a one-time kind of thing.

<comment><USER3> Ehh, there are effectively equivalent ways of ensuring that you hire X more women without discriminating against men in the interview process.

If you have X people interviewing at your company, you should hire the best person who interviews, no matter the gender.

The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage.

If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.

I am suggesting that you do this same but biased towards women referrals, instead of biasing it toward male referrals. You make specific, targeted efforts to get as many women as possible to apply, while not bothering with referral/reachout processes that are likely to receive male heavy applications, and THEN accept the best person who applies to the job, which will almost certainly be a woman, since instead of having a 20male-1female application ratio, you now have a 1male-20female ratio.

One way of ensuring that you get women referrals is to reach out to all of your female engineering friends, and ask THEM for referrals. Or when you are making your job postings, forward it along to the mailing list of all the women in tech meetups, facebook groups, email lists, ect.

I mean, thats what the tech industry is doing right now, but targeted at men, and they never get in trouble for it, even if it is "accidental" that the job postings only get sent to tech groups/meetups that have a 20-1 male to female ratio.

<comment><USER4> >The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage. >If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.

God this hit me like a sack of bricks. It's exactly what I would do and I now realize, dudes gonna have dude friends, just like how ladies are gonna have lady friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Education shrank the results to single digits for each occupation, gender and work experience, so I decided to remove it from the final dataset.

First of all you could have used buckets. Secondly, it doesn't seem like you have enough data judging from your charts.

Dice did a study and found that

>when you control for education, level of experience and parallel job titles, says Dice, men and women earn the same amounts.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/03/20/women- are-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/03/20/women-are-now-paid- as-much-as-men-in-tech-study-finds/#1cfa195650dc)

> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring > rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance > our team

I hope you get sued

<comment><USER6> But you know they won't be, because good luck winning that case, and before that, good luck finding a lawyer to represent that case.

<comment><USER3> Also, apparently anti-discrimination laws dont kick in until you have 15 employees, so what this guy is doing is probably not illegal anyway.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the state. In CA, the number is 5. [1]

1: [http://www.workplacefairness.org/minimum](http://www.workplacefairness.org/minimum)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring > rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance > our team

I stopped reading after this part!

<comment><USER9> If he had decided to give preference to (e.g.) Syrian refugees because he felt a sense of wanting to help, would you have the same response? If he gave preference to a veteran out of Patriotism or an ex-con out of a belief in "second chances" would you have the same reaction?

<comment><USER10> Interesting argument. So you are equating being born the female sex the same as being a war time refugee, war veteran or ex-con? Could you explain that analogy a little better?

<comment><USER9> I was just presenting other situations where an employer might give someone hiring preference.

Is it just the idea that someone was getting hiring preference that isn't 100% tied to skills that is the issue? Or is it _specifically_ because it was _women_ that were getting hiring preference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Generally as a startup, many applicants come through current employees, friends, investors, etc. This generally encourages the cycle of the same people getting the same jobs. Don't rely on your website to widen the diversity of your funnel, even if your jobs list is current...most startups I know are not great about keeping this current anyway.

A few (relatively easy) ideas:

1\. Join a few "______ in tech" email lists, and if you don't feel comfortable joining the list or it is not allowed, at least email the moderator and ask if they take job postings.

2\. Send someone from your company to attend to a "____ in tech" meetup. There are a lot and they happen often. Ask people at these meetups where they get their information, what email lists they are on, etc. Then, act.

3\. Interns. People have mixed thoughts on interns, fine, but the "lack of experience" trope happens because it's really hard to get that first chance. Take a chance on someone in a lower-risk way.

4\. Host some kind of public-facing community event one or two times per year. Advertise it on your website and your twitter. Generally as a woman I am more comfortable attending something like this rather than cold-emailing a company for a position that I am not even sure they are hiring for. See: "Code as Craft" at Etsy. Tech-centric topic, inclusive and public-facing way to see the office, meet employees etc.

<comment><USER12> >Generally as a startup, many applicants come through current employees, friends, investors, etc. This generally encourages the cycle of the same people getting the same jobs.

Is that a bad thing? I say this from the perspective of small businesses who typically hire family then friends, etc. In theory it may be bad as they may eventually run out of vigor and ideas... but is it bad in other ways? I have known many businesses started by immigrants where lots of the employees were family, same ethnic group, etc. but I had not though of it as "wrong" in a moral sense maybe wrong in a business sense (as I think it limited their potential, but I saw that as "their" problem, not a social problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought this was an interesting article and then I read the comments. Oh dear, a bunch of white guys kvetching and clutching their...pearls. Your deprivation moves me. Really. Anyway I had a point to make, as a software engineer for 30 years and a woman. (The proportion of women in the field has fallen by half since I started my career.) For my last job I went with a high end recruiting agency and the recruiter got me to raise my salary request by 25K. I ended up getting 10K above her suggestion. It was interesting to see that indeed I was undervaluing myself. In this I find that I was pretty typical of female engineers. I'm glad I took the recruiter's advice. By the way my salary seems to be exactly in line with the salary of men with my experience, from these charts.

<comment><USER14> Your point is spot on: people should _always_ know what they're worth when they negotiate salary at a job, asking for what you can get is the most crucial thing when taking a job.

Both men and women are uncomfortable negotiating up (I've heard that women are much more hesitant about this, but I don't know the research that well and never sat on the hiring side of salary negotiations), and low asks are probably the biggest mistake anyone can make: $10-20k doesn't mean shit to the manager that wants to get you on their team if you negotiate it at hiring time, but if you try to get that bump during annual raise period, that's almost impossible to achieve at any large-ish company (it means either nixing raises for other people on the team or calling in VP-level favors, which most managers don't have the ability to do).

In tech nobody is ever going to tell you to piss off for asking for $10k more than they can offer, they're just going to negotiate you down (if even that - most of the time they'll just say "yes" or split the difference). Now, if you're $50k+ out of line, that could be another matter, but that's why you do some research and don't go crazy with your ask.

The rule for contracting is more brutal, but also a bit simpler: you should always be losing a lot of business because of how high your rate is, somewhere between 25% and 50% is my rule of thumb. If clients are saying "yes" without negotiating or at least complaining, you're _definitely_ charging too little.

Protip: you can look up top salaries at most non-profits online, they have to report them for I think the 15 highest paid employees. Pick a smallish one in your area, look at the engineers there, and you've got an anchor for senior engineering rates. Non profits might not be 100% competitive with for-profit companies, but the better ones have to be somewhat close as far as base salary (they don't offer stock or other perks, usually) if they want good people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Born white and male in today's world I won the lottery without having a > clue.

Here we go. (actually I stopped reading).

<comment><USER16> There's a couple comments to this effect. Why? It comes across as being unwilling to consider ideas at all.

<comment><USER12> Probably because Germans have won the "German lottery", Japanese have won the Japanese lottery, People from Syria "lost" the lottery. Many advanced nations in a kind of way "won" the lottery for their people. Many Americans believe Europeans won the lottery vis a vis the US because they think things are much better and more fair there. On the other hand, people from poor countries think America is a lottery and put great efforts at crossing the border...

It also has a "guilt" aspect to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work!

How many data points per graph? Really just 1 median salary a year (20x2 data points and 1k^2 pixels :)? I would have preferred just points with straight lines over the interpolated wavy line that looks fibbed. Why not more points? Why not a heat map/2d histogram instead of medians? And why not have the same axis on all the graphs?

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks pretty compelling based on the graphs at the bottom. Seems like OP could lead with those or at least make a percentage right up at the top for those of us that need a TLDR instead of a play by play.

</comment><comment><USER19> > At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring > rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance > our team

Most of us can agree that this is a bad decision, but I've always wondered how people can end up with such tunnel vision. Men in IT has always been overrepresented, so it's not surprising that the majority of teams are mostly men. But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will change this trend? It is in fact gender discrimination, but I believe that inspiring women to work in the IT field is the key to solve the problem. I don't think anyone wants special treatment due to their gender, but rather evaluated by their skills and experiences.

<comment><USER20> > But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will > change this trend.

As someone else pointed out in another comment, many women feel better about working at a place that already has other women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Completely tangent, but I'm surprised ops and hardware are so low.

</comment><comment><USER22> Any idea where I can find LGBTQ wage gap too. Also, now that female glass ceiling is broken, which glass ceiling is next? L,G,B,T or Q?

</comment><comment><USER23> Would be helpful to see some histograms. The patterns of the data seem oddly suspect to me (sinusoidal - with things like Operations in 5 year earning more than ops at 7.4ish year). Maybe I am missing something but am assuming this is just because of sample size. It seems extreme for things like Operations and Hardware Engineer though.

</comment><comment><USER24> Now all men who were rejected can easily sue you. Solid move bro.

</comment><comment><USER25> Data collection: A+

Analysis: needs improvement.

From the article:

> Based on the data, women are definitely undervaluing themselves in > comparison to men. The gap starts around $10k/year for the first year and > grows to a staggering $30k/year after 10 years of working epxeriences. [sic]

An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience. Efficient markets are a thing.

I'm not saying that's my interpretation of the data, I'm just cautioning against jumping to conclusions when that conclusion is implicitly blaming the victims. It's a really great analysis and the dataset could set up a great follow-on study of causation.

<comment><USER26> The gap is large enough that the efficient market argument doesn't hold very much water. A 5k difference should be enough to favor one candidate over another all else equals. If firms are efficient they wouldn't be paying 20k extra for males.

I do think wages are really very much a bottom up thing in that people can collectively raise their wages by simply not accepting lower pay. Putting a (reasonably) high price on your head is not only good for you but for others like you in the labor market. Firms are not really in a great position to keep wages down, the best they can do is make sure nobody knows what anyone else makes.

<comment><USER27> As far as I can tell the data does not adjust for usual hours worked or overtime beyond restricting to only full time data points. Men working more hours than women is a consistent trend across pretty much the whole world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I realize you're going to get a lot of controversy on something like this but this is a great read. First and foremost, excellent work with the data gathering. Now I want to tinker with TensorFlow.

I think you drew the generally correct conclusion from this:

"But I hope that it will encourage at least some women to think more about their value for an employer and next time will negotiate a better deal for themselves."

My only problem with the conclusion is that statements like this make the assumption that women are not already thinking about their value. My family owns a business that employees almost entirely women with graduate degrees. All very sharp and want to do well in their careers but having diverse interpretations of what doing well actually means to them. Your data is probably better than any I've seen to point that out since it is based on DESIRED salaries.

Some want to advance their careers primarily and while others significantly value flexibility for sake of their families. Men tend to be more singular in focus. We want to advance our careers for sake of ourselves AND our families.

The goals naturally align with a desire to advance in large part to make it easier for our wives to take a pay cut to have more time for the kids. While there are plenty of stay at home dads and role reversals today, the norm is very much the opposite...and it's going to stay that way not because of social acceptance but because of biology...unless of course men start carrying babies for 9 months, going through childbirth, recovering from childbirth, breastfeeding and everything that involves (waking up and night, pumping, freezing milk) and the bond that naturally comes from all of that. Before repeating the process for additional children.

A lot of that stuff is hardwired. I see my wife doing all of that and realize there's only so much I can do to help...but I can try to make more money to make life a little easier.

There are a WHOLE lot of women who decide they want to stop having to work for a while after they've had kids, at least for the early years but then discover that they can't afford too. Between student loans, potentially going overboard on a mortgage from two incomes, etc NOT having a job with the new expense of a child becomes almost unimaginable to handle. There's even a book about it called The Two Income Trap.

All that's to say, don't make the mistake of thinking that people are undervaluing themselves because you don't agree with what they're asking for. You never know what they really want.

</comment><comment><USER29> > implying being born in Slovakia is winning some sort of lottery

<comment><USER30> Yeah, unfortunately a lot of these blog posts are very US-centric. There are still plenty of people in Europe living in poverty and their white privilege somehow didn't save them.

It's interesting how these racist ideas get tossed about proudly here and in the US media.

<comment><USER29> The author was actually born in Slovakia but it seems like he got infected with white guilt when he came to the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "graphs generated for each occupation, representing a median (not an average!)"

But the y-axis is labeled average salary!

</comment><comment> james-watson >If you are a female engineer living in the Bay Area, we'd love to meet you.

Totally not sexism folks. Equality at its best!</comment>


A real nerdbook should be like this, not like a Macbook Pro Retina - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/1xF5jS1i

<comment><USER2> I have noted a number of prominent technologists do their work on MacBook Air 11s or 13s, even Linus. The MBA is in some ways the antithesis of this list, it makes a number of 'nice to have' tradeoffs for a few important things: weight, awesome disk performance and great keyboard and screen quality are these things.

I would love to have an LTE option on my MBA, and I VERY occasionally wish I had an ethernet jack on it. I would like it to have a retina display. And I would like it to have 6x the battery life. But, I most often don't worry about my Air at all, it's there, it works, it boots super fast, and if I remember to run make -j4, it compiles relatively quickly.

I'm not willing to add 2 pounds to get any of my nice to haves; the combination, while necessarily limited, is as good as it gets right now.

For this reason, I think that the MBP 15 Retina is a sort of proof of concept device, the real awesomeness will come when those displays work their way down to the Air line.

</comment><comment><USER3> sudo wget --pay-whatever-they-want --random-wait NERDBOOK :D</comment>


What is the exact difference between a terminal, a shell, a tty and a console? - <AUTHOR> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4126/what-is-the-exact-difference-between-a-terminal-a-shell-a-tty-and-a-cons/4132#4132 <comment><USER2> This was a great write-up, especially if you like your ol' unix history. Aside: I love the stack exchange sites (i.e. stack overflow, etc) - they are probably one of my top companies based just on how much I interact with their sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> The second answer by andcoz ends with a great summary. I'd quote it here if copy on ipad worked on SE.

<comment><USER4> Can anyone tell me why I can't zoom or select the text on this site on my iPad? Isn't this the very sort of thing we hate in flash thoughtfully recreated in HTML5?

<comment><USER5> I can zoom and select text just fine on an iPad... Odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Terminal is a program of some kind, like xterm, (or a monochrome device with nice smooth scrolling), shell is a different kind of program, that interpret your input like bash. TTY is an interface to access a system over serial line, and console is an interface pre-configured for administrative access. ^_^

<comment><USER7> A terminal is a physical device for access to a computer. The VT-100 and Teletype ADM-33 are both examples. Xterm is a _terminal emulator_ for X--it pretends to be something like a VT-220, so you can run your text mode programs.

TTY, of course, stands for Teletype, which was a common terminal used in the early days of Unix. In the old days, you'd talk about having a whole room full of TTYs. Now, it seems to refer to the emulated terminals provided by a Unix- like system.

A console would originally be a specific terminal (often hard-copy, like a Teletype) hooked directly to the computer for administrative tasks.

<comment><USER8> I remember seeing a a tty at a pay phone at a rest stop in Maine a few years ago (maybe 2007). IIRC, it was for the deaf.

<comment><USER9> You are correct. If you look at the bottom of posters/flyers for government services (suicide help lines, schedule services for transit, that sort of thing), you'll often see underneath "phone: " a line "TTY: " with a slightly different phonenumber following.

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Telecommunica...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Telecommunications_device_for_the_deaf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> edit: SO back up, comment removed

</comment><comment><USER9> This should be taught in the first CS class at every school. It continues to stun me how many CS grads in the US don't understand the difference between these things.

<comment><USER11> Why should they know the difference between these things? Unless they are trying to implement a new terminal, there isn't much of a reason to know this minutiae. The rationale for the differences between them are mainly historical and not really a good design.

Now, I'm all for a "History of Computing" class being required for CS, but that's another story. I also wish that I had time during undergrad for a "History of Biology/Chemistry/science/alchemy" class (I was a biochem major).

<comment><USER9> They should know what they are because _they use them every day_. It's like a racecar driver not knowing the difference between an axle and a wheel, he doesn't have to know how to make them or even fix them, but he should damn well know what they're called. Understanding this issue is fundamental to understanding Unix, and is also a superb way of introducing some classical IPC methods. Last I checked most schools still devote a required class or two to the subjects but somehow it fails to work a good deal of the time.

 _"The rationale for the differences between them are mainly historical and not really a good design."_

The separation of shell, a terminal emulator, and a psuedo-terminal is bad design? _Really?_ I would love to see a rationalization for that. EDIT: Or downvotes will work fine as well I suppose.

<comment><USER12> The system as a whole is badly designed, extremely complex, and not maintained in Linux. See eg <https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/>

Sure there should be layering, but starting by emulating a serial port to create an ssh session? Why is this in the kernel not in userspace?

<comment><USER9> Your "system as a whole" is the linux TTY... so exactly _not_ the system as a whole. Furthermore, Alan Cox stepping down 2 years ago does _not_ mean the linux tty system is unmaintained. It is in fact.

The reasons ttys and ptys are in kernel space are numerous. As one example, it needs to be there because different line disciplines are necessary and relying on a userspace program to implement them will not do. Ever notice how su/sudo/passwd/etc don't echo your password? Yeah, that sort of important. Furthermore, ttys in modern systems are tied to job control rather deeply. Implementing correct signal sending, sessions with controlling terminals, forground/background processes, etc in userspace? Have fun.

I could write a book on this subject, but this is easier: "Write a fully functional pty in userspace. If you ever manage to get that far, then compare your work with traditional implementations and defend it."

PS: ptys are not "emulating" anything in any meaningful sense of the word.

<comment><USER12> Userspace can not echo a password too, its not exactly difficult. And do we really need the job control model as is? If you started from scratch would you design it anything like this at all? And signals, it is all the least successful parts of the unix design...

<comment><USER9> If you are implementing all of your line disciplines in userspace 1) userspace _where_? 2) How do you handle other modes, besides just noecho? 3) How do you do that while minimizing responsibilities of user generated code?

 _"And do we really need the job control model as is?"_

Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's be clear about this: a terminal is what you have to disinfect Friday nights in the computer lab after a week of disgusting freshmen.

Wikipedia is sorely lacking in this critical detail.

<comment><USER13> ouch, the downvotes! for posterity let me note here that, in fact, I really did have to clean vt220 keyboards with alchohol wipes every week when working in the comp. lab. I have very fond memories of the vt220 despite this ignoble responsibility. Not germane enough to the conversation but anyone that spent time on a real terminal will hopefully relate.</comment></comment>


Rent my private airport for your hardware startup - <AUTHOR> https://app.box.com/s/i4gu6lxffloq6sif56uqfezyakmyk37b <comment><USER2> Hmm, October through May, snow blower included? On the plus side its probably great for focus, on the down side its going to be a haul to resupply mid- winter. Although with another outbuilding for supplies and pulling gigabit fiber from the Internet all the way out to the house, you could treat it like the Arctic stations and just work solid for 8 months.

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean "haul". It's right next to Hwy 89 and only 10 miles from Livingston.

<comment><USER2> Well they mentioned 40 minutes from Bozeman (for me that is a 'haul' just to get groceries.) but if it is that close to Livingston there used to be an awesome steak house in town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this really in the spirit of a Show HN post? It's basically an advertisement to rent someone's space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, thanks for your feedback. I posted this because I feel like it is a very unique space/opportunity and is in the spirit of fostering startup progress. I guess many Show HN posts could be considered to be an advertisement. Usually it is an advertisement for an individual's skills or awesome ability. In this case, my wife's and my awesome ability is restoring a run-down airport facility and trying to make it into something more modern. A lot of hard work has gone into this space and I believe that this opportunity is a reflection of our hard work, just like a lot of the software projects out there. I apologize if you feel like my intent is too commercial for the subject line chosen.

<comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombiinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombiinator.com/showhn.html)

 _For example, blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers can 't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs._

This isn't something you've made that people can try out so it is not a Show HN.

<comment><USER6> That's correct. We've taken Show HN out of the title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> o, man! it brings me to tears - compare all this majestic grand scale to my condo backyard patio in MV where i'm trying to build up toward ultimate goal of 2 humans carrying octocopter (and at full scale it actually would hardly fit into the patio :)

<comment><USER8> At current real estate prices, you can rent out the interior of that octocopter to fund its development and still have space + funding left over! :P

<comment><USER9> I was always tempted to try to AirBnb out my parking spot in SF, and put up a tent there, and see how much I could charge!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much would it cost? Any ballpark figures you can give?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're thinking approximately $2500/month for basic use of the hangar and house. Please contact me directly for more details.

<comment><USER11> Damn, isn't that basically SF apartment rent?

<comment><USER12> To be fair, SF apartment rent doesn't include a 5000-foot runway.

<comment><USER11> Right. So it's a great deal. Even without the runway.

EDIT: So, a few of you get together and propose a skunkworks project to your employer. Move to Montana for five months and kick some ass.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VC funding continues record pace in third quarter - <AUTHOR> http://m.cnet.com/Article.rbml?nid=20119514&cid=null&bcid=&bid=-62

<comment><USER2> Somebody please explain to me how this headline completely contradicts another HN headline (from the Wall Street Journal) that says the exact opposite: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3105596>

From what I can tell, the WSJ is blowing smoke by saying that current VC funding is something like 76% lower than the 2000-2001 high - but this article is saying that current spending over 9 quarters is still going up. Is this correct? If so, I'd say that the WSJ is pulling feathers out of their ar$e akin to "current spending is lower than the high from the 1890's - who cares if this boom is more sustainable and less inflated than the tech bubble? For once CNet is doing a better job than the WSJ.

<comment><AUTHOR> TechCrunch tries to clarify the contradiction.

Web "Start-Ups" Hit Cash Crunch. Or Don't, Depending On Whom You Ask. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/web-start-ups-hit-cash- crun...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/web-start-ups-hit-cash-crunch-or- dont-depending-on-whom-you-ask/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Follow up: Are the good times over (again) for startups? [http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8141-are-the-good-times- over...](http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8141-are-the-good-times-over-again- for-startups)</comment></comment></comment>


USDA: We will not steer people away from meat to protect the environment - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/usda-we-will-not-steer-people-away-from-meat-to-protect-the-environment/ <comment><USER2> There is no shortage of meat consumption in the US to the point of adverse health effects - in fact the opposite would seem to be the case. The amount of meat consumed per capita has increased around 54% since 1950 (up to something like an average of 222 lbs per person per year)[1].

There is likely a shortage of healthy vegetable consumption compared to what's been reported to reduce all-cause mortality.[2] Meanwhile beef production uses something like 160x the amount of land per calorie of crops like potatoes, wheat, rice, and around 28x that of other meats.[3]

[1] [http://grist.org/article/2010-03-25-corn-ethanol-meat- hfcs/](http://grist.org/article/2010-03-25-corn-ethanol-meat-hfcs/)

[2] [http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2014/03/03/jech-2013-20350...](http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2014/03/03/jech-2013-203500.full)

[3] [http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/among-meats-beef- has-...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/among-meats-beef-has-a-beefy- environmental-footprint/)

<comment><USER3> Isn't the issue that poor people cannot afford fresh food? The calorie/dollar of veg+fruit is not a good value because in places like NYC or SF the markets are completely gentrified and the prices are astronomical. The other consideration is that the poor cannot live in nice real estate areas -- they live in grocery ghettoes. Take a look at the un-even distribution of places like trader joes around the uS and compare that to wal-mart. TJs is only in NFL metros for the most part (with upscale exceptions proving the rule). All of these public health "concerns" reeek of 1st world problems by weatlthy urban people who don't farm or have extensive familiarity with subsistence living. Remember that food stamps were created for poor white people in rural appalccia. The urban poor have completely different health concerns tied to the economics of real estate and transportation. None of this is served or in the scope of normal by the usda.

<comment><USER4> Here's the actual price data of U.S. cities compared to the midwest:

[http://www.bls.gov/regions/mid- atlantic/data/AverageRetailFo...](http://www.bls.gov/regions/mid- atlantic/data/AverageRetailFoodAndEnergyPrices_USandMidwest_Table.htm#ro3xg01apmw.f.1)

<comment><USER3> Obviously real estate and food prices are correlated at the county and/or zip code level and that is a bit of a data challenge in reviewing this linked data.

My point above is that its a hard thing to mandate people eat food X when it might be $10 for 2,000 calories vs $2 for 2,000 calories. Its also a problem if the $10 option pre-supposed you buy in bulk, have access to refrigeration, and use spreadsheets to minimize wastage which otherwsie might be as high as 30% (making it $10 for 1400 calories down the gullet). My understanding of what little research has been done in this area has highlighted that the logistics and economics of fresh fruit/veg are heavily biased towards the upper/middle classes in many ways that are not obviously apparent nor addressed stricly by "guidance" on what is a "better" mix of foods. To use an analogy that people with white priveldge may be more able to understand: if I tell you to pack a weeks worth of fresh fruit and raw meat for a hike in yosemite, which you have to carry, and forbid you from eating anything like nuts/granola/raisins/cliffbars/dried meat, you probably would have a bad time lugging around that backpack over 10,000 ft passes and what not. The reality is that rich white people in the backcountry eat the same crappy food as inner city poor people once they lose access to refrigeration/storage and frequent/convenient resupply options. It doesn matter if you look at a pro bar or a nature valley or a power bar or a snickers. They are all interchangeble in that context and do the job, despite some being up to 7x as expensive. And nobody would call a diet of 8 probars and a pack of beef jerkey a day either healthy or well rounded, but you will survive your trip. Of course, if you eat this diet in a sedentary culture, you're BMI will get out of wack. But that is the power of the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The USDA should advise on nutrition not on environment, likewise the EPA should advise on environment and not nutrition. So, while I eat little meat, I think they made a good call. It's not in their direct scope. At the same time, the meat producers should be reserved, one day they may find that less meat is better nutritionally and if they do find so, tell it like it is.

Not sure what the WAPO is trying to imply here. It's as if they want the USDA to go outside their scope --you know, not printing newspapers might also be beneficial to the environment, WAPO, but I don't see you ditching printing out of benevolence but rather necessity as fewer people buy newspapers.

<comment><USER6> On the contrary, the mandate of the USDA is to provide guidance and regulation relating to the meat and dairy industries. As the meat and dairy industries have definite environmental impact, they have space to make recommendations relating to the intersection of the meat industry and the environment.

It's foolish to think that we should all live in tiny, proscribed silos of expertise, and simply ignore all areas which other silos might have some claim to...

<comment><USER5> That's why we have other departments of the gov't to advise on their proscribed silos of expertise. No, I think this is the right thing to do. Stick to your area of expertise. I don't want gov't departments going rogue using up resources.

They should stick to their scope like nutrition, food safety, etc. They have too few food inspectors as it is.

<comment><USER7> They are sticking to their scope, actually. They're just not sticking to your baseless claim of what their scope is.

[http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=USDA_MISS...](http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=USDA_MISSION_AREAS)

> Natural Resources and Environment ensures the health of the land through > sustainable management. Its agencies work to prevent damage to natural > resources and the environment, restore the resource base, and promote good > land management.

[http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/](http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/)

"going rogue, using up resources" \-- doesn't apply to the USDA, does apply to meat production. And it's not like the industry just shuts up and makes meat, sticking to wasting resources that way; they also advertise and lobby, do they not?

<comment><USER5> I think there is a distinction between good land management, given conditions, that's to say how to best use land, with the presupposition of it being used, versus saying don't use it at all.

Moreover, the USDA itself is of the opinion that kind of recommendation you're suggesting, it out of their scope. So they disagree. I know people want them to think otherwise, but, they don't think so. I'm glad they have not become an activist department going beyond their scope, in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a sad day, this really should have been established... at least the discussion brought attention to the thunderous impact of animal ag on the environment, given that it produces more CO2 emissions than the combined exhaust from all transportation.[1]

Also quite revealing the meat industry's objection,

> _The meat industry disputed the claim, and the notion that dietary > guidelines ought to consider the environment._

They, of course, didn't dispute the impact, just that people should even consider it in a dietary guideline.

[1] [http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM](http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's possible that we could run out of food by ignoring the environment.

If we overfish, there will be no more fish for the FDA to regulate. If we pollute the earth, water and air, there will be less clean earth, water and air with which to grow crops to eat. The crops are fed to the land animals we farm, too, so those are also affected.

There is no government agency dedicated to making sure we have both good quality food and enough ("sustainable") food. The FDA and USDA are concerned with food _safety_ and not availability or quality.

There aren't ecosystems, there is one giant ecosystem that everything is a part of. Until the majority of our food is grown in underground caves, both the FDA and USDA should make an interest in the environment a major priority so we can have the best quality (and most abundant) food possible. But this doesn't happen.

Why? Because the people with the greatest financial incentives to create food will profit more now by caring about the environment less now. Politicians don't get increased campaign funds to make sure your tomatoes are healthier for you. They get increased campaign funds to make sure the tomato seeds are copyrighted by a corporation.

Fish fall through the cracks in a big way because we never needed to "grow" them before. Between 1970 and 2010, fish stocks worldwide fell to 26% of their former levels. About 70% of current worldwide fish stock is overfished or at its limit. But USDA only regulates farmed fish like catfish. The rest is handled by the U.S. Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service. The EPA in collaboration with the FDA sets limits on acceptable levels of contaminants in fish products.

</comment><comment><USER10> USDA: The United States Department of Agriculture

The U.S. federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal government policy on farming, agriculture, forestry, and food.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Agriculture)

</comment><comment><USER11> I always assumed that USDA was some kind of industry body set up to promote the U.S. beef industry. I'm surprised to learn that it actually has other roles!

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, it's like there's a government department which sees its job as serving the people instead of ruling over them.

<comment><USER13> Because the meat worship we have today is totally a grass root movement.

<comment><USER14> It is. Also grass fed. Tasty tasty grass fed.

Meat has always been the food of the rich, of the higher classes and is damn tasty. Meat is also terrific source of proteins, fat soluble vitamins and fats.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's also a great source of saturated fat and cholesterol. Besides, fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes have all the protein and nutrients you need, so why filter them through an animal's body?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> USDA was the department that bought us the "food pyramid"[1] and somewhat controversial[2] plate[3][4] marketing campaigns.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_%28nutrition%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_%28nutrition%29)

[2] Controversial due to the details surrounding the including the replacement of a water drink with a dairy drink placeholder. See [4]

[3] [http://www.webmd.com/diet/20110602/plate-replaces-pyramid- as...](http://www.webmd.com/diet/20110602/plate-replaces-pyramid-as-diet- guideline-icon)

[4] [http://friedmansprout.com/2011/10/04/harvard-vs-usda- dishing...](http://friedmansprout.com/2011/10/04/harvard-vs-usda-dishing-out- controversy-over-dietary-guidelines/)</comment>


Functional Geometry - b-man http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/functional.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat. It might be interesting to try this with DrScheme, since it can display images inline in the repl.

<http://docs.plt-scheme.org/quick/>

<http://docs.plt-scheme.org/teachpack/image.html>

<comment> b-man In the same spirit I would recommend that you try section 2.2.4[1] of the SICP textbook using The SICP Picture Language [2] which can be found here [3].

That section is based on the same original paper, and it is very nice to check on the book's explanation using a modern environment such as DrScheme.

[1] [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-15.html...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-15.html#%_sec_2.2.4)

[2] [http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package- source/soegaard/sicp.pl...](http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package- source/soegaard/sicp.plt/2/1/planet-docs/sicp-manual/index.html)

[3] [http://planet.plt- scheme.org/display.ss?package=sicp.plt&...](http://planet.plt- scheme.org/display.ss?package=sicp.plt&owner=soegaard)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Thank you so much! I first encountered this article back in 2004 or 2005. I just remembered it again about a month ago, and have been fruitlessly Googling for it off and on since then. You've really made my day!

<comment><USER2> And, I just did a quick port to Python: <http://gist.github.com/220038>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The GIMP has a Scheme-based console that would be pretty suited to this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of Esher. Very cool.</comment>


Welcome to the real world of digital nomadism - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/want-to-be-a-digital-nomad-read-this-first-14907d66963e#.1oq6n29l9 <comment><USER2> I think that I'd be way more interested in reading about this phenomena if there was literally any term used to describe it other than "digital nomad".

There's also just the creeps who really enjoy being served by other humans, but can't really afford to own a full time servant class anywhere but SE Asia so that's where they live. Something really rubs me the wrong way about the white people who do this, lots of really creepy stuff going on.

<comment><USER3> I quite enjoy having servants when I'm in India. There are many jobs where I don't have a comparative advantage so I pay people to do them. Your language "own a full time servant" is nonsensical, it's "pay a person for their labor at a mutually agreed upon wage". If an employee finds something better (which they often do in a fast growing economy) there's nothing I can do to keep them besides offer them more money.

By contrast, in the US, I'm forced to pay people not to work.

Why is preferring the former "creepy"?

<comment><USER4> [http://thefutureprimaeval.net/servants-without- masters/](http://thefutureprimaeval.net/servants-without-masters/)

White Americans have a very odd bias against personal service. Honestly I think it is a major obstacle to economic growth - image how much more productive the average upper middle class family could be if they could employ servants to get things done at home.

Instead USG pays a big portion of "poor" people not to work, and also insists that they cannot work for low (market clearing) wages.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't describe human dignity and equality as "a very odd bias".

<comment><USER4> So you are putting forth the idea that all forms of personal service require sacrificing dignity? What does equality even mean with respect to one's work role?

<comment><USER5> >So you are putting forth the idea that all forms of personal service require sacrificing dignity?

Well yes. Following orders is always a sacrifice of dignity, even when we make it a small, subtle one.

> What does equality even mean with respect to one's work role?

That you can give input and have as much voice in the group's direction as anyone else.

<comment><USER6> > > So you are putting forth the idea that all forms of personal service > require sacrificing dignity? > Well yes. Following orders is always a > sacrifice of dignity, even when we make it a small, subtle one.

Maybe the problem is that both 'following orders' and 'dignity' (and perhaps even 'sacrifice') are ill-defined, but I can name countless examples from my life, as well as from a cursory look at the life of friends of mine, where 'following orders' provided joy and satifsaction _and_ where it didn't affect my (sense of) dignity. _Especially_ in small, subtle cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> it seems like a lot of these problems can avoided by simply staying in one spot longer, i.e. 6 months to a year. i'd say anything less than 3 months and you're basically just a tourist.

i've lived in my current spot for 6 years and i still find new things less than 1 km from my house routinely.

<comment><USER8> I agree. In most places it's difficult to rent places at reasonable prices for less than a year. Sure, you can rent crappy places, but nothing good. You get a lot more mileage committing a year at a time than jumping around every month. Knowing you have 12 months ahead encourages behaving like you actually live there and also allows real friendships to develop.

It amazes me how some people jump around, going to 5 cities on their 2 week holiday. They go everywhere and they they experience nowhere.

The big challenge is immigration. 60 to 90 day visit limits are common, and how many times you can do quick ins and outs varies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm currently in Siem Reap, ready for the last leg of my trip. It was more of a vacation to escape Berlin's cruellest months (january and february), but so far work has been hard. Very sporadic and much less consistent than I expected. Mine's a short trip, tho, with lots of travelling in between places, so I won't describe it as a real digital nomad experience.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm in Bali now and can see where you are coming from.

This is def an age thing though. The older you get the more you want to settle (in general).

<comment><AUTHOR> True.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of the issues you describe seem to come from remotely working in countries throughout SE Asia. What if one were to travel the US as a US citizen? Issues like unreliable internet connection, workplace issues, food poisoning, visas/paperwork, and language barrier would be greatly minimized. Traveling Europe with an EU citizenship would be a similar experience, though you may run into some language barriers. You also have a general idea of what the weather will be like in any of these places.

Overspending on the other hand is definitely something that would be an issue while remotely working anywhere, but if you stay disciplined enough I think you'd be able to manage.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, when travelling domestically or within more or less same culture, most points described in the article don't apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, this is part of the reason we built [https://cafewifi.com](https://cafewifi.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how many people nowadays know of Steven K. Roberts, the original "High Tech Nomad" starting in 1983:

[https://microship.com/high-tech-nomad-popular- computing/](https://microship.com/high-tech-nomad-popular-computing/)

</comment><comment><USER14> How do you find the accommodation? It must be quite frustrating to pay for WIFI that's almost nonexistent.

<comment><USER15> Honestly i dont mind that factor at all. Sometimes wifi is shitty, sometimes not. Usually it works because otherwise people would complain. At home i had a gigibit sync internet connection and honestly i rarely really miss it. If everything else fails 4G is widely available and cheap</comment></comment>


Managing Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/managing-ideas/

<comment><USER2> Its' funny how writing everything down can not only clear your mind but also see if the idea sticks. Would you spend the next weekend/month building a MVP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on how good the idea is. So many ideas aren't worth pursuing any further, but still cloud your focus.

Ideas are so common that I most likely wouldn't do anything else with it. Though I have a couple that I have turned into simple iPhone apps.</comment></comment>


Rands In Repose: Bits, Features, and Truth - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/03/29/bits_features_and_truth.html

<comment><USER2> What? He winds up exactly where he started but with the roles of people relabeled.

> Features: I want feature X and I want it on the same schedule.

> Truth: We need more time and since I know all the moving parts, I know that > we're ahead of schedule of one feature. I think we've got two weeks of > wiggle room.

> Bits: Two weeks isn't enough. Can we cut this one feature that we haven't > started and no one cares about in half?

> Features: I can live with that.

> Truth: Sold.

This exchange is "the triangle" working properly. They sacrificed some of the quality in the form of features in exchange for time. All he's done is found another way to say we need to properly prioritize application development.

I believe it's addressed in The Mythical Man-Month.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> We have six weeks to shipping...

That tells me that they are dealing with release cycles measured in months. No wonder the pressure to add features at the last minute. Those of us in the web world are used to releases every week or even every couple of days. Then the releases are run like subways. The train pulls into the station and you board the features. No one worries about a four week project because another train will be there when it is done. If another project gets bumped, no big deal, another train will pick it up.

This can even work with customer hosted servers. I worked on a project where a couple thousand customers received a new server every week or two, including database updates. The customer's server called home every night and asked if its replacement was ready. If it was it downloaded it.

If you have agile, automatic delivery, you dont need a lot of heavyweight process. Some process, yes, but not the kind that makes millionaires out of consultants.

<comment><USER4> I wish that process consulting was making me a millionaire. That aside, I think in one of Jerry Weinberg's books he says something along the lines of "things are they way they are because they got that way." In other words, in most cases processes in big shops have evolved in response to past circumstances. It's kind of like contracts - they're long and complicated, but each clause reflects a lesson that someone learned in the past (the hard way).

I like the idea of regular, frequent delivery, but my experience has been that for a lot of IT shops that is not a practical approach, either because of user or management expectations. And in a few, rare cases it may be because of IT's technical capability. More often the heavyweight process has evolved because of issues that have occurred in the past (unplanned outages, etc.), or because of management's desire for "predictability" in their delivery process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first time I heard the "triangle argument", the points were labeled "Good" (as in quality), "Fast" (in terms of time to deliver), and "Cheap" (cost of the project). Maybe that version is more specific to MIS-type projects?

<comment><USER5> I also found quality/features to be an odd distinction to make.

Then again, I've never been a real fan of 'cheap' either.

Experience has shown that there are very real upper-bounds on the effectiveness of throwing resources at projects.

And, particularly when you're having these late-cycle meetings, it strikes me as flat-out disingenuous to imply that throwing money at a project is a reasonable or even plausible way to hit an expanded scope on an existing schedule.

<comment><USER4> True. The triangle doesn't really call out the issue of non-linear increase in cost/risk of changes as the project progresses, or other aspects of Brooks's Law.</comment></comment></comment>


Rebooting Germany – Where Europe's most powerful economy is falling behind - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-digital-gap/special-report-rebooting-germany-where-europes-most-powerful-economy-is-falling-behind-idUSKBN1JL0YT <comment><USER2> A bit inaccurate. Deutsche Telekom AG owns the majority of the Infrastructure and outright refuses to invest in it. Why should they? For them its simply not lucrative to install fiber for a place like Brandenburg with a population density of 84 people/ Km²

The Goverment tried to fix it by forcing the Telekom to allow other companies to use their lines. So now you can chose who you pay for your internet access thats served over 50 year old copper (Not even an exaggeration for some parts)

The Telekom still decides what, if anything, happends to the lines. There is a constant haggle between goverment and Telekom where the goverment is basically begging the Telekom to invest in the infrastructure.

The Telekom doesnt want to and tries to find cheap workarounds (vectoring) that simply don't cut it and also damages the competition. As long as they can serve overpriced Internet they are happy.

Now that the problem has been ignored for several decades it has become too expensive and complicated.

This is the prime example for what happends when you privatize a vital part of your infrastructure and hand it to a profit oriented company. But that does not stop people from wanting to privatize roads and water too.</comment>


Show HN: I created a free Highrise (37signals) plugin for my birthday - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessframe.com/highrise_task_guard/

<comment><USER2> Great app, does what it says. My Highrise contains more than 500 companies/people so it a couple of seconds but I got the report at the end. Appreciate https

M.

<comment><AUTHOR> @wotaen - Thanks for the nod! I appreciate it :)</comment></comment>


It really is better to ask for permission - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@enkiv2/it-really-is-better-to-ask-for-permission-3fb1f4b5a22a#.m3ixqwyc3 <comment><USER2> In general, it is better to ask permission. To see this, try helping yourself to someone else's chips in Glasgow on a Saturday night.

</comment><comment><USER3> The phrase refers to, IMHO, how to deal with institutional inertia, wherein if you try to seek permission for all change then a general preference for no change means you'll never get anything done at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have never heard this said outside of a discussion about Python code, where it makes as little sense as it makes anywhere else.</comment>


Best practices for managing and storing secrets like API keys and credentials - mackenzie-gg https://blog.gitguardian.com/secrets-api-management/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty much why we created encpass.sh([https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh](https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh)). It's just a single POSIX compliant shell script whose only real requirement is having OpenSSL installed.

Sometimes when you are hacking on a shell script or you have some configuration management pieces you just need a simple way to store and access secrets locally without having to invest in a lot of infrastructure. (Especially if you are working for an employer where you don't even get to have a say in the infra)

At Plyint([https://plyint.com](https://plyint.com)), we actually use it to manage team level secrets through Keybase. To make this easier we wrote an extension encpass- keybase.sh([https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/master/extensions/...](https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/master/extensions/keybase/KEYBASE.md)), which uses Keybase's keys, encryption, and git repos.

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/93d42340/encpass.s...](https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/blob/93d42340/encpass.sh#L775)

It uses PBKDF2 with 10,000 iterations if anyone else was wondering.

The code is clean, kudos.

<comment><USER4> Is there an easy way to tell the version of an encpass.sh if all you have is the script?

Say I was checking my encpass.sh files on a bunch of different nodes and wanted to make sure they were all based on the current master version - <AUTHOR> I have to sha256 them and compare?

<comment><USER2> Yes, just compute the sha256 checksums and compare. I had been meaning to add a version command to encpass.sh for a while now and just hadn't made time for it. Your comment was the impetus I needed, so I've gone ahead and added support for computing the sha256 checksums of encpass.sh and any extension and also displaying the tag version.

I've cut a new release for the version command, v4.1.0. See the release notes here for additional details -> [https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/releases/tag/v4.1.0](https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh/releases/tag/v4.1.0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great article.

I would point out, though, that the disadvantages listed against Secrets as a Service need not apply to Hashicorp's Vault:

1) Single point of failure: Vault Enterprise offers high availability solutions that should be able to mitigate much of this (at a cost, of course).

2) Codebase must be changed: Vault (and Consul) really shine here: Consul Template -- and Envconsul -- can be used to seamlessly integrate legacy code with Vault.

3) System-level access must be protected carefully: Well, this is always true, but Vault gives you more options than many others here as well: based on risk assessments, you can choose to limit the secrets you issue, particularly when you're talking about system-level access. You can have very short TTLs, one- time-use wrappers that limit the exposure of said secrets, etc.

(I don't mean to sound like a shill, BTW. It's just that these points easily jumped to mind, having just certified as a Vault Associate. YMMV. :-) )

<comment><USER6> Regarding 1, I don't think you need Enterprise to have HA, I'm pretty sure it comes with Vault OSS. You may be thinking about Vault Disaster Recovery which makes one cluster fail to another one, but HA is in OSS.

<comment><USER5> I was thinking of on-call support being a key part of the overall concept of HA, but, yes, good point: much of this risk can be mitigated, even with OSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "Store secrets safely" section seems to propose three alternative solutions: store secrets encrypted in Git, expose secrets to applications with environment variables, and encrypt secrets with KMS. But those are solutions to different problems. You can use all three.

For example you can use sops ([https://github.com/mozilla/sops](https://github.com/mozilla/sops)) to store encrypted secrets in Git, using AWS/GCP KMS to encrypt/decrypt them (or encrypt/decrypt the encryption key), and have infrastructure automation that gets the secrets from sops and exposes them to applications as environment variables.

</comment><comment><USER8> For storing secrets as environment variables on your local machine I recommend _envchain_ : [https://github.com/sorah/envchain](https://github.com/sorah/envchain)

It uses gnome-keyring (linux) or keychain (mac).

Unfortunately you need to install it from source as it's not popular, or known at all, but how about we give it some love and push to include it in package repositories (debian, arch, etc)?

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://github.com/mozilla/sops](https://github.com/mozilla/sops) is quite good to store encrypted secrets. Because the decryption key is stored in a KMS the secret access can be revoked any time.

</comment><comment><USER10> This post is spot on! For anyone looking for a light-weight solution based on environment variables/12-factor, check out EnvKey (I'm the founder) - [https://www.envkey.com](https://www.envkey.com)

It's cloud-hosted, but uses client-side end-to-end encryption to avoid trusting our servers (all clients are open source). The focus is on seamless integration (generally ~1 minute for a new project), intuitive ux, and platform-agnosticism.

We're also close to launching a v2 that can run on your own infrastructure with HA and offers a lot more power and flexibility--version control, audit logs, a CLI for automation, 'config blocks' that can be re-used across apps and services, managing local environments, SSO, teams, and event hooks are some of the highlights.

Also, we're hiring (remote in the USA). Our stack is TypeScript/Go/Polyglot. Please get in touch if you're interested in this stuff! email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER11> > Secrets management systems such as Hashicorp Vault or AWS Key Management > Service

KMS isn't a secrets management system. It's for managing encryption keys, though it can be used in tandem with AWS's Parameter Store, which can be used as a secret management system. As a matter of fact, Task Definitions in ECS can pull those secrets out as environment variables in your containers, which IMO is pretty elegant.

<comment><USER12> I laugh every time I see KMS used as the initialism for that, because in my circles that's short for "Kill MySelf."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This post is great! I would also add using the built-in secrets store your infra provider has in staging and production. For example, Heroku has config vars.

Shamless ad: If you guys are looking for a free and easy to use secrets manager with powerful features that work on every stack, I would recommend Doppler (YC W19). For transparency, I am the CEO.

Doppler is a cloud-hosted secrets manager designed to win the heart of the developer while meeting all the requirements of your security team. It works great in local development and production, can be nearly 100% automated, and has built-in versioning, reusable configs, audit logs, SSO, granular access controls, can automatically sync with your infra provider's secrets store (ex: Heroku Config Vars). It also has high availability features built into every part of our stack (from our open-source CLI creating encrypting fallback files to our servers running on multiple infrastructures).

Feel free to create a free account (no cc required) at [https://doppler.com](https://doppler.com)

</comment><comment><USER14> We built ironhide [https://github.com/IronCoreLabs/ironhide](https://github.com/IronCoreLabs/ironhide) to help developers share secrets with each other and with CI.

</comment><comment><USER15> Shameless plug for a k8s oriented tool that fits this space:

[https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets](https://github.com/bitnami- labs/sealed-secrets)

</comment><comment><USER16> the current solutions for secrets management just seem to pass the buck, this problem is far from solved. Where you going to store your secrets that spin up your k8s environment? It eventually comes down to protecting your PGP key I think. Where do you store the secret for your admin account to AWS? Or to your domain name provider? Or bank account? 1password?

I suppose once your core infrastructure is up you just generate random passwords and store them in k8s for access when bringing up your infrastructure.

<comment><USER10> For passwords, you can use 1password or another password manager--that's pretty much solved at this point.

Secrets that are needed in server or development contexts are a lot trickier. There's a fundamental tension between making them widely and easily available (which makes development and ops easier), and restricting access (which is necessary for security). You'll also probably have multiple versions of the same secrets in different environments, have teams of developers that all need to stay in sync, etc. etc. Password management, as important as it is, has fewer moving pieces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Using wildcard commands like git add *or git add . can easily capture files > that should not enter a git repository

No they cant, because of .gitignore

<comment><USER18> Because mistakes happen and adding a secret into path that is not hit by gitignore can happen. At least if you manually add you will have to consciously add the path that leaks secret.

It is a defense in depth. Ideally first layer protects you, but this way you have another strong layer.

<comment><USER19> Giving up "git add ." is a steep price. I prefer to store my secrets outside the working copy. Then when I cd into the working copy, direnv sets environment variables either pointing to or catting the files from my home directory. This works beautifully with Ansible Vault.

<comment><USER20> I'm curious why people use "git add ."? I don't see the convenience over "git add -i" and quickly reading through the items to add.

Realistically if you have a reasonable git workflow any add operation should only have a handful of files that you can quickly scan through to make sure nothing fishy is present and at most interactive mode adds a few seconds to the add process for you to read through everything.

Note: This is an entirely serious question and I am hoping for an answer. I promise I'm not trying to antagonise anyone. I just see so many people reaching for "add ." instead of "add -i".

<comment><USER19> Keeping a file untracked is _never_ what I want. Either it goes in the repo or it goes in .gitignore. My gitignores are usually comprehensive, and when they're not I'll catch it in my self-review of the PR.

<comment><USER20> That's fair but isn't it more work to go back and have to rebase your commits to remove something that accidentally got skipped in your .gitignore?

I say this because I am also a firm believer of if it shouldn't be committed it should be in the .gitignore but I've only ever been burned by that when either myself or others weren't using interactive add.

Basically, isn't it easier to fix a .gitignore at commit time than at PR time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> rule #1: never give developers production secrets. That way they wont be able to misuse them or push them to the repo. From my experience devs only care whether their software works, security is often an afterthought.

rule #2: its not only secrets management, the whole stack should go through security hardening and regular security review.

<comment><USER22> Rule #1 is really important. Unfortunately many small companies and most startups only have developers and no separate operations department. The best those developers can do is keeping secrets out of git, slack and email. I'm using git secret for a project of a customer with one internal developer and about five external consultants.

<comment><USER21> if that's the case, then only a team lead / most senior dev should have prod secrets. and I would prefer to be very low tech in terms of secrets management.

definitely not passing secrets in ENV (cause any process can access ENV and exfiltrate) or as command line argument (cause they will be logged as all tty commands are)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Use local environment variables, when feasible

Hmm no, environments vars are very convenient but leak like crazy easily.

<comment><USER24> Citation, please.

No situation readily come to mind where an attacker could gain access to env vars but would not also have access to any other means of persistence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great article</comment>


A comforting lie - <AUTHOR> http://www.dansdata.com/gz148.htm <comment><USER2> The comfort noise that he is referring to is the white noise that is intentionally introduced by modern digital cell phones. Most cell phones have a CODEC that will detect silence and rather than wasting valuable bandwidth on nothing, a silence packet is sent that says something like "quiet for the next 250ms" or something like that. The GSM specification for the AMR CODEC provides for a feature called comfort noise. It turns out that on the other end, if the listener hears total silence, they worry that the connection was lost. So instead it will provide white noise, specifically +/\- 2048 (of a 16 bit word). Since a pseudo random number generator on the phone is typically used, it is making white noise, similar to the white noise you hear on an old fashioned analog phone or as the author references, a radio tuned to no station and you hear random static a percentage of which is cosmic MW background radiation from the big bang. It is ironic that with all that digital technology and people still like the comfort of white noise in the background, not complete silence. Of course the carriers could instead use some extra BW and transmit the actual background noise of whoever you are talking to.

<comment><USER3> "Of course the carriers could instead use some extra BW and transmit the actual background noise of whoever you are talking to."

Another effect is the overall system would get more complicated and latency would increase because you'd need some fancier echo cancellers.

<comment><USER4> It's less complicated and unrelated to echo cancellation; you just tell the transmitting codec to always encode whatever audio you've given it, rather than detecting silence.

(Echo cancel is usually in the local audio path before data is passed to the codec. So the outbound codec would hear silence rather than an echo of inbound audio. At least that's my experience of working with PJ-SIP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And my copy of Linux Mint still uses the shutter-click-motor winding sound for screen shots... Since the photos get dropped in the Pictures folder, it is one of the few ways I know it happened, unlike the copy of Ubuntu I am running on another box that shows the Save As interface.

So we developers keep adding the comfort noises, as well.

At least Mint didn't use the AOL's "File's done" announcement :)

<comment><USER3> "shutter-click-motor winding sound"

Anecdotally my kids are rapidly approaching teenage years and they have no personal experience with film cameras, or floppy disks. Most attempts at real world icons fail miserably because 1) multicultural 2) one glyph can't explain anything complicated which is why our writing uses alphabet and words.

Notice that however poorly point 2) was written, it contained 15 words and many letters, not a iconic graphic interpretation resembling mating centipedes on a teacup, or whatever GUI icon would be appropriate.

Its almost 2015, the GUI concept is dead and starting to smell, just some haven't noticed yet.

Nothing in IT is ever new and everything in the rotating wheel comes back into style and I GREATLY look forward to the inevitable return of simple text menus as the dominant UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remember that it's not always about comfort, sometimes it genuinely is about usability. Consider Skeuocard [0]: it's much easier to enter information when the place you're entering it looks like the place you're reading it from.

[0]: [http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/](http://kenkeiter.com/skeuocard/)

</comment><comment><USER7> One "comfort noise" that Just Ain't Right is the fake engine noise they pipe over the speakers of cars that have a lot of sound proofing, etc.

It gives you feedback (which increases safety) but it raises trust issues.

<comment><USER8> I once tried to start a car that was already started because its engine was so quiet.

<comment><USER9> Note that in current gas/electric hybrids, the concept of "started" loses most of its meaning. The system as a whole can be "on" or "off", but doesn't intrinsically make any sound that distinguishes the two states. The gas engine subsystem will get turned on and off at the whim of the controller; if the engine is up to operating temperature and the battery's charge level isn't too low, the controller will turn off the engine whenever its power isn't needed (stopped at a stoplight, driving very slowly, coasting down a hill, etc.). On some models, it's also possible to press a button to tell the system "delay starting the gas engine as long as possible". Hence the concerns about hybrids "sneaking up" on pedestrians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sony's Magic Cap had a skeuomorphic interface as well. I always wanted to try it, given that Bill Atkinson was involved, but I never had the chance.

The Wikipedia page has a screenshot for those who haven't seen it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap)

<comment> shawn-butler When I first saw them I assumed Magic Cap was also influential in some early Android pre-1.0 concepts.

Rubin was an engineer on Magic Cap either at General Magic or when it was still Apple if I recall correctly.</comment></comment>


RHEL 6.5 ships; adds support for docker, TLS 1.1/1.2, and ECDHE/PFS - <AUTHOR> https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.5_Release_Notes/

<comment><USER2> Where does it add support for docker? Otherwise seems like a deliberately misleading title.

[https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en- US/Red_Hat_E...](https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en- US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.5_Release_Notes/bh-virtualization.html)

[https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en- US/Red_Hat_E...](https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en- US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/6.5_Technical_Notes/index.html)</comment>


Duolingo achieved a 50% female ratio of new engineering college graduate hires - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/LuisvonAhn/status/1050425977925459969?s=20 <comment><USER2> > We achieved a 50% ratio not by lowering our standards or by discriminating > against men

To use a oversimplified model, assume everyone can be perfectly linearly ranked.

The gender ratio is skewed towards men at the top purely due to pipeline reasons (because college grads are nowhere close to 50/50).

Set a threshold to call your "standards" (say top 10 if you have budget for hiring 10 people).

If the top 10 are 7 men and 3 women, then you must give up on 2 of the men to fill it with 2 women from _below_ the top 10.

Do you call this "not lowering standards"?

(I have no problem with lowering the bar to achieve better gender ratios because of long term social/game theoretical reasons. I just pedantically don't like lying to ourselves about not lowering the bar)

<comment><USER3> You just need to increase the size of the funnel. If you were going to interview 100 people, interview 150.

It's not about lowering the bar it's about making the extra investment to achieve diversity. It's worth it.

<comment><USER4> > You just need to increase the size of the funnel. If you were going to > interview 100 people, interview 150.

Then you are not in the "lowering the standards" part but in the "discriminating against men" part.

You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50 gender ratio without looking at the gender (Edit: When considering that all are all above the hiring bar).

<comment><USER5> "You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50"

Yes you can. As long as you are not hirering more than 60% of the Total available workforce.

<comment><USER4> My sentence did not end at the point. You cannot change the ratio without specifically looking at the gender, that is, specifically hire more of one group (because of their gender) and less of the other group (because of their gender).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very smart people can believe in and say very not-so-smart things. To make the output equal when the input isn't, you're skewing other factors.

I remember watching a video about communism the other day that talks about equality. When trying to make everyone's pay "equal" while each person works a different number of hours, what ends up happening is that you don't pay equal hourly rates. If you pay everyone one equal hourly rate, then you can't make the total pay equal. It's important to see what factor we want to make equal for everyone.

Here he makes an elementary mistake when the input ratio probably isn't equal and somehow magically the output ratio is equal. What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER7> Probably just figured out it's a great way to pay slightly less for the same quality people. It's smart.

Recently found out the real reason everybody has these unlimited vacation policies - don't have to pay for unused vacation time.

It's better to come across as hypocritical but well-meaning than to have the real intentions revealed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A more thorough explanation on what exactly they did [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-duolingo- achieved-5050-ge...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-duolingo- achieved-5050-gender-ratio-new-software-engineer-sohn)

</comment><comment><USER8> Does that mean one more woman, and there will be a discrimination problem against men?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think this is how discrimination works.</comment></comment>


Up from Pain - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/opinion/sunday/charles-blow-up-from-pain.html <comment><USER2> This is really interesting (if not exactly HN material). The two things I got from this were 1. That bisexual people might feel somehow worse about not being straight or gay. I've always assumed that bisexual men would face the same stigma as gay men and hadn't thought about the gradations therein. 2. That being attracted to both genders doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have sex with anyone of that gender. It sounds like a particular kind of anguish to think you want something repeatedly, not have your body respond as you think it should, and, on top of that, feel like you're misleading the people you're with.</comment>


Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html <comment><USER2> official response from nokia siemens:

[http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press+relea...](http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press+releases/news- archive/Provision+of+Lawful+Intercept+capability+in+Iran.htm)

 _"...The restricted functionality monitoring center provided by Nokia Siemens Networks in Iran cannot provide data monitoring, internet monitoring, deep packet inspection, international call monitoring or speech recognition. Therefore, contrary to speculation in the media, the technology supplied by Nokia Siemens Networks cannot be used for the monitoring or censorship of internet traffic."_</comment>


US and EU politicians use Charlie Hebdo attack to call for more surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/37985/us-and-eu-politicians-use-charlie-hebdo-attack-to-call-for-more-internet-surveillance/

<comment><USER2> This is so weird. I live in the continental USA, at least 8 time zones away from Paris. Why am I being punished by being deprived of privacy for the crimes of someone a quarter of the world away? US and EU politicians are _stupid_.</comment>


Become a bird with the Oculus Rift and a pair of wooden wings - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/8/5695118/birdly-lets-you-become-a-mechanical-bird-in-the-oculus-rift

<comment><USER2> Awesome looking. I'll wait until I can use it on a non-Facebook device. Looking forward to it.</comment>