Couple Proves Facebook Listens in on Conversations with Simple Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://theearthtribe.net/video-couple-proves-facebook-listens-in-on-conversations-with-simple-experiment/ <comment><USER2> Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

This experiment is so full of flaws it's ridiculous. Here are just some of them:

* Pet food ads are extremely common. The chances of not seeing them are fairly low.

* The likelihood of them choosing that subject at random is also very low. It's more likely that they had seen an ad on the topic recently, but were simply unaware because of its lack of relevance to their lives.

* They didn't do a placebo. They should also have discussed another common subject, away from any phones, then waited to see if they were also served advertisements about that.

* Two days is arguably too long to wait to influence purchasing decisions of much needed groceries.

* Confirmation bias. How many scores or even hundreds of other subjects did they see in the same period that they had not discussed.

At least the "simple" in the title is not misleading.

<comment><USER3> I love everything you said.

It'd be so easy to structure a clean experiment to test this. Bad science sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The video is really a flimsy proof IMO. We don't know what else they did with their phones between the start and the conclusion. Did they search for it somehow? Did they or their friends post about it somewhere? I've seen this video posted several times already but never found anybody replicating the experiment, only anecdotal evidence in comment threads. That's not very scientific.

I'm in no way a Facebook shill (I don't even have an account) but I doubt they're silly enough to risk the insane backlash they would get if people caught them spying on conversations when they shouldn't.

I mean, think about it, Facebook would be listening on all their users cell phones all the time, parse it constantly to isolate keywords (not an easy task at this scale, and would probably result in a comical amount of false positives) and then use it to show ads? And all that in complete secrecy?

Furthermore the video is more than two months old now, I'd expect that somebody would have found a harder proof by now, either by snooping on the network or even at the hardware level.

<comment><USER5> Facebook is still showing me ads to buy an iPhone, car, and a clock from my home _country_ 5 months after I moved away and updated my location. If they can't get that right, I doubt they're able to gain anything useful from listening from my mic 24/7.

<comment><USER6> They know you're an IT-worker who could expose them.

<comment><USER5> So they know where I work but not where I live, even after updating my location and 5 months of location-tagged posts?

The level of mental gymnastics people are going through to hold their belief is astounding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "My wife and I took a random subject we had NEVER every talked about or > searched online, and talked about it while her iPhone was on in the > background. Two days later, our Facebook advertising completely changed over > to cat food for a few days," Neville wrote.

This is really unconvincing. How many hundreds of ads were they shown over two days until they were shown one in the category that confirmed their bias? Refreshing Facebook a few times now, I'm shown several ads for products and pages I have zero interest in which I don't search for or talk about.

Wouldn't Facebook randomly recording your conversations be a PR disaster for them as well? Seems like a damning and unfair claim to make with such flimsy evidence.

<comment><USER8> >How many hundreds of ads were they shown over two days until they were shown one in the category that confirmed their bias? Refreshing Facebook a few times now, I'm shown several ads for products and pages I have zero interest in which I don't search for or talk about.

And to go even further. How many ads of cat food have they seen in the days prior to their experiment that they did not conciously see but that influenced the "random topic" they chose.

</comment></comment><comment> shawn-furyan There was a Reply All episode on this conspiracy theory recently.

My thing is, why does everyone get hung up on listening to the microphone? Facebook surveillance of users and non-users alike is _more powerful_ and _creepier_ than listening in on the microphone!

I mean at least people have some understanding of audio bugs. Nobody really understands the byzantine network of distributed opt-in web trackers and data brokers that Facebook uses to put together its compelling, yet deeply flawed dossier on every person.

</comment><comment><USER9> If their experiment is N=1 then allow me to be N=2. The moment I heard about this I inserted "Toyota" into nearly every other sentence with a couple of friends of mine. No ads from Toyota yet. Now that I posted the word twice here my experiment of course has ran its course.

<comment><USER10> Does it work with brands, too? Why would Toyota show you their commercials if you remember them so well?

<comment><USER5> Okay I just said "adult diapers" three times around my phone and still no related ads are coming up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every time an article like this hits HN, one of the standard responses is how trivial this would be to check doing network analysis.

I'm curious if anyone has ever actually gone and done the so-called trivial network analysis to check it out?

<comment><USER12> I don't think it would be that easy. If this is done "the right way", then facebook processes audio locally and only uploads keywords every once in a while. The traffic would be indistinguishable from normal https traffic between your phone and their servers.

<comment><USER13> Also - Facebook is likely doing SSL Pining so it isn't easy to unpack their SSL traffic either...

Also - The Facebook App itself is heavily obfuscated making the task of rooting through the source code very difficult to try and discover what is going on...

Not an easy task at all...

(Although I doubt they are actually recording sound)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this trivial to check if you just inspect the network traffic?

<comment><USER5> This is exactly what I would imagine. What is it about this topic that causes HN-types to drop all sense of logic and critical thought?

People have been claiming Facebook eavesdrops on conversations for years now, yet no one has been able to technically prove it. Facebook is a huge target for people to 'decompile', reverse engineer and sniff network traffic, which has been done multiple times, yet no one has been able to identify this.

This is of course ignoring the fact that its 'supposed' to be impossible for iOS apps to use the microphone without the status bar from going obviously red. It would be _extremely_ surprising if there was a venerability that only Facebook knew about that they were exploiting to bypass iOS.

<comment><USER10> They might have a neural network that preprocesses the input first; then it would be quite difficult to understand its output.

<comment><USER15> If you mean doing speech to text on the device then that was my first thought as well. But DSP isn't cheap and we are talking about serious battery consumption. Even if they cache audio and only process it while the phone is charging then they would still need the algorithms baked into the binary (researchers could find em) unless they somehow sidestep the app stores not allowing remote code to be loaded.

They could have a really cheap algorithm that just tries to inexpensively match audio fingerprints in windows of audio. I guess if you have trillions of hours of audio it's ok not to inspect every minute to the fullest extent.

It's an interesting problem to think about but as other hackers have mentioned: why would they risk doing it in secret? They could just update the EULA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I saw this on reddit a few days back, and showed to family members who are less technically inclined and hopelessly addicted to facebook. It seemed to hardly bother them, as they continue to use it the way they have been - shaping their life choices based on the chosen moments of others' life. What concerned me was they found the advertisements "very useful", as it reduced the time spent searching for goods they wanted to buy. I haven't been able to put up any argument convincing enough about why this trade off is bad.

Metaphors, I think could have a better result. One that I have thought of is: If this was a job position, and one candidate could buy their chances of getting picked - would it be fair to the other candidates or the company? It only profits the broker.

Any other convincing argument I can put forward to get them thinking about it?

Ultimately, all arguments come to the fact that "keeping in touch" is so much easier with facebook - and I do not have an alternative that I can propose. Note I use the word argument as any discussion I have tried to initiate becomes an argument very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you really don't want Facebook listening to anything you say at any time, you can turn off the app's access to your microphone.

In iOS, go to the Settings panel, find Facebook, and slide off the "microphone" option.

On Android, go to "Privacy and Safety" in Settings, find the microphone section under the app permissions panel, and toggle off Facebook's access.

<comment><USER5> Well, the premise of these claims is that Facebook is bypassing system protections (which I highly doubt they're doing) to listen without notifying the user. If they're doing that then surely they can get around microphone being shut off for the app.

Again, I would be extremely surprised if they've managed to do this without anyone finding out. iOS and Facebook as just too big of a target for this to stay with just them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a wild speculation:

What if Facebook is only doing this to people it profiles as non-technical and therefore unlikely to notice it?

Taking the app apart might not even be good enough since in that case those not receiving surveillance may not even have the code for surveillance. (Apple's store technically bans such practices, but this is Facebook we're talking about.)

<comment><USER19> I once joked with my friends about something similar to this. The best target audience to attempt something like this one would be people who are really big into conspiracy theory's and would have any attempts to bring something like this to light immediately shot down due to their other beliefs. It would be pretty simple for facebook to flag users that match a profile like this just off their likes and profile activity!

<comment><USER18> One of the best ways to cover something up is to have someone with "negative credibility" break the story. There's been a persistent rumor for years that some tabloids have ties to intelligence agencies and pretty much exist for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't this covered before and it was something like Facebook analyses audio from messenger for modulated id codes in adverts that may be playing in the same room? (ex, find out what TV station they've got on in the background, deploy adverts based on said station's demographic) That sounds way more probable than running speech recognition on everything. Even then I think they would only do it if the app had focus.

</comment><comment><USER21> I cant watch the video, but in general I dont take anything seriously on a horoscope website.

Still this seems like a good time to point out that mbasic.facebook.com exists.

</comment><comment><USER22> The page would convince me more if it didn't appear in its own "popular posts" section between two articles about horoscopes.

It sounds to me like the kind of thing targeted at people who believe an article because it has "proves" in the title and one data point in the contents.

I do not think it likely that Facebook could pull this off without either Apple or Google noticing.

</comment><comment><USER23> This sort of articles always end up with people doubting that Facebook actually records audio, me included.

But somehow it seems even scarier how much information facebook can scrape without having to record audio. They can read chats and emails, track your location and daily routine, they buy data from credit bureaus, track which sites you visit... And on and on it goes.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article states as "proof" that it is possible to eavesdrop is based on what the FBI could do in 2006. That was before the first iPhone or Android reached a customer.

Is FB somehow able to hide the notification that the iPhone displays on the top when an app is using the microphone?

</comment><comment><USER25> Direct YouTube link when theearthtribe.net is suffering the HN hug of death: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SOxb_Lfps&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER26> On a related topic, I was looking for a rental car and was googling related keywords, and then 30 minutes later chat bot from some car company messaged me on Facebook. Can someone explain how it is possible, how did they know my Facebook account?

</comment><comment><USER27> Couple Alleges Facebook Listens in on Conversations with Alleged Simple Experiment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yawn, nonsense.

They obviously just used deep learning to predict these were the kind of people who would want to do a cheesy video, and predicted cat food was an obvious topic they'd pick.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've bet they discussed with friends on instagram/whatsapp, how they are gonna do experiment with Facebook, about cat food. :D

</comment><comment><USER29> Sorry but this doesnt prove facebook doing it, unless only app on the phone is messenger.

</comment><comment><USER30> Android doesn't give access to always-on microphone, right?

<comment><USER31> No, and the battery usage should make it very obvious if the microphone is always on.

<comment><USER32> One day someone is going to write some Android malware that does system level power optimization to cover it's tracks. The only means of detecting it will be to observe abnormal battery life on your Android phone. People will start freaking out when their phones start lasting all day. It will be madness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Prove it at least a x>1 times, a little more please.

</comment><comment><USER34> Could this not just be a coincidence?

</comment><comment> Digit-Al Source: David Wolfe

Case dismissed.</comment>


Cloudflare Dashboard and API Outage on April 15, 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-dashboard-and-api-outage-on-april-15-2020/ <comment><USER2> This is not a critique, CloudFlare is clearly a solid, well engineered system given its scale, just look at their other post-mortems.

But it's just kind of interesting, you can have all the redundant systems and smart software and some dude could accidentally pull cables – oh humans!

Would love to see what other mitigations they came up with than the ones listed (apart from probably putting 20 BRIGHT RED labels next to the patch panels saying DO NOT DISCONNECT, EVER EVER EVER!).

Perhaps one mitigation could be a better way to literally identify who's there and call them up within seconds and ask what they just did?

</comment><comment><USER3> >"Documentation: After the cables were removed from the patch panel, we lost valuable time identifying for data center technicians the critical cables providing external connectivity to be restored. We should take steps to ensure the various cables and panels are labeled for quick identification by anyone working to remediate the problem. This should expedite our ability to access the needed documentation."

So they failed to label their cables? I'm sorry but this is "datacenter 101" stuff. How are none of the cables plugged into your patch panels labeled? Every colo has a label gun you can borrow! Also remote hands will gladly send you a pic of a rack or cabinet to verify what they're looking at.

<comment><USER4> Why is this post being voted down? It is extremely impressive what Cloudflare has done since its foundation. My company has been a customer since 2011 because of me, and yet Cloudflare looks like a nice shiny shell with the same total chaos underneath as in any small IT company I've ever had the chance to look into. Unfortunately this doesn't let me sleep well when my company is dependent on Cloudflare. Therefore we hardly use any features of Cloudflare to be able to switch to our own infrastructure at any time. As annoying as Google and Microsoft are, I can sleep better because they have their processes better under control (I know that these companies offer different products, the question of dependency remains the same).

<comment><USER3> There seems to be an almost unspoken rule on HN that you don't say anything critical about Cloudflare. It will almost universally be downvoted even if it's done respectfully. You will even see people fawn over their post-mortems yet still not be critical or express disappointment at being affected by the actual outage. I am not sure why this is. It is very peculiar though. It's stranger given that Cloudflare seemingly uses HN as their primary marketing channel to generate discussion about the company but somehow that discussion should only ever be positive commentary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's strange to me that their remediation did not include distributing these systems to be redundant across multiple datacenters, maybe with a globally distributed database.

> we knew that the failback from disaster recovery would be very complex

The disaster recovery failover to a second data center (and failback) should not force a choice to failover or not. They should be able to immediately failover and the system should self-heal once the original data center was back online.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll just leave this here ... [https://github.com/netbox- community/netbox](https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox)

</comment><comment><USER7> In summary, 10% of internet traffic relies on one patch panel somewhere :)

<comment><USER2> The cloud is just someone else's computer right? :-)

Submarine Cables are like this too. It all comes down to a quarter inch thick bunch of fibers (each being thinner than a human hair)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it me or does it feels like these post mortem blog post are becoming extremely common with Cloudflare.</comment>


If I can't see your work - you're crap - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingjohnson.com/if-i-can-t-see-it-you-re-crap

<comment><USER3> It goes the other way too. I expect this opinion to be unfavorable with the HN crowd, but let me explain:

Spending your free time contributing to open source projects generally indicates that you're not a money driven person. This is anecdotal, but every software engineer that I have hired who contributes heavily to open source ended up being a huge pain in the neck in a corporate structure. The reason is that corporations don't have emotions and in general they don't have morals. They are money generation machines with schizophrenic personalities. If you're money driven, you do well there.

What inevitably would happen with open source people is that they would become upset about something the company was or wasn't doing. In one case it was even the fact that the company refused to open source a project that they felt should be open sourced. As a manager I'd say they were high maintenance employees. They would also often go rogue in the name of "doing the right thing".

Believe it or not, I see open source types as often incompatible with corporate jobs and when I see a resume that has a big list of open source contributions it concerns me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use private repos on Bitbucket. Most of what I've worked on over the last 5 to 10 years my competitors would absolutely love to get their hands on. Much as I'd love the street cred, I can't publish my code. If the software is an important part of what gives me an advantage over my competitors, then I can't publish the code. If it's written for a client, I can't publish the code. Really, there's only a very narrow spectrum of circumstances under which code can be given to the public. Computer software runs all facets of our lives, and very little of it is publicly available on github.

How about this. If you make sweeping generalizations without thinking things all the way through, you're crap.

<comment><USER5> My competitors also love my software. By giving them (at least part of) the source they solve bugs and add features for free. A good developer generally has far more than one good idea or library up their sleeve.

I begin work with clients with the explicit understanding that I am using public code that may be improved during the course of their project. I sell them on the benefit that they effectively get the project foundation for free, thanks to using this process with previous clients. Open code is better tested and guarantees that their business and codebase is sustainable towards the future, if something happens to me or our relationship otherwise ends. This security is invaluable to a client.

Closed-source, private code is a much harder sell even with a long list of happy clients. What guarantee can be given that the software will be sustainable going forward?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> OP has missed the point spectacularly.

There aren't just two developers in the world, there are hundreds. For those with published commits, I can assess quality of their code myself and see whether they actually know what they're doing within a couple of minutes.

A developer with only a CV is a pig in a poke. They might be a terrific developer, they might just be very good at bullshitting their way up the career ladder. Unless I know that the company they worked for has a very developer-centric culture, I'm probably safe in assuming that the decision to hire and retain that person was made by a non-technical manager. The message they're giving me is essentially "I can code, because someone who can't code says so". I have no way of distinguishing a genuinely talented developer from a bullshitter.

Why should I bother? Why should I spend half a day or more interviewing a candidate who can present no real evidence that they can actually code, when I can have my pick of people whose Github profiles are overflowing with quality commits?

<comment><USER7> > I have no way of distinguishing a genuinely talented developer from a > bullshitter.

Nonsense. Put him in front of a computer and ask him to write something. Then evaluate him based on that.

I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but only have a few thousand up on Github and quite frankly, most of that is not my best work. Most of the code I write is proprietary.

> Why should I spend half a day or more interviewing a candidate who can > present no real evidence that they can actually code, when I can have my > pick of people whose Github profiles are overflowing with quality commits?

Pretty simple. Those with overflowing commits on Github either have a very skewed work/life balance or quite simply, have no actual work experience. Open source only pays the bills in very rare circumstances.

<comment><USER8> > Those with overflowing commits on Github either have a very skewed work/life > balance or quite simply, have no actual work experience.

This. I would LOVE to contribute to open source. But I also want a life. I want the life more than I want to contribute. So until I can contribute while I'm on the job, my github account will languish. And that's fine by me.

My last interview asked me about my github account, and I told him just that, that I'd love to contribute, but just don't have the time. I still got the job.

It's not a problem until you make it a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I fall into the "developer 1" category myself. I only recently started doing side projects in my own time (and publishing them on github), almost entirely because I was starting to run into walls job searching without a "portfolio." Unfortunately, this means that what potential employers are seeing is stuff that I've done in my almost non-existent free time, so it's generally unfinished, unpolished projects that had a really simple goal or were for learning a new language/framework. So, it's not necessarily a good indicator of what I produce when I can focus full time on a project.

It sucks that I am "punished" because all of my actual work has been for companies that aren't interested in sharing their products with the community. I've even tried a few times to get tools I've created released as open source, but the general response I get is, "uh, why?" I can understand that the companies see no value in it and in fact may cost them money if there end up being licensing or other legal issues.

<comment><USER10> >Unfortunately, this means that what potential employers are seeing is stuff that I've done in my almost non-existent free time, so it's generally unfinished, unpolished projects that had a really simple goal or were for learning a new language/framework. So, it's not necessarily a good indicator of what I produce when I can focus full time on a project.

That is a tricky situation to deal with. On the one hand, you don't want them to think that this is you at your A-game. On the other hand, the naive approach of apologizing in advance is just bad psychology. I don't have experience with presenting this to employers, but in general the best way to frame those kinds of things is to think not in terms of expectations (you actually want expectation high; people see what they expect), but in terms of objective context.

If you say "Here's something I did which really isn't me at my best, but it's what I had time for", then people will expect crap, and that's what they'll see. If you say "This is something I built in my free time", or "This is something I built while I was learning Backbone" (and keep you tone enthusiastic, not apologetic), then people will understand the context in which they should be judging what they see. If they're smart, they'll realize that seeing what you can do when you don't have much time, or when you're on unfamiliar ground, is at least as valuable as seeing what you can do under ideal conditions. If they're not smart, do you want to work for them?

>I've even tried a few times to get tools I've created released as open source, but the general response I get is, "uh, why?" I can understand that the companies see no value in it and in fact may cost them money if there end up being licensing or other legal issues.

That's hard too. It might help if you can come armed with some benefits of releasing something as open source, like the fact that other people will be able to find and fix bugs for your employer, which is basically free labor.

<comment><USER9> >If you say "This is something I built in my free time", or "This is something I built while I was learning Backbone" (and keep you tone enthusiastic, not apologetic), then people will understand the context in which they should be judging what they see. If they're smart, they'll realize that seeing what you can do when you don't have much time, or when you're on unfamiliar ground, is at least as valuable as seeing what you can do under ideal conditions. If they're not smart, do you want to work for them?

That's a good point and it's what I've been following so far. "Here's a project I built in my free time because I wanted to brush up on my Python skills, and in the process I also learned a lot about Flask, MongoDB, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript."

> That's hard too. It might help if you can come armed with some benefits of > releasing something as open source, like the fact that other people will be > able to find and fix bugs for your employer, which is basically free labor.

Also a good point. I'll have to give that a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From time to time I have to hire a developer and since I started looking for type #2 I'm having a hard time.

I'm in the MS World and these kind of developers are really hard to find in our world. So, I usually I go with the type #1 and shoot myself in the foot because even if they do know their salt to get through most of small-internal- applications development most of them are unable to search, find or use popular open source libraries that can save tons of time and improve the performance of the whole app and sometimes even the whole company.

As a simple example I asked one of the candidates how they would build a small dashboard to show some e-commerce data and he came up with the idea of building an entire app from the scratch (including charts and client stuff) while simply using Dashing (what I ended up doind) would do.

I have no problem with developers who do not publish anything, but I do have a problem with developers who claim to be "senior" but always build everything from the scratch costing the companies thousand of dollars that might be spent somewhere else.

<comment><USER12> Plenty of companies are willing to spend the thousands of dollars building everything from scratch rather than rely on bought components they can't control or know entirely. Developers & management from that world may not know (or trust) available libraries; doesn't mean they're not "senior", it means their skillset may not match your needs.

The reverse complaint can be made: ask a candidate to build a small dashboard to show some e-commerce data - from scratch. If he can't do it without third- party libraries, is he "senior"? If he _can_ do it, surely he's capable of spending a couple hours finding available packages to shorten the development cycle (saving time & money at the cost of reliance on outsiders).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd hire developer 1 for sure. I've never understood the idea that someone may be worse because they are employed and all the code they write is good enough to be paid for by someone else and thus can't be posted publicly for anyone to take.

<comment><USER10> A lot of people feel that most of the better developers code in their free time as well as for work. Whether or not you accept that premise, it should at least make sense how you get from that to expecting people to have some code to show.

<comment><USER12> Premise understood. Note that it's also fair to consider the better developers code in their free time _and sell it_.

Fair arguments on all sides. Crux of the problem is that what we do as developers is valuable enough that others will pay good money to own it outright, leaving us with no publicly-viewable portfolio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Depending on the type of work you do your code would not go on github. If you write code for drivers for IR cameras in C or fix bugs in FORTRAN you won't be putting your stuff on Github or contributing to stackoverflow. Github/stackoverflow is, in my opinion, more catered towards the mobile/web/C# community. Military, medical equipment and aerospace software developers prob don't use it either one very much.

<comment><USER15> I don't see the parallel between github and Stack Overflow. I can understand why programmers in certain industries and companies won't be posting their code on github. If all of the code you write professionally is proprietary, it makes sense that none of it would wind up in github public repositories. But even if I'm writing proprietary code, I can still ask questions about it on Stack Overflow, and answer other people's questions.

<comment><USER14> Stackoverflow: 212 Ada followers 508 FORTRAN followers 38,600 C# followers 44,500 JavaScript followers

Github: 329,678 Search language:ada 720,910 Search language:fortran 6,034,816 Search language: c# 44,430,272 Search language:javascript

The two services are heavily used by the C#/web community. mobile too but I did not include numbers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I dislike how this is trying to make this about oppression. In particular, the "or maybe they're female" toss-in is just dumb. Contributing to open source, blogging, and having a code portfolio _are_ all relevant to assessing your competence as a developer. Being female is not.

Whether or not you have a github account and contribute to OSS is something you have control over (unless your previous employer prohibited it - <USER2> that's hardly your prospective employer's fault). If you're having trouble finding a job because you don't contribute to open source then... _contribute to open source_. Make a github account. Find some bugs. Fix them. Submit pull requests. A lot of projects could use the help.

I'm sort of thrilled, actually, that we live in a world where not contributing to open source is enough of a career hindrance that people are complaining about it. That's a trend that I'd like to see continue. I want "you need to have at least a few contributions to FOSS" to be the equivalent of yesterday's "you need at least some kind of bachelor's degree".

As for not having a code portfolio, well, if you're interviewing for a job as a photographer or a graphic artist, and you show up with a resume and a smile, you'll find yourself in much the same position. "Coca-cola really liked my photos" is only going to take you so far. This is a field where you can easily tote your work around, so of course potential employers are going to want to see it.

I feel like the complaint here could easily be applied to other things, like not having a resume or not showing up to the interview in your underwear. What do those things have to do with coding? There could be plenty of great coders who do those things, and you'll miss out on that talent if you don't give them a chance! _Stop oppressing them._

<comment><USER16> The problem is that a lot of us have lives outside of work, and work is proprietary software. I hit this problem in my latest job search. I had a limited presence on github and a rarely updated blog... if you'd asked me 4 years ago, I'd have nothing. Which doesn't mean I'm not a good coder. It means I have a wife and a family and non-coding hobbies, and I'm not 25 with the ability (or desire) to code until 2am every night. Luckily I had enough of an online presence that I was able to do a weekend coding project to prove to my (now current) employer that I'm worth hiring.

I think it's pretty safe to say that _most_ professional software developers work for companies that do not open source their software. So, the majority of your time coding is hidden away. For anyone with a family, the rest of your time is pretty much taken up. To get work done on side projects, I get up at 5:30am... and haven't been able to do that since the birth of our second child.

Now, I 100% understand why people would hire #2. He/she is a known quantity. The other one, well, who knows? It's famously hard to figure out in an interview who will be a good coder and who will not... and it's incredibly expensive, both in time, opportunity cost, and actual dollars, to hire a bad developer. Not to mention the bad code that might infiltrate your codebase. So, playing it safe with #2 is usually not a bad idea. But, at least give the other guy a chance. If you like him in the phone screen and preliminary interview, give him some coding homework and see how he does.

<comment><USER17> What I don't quite understand in this discussion is the either/or nature being suggested here and elsewhere in the thread. There are plenty of opportunities to contribute to OSS in the context of proprietary software. Even if you write proprietary software, you most likely _use_ open source software (I know that's not true of everyone-- more on that below). And when you use it a lot, you find bugs or missing features, which _you can fix_ as part of your job. When I was less experienced and there was no Github, I shrugged my shoulders and worked around problems I found, which usually just led to more pain. Now, I grok the code and make a pull request. It helps the proprietary project I'm working on and helps, almost incidentally, all of the other users. And ultimately, I suspect that's where a huge portion of OSS code comes from: people who need it and are thus willing to contribute as part of their proprietary software jobs, not from dedicated OSS developers volunteering their time, forgoing sanity and a paycheck. That's why there's so much good OSS infrastructure software.

With that in mind, let's imagine a manager hiring engineers for a project built on top of an OSS stack. Sometimes that stuff won't work right, and sometimes--I'd argue usually--the right answer is to just fix it. And you're looking at a developer with experience doing just that and someone who hasn't. One has taken the initiative to learn their way around the internals of the tools they use and the other may or may not have. Who do you pick? Contributing to OSS is not just a badge of honor here; it's what's left behind by good development work.

Sure, some jobs don't have that. Maybe it's a video game built on some proprietary toolkit, maybe it's a low-level library written from scratch. But surely those aren't the employers who care so much about your Github account, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What an unfortunate title. Anyone who doesn't bother to read the article will assume that's his belief.

</comment><comment><USER19> This attitude has cost me at least one job offer, but my current situation is good enough that I'm not really interested in doing publicly-visible things just so prospective employers can see it.

What can I say, my code goes into private repos, sorry. You reply, I can't offer you a job if I can't see your commits, sorry. Understandable. But then the matter boils down to whether I want the job more, or you want me as an employee more. How good am I and how good are you? I'm not hurting for job offers, but my guess is that you're hurting for developers. Seeing as how you're hiring and all.

I agree with the OP that people in our field often bank on the GitHub account and the Macbook as indicators of "developer-ness". The homogeneity of it grosses me out a little, even though I like GitHub and use many Apple products. It's a groupthink thing that I personally try to avoid, but I wouldn't rail against it.

<comment><USER20> > It's a groupthink thing that I personally try to avoid

Because the Good Ol' Boy network of references and handshakes is a groupthink thing you've gamed better.

<comment><USER19> Huh, I wonder what that means.

<comment><USER21> "I'm presumptuous and have little perspective into how work actually gets done," would be a good interpretation.

<comment><USER20> A Good Ol' Boy network is a wonderful example of groupthink: "If my friends like this person, they must be good!"

As opposed to doing your own research and developing your own standards.

Maybe other peoples' definitions are different. That doesn't make either of us presumptuous or ignorant, but you could have laid out your definitions before slinging the insults.

<comment> jack-r-abbit But the OP that you first insulted made no mention of gaming any such "Good Ol' Boy network" that you envision. Knowing people that make it easier to get your resume in front of the right person or to get an interview is how things are done a lot. It's not gaming anything. And that is nowhere near the same as your "If my friends like this person, they must be good!" example. I've seen plenty of referrals come in for interviews and leave without getting a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like some people here I've written a lot of proprietary code used by millions of people but have (almost) zero code in public repositories.

I do see the value in having some sort of "portfolio" piece to show off your skills and if I have spare time (and I never seem to have much) I may do a small project and put it in the public domain. Obviously there's a limited amount of time that I can put into something like that.

</comment><comment><USER23> Developer 1 is just fine with sufficient networking/publishing.

I don't have a single commit on github. But I have no problem with job offers. I suspect that's because I have author credits on a lot of refereed publications in the past few years and a bunch of recent patents, mostly single inventor. I'd say that's worth more than a bunch of code on github myself, but to each their own.

<comment><USER24> Personally, I wouldn't hire you because you file patents.

<comment> jack-r-abbit I can't decide if I'm reading that correctly. Which do you mean:

1) I would not hire you and the reason is "because you file patents"

2) If I did hire you, the reason would not be "because you file patents"

<comment><USER25> Pretty sure it's #1, based on HN's general feelings towards software patents

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been the victim of this before myself. I've written a 100 plus million dollar billing system for a fortune 500 company. have 10+ years development experience using the full breadth of MS products. Majority of my work has been done for clients with revenues in the billions. Yet,The interview panel wanted to know did I have something on GitHub...

</comment><comment><USER27> >> ...maybe they're paid less or maybe they're female...

I never used to think being female was as big a problem as people said it was until I observed it happen _twice_ last week to a female friend really close to me. I've always been for gender equality in the work place but now I'm even more so.

</comment><comment><USER28> Even if the code looked crappy, I'd hire dev who shipped working code for working products that people pay for. You know that rant about the premature optimisation, right? Live example: I recently paid for small Twilio app development to a guy who does not know what code management is. But the app works.

</comment><comment><USER29> Blogging and open source is about giving back. And there's value in that.

You open yourself to criticism from peers. Working in a Fortune 500 company doesn't tell me much about your coding skills, but it tells me a lot about your political skills (Not meant as a criticism).

</comment><comment><USER30> We might be equal in an abstract sense; but in particulars we are very different. If you are alien or opaque to me then the uncertainty about you is a risk. Risk devalues.

<comment><USER12> Flip side: giving work away free devalues. Is your work valuable enough that others will pay a tidy sum to own it outright? If your effort is not valuable enough for anyone to pay for it, is it worth paying you for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone know how a developer in situation 1 can get a job?

I am a game developer, and many game companies have two qualities:

1, they demand lots of time.

2, they do either very specific work related only to their game, or they do things that can be re-used, but then this mean it become very valuable internal tech and must NOT be shared with competitors.

Currently my lifestyle is: wake up, drink tea, wear something, go to work.

Arrive home, take a bath, eat something, sleep.

In saturday it is: wake up, clean house, wash clothes, do all other home chores, leave to see SO.

Sunday: return home with SO, cook a food for the whole week with her help until it is night (I have only 1 cooking pot, meaning each dish must be done sequentially, instead of parallel, also the kitchen is shit, IF I had several pots, I still would be unable to use them), eat something, send SO away, sleep.

I worry that if my current startup fail, I will spend another long time unemployed, and since I have college debts that currently cost 2 times a minimum wage here, this is something that I CANNOT afford (it is already 3 years that my bank account is either zero, or negative at the end of the month).

Sometimes I do some check, prodding here and there to see if I can find work, and I am not even invited to interviews, except by jobs with pay lower than my university debt (ie: the pay is 1.5* the minimum wage, or lower... those always want me working for them as developer, by the way, the minimum wage here is about 300 USD month).

<comment><USER32> Sounds like you are way underpaid and not really happy with your current job. You should be looking actively for better paid jobs that allow a healthier life / more spare time, this is particularly true if you are worried about your current company failing. If you are not invited to interviews at all, there's probably something wrong with your CV/presentation, try to identify and fix that.

<comment><USER31> I am actually overpaid for our standards. This is because I am associate of the company, and thus I can get whatever I need... The thing is, what I need (mostly thanks to student debts) is still more than what most companies here would pay to a programmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> there are a ton of software application that do not go well with github. Mr Johnson should have put a scope in his posting explaining the very very very very limited field his opinion is valid.

<comment><USER34> The article is about why this type of thinking is _not_ valid.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened to Visual Thought? - <AUTHOR> I was looking around for a good graph drawing program recently and I realized that there still doesn't seem to be anything as slick, easy-to-use, and cross-platform as Confluent's old Visual Thought from the early 2000s.<p>I understand the company went under, but how could that happen? Visual Thought had a lot of fans even back then. Surely they could have just supported it profitably as a crisp, well-designed, cross-platform diagramming tool that emphasized ease-of-use and graph-drawing. <comment><USER2> Who knows what the old corp did? Someone needs to buy the IP and make a modern version of it as a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Think how many startups lose huge amounts of money for years and years. I just don't understand how a company could close when they had a reliable, well- done, popular, software product. I seem to recall they charged some reasonable amount for it - it wasn't free - which must have covered expenses and then some.

I just don't get it.

<comment><USER2> OK, I just figured it out. You are a niche company that makes a good product and you get good sales, the problem is you don't get enough sales to make enough profit to keep the shareholders happy.

Then the OSes you support get changed so much that you have to develop the new versions on them, but the programming language you use got changed to support that new operating system, etc. So you have to pay for training your developers or hire new developers to work with this new technology.

IBM had this problem with the Lotus series and Windows 9X. The Windows API had been changed so much that it broke Lotus Smart Suite and the cost of rewriting it to work with modern Windows like Windows 2000/XP had cost so much that IBM had to fork OpenOffice.Org into Lotus Symphony which was easier than rewriting Smart Suite and cost a lot less money. But it failed. Also, that darn DOCX format broke the Lotus products trying to be compatible with the old and new office file formats.

So this is a problem that the so called Unicorns that do just one thing great have to face.

I wonder why more isn't written about it? You can learn more from a failure than a success.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I could find out specifically what went wrong with Visual Thought.

Visual Thought was not an OS or some immensely complex distributed workflow product. It was a simple diagram editor. It just did its job very well (probably because it didn't try to be too much). It just couldn't have cost all that much to keep it up to date with the different OS's.

Not sure how many people have used it, but it was head and shoulders above anything else on Unix at the time; and I still can't find anything on Mac in 2017 as good (it was much better than Visio at what it did as well).

And it was popular. They must have had decent revenue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The New Irrelevance of Intelligence [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lifearchitect.com.au/pdf/2020-Alan-D-Thompson-The-New-Irrelevance-of-Intelligence-Rev-2-(Mensa).pdf <comment><USER2> Clearly the author finds intelligence to be irrelevant to his conclusions.</comment>


Facebook threatens to sue techcrunch commenter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-threatens-to-sue-techcrunch-commenter/

<comment><USER2> As Ted Ullyot said recently at an event I attended, 'it is hard for even Facebook employees to know what is going on' :-)

[http://www.fedsocblog.com/blog/peter_thiel_and_ted_ullyot_di...](http://www.fedsocblog.com/blog/peter_thiel_and_ted_ullyot_discuss_regulation_of_technology_at_fedsoc_sympo/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone makes mistakes, so the fact that Perkins Coie sued the wrong person isn't so bad. But the fact they won't admit their mistake without this person hiring their own lawyer to prove them wrong? Bad. I suppose he can countersue Perkins Coie in small claims court for his legal costs, but what a hassle to deal with their mistake.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Could this qualify as frivolous lawsuit [1]?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_litigation>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was previously posted here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3791431></comment>


Scott Adams on How to Get a Real Education - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704101604576247143383496656.html?mod=WeekendHeader_Right

<comment><USER2> Regarding "Attracting Luck": it sounds like a value-free bromide, but it really does work. I'm not a social butterfly by nature, but I force myself to go out and network. It blows my mind how effective that is, because there exists someone with the ability to give you what you want just by saying "Yeah, sure" and that is 1000000000x more likely to happen after you have asked him for it in person versus happening spontaneously. (Ditto hearing, e.g., "You do SEO consulting? What a coincidence, we need that. Send us a proposal." , "You made what? That's interesting. I have someone you should get a coffee with.", etc)

</comment><comment><USER3>
      Why do we make B students sit through the same classes as their brainy peers?

Not to be too literal here, but the B students are not necessarily less brainy. In college I was everywhere from a D student to an A+ student; it took the competition with my peers to bring me up to that level. Without being with the "brainy" students I had no chance of becoming one.

<comment><USER4> That's an ongoing debate with things like gifted-student programs as well, especially at the earlier stages of education. The pro is targeting students with material suited to their pace, so there aren't students going much more slowly than they could on the one hand, or being overwhelmed on the other. But the con is that the giftedness-segregation itself might produce a self- fulfilling prophecy, as students not in the gifted track aren't challenged with the advanced curriculum, and also lose the benefit of interaction with some of their bright peers.

<comment><USER5> So, arguably to fix this we should improve our methods of gifted student identification? versus not having a special education program at all.

I was a gifted student, and I did not start off that way, I was not until high school that I gained entry to the higher level classes and I had to fight tooth and nail to get into them because my grades in the regular classes were Bs not As. It took a few of my teachers arguing with the administration to get me into the program where I excelled, and my grades got better, but because of the blind spot you describe it was almost impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Surprisingly, almost everything Adams talks about is what is learned at the worst schools in the drug game. Obviously not for everyone because (a) it's illegal, (b) often violent, and (c) not generally well-regarded. But at least there's precedent for this type of education of the B student.

<comment><USER7> What exactly are you referring to by the "drug game"?

<comment><USER6> Drug dealing, especially in the inner city. You could find most of the skills he talks about learned by dealing drugs. You want to learn things like Learn Persuasion, Attract Luck, Find the Action, Combine Skills, Fail Forward, then look at drug dealing.

The only skill that doesn't strongly apply is Write Simply, although it does to an extreme -- in the sense that the less you have written down the better off you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design._

Scott Adams just shared with us the ideal framework for an entrepreneurial curriculum. But more importantly, the article reinforces the fact that the whole is far greater than the sum of these parts, especially in the context of an entrepreneur.

 _I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created._

As an aside, this makes a compelling case for the pursuit of a co-founder with complementary skills.

<comment><USER9> Or to have the complementary skills yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Combine Skills. Fail Forward. Attract Luck. Conquer Fear. Write Simply. Learn Persuasion."

Sorry, but that "education in entrepreneurship" curriculum just looks like a list of skills absolutely anyone should pick up in the natural course of life and career. I understand the need for a useful, technical education, but sometimes I think we overestimate how much useful, technical skills can be gained from classroom instruction v. the real world. This is an argument against mainstream college education as much as it is for a challenging, classical liberal arts degree..despite what Adams writes.

<comment><USER11> There is something about the do-or-die pressures of entrepreneurship that really drives the lessons home compared to trying to get an A in your mandatory Sociology class.

<comment><USER10> Yet, correct me if I'm wrong, but Adams is advocating an entrepreneurship class. If all he's aiming for are the skills developed in entrepreneurship, why make it a class at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good article. The combining skills was the best part (you're more likely to be marketable by combining several skills than by trying to become a world-class practitioner of one in particular).

I found this bit disturbing though

' _I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good- looking and so gifted at b.s. that he'd be the perfect leader._ '

<comment><USER13> It's pretty true, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What Scott Adams doesn't mention is that while you can learn entrepreneurship on the fly, learning about the classics, literature and art is a social experience. I've met lots of successful individuals who seek out high-culture trophies of validation (expensive art, season tickets to the met) -- many times only as overcompensation for their lack of understanding of the liberal arts in general.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think that education is continuous. We are trying to squeeze all learning, all education, and all wisdom in first 25 years of life. That is just wrong.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find it interesting that Adams mentions a MBA rounded out his entrepreneurial experience. From his descriptions of his business escapades in college, it seems like he was a well-rounded, experienced entrepreneur already. The only value from the MBA that I can think of would be the corporate perspective.

</comment><comment><USER17> Favorite quotes from the article:

 _Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle._

 _Luck finds the doers._

 _Simplicity makes ideas powerful._

What made the article worth it were the real life stories he shared to make a point. Would love to hear some similar stories. Any HNers have any good ones that they'd like to share?

<comment><USER18> > Luck finds the doers.

 _Audentes fortuna iuvat_ \- Virgil.

<comment><USER19> I'd heard it as "Audaces Fortuna iuvat".

Wikipedia once again impresses with an article on the subject:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Adams shares the most common view nowadays that school is either supposed to prepare you for your 'carrier' or make you an academic.

In fact school is here to increase your wisdom to the fullest before putting in you in risk to gather experience.

This is relevant to any student. And explains why sometimes B students (as marks) succeed at business - they may not been better memorizers, but have the knowledge to make better choices and use this knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do you decide you are a B student ? Standardized testing? Then another no- good John Q Idiot will write a blog post on another seemingly important rag like the wsj or fox news about how this entrepreneurship curriculum is the next incarnation of some mega-corporation fascism + US gov racist intentions and blah blah blah.

<comment><USER22> I believe he's deriving "B student" from "B school"

"B school" == "Business school"

<comment><USER23> You're mistaken. The context makes it clear that he is speaking about students who get a letter grade of "B".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This article reminds me of something that I would read while waiting for my copies at Kinkos. It's generally vague and would contain very little substance.

<comment><USER25> he gave examples from his real life

<comment><USER24> His examples were about him essentially manipulating rules to his favor. I do not think they contain much substance and would only be beneficial in Wall Street and politics.

<comment><USER26> He saw opportunities, sometimes embedded within problems, and worked them to his favor. This is what he's referring to when he speaks of the learned skill of transforming "nothing into something", and it's a skill that obviously applies to business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ah yes, Scott Adams, the great expert on education.

Last I checked, he was somebody who made a semi-funny cartoon. Why are we listening to him for education advice?

<comment><USER28> I think HN is filled with great advice from people that are not experts in a particular field, but nonetheless have gained some kind of insight usually through experience.

I have a general rule not to heed advice unless the advisor can back it up with some kind of personal experience. This excludes maybe 99% of financial advice, which I think is a good thing.

Your criticism might be relevant if he was putting forward a comprehensive plan to reform the education system, but he is just trying to give another perspective on what the goals of education should be.

<comment><USER27> I do not object to Scott Adams giving his perspective. I do not object to the contents of his piece. I'm wondering what the heck it's doing on HN.

The _only_ reason this got any traction is that he happens to make Dilbert. His is not a particularly rare and/or valuable insight, and nothing in there makes it different from millions of other armchair education reformers.

I expect more from HN links. My mistake for making a snarky comment instead of spelling it out properly.</comment></comment></comment>


Using your browser url history to estimate gender - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/ <comment><USER2> In our house you could nail it a lot less scientifically. Just scan the domain names and add 1 point for male with a /porn/ match and 1 female point for /baby/. I dare say the Google seaerches would be an immediate giveaway too!

<comment><USER3> JS doesn't have direct access to browser history, it can only find if an exact URL is visited or not. Even that will soon go.

<comment><USER4> I think it already doesn't work in the new Firefox 4.0 beta, or the Chrome dev builds.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't seem to work in Chrome dev here (well it says 50% but I doubt that my history is so less biased).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, not only are they probably using two-year-old data, but if the confidence given is 97% for it being the wrong gender for me, I doubt that it's actually an effective tool.

There are all kinds of fuzzy behavioral ways to analyze gender. I remember when the Gender Genie (<http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php>) made a similar splash. The issue is that it ignores the finer-grained sociological contexts in how certain people behave.

I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their cultural definition of gender roles at play.

Mainstream culture subsumes a variety of subcultures and idioms, meaning that using statistical methods to determine the characteristics of specific behaviors within a coarse-grained social group may overgeneralize. For a more nuanced approach, it would be a good idea to use ensembles, or add subculture membership as a feature to a linear regression classifier.

<comment><USER7> _if the confidence given is 97% for it being the wrong gender for me, I doubt that it's actually an effective tool._

Not necessarily. Of all those it predicts with a 97% confidence interval, you'd expect it to be wrong 3% of the time. Without any information other than that it was wrong about you, there's not much evidence about how accurate it is.

 _I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their cultural definition of gender roles at play._

Men dress up to attract women in just about every culture. The fact that they also wear makeup shouldn't be surprising.

 _I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their cultural definition of gender roles at play._

My, what a lot of big words. Of course, what we're looking at is somewhat culturally dependent; it just so happens that in our culture there's a heavily male-biased interest in, frinstance, looking at car websites (these seem to be the most male-dominated sites on the list it gives me). What's really interesting, though, is to what extent these patterns persist across different cultures... are men _always_ more interested in transport than women are?

<comment><USER8> Men (in American culture and similar ones) aren't interested in cars because they are transport. They are interested in cars because they make noise and go fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 100% - Likelihood of you being MALE is 0%

This is news to me.

</comment><comment><USER10> The probability of me being female is 100%. Not sure what to make of that!

<comment><USER11> It means, literally, that all the websites you visit are visited more often by women than men. The implication breaks down past there—there are other reasons for visiting female-dominated sites than _being female_. It could be (if they're mostly content sites/blogs) that you enjoy female writing style/viewpoint more than male writing style/viewpoint. It could be (if they're forums/social sites) that you're single and seeking a female partner. Many other explanations exist. This is a _correlation_ , not a causation.

<comment><USER10> Definitely not true. Just looking at the list of sites they scan, I've visited plenty that have a male/female ratio greater than 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> God.. CSS Visited Hack again. WHY does nobody come up with something? I know it's a fundamental issue, but hell.. this is a massive privacy exploit. Please Google? W3C? Someone?

<comment><USER13> Firefox 4 has a fix for it: [http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related- changes-com...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes- coming-to-css-vistited/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't work in Safari. (Which is a good thing, I suppose.)

</comment><comment><USER14> I suspect what this 'tool' really tells us is that its author needs a new source of data as to what sites men and women visit.

</comment><comment><USER15> Did Bart Simpson pick that name. _Ring_ , _Ring_. "Hello, Is Mike On Ads there?"

My Gonads, Bart Simpson

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm about 60% male but hey, my girlfriend use my computer sometime :D

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm wondering why google.co.uk has a Male-Female Ratio of 1.35.</comment>


Stalking people online for thought crimes - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/golang-dev/pOvceAZwLHY <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this here, I am the person who wrote the complaint.

I use Go since the day of the public announcement. I love Go. I contributed to Go the Solaris port, the arm64 port, and now I am finishing up the sparc64 port. I don't want to play a game of who's contribution is more important, but since I started contributing to Go, I received only unfair treatment from people associated with the Go project in either official capacity, or from powerful members of the community.

This is just another example (one that broke the camel's back apparently) of the shit I have to swallow to contribute to the project I love.

I cannot continue contributing if I all I get is insults, nobody thanks me for anything, and people are actively hostile against me and discriminate me against me at conferences. Sorry.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your contributions.

<comment><USER2> Welcome.

I have some plans that would improve the portability of Go and some plans for some tools that will aid debugging complex Go systems. Sort of like a debugger, but much broader in scope and programmed in Go instead of some ad- hoc scripting language. Hope people will find it useful.

The ideas come directly from my painful experience in debugging low-level Go runtime issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy should grow a thicker skin. If you act like a jerk online, someone _will_ complain about it, even if you don't recognize their right to do so.

Also, "stolen intellectual property"? They should steal his pixie dust and unicorns too.

<comment><USER2> > This guy should grow a thicker skin.

I think I have a very thick after dealing with so much shit thrown at me over years.

> They should steal his pixie dust and unicorns too.

You have not read my links carefully. Nobody stole my code. I voluntarily gave the solaris, arm64 port, and now sparc64 port to the Go project. You are welcome to grep the git log for my name, or try running Go on SPARC: [https://github.com/4ad/go](https://github.com/4ad/go)

Many tens of thousand of lines given away with no expectations other than human decency.

It was a different person's, and a different project stolen by a completely different project. How I am treated by the Go project is completely orthogonal to what happens to other people's stolen code. However, I have provided links so that anyone can independently verify that part of the story, if they are interested in it.

<comment><USER4> Whether or not the complaint is legitimate is irrelevant.

If you're going to complain about somebody, you should expect people to complain right back about you. When they do so, writing a post whining about it ends up looking childish -- it's hardly "stalking" or "thought policing". People complain about each other's writing style on the internet all the time. Being butthurt about getting an email isn't so rare and precious that you should write a thinkpiece about it and post it to HN.

<comment><USER2> > Whether or not the complaint is legitimate is irrelevant.

I do not want to live in a world where truth does not matter. Truth is all that matters.

> If you're going to complain about somebody, you should expect people to > complain right back about you.

Oh, I definitely expect people to complain about me. I support their right fully. Here it is not a case of complaint. It is a case where a non-technical group of people think it has the authority over my interaction with a _different_ group of people, and takes an _administrative_ action.

A bunch of people are _threatening_ me and actively take action against my way of being.

> Being butthurt about getting an email isn't so rare and precious that you > should write a thinkpiece about it and post it to HN.

I have not posted to HN. I have posted on the Go mailing lists. I have no control of what is posted on HN. I posted on the Go mailing list because there are other people who feel the same (I know because they told me), and are afraid to talk in fear of repercussions. I posted in the minute hope that things might change.

This incident is just another event in a long streak of events of constant discrimination by some people associated with the Go project. It is no sole event, although my e-mail to the list mentioned only this particular event.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Erlang distributed node in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/goerlang/node <comment><USER2> I'm fond of the idea of Erlang as a "systems glue" while using other languages for performance or safety.

Another example is an Erlang node in OCaml, with a very nice writeup by Ulf Wiger explaining the reasoning for this kind of architecture:

<http://code.google.com/p/erlocaml/>

<comment><USER3> I seem to recall that Sergey Aleynikov was using something like this for his HFT.

<comment><USER4> Chicago's Connamara Systems does this with their HFT framework.

<http://www.connamara.com/solutions-hftframework.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are major semantic disagreements between Go and Erlang, and I would consider it somewhat dangerous to try to attach them too closely together like this. For one, the fact that Erlang messages are fundamentally asynchronous and Go messages synchronous (or buffered, but in Erlang terms, that still basically synchronous, just with weirder semantics); the inability to constrain message order coming from Erlang and going into Go is just asking for deadlocks if your Go servers are anything other than RPC servers (ie, one message in leads to precisely one message out, guaranteed, and no other channel communication within that handler). For another, Erlang messages are untyped and Go channels are typed, not to mention Erlang's type system and Go's don't really get along either. It's nice to hook them up like this, but I suspect in practice this is going to prove surprisingly less useful that hooking the two together across a protocol that carries a lot less semantics in it, like any existing messaging server. You're going to end up with that semantic translation layer on the Go side anyhow.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the answer to solving concurrency and parallelism problems lies entirely in the approach of Go, Erlang, or some other language. Rather, different layers of approaches seems to be the best solution. Using an asynchronous, Erlang-style, mailbox & message protocol might better approximate the network latency costs in the distributed layer of a system, while synchronized lightweight threads such as in Go might be better suited to take advantage of single-machine hardware. And that's what this project is enabling: use Erlang-style coordination, with Go-style optimized worker processes. It's just providing another option for managing concurrency, and it might be more suitable than, say, Paxos in many situations.

As far as the type systems go, it's been well established practice that you use a data interchange format. I thought Erlang used strings for its messages - surely Go can handle strings as well.

I don't think that you'd necessarily need to have both Erlang and Go running here - rather, this might be best for writing Go systems that 'act like' Erlang systems.

<comment><USER5> No, this is about Go functioning as an Erlang node using the Erlang node communication protocol, and my objection is _precisely_ that this is _not_ using "different layers of approaches"; it is simply smashing one model up against another _without_ an intervening layer, which is likely to produce unhappy consequences on both sides. You need an intervening layer between Go and Erlang because despite their superficial similarities, they are very different.

You can not do Erlang-style communication with Go processes. The channel- process id gulf is fairly large (though potentially crossable in Go if you just throw away a great deal of the style of the language and really jam in the idea that channels are instead untyped channels for which only one goroutine will receive, every clause of which is false at the language level and you will be enforcing it strictly manually), and the synchronous- asynchronous barrier is effectively uncrossable. If you try to program Erlang in Go, Go will _deadlock_. Frequently. (Although if you are foolish enough to try to simulate it with extensive use of buffered channels, it will only deadlock "frequently" in production, rather than in testing. Buffered channels are still synchronous, in the end.)

It may be a useful tool in conjunction with an abstraction layer, but the affordance of using this directly is dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They should have called this project "ergo".</comment>


Nearly 1000 of NY Tech protesting Senators on PIPA this Wed - join us, Valley - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/113164038788726940319/posts/5sxZg1pHgQ7

<comment><AUTHOR> Success! A new protest has arrived! [http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/48317262/?eventId=4...](http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/48317262/?eventId=48317262&action=detail)

PIPA-supporting Senators, meet the job-creators and innovators of California.

<comment><USER2> I'm confused, why is that protest at Joseph Ailoto Plaza instead of in front of Sen. Feinstein's office? <http://g.co/maps/r8s85>

Perhaps because the chosen location is in front of City Hall and usually has media trucks nearby?

<comment><USER3> We want to obey city ordinance and not block any sidewalks or streets and there aren't any decent sized parks close to Feinstein's offices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seattle Against SOPA (and PIPA) <http://www.meetup.com/SeattleAgainstSOPA/>

</comment><comment><USER5> DC Tech will be there: <http://www.meetup.com/DC-Tech-Meetup/events/48101142/>

</comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome.

Am I the only one that fears a big corp from using SOPA to kick my little website off the web by them simply pasting a bit of their documentation in my forum? I can imagine the copyright trolls asking for "protection money" so that bad material doesn't show up on my site. The lack of due process is what scares me the most about this whole thing.

I ask since it's one side that I don't see getting much discussion.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looking forward to bringing my body, taking up some space and voicing my concerns to the Senators.

Tell me good Sir... what does democracy look like?

Media will be there, so bring your A game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there is already media interest brewing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anybody else going from Palo Alto?

Right now, I'll be taking the Caltrain. If the are more people, perhaps we could get a carpool together.

If not, is there anybody else also planning on taking the Caltrain? Feel free to e-mail me (address within profile) if you would be interested in going together.</comment>


Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html?ex=1360645200&en=0cd591c7ca4da736&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> What would happen if you gave all the candy away. No, really, what would happen if, for one country in particular, candy was free? 10% would show restraint and eat healthily. The rest would more or less bing. If you put escalators everywhere, 90% wouldn't climb stairs anymore. This is what has happened with capitalism in America. We've made everything easy and most have binged on it. In fact, I think it's part of a natural cycle. America will lose the power to compete (the escalators will stop), and the next generations will be quite smart because they have to be.

Companies go through this all the time. Company X was at the top of the world, got complacent, lost its competitive edge, and had to start over. What makes us think that countries are any different?

Of course the article cherry-picks evidence to support its claim, and that's not fair. But I think, outside of America, no one questions its premise. Worse, it's evident there is nothing that can be done to remedy the situation; all we can do is wait and let nature take its course.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meh.

Most people are wrong about most things most of the time. Some people are right about some things some of the time.

Work hard, collect your "some things" into a narrow category and you'll be a professional, maybe even an expert. Just go with the flow and you'll have a brain full of random pop culture trivia.

The world is chock full of stupid people, it just seems like they're somehow easier to spot in America.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sure they are. Once we have established that (look, we have plenty of anecdotal evidence!), we never need to reconsider our judgement or allow exceptions, since everybody arguing against it is clearly (in mentality) an American and thusly, (due to what we already know about Americans (they're dumb and dumber)) not a reliable source of information. Call me Logic Master.

<comment><USER4> BTW, notice how my argument (the one behind the irony) is based on an incorrect assumption about the message of the article. (I read something about rhethorics.)

<comment><USER4> BTW, notice how I try to get away with not reading TFA by pretending it was a special rhethorical feat.

<comment><USER4> Further, notice how I seem to be replying to myself all the time.

<comment><USER4> It surely is the expression of an inner intellectual dialogue; no, no MPD here, go along!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The youtube video the author is referencing is this one: <http://youtube.com/watch?v=juOQhTuzDQ0>

<comment><USER5> Well, yeah: If you pay them to be entertainingly ignorant, Americans are very good at being entertainingly ignorant.

I mean, geez, the show is _called_ "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader". If _I_ were a guest on that show, I would damn well find a way to make the fifth grader look smart. Otherwise I would be a _spoilsport_ , a far greater sin in American culture than pretending to be stupid.

Replace Ms. Pickler with the all-time Jeopardy champion, and the show is boring. The guy just gets everything right, the kids get frustrated, the premise falls apart. Then they leave him on the cutting room floor. Not much of a way to get ahead in your career.

I'd say that Pickler did an excellent job -- her bravura performance as an idiot seems to have landed her a mention in the _Times_ , made her extra famous on YouTube, and probably boosted her asking price for her next gig. Now even _I_ have heard of her, and I've never watched five minutes of _American Idol_!

Whether or not I think that such a show should exist is a different question, but that's kind of beside the point. Who am I to decide? I am pretty sure that, in a culture that has spent fifty years promoting egghead-positive television like _Jeopardy_ and the more recent _Millionaire_ , this kind of parody is bound to become popular now and then.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, American's are meta-stupid!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why the hell should I care?</comment>