Ask HN: Any Startups in Portland? - <AUTHOR>

I will be in Portland, Oregon on July 31st and August 1st and would love to check out the startup scene and meet any developers working on something cool? Where do all the startups hang out/work? Thanks! <comment><USER2> PIE is an incubator that just kicked off their latest class, probably a good place to start:

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

Others are close by: Urban Airship, Simple, Puppet, Cloudability, etc.

Check Calagator for events too: [http://calagator.org/](http://calagator.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm on the TrapIt UI team in Palo Alto, and we have a very solid team of platform / dev ops / machine learning engineers up in Portland.

We are mostly looking for a new dev-ops/sysadmin guru, but we are constantly searching for great talent in other areas too. Send me a pm and I'd be happy to help you get in touch.

A little bit about TrapIt: [http://trap.it/about/](http://trap.it/about/) The jobs page: [http://trap.it/jobs/](http://trap.it/jobs/)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you post to the pdxruby list introducing yourself, I'm sure you'll get several invitations to drop by and visit:

        http://pdxruby.org/

One startup I don't see mentioned yet is New Relic. There are lots of smart and friendly people there. Also Cloud Compass and Elemental Technologies.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://angel.co/portland](https://angel.co/portland)

</comment><comment><USER6> Janrain and Engine Yard have been known to host community events.</comment>


Interactive iterated function system in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~jskorups/mush/

<comment><AUTHOR> A WebGL port one of my friends did of: <http://superfiretruck.com/iteration/>

Works well in Chrome on OSX for me, after an initial slowness while my MBP switches from integrated to discrete graphics.</comment>


Show HN: Watch our startup's launch becoming viral – live - <AUTHOR> http://www.yevvo.com/yoovi

<comment><USER2> If this is what I think it is... soo meta. God I hate that word now. (.. and good luck! - nice idea)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good luck on getting your startup to become viral! I like the idea of live streaming it. I didn't [http://www.yevvo.com/](http://www.yevvo.com/), I could use it to do some live coding :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I was happily watching and then all of a sudden "@yoovi is not on air". I hope it didn't break down!

<comment><AUTHOR> hey.. just reload, every time we go off air we come back after a few seconds. And it's going to be fixed the next time it happens(we're switching phones). Thanks and sorry :)</comment></comment>


Another new feature in Opera 11: tab stacking - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/tab-stacking-is-here

<comment><USER2> Maybe I use browsers differently to most people (I don't think so), but I really feel these features to manage tabs are misguided.

I get through thousands of tabs a week. Tabs don't indicate a web page is significant or persistent. They indicate that I wanted to have two pages open at the same time. Thus it makes no sense to manage tabs: they are an effect of untidiness, not a cause.

What these features are hinting at is some better way to handle common [sites]. I have a dozen or sites that I check every day, and being able to have those all open in one place would be great. But using the poor old _tab system_ for this is not the answer. It already has a job.

<comment><USER3> I strongly believe in: ● space = area (programming, twitter, mail) ● window = subject, search, etc ● tabs = the subject expanded (pages relative to a search, links of an article)

Can you see? It has 3 levels of Hierarchy! If you use Google Chrome you have only one! This stacking thing is another trying to circumvent some OS's crappy UI. If something has to be done is go beyond the App centric paradigm and go to the 'task' center paradigm (like Palm OS's stacks).

<comment><USER4> Actually, all those things can be handled by a competent window manager. If you had the ability to have tags on your windows, and quickly change your view based on those tags, that would be Awesome.

<comment><USER5> Do you actually use it this way (with uzbl, for example)?

<comment><USER4> I have Awesome window manager and Firefox with the Pentadactyl (and previously Vimperator) plugin.

I use Awesome's tag system extensively. When tabs aren't in use, the task list then looks and works like tabs - that is they are lined up across the top and you can click on them.

Not only do you get the benefit of the tagging, Awesome can be controlled completely by keyboard. I have mine setup to use Vi-style keybindings. Combine that with both Firefox and tmux using Vi-style keybindings, and you get a really cohesive, reinforcing keyboarding system.

It works great on my netbook for a couple of extra reasons: Firefox's chrome in this setup takes up about 20 pixels (for the status bar, and even that can be hidden if you want), and I don't have to use the horrible trackpad nearly as much.

I do prefer this, but I should point out that there are a few of gotchas to working without tabs. First, Firefox 3.6 is much slower opening a window than a tab. Firefox 4 improves this quite a bit, but it's not yet stable. Second, the Vimperator/Pentadactyl keystroke for opening a window takes two keys (";w") instead of one ("f"); this is probably fixable, but I haven't done it yet. Third, I haven't found a way to make a window open in the background yet; that means to open a window, it's ";w [link]...[mod+j]" - I open a new window then switch back to what I opened it from.

<comment><USER5> I'm using vimperator now, I didn't know about pentadactyl, thanks!

I actually don't bother forcing everything into windows, I'm fine with firefox managing its own tabs. In fact, I rarely have more than two windows on any one tag (and I really only select one tag at a time...kind of a "everything runs in fullscreen" mode for the most part).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was just thinking to change from opera (that I love since forever) to ff4 because of the tab-candy feature. I tried, but I missed so much the features I got used to, like mouse-gestures, notes, downloads, quickstart thumbnails, no slowdowns...

Finally opera, again, has everything I need, and this tab management actually feels so much more usable and faster then ff.

Thanks Opera!

</comment><comment><USER7> Also new in Opera 11 is Web Sockets:<http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introducing-web-sockets/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Isnt this pretty much the same as what firefox "tree style tab" addon has been doing for some time already? Except for the preview option, but im not a big fan of that anyway. And tree style tab was putting the tabs on the side, which imho is better because it saves the precious(on widescreens) vertical space.

Anyway, good to see the cool concepts spread :)

<comment><USER9> Opera has been able to move the tabs to the left side for a while. So combine that with this new feature and you have the basic functionality of that "tree style tab" addon except only 1 level deep but much more polished/usable.

<comment><USER4> More usable? I'd say definitely not. Tab-style-tree works automatically in the way I like it to the best. If I want to further group things beyond what it automatically does, I grab the tab and move it to where I want it - I don't have to hover there until it snaps to stacked mode.

Furthermore: with Informational Tab, you get thumbnails on all your tabs; with Multiple Tab Handler, you easily select many tabs to move to where you want them. These three plugins work like a perfect trio.

<comment><USER10> Even better, if you don't like the default behavior, it's highly configurable based on how the tab is opened, and from where (although I don't believe site specific options are available).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been wanting to move away from Chrome for a while (too many issues in too short a space of time). Opera looks to be the near-bleeding-edge browser I actually want. Minimal UI, draft standards support, efficient and still finds time to be innovative. If you stick with Chrome for the UI give this a try.

<comment><USER12> I'm not intending to troll, but you seem to be describing Firefox more than Opera. Minimal UI? Sure it only has one more button on the screen, but once you open the context menu, or opera menu things get just as complicated as they have always been for Opera. Not that it's necessarily bad - I think Opera is a great browser, it's just the properties you describe seem to fit Firefox 4 more.

(To address 'draft standards support' - Opera doesn't even have the HTML5 parser or WebGL...the list goes on.)

<comment><USER11> Mm, when it comes to "minimal UI" I just want as much screen space for the page as possible. At the moment Firefox's tabs don't overlap with the title bar and I was surprised how much this annoys me - Chrome has spoiled me.

After using it for a few days I can't say I particularly like the menu system (although it's smaller than Firefox's in terms or items. Ad blocking doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Opera Link's useful but replicated by every other browser than IE (and Safari? but I'd never use that). My previous post was written on elation or something like it, I'm missing Chrome already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Warning: not as good as Firefox 4's Tab Candy

<comment><USER14> Interesting. I've been using the Tree Style Tab addon, which seems to achieve the same goal of grouping and nesting with less administrative overhead:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/>

<comment><USER15> don't try Tree Style Tabs; ones hooked and you can never go back :)

No seriously, Tree Style Tab is the best experience I ever had as a notorious tab user.

<comment><USER16> "once hooked"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here are screenshots and a comparison with some other tab stacking evolutions (amazon.com's): [http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4824/tab- st...](http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4824/tab-stacking)

</comment><comment><USER12> Finally someone implements the tab organization feature I've been peddling for years.

My latest peddle attempt: [https://mozillalabs.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5000...](https://mozillalabs.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5000&Focus=12592)

</comment><comment><USER18> How about a screenshot?

<comment><USER19> I'll do you one better. Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drCAiTSAYdc>

<comment><USER20> I actually saw the video link in the article and came back to the comments hoping for screenshots. Video typically makes me wait while the person introduces themselves, explains what they're doing, and it's usually much more of a time-sink than just looking at screens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get all the fuzz about that. I've been using Tree Style Tab [1] on Firefox since ages and I think it does the work better.

[1] <https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/5890/>

<comment><USER16> "fuss", not "fuzz"

<comment><USER22> I would have to put a person like that on a pedal stool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I look forward to this once it actually works. Right now, when any stacks are collapsed tab order breaks badly. And you can't have more than one uncollapsed.

</comment><comment><USER24> It works almost exactly like iOS folders.</comment>


Show HN: I Wrote a Book: Minimum Viable Perl - <AUTHOR> http://mvp.kablamo.org/ <comment><USER2> Nice work, I like it! It's like Learn X in Y Minutes, but with some more depth..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Thats exactly what I was aiming for. I'm glad that came across. I was thinking the same thing although I didn't actually discover [https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl/) until after I had written Minimum Viable Perl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do people still use Perl? Why and where?

<comment><USER2> Yes, there are several legacy systems where a full rewrite is way more risky than maintenance-and-minor-enhancements-only. If you're surprised that Perl is still alive, don't go asking about how many COBOL systems are still out there!

<comment><USER3> I was more curious whether people are still using Perl on new projects and if so why they choose to do so.

<comment><USER4> This gets asked a fair amount on r/perl and on here. In short, because it's still a great language with yearly releases and a large library ecosystem (CPAN). It's built in to Linux and works really well there (although Python is as well), but also you can generally run 20 year old perl code in a 5.26 distribution of Perl without much issue. Performance is really good too. I'd say it's harder to learn than Python if you had to pick one, but if you're already good with Perl, there's really not a reason to go to Python unless you need to do numerical work (numpy/scypy) or data work (Pandas & Matplotlib). Perl has 3 good web frameworks. The language's base OO support is pretty sparse, but the Moose module on CPAN allows Perl to become supercharged with very advanced OO capabilities and the Moo module is a lightweight version of Moose that is a lower performance hit. Perl is much better than Python or Ruby for shell one-liners to do quick and dirty work as it has a lot of things built in to help there (see book Perl Oneliners). They spent 15 years designing Perl6 which is not the next language, but a new sister language that still has some work in the performance department, but is a very nice language. As a python guy, I would switch to Perl6 in a heartbeat if it were as fast as Perl5. A lot of things from Perl6 were backported to Perl5. All in all, y not choose it? It has a lot of neat developer tools as well.

<comment><USER5> > unless you need to do numerical work (numpy/scypy) or data work (Pandas & > Matplotlib)

Perl has libraries for numerical/science stuff too. :)

[http://pdl.perl.org](http://pdl.perl.org)

[http://search.cpan.org/dist/Math-GSL](http://search.cpan.org/dist/Math-GSL)

[http://bioperl.org](http://bioperl.org)

Those are some of the major ones. Being Perl, of course there's more.

<comment><USER4> Bioperl is specific to biology/genomics to my knowledge although you could probably use it for other tasks. I'd use PDL if it had more use and support and was easier to setup, but it's a pain in that regard. I've tried installing it on windows via strawberry perl & activestate and won't be trying again after the 1/2 hour install repeatedly failed tests.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Streams, Rulers and Laziness - <AUTHOR> http://wenderen.github.io/Ruler-Series/ <comment><USER2> I discovered this course a while back and must say it is awesome. here's the link for those who missed it in the article's footer: [http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/](http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/)

For me personally, it is the best intro to haskell I could find, succint, to the point, and best of all are the assignments.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is cool. I wonder what the performance is on large streams?

>It doesn't work because we haven't defined interleaveStreams - which, for the sake of brevity, we will now refer to as iStr.

I much prefer `interleaveStreams` to `iStr`. I know Haskellers like to abbreviate things, but I think it just makes things harder to read for most people. What about using `interleave` and allowing the user to infer Streams from the function signature?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that `interleave` reads better than `iStr`. I've updated the post.

FWIW I wasn't really trying to name things in an idiomatic "Haskell" way, I just wanted a shorter name and `iStr` was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Regarding the performance issue, it's fast. As an example, running `take 10000000 $ streamToList ruler` at ghci forces Haskell to evaluate (and print) the first 10 million elements of the ruler sequence. On my machine I observed that the printing is the bottleneck. The computation of the next Integer in the series takes next to no time.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the abbreviation was necessarily idiomatic Haskell. I've just seen so much Haskell code that contains abbreviations that it kind of turns me off from the language. :/

I really look the like of the code now :)

Printing will definitely be a bottleneck unfortunately, but I imagine the non- printing code will be quite fast. I'm mostly curious how it would compare to a well optimized C version.

Are you planning on developing on top of this anymore? One interesting use case I have for interleaved streams is for the streams to contain Promises (not sure what the equivalent is in Haskell) that must be run while only allowing a certain number of them to be run concurrently. Additionally handling multiple consumers (based on the value in the Stream), each with their own limit on how many Promises of that type can be run at a time. Adding time-based (say, a max of 10 items per second, per consumer, regardless of how fast the Promises finish). I'm sure this has been implemented many times, but it can be quite useful.</comment></comment></comment>


Sergei Skripal believed to have been poisoned with nerve agent - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/07/russian-spy-police-appeal-for-witnesses-as-cobra-meeting-takes-place <comment><USER2> This story should not be so obscure. British PM today: if there is no credible response, we will concludes this was a use of force by Russia on the territory of the U.K.

That proposes the possibility Putin has lost control of chemical weapons, even though what is most likely a deliberate attack against a perceived traitor. These kinds of attacks will only get more brazen. Any politician aligned with Russia is at increasing risk of being seen as a traitor if they become critical of Putin. Why not kill some politician's daughter if they speak out against Putin? The UK has let this slide too far, so has the EU, and certainly the U.S. has said nothing about it.

Maybe we see Putin do Trump a favor with Manafort, should he end up cooperating with Mueller? Trump gets what he wants twice: the Manafort problem goes away, and by telling CIA to do nothing about it, damages the "deep state" he distrusts. We end up with a tacit acceptance of political assassinations on American soil. It is the czarification of western civilization.

I guess people need a taste of authoritarianism to understand the problem. In the meantime they are all too pleased with their distractions.</comment>


Getting started with Scientific Programming - <AUTHOR> http://functionspace.org/articles/4/Getting-started-with-Scientific-Programming

<comment><USER2> The article refers to the Synaptic Package Manager, which is available on many Debian-based Linux distros. Your OS may use something different. The general instructions in the article on using Python with SciPy, NumPy, Maxima, and MatPlotLib and should work with any OS, including Windows and Mac OS X.

<comment><USER3> There are more general instructions for getting these tools set up here: [http://www.scipy.org/install.html](http://www.scipy.org/install.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would add to this excellent intro: pandas, for doing data analysis, and the fabulous ipython notebook for easily interacting with your computations.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very useful introduction!</comment>


Data Center Computers: Modern Challenges in CPU Design [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBu2Ae8-8LM <comment><USER2> One thing that makes this February talk particularly relevant now is the part about 40+ minutes in where he talks about cache interference. That's the inverse of cache partitioning (or Cache Allocation Technology in Intel-speak) which Dan Luu wrote an excellent article about a few days ago.

[http://danluu.com/intel-cat/](http://danluu.com/intel-cat/)

Anyone trying to cram lots of workloads onto a single physical system should make sure they understand this stuff.

<comment><USER3> And here's the HN discussion of that article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334579)</comment></comment>


Hey Sweetheart - AwesomenessReminders.com for love - <AUTHOR> http://www.heysweetheart.com/ <comment><USER2> Total rip off of awesomenessreminders.com See also: [http://jacquesmattheij.com/Beware+of+being+too+open+about+yo...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Beware+of+being+too+open+about+your+company+on+Hacker+News)

Edit: the OP totally changed the title of this submission after I posted this. Classssy.</comment>


The best damn Olympic infographic ever - <AUTHOR> https://gosquared.com/london2012

<comment><USER2> I just found it strange that of the 42 countries who have yet to win a gold medal, one of them was "the Olympics". Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER3> I was into the stats until I hit the giant stadium image (../img/stadium.jpg). The compression artifacting is wildly distracting.</comment>


Raphaël Demo - Cross Browser Vector Graphics - Topic Connections Graph - <AUTHOR> http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/sunraylab/blog/2009/Oct/04/raphael_demo__cross_browser_vector_graphics__topic_connections_graph/ <comment><USER2> Kinda interesting, but the demo itself is pretty basic.

The official Raphaël site [1] has a whole bunch of awesome demos. Check it out (scroll down a bit, they're all right there on the home page). The pie chart [2] is my personal favorite.

[1] <http://www.raphaeljs.com>

[2]<http://raphaeljs.com/pie.html>

<comment><USER3> plus, g.raphael.js, a graphing library built on top of raphael, is due out oct 7th according to dmitry, the main developer <http://github.com/DmitryBaranovskiy/g.raphael></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Extreme programming with two mice and keyboards? - <AUTHOR> Me and my co-programmer like to sit behind the same screen and work - it suits us well and is efficient. But 50% of the time, code just need to be entered/edited - meaning one of us needs to be idle, which is frustrating. What we really would like, is for each of us to have a mouse and a keyboard AND for the display manager to be able to assign windows focus independently to each developer. If we were both to focus the IDE, we would both have a cursor each, and if one of us were to focus another window, the other would continue uninterrupted in his/her window.<p>Googling turns up concepts such as multi-seat (which refers to two independent logins on different screens), but I can't seem to find solutions for extreme programmers. <comment><USER2> would not seeing two different screens defy the purpose of pair programming ?

<comment><USER3> Maybe. Adapting by doing what works would be agile, however.</comment></comment>


Twitter Thinks My Gender Is [EICAR String] (Or "Server-Side Checks Matter") - <AUTHOR> https://soatok.blog/2020/04/27/why-server-side-input-validation-matters <comment><USER2> As an aside I like the idea of using the EICAR anti-virus test file[1] as a way to "auto-delete" your data.

I suspect this plan might even work. I happen to maintain the libmspack library[2] in RHEL, it's a library for extracting Microsoft CABinet files. Part of the source contains regression tests. Some of those tests are flagged by AV software because they contain past exploits for the library: the idea of these regression tests is to ensure that they don't reintroduce the vulnerability by accident.

Well, the libmspack source RPM causes all kinds of problems, both internally at Red Hat and at customer sites. It is constantly being flagged by AV software. Every release I have to manually waive the package through our AV checks, and we've had feedback from customers that we're "shipping a virus" which had to be handled very diplomatically.

AV software is crazy, but let's make it work for us :-)

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

[2] [https://www.cabextract.org.uk/libmspack/](https://www.cabextract.org.uk/libmspack/)

<comment><USER3> > As an aside I like the idea of using the EICAR anti-virus test file[1] as a > way to "auto-delete" your data.

Nobody detects EICAR when it's surrounded by other data.

Strings like

      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://web.nba1001.net:8888/tj/tongji.js"></script>

will work much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What does their backend look like that a 30 character string for gender could end up containing a limitless amount of text?

<comment><USER5> As long as their backend isn't going to fail under a limitless amount of text, it's fine for this to be a front-end only limit...

But unless they've tested the backend against a 64 gigabyte gender...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The ML based guessing of people's genders sounds extremely tactless. You'd think given the demographics of their userbase Twitter would've known better.

<comment><USER7> Not the entire world consists of 'did you just assume my gender' people. Most people don't care at all.

Stereotypes exist because they model people pretty well.

If you enter that your gender is unicorn you probably just get slightly more generic ads.

Here's a scary thought: if you walk the street everyone who sees you will assume your gender.

<comment><USER8> Eh - if you're trans and experiencing dysphoria it can be pretty painful when people misgender you. The whole 'did you assume my gender' thing is a sort of weird take on the fact that yes, it is pretty hurtful when somebody's going through a really hard and vulnerable time in their lives, then some douchebag is determined to make a political point that a complete stranger is 'really' x, or y.

It's also just really bizarre and rude. Imagine referring to a cis woman with a beard as an 'it', or 'he'. For whatever reason, people go out of their way to commit this kind of absurd faux-pas with trans people.

<comment><USER9> _> It's also just really bizarre and rude. Imagine referring to a cis woman with a beard as an 'it', or 'he'._

I do that sometimes, unintentionally (regardless of the person in question having a beard or not). It's just that gender in language is most of the time redundant and it only introduces noise into conversation. For most topics, the gender of the persons involved is irrelevant. But many languages force you to choose one, which just creates confusion if this piece of information is crucial or if it's just this bloat that the language forced you to include in your sentence.

Oh, and genders are much more prevalent in my native language. English is actually better than most languages in this respect. But let's go a step further and just get rid of it. I've heard the Swedes chose to move to "person/thing" pronouns, as opposed to "male/female/thing".

In my native language, verbs change their forms based on subject's gender. And then when you have sentences like "if I were in your shoes, I would _verb_ ", my brain tells me to assume the gender of the other speaker when I say _verb_. I mean, it's only logical: if I were in your shoes, I would be of your gender. But the language works otherwise. It's just stupid.

As to people's reactions to my occasional misnamings, most people don't care at all, some are amused. Because, really, this part of language is ridiculous. And making an issue out of it is immature.

<comment><USER10> Oh C'mon, have some empathy. Of course cis people are just going to be amused to mildly annoyed. Trans people however are in a daily grind to be recognized. From personal experience, it always depends how deliberate a misgendering is, once with subsequent correction stings but is fine, not putting in any effort is quite uncomfortable and deliberately doing the opposite is "fuck off and never talk to me again" territory. The later happens not as infrequently as you might think, so the second might be misunderstood for the the later (and really, it costs nothing to not make people feel like trash).

While most people will eventually be recognized - at least if they fit within the binary somewhere and medically transition - a few will not, and almost nobody will on the long way there.

To insist it is not a big deal because you can't relate, that is immature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting, twitter correctly guessed my gender, but incorrectly what languages I speak.</comment>


Andy Ihnatko: Google lacks guts in killing short-lived Wave platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/2570324,google-wave-ends-ihnatko-08-510.article

<comment><USER2> Shame this story hasn't caught on - it's the best piece of the Google Wave kill so far. Quote:

 _Has Google become a bunch of technology spammers? Is their strategy to simply flood the world with as many ideas as possible in the hopes that one or two percent of them will become hits without any further work?_

Ouch. But, you can see why he's asking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article. I must admit that I was really disappointed when I read the news that Wave was going to be killed.

We have been used to Google's fast paced innovation. They do push the limit on what the browser can do (for instance in Wave) but as far as they are concerned that technology would not help their business model which like any other business is to make money.

As the article states, I would not be surprised if Wave technology is introduced in other Google products.

I am however disappointed that Wave was killed. I really loved that product :/</comment>


Face ID FUD - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/2017/10/face_id_fud <comment><USER2> This article is biased nonsense. Gruber is a smart guy but his biases blind him to nuances way too often. Apple is talking about the spec for face id but clearly said nothing about the specs for each part.</comment>


Technological clairvoyance - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/technological-clairvoyance

<comment><USER2> My own arm chair theory is that the market leader's dominance of their environment causes an "economic hold" on the market as all the players maintain the status quo soas to recover their investment in whatever their product(s) happen to be (within the current leader's product supporting ecosystem.) This economic hold maintains as long as a competing option's "benefit" provides less economic opportunity for the entire market than the current market leader. After all, it's a collection of companies that make a market, and they will collectively protect their revenues then threatened.

</comment><comment><USER3> However, prediction is still difficult. Especially about the future.</comment>


Airpair's fast growing pair programming community - <AUTHOR> http://www.airpair.com/pair-programming/our-future

<comment><USER2> Ohh sweet! Super psyched to see us on the front page of HN.

We are looking for as many folks who love pair programming as possible. So if pair programming is your thing, please consider applying to be an expert here:

www.airpair.com/be-an-expert

Let me know if you have any questions about AirPair.

Cheers,

Maksim AirPair co-founder

<comment><USER3> What does it cost and what does it pay? It's not all that clear on the site.

Also looks like you need a favicon.

<comment><USER4> It's set up as a marketplace where experts can have ballpark hourly rates and clients can also offer a specific rate for a given request. Then a mutually agreed upon amount (could be zero on up through top-dollar market rates) can be negotiated. As an expert you can decide "I always want $X/hour" if you like or you can do it case-by-case. Same thing as a client, you can specify in the request an amount you are offering and let experts take it or leave it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any experts beyond: [http://www.airpair.com/experts](http://www.airpair.com/experts) ?

I'm working on a C# extension to Visual Studio and some of the interfaces I've come across have little (or no) documentation on MSDN. I'd love to get in touch with an expert who works on Visual Studio extensions or works directly on Visual Studio at Microsoft.

Do you often find new experts? I'd love to pay for someone to help me with this particular problem.

<comment><USER2> Definitely! We have almost 1,000 pre-screened and thoroughly vetted experts in our network already.

For C#/Visual Studio/.NET, we have some really awesome experts. Related - check out Peder Rice's post [http://www.airpair.com/.net/expert-help-peder- rice](http://www.airpair.com/.net/expert-help-peder-rice)

If you'd like to get one on one help with C#/Visual Studio, please fill out a request form here: www.airpair.com/find-an-expert

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,

Maksim

<comment> do-it-good Your site is extremely slow. Maybe you need some expert help ;-)

Sign in with Google? Yeah, why not. Sign in with NSA?

Sounds like a good idea, the guys from techzing were trying to build something similar. I can really use a CSS expert right now to polish my web site. Any alternatives to airpair.com outhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm enamored with this service. I use google hangout to pair program all the time, but I love the idea of finding people on Github to video conference for rapid problem solving.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this what Plural Sight does? For 20$ a MONTH?

I've used Plural Sight videos and their supporting code download for learing C#, Design Patterns, Algorithms, Interviewing Questions, Android programming, the complete works.

(Disclaimer: I have no relation with Plural Sight or their employees. Just think their products are awesome, and let you learn at your own pace, and have everything that this pair programming site seems to offer, for a fraction of the cost.)

<comment><USER2> Not familiar with Plural Sight, but our service connects customers with tech experts over video and screen sharing for hours at a time. The AirPair experts range from senior software engineers with specialty in certain tech (Rails, JavaScript, .NET, Oracle, etc, etc) who are also great mentors to thought leaders in their domains (e.g., core AngularJS committers).

These experts help customers ramp up on new tech and solve complex problems via pair programming and real time help.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Maksim AirPair co-founder

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I smell a super success and acquisition

</comment><comment><USER9> Would be very helpful in a team where most of the people are working remotely. Great job !

<comment><USER2> For sure! We've had quite a bit of success there already.

-Maksim

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do you guys have experts in graphics coding?

I may be needing to program a bidirectional path tracer in the near future, and it'd be awesome to get up to speed by pairing with an experienced coder in that domain on that.

<comment><USER11> We've done a request for Divshot ([http://www.divshot.com/](http://www.divshot.com/))?

Can you be more specific about which framework you need help with. We will connect you with someone who has the tech you want to work with => [http://www.airpair.com/find-an-expert](http://www.airpair.com/find-an-expert)

<comment><USER10> I'd be needing to use either CUDA or OptiX, working on a bidirectional path tracer at least initially: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing#Bidirectional_path...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing#Bidirectional_path_tracing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Feedback: It is necessary to set company name/description mandatory for sign up? I have no company yet and I plan to use your service for different projects.

<comment><USER12> I have just discovered that the sign up process is a pair request too, I though that one thing was registering an account and another one asking for pair.

<comment><USER11> To apply as an expert => [http://www.airpair.com/be-an- expert](http://www.airpair.com/be-an-expert)

To ask for help => [http://www.airpair.com/find-an- expert](http://www.airpair.com/find-an-expert)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is any way to sign up using a simple email address instead of a Google account?

BTW: I love the idea. I am going to try it.

<comment><USER11> Presently no, as we use google hangouts to do most of the video chat. We have plans for our enterprise clients to provide straight email sign up in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great support for me as I am learning RoR :)

</comment><comment><USER14> McAfee is tagging airpair.com as pornography inside our company firewall. Might want to fix that.

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks like a great concept, but I'm disappointed to see that out of 40 people available to work with, only one person is a woman.

Surely there's an opportunity to aim higher here? There's many smart female coders that would probably love to be involved in something like this.

<comment><USER16> Are you also disappointed that there aren't any transgendered experts listed?

Diversity is great, yes, but can we please stop suggesting that there is sexism happening here?

<comment><USER15> I didn't mention sexism or imply gender prejudice, because I don't believe that's what happened here.

I ran this by a female developer for sanity checking, and I like what she came back with: "Transgendered people don't make up 50% of the population. Women do. Female software developers make up 18% of the industry, so if you're not getting 18% women interested in working for/with you, you have a communication problem."

For the record, I have no idea how many of the people on their roster identify as transgendered, and neither do you.

<comment><USER16> Edit: This is my complete misreading of the situation. I genuinely apologize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks awesome. Now I just need to wait until I get stuck.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the early success. Time to spin up more dynos ;-)

<comment><USER2> Haha, done! :)

Maksim

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is too for spanish people? Or only english?

<comment><USER11> We have quite a few spanish speaking experts like Felipe Lima [https://github.com/felipecsl](https://github.com/felipecsl)

We're also in discussions with a partner in Brazil to get some Portuguese experts.

Jonathon, AirPair Cofounder

<comment><USER19> Is possible to pick based in language? So, If I join, could help only in spanish?

<comment><USER11> We will support listing languages you speak on profiles soon.

Jonathon, AirPair Cofounder

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> i think I broke it...

<comment><USER11> We just scaled from 1-10 dynos. Hopefully fully up now cheers.

Jonathon AirPair Cofounder

<comment><USER21> OAuth callback from GitHub fails :(

<comment><USER11> Please contact us at team at airpair so we can diagnose - it is working for others people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great idea.</comment>


AT&T Hobbit - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Hobbit <comment><USER2> > They found, as RISC designers would have expected, that without a load-store > design it was difficult to improve the instruction pipeline and thereby > operate at higher speeds. They felt that all future processors would thus > move to a load-store design, and built Inferno to reflect this. In contrast, > Java and .NET virtual machines are stack based, a side effect of being > designed by language programmers as opposed to chip designers

That's some solid trash talk for Wikipedia.

<comment><USER3> > _Java 's virtual machine and compiler are many times larger and slower than > the Dis virtual machine and the Limbo (the most common language compiled for > Dis) compiler. Android's Dalvik virtual machine, the Parrot virtual machine > and Lua virtual machine are also register-based._

And the rant continue...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fun facts from the See Also.. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle)

"allows some ARM processors to execute Java bytecode in hardware"!

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote about the EO recently for Input ([https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the- story...](https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story-of- atts-eo-communicator-90s-ipad-flop)), so I actually have a couple of Hobbit chips in my house at the moment, strangely enough. (No, the EO units don't work, unfortunately … something about 27-year-old batteries.)

It's a really fascinating chip that reflects AT&T's tech ambitions of the time—which flopped, hard, almost immediately after they shut down the chip's production. If the EO situation played out differently, who knows how much bigger the Hobbit would've been.

<comment><USER6> This. Given the Wired advocacy for newish techs at the time and AT&Ts market and economic dominance we could have seen this as the pager or the late 1990s. Dominate and then reduced to a niche like Blackberry as the smartphone took over. Who'd a thunk?

<comment><USER7> Was AT&T that dominant at the time? They had been broken up just a few years earlier and would go on to be acquired by one of their spinoffs a few later

<comment><USER5> One factor here worth keeping in mind: In 1991, they bought NCR, so they were trying to expand into the tech market beyond their traditional telecom base. (Bell Labs was also owned by AT&T during the period.) They were still very cash-rich in the '90s and trying to use that leverage in other parts of telecom, even if the Baby Bells owned local telephone service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Hobbit was also used in the earliest (unreleased) versions of the BeBox."

This is an unfortunate dead end for this technology.

</comment><comment><USER8> > It was based on the company's CRISP (C-language Reduced Instruction Set > Processor) design. CRISP and Hobbit were optimized for running the C > programming language.

Couldn't the same be said of any modern CPU short of the Java processors that have mostly failed?

<comment><USER9> I took a university assembly language course (UIUC CS225) on the WE32100, which was the predecessor to the Hobbit. We worked on a stack of AT&T 3B2s donated to the college.

I distinctly remember the STRCPY opcode, which did exactly what you expected it to do.

[https://imgur.com/a/auZlxwG](https://imgur.com/a/auZlxwG)

I have fond memories of that instruction set, but looking back now it's like looking at a loaded weapon.

<comment><USER10> Huh, interesting. I don't know a lot about the various architectures, but with instructions like that, my intuition tells me you could do some really interesting stuff.

Coming from an embedded background, I'm wondering, could you not, for example, do a machine where you offload bulk memory operations to the memory controller itself? Copying memory, zeroing memory, moving memory around, all these things could happen at the memory controller level and you'd never need to put them on the actual bus. Perhaps there is something like this for some exotic architectures?

<comment><USER11> I've seen obscenely complicated DMA controllers that can do that and more. Check the NXP iMX6 SDMA peripveral for instance.

<comment><USER10> It would still put it in the bus, tho, no?

I'm wondering now how these processors/MCU's handle bus access since you have so many peripherals that probably want to access it as well as the CPU acceses that need to happen. Certainly you have to have a priority settling mechanism and some way of arbitrating the resource. The CPU probably doesn't use it all the time, but if you have a pipeline, it probably uses it in the background anyway.

<comment><USER9> On ARM there's a whole series of controller blocks that sit between the CPU caches and the outside world. Start looking up the AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture) and you'll see how complicated it gets:

[https://developer.arm.com/architectures/system- architectures...](https://developer.arm.com/architectures/system- architectures/amba)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you monetize your IP? - <AUTHOR> This is my effort, and it totally sucks
https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserGap
I'm failing at this. Zero money from this.
I'd love to hear from people who know how to win. <comment><USER2> Try to think of more product uses. Explain why it's different than 100 other browsers running in maybe headless mode. Work hard to get a 'launch customer' that might be free but that illustrates what you can provide.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was hoping you could help me think of more uses.... :D haha</comment></comment>


Skid Row - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles <comment><USER2> What struck me reading this is all the issues SF and LA have had around housing and homelessness are not new — and, more importantly, the knee-jerk reaction of "cleaning the streets" (a nicer way to say incarceration) every- other city council has tried simply does not work.

The real solution is potentially more expensive, less immediate, and less politically feasible. Build more housing: build more public housing, more market rate housing, more publicly-subsidized private housing, affordable housing, luxury housing, social housing, mixed-income housing — just build!

But don't stop there, the city should provide support not just to those currently living on skid row, but to private caretakers, nonprofits, churches, property developers, business owners, everyone in the area.

The solution won't be cheap by any measure, so why cut corners? Go all the way.

<comment><USER3> More housing won't help if they don't _want_ housing.

I lived on the streets for awhile and _many_ people did not want homes, they wanted comfort, food, happiness, forget their pain, booze, drugs, entertainment.... a house? Nope.

Now what do you do with those people?

<comment><USER4> We don't really need to worry about those people. Let's just build enough housing for those who want housing. That at least shrinks the problem.

Let's do what reasonably can be done and follow the 80/20 rule and take care of the majority of the problem that is relatively easily resolved, thereby freeing up more resources for the short list of really, really hard cases.

<comment><USER5> But we do need to worry about those people when those people may be a large percentage of the people on the streets. These people are deep into the throws of mental illness, addiction, or both. What do you do to help people who don't want to help themselves? It's a very difficult problem and I don't know if there is an easy solution that doesn't infringe on people's rights. You can't make being homeless illegal and state conservatorship seems dystopian.

<comment><USER2> Those who need more support than just housing (and I'd assume that could be many!) should be able to have it provided for them — I am sure the lines get murky if someone claims to not want to get helped, but I am also sure there is a way to still provide it humanely — anything is a step forward from the present conditions of homelessness and/or incarceration, at this point

<comment><USER6> For what it's worth, I don't think anyone is arguing that the present state of things is optimal.

The approach I've taken in the past to these issues is to simply treat people as people worthy of fair treatment, do what I can personally to help, and provide what resources I'm able to provide to support organizations that I believe to be effective in helping people.

The parable of the starfish seems to apply: if you walk down a beach covered with starfish dying in the sun, you have no means available to save all of them. You can only put the ones you encounter back into the sea. It doesn't solve the problem as a whole, but it makes a difference to the ones you're able to save.

Or, from a Judeo-Christian perspective; "If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be … For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore I command you, 'You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land." (Deuteronomy 15:7-11)

I take this to mean that helping those who need help is the responsibility of every individual, within that individual's means. I also take it to mean that it is a problem where one should not expect a neat resolution; no matter how much you give or how many people give alongside you, there will always be more that can (and should) be done. The purpose of the commandment to help the poor is not to eliminate poverty, but to provide an ongoing means of spiritually enriching all parties involved.

I know that the things I've done for others have lead to personal growth in both myself and the people I've come to know through those actions.

I'm still trying to integrate the apparent contradiction that some of the smallest sacrifices I've made have had some of the largest impacts. Several times my wife and I have given substantial monetary gifts to individuals and organizations - they're important and I in no way mean to dissuade someone from doing that, but at the end of the day it feels like the phrase "it's just money" seems to apply. On the other hand, the single most impactful thing I've ever done was to pick someone up who was walking down the highway in my small town. I had some time that day and ended up not only taking them where they was going (home), but spending about two hours afterward taking them to run a handful of errands that would have taken them at least a full day to accomplish without a vehicle - to the DMV for a replacement license, to a staffing agency to sign up, and to the grocery store to pick up a few essentials. In that case I wasn't even able to help them pay for groceries due to my own financial situation... but months later, that same person flagged me down and told me - with tears in their eyes - that the fact that I took the time to help them was a major factor in their deciding not to attempt suicide and to seek help. That was a bit over two years ago, and while that person is still dealing with their personal demons, they are no longer regularly using hard drugs, have reconciled with their family, and are living with an elder relative to help care for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been there with a van full of sandwiches and juice boxes for extra credit for some underwater basket weaving class. The food was gone in 10 minutes, with some getting portions for their immediate and extended families. Other than the obvious mental illness many were facing, some were nice enough to line up.

</comment><comment><USER8> this is america: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCvcd0FYi58LwyTQP9LITpA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCvcd0FYi58LwyTQP9LITpA)

<comment><USER9> Nice interviews, thanks!

As non-native english speaker I liked the one with the mafia boss ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwnDF2dRgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwnDF2dRgI) ) as he was talking nicely. Others use a lot of slang and/or people get stuck from time to time ("and you know..., well, I did.., I did..., well, the thing is..." => this makes me nervous).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My disappointment when the article wasn't about the demo/cracking-scene group Skid Row. :/

<comment><USER11> Anyone who ever owned an Amiga probably remembers the group. Their cracktros were really cool.

<comment><USER12> They still exist and are as good as they used to be! The only caveat these days is downloading 60GB ISO is not as appealing.

<comment><USER13> Why not? People using Steam download that much or even more all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is an interesting documentary narrated by Charles Bukowski called "The Best Hotel on Skid Row" from 1990, you can find it on YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER15> A better title for this link is "Skid Row, Los Angeles" per the page title.

In the Pacific Northwest there's a longstanding debate about the origin of the term -- afaik both Seattle and Victoria claim primacy of the term, which is originally related to logging. As I understand it, these neighborhoods were first named Skid Row because of the logging, and due to economic realities, the name became associated with poverty and then spread to other towns without significant logging industries.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_row](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_row)</comment>


Mac OS X Lion: How Apple's Turning Your Mac into an iPad - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/07/25/mac-os-x-lion-how-apple%E2%80%99s-turning-your-mac-into-an-ipad/

<comment><USER2> _yawn_

I do get tired of these "recieved wisdom" nuggets as seen in the headline here - see also "ipad is for consuming only" and "linux not suitable for desktop" (although that one seems to have died a death) etc. etc. and of course the actual article is a rather mundane overview of one or two of the features

Since I'm here: is Lion turning into iOS - no. I'm finding it makes me even more effective - I fly round my Air like I can fly round my source code with Vim. I find the gestures and the trackpad make a mouse feel like a clumsy ancient thing, Launchpad is acutally not too bad sometimes - gesture tap is quicker than ctrl-space typing enter (I use launchbar now - switched from quicksilver when it was going through rough times). Mission control, or whatever it's called, is much better than spaces and expose - I love the re- arrange spaces so apps I alt-tab between are close to each other. I find that full screen and focusing on a single task is much better for my concentraion - and was something I've been trying to do since long before I got Lion.

this is actually a power users update whatever you might hear

</comment><comment><USER3> Even with Launchpad, I still find myself defaulting to Spotlight to find/execute my apps.

<comment><USER4> I still use quicksilver. That's going to be a bit sad when I give that up. I use functionality in it that doesn't exist anywhere else, though.</comment></comment>


REMUS Transparent high availability for Xen - <AUTHOR> http://dsg.cs.ubc.ca/remus/ <comment><USER2> Has anyone here used this before? If so, do you know how this tolerates latency? Could I use Remus to replicate a VM to LAX from NY or similar distances?

<comment><USER3> That's unlikely to be very useful since, to do transparent network failover, both VM hosts need to be on the same layer 2 network. And half the point of having geographically diverse sites is so they aren't on the same network.

<comment><USER2> If you had your own AS number, couldn't you multihome your address space with BGP, and still update the IP on the other machine if the other machine fails?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Remus has been applied to the official Xen repository, and is expected to be included with the next major release.</comment>


Rename and manage Apk, ipa(iOS) & Appx from windows explorer - <AUTHOR> http://www.apkshellext.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Its really amazing utility for those people who avoid google playstore and use apk manually. apkshellext2 can batch rename files with their version information and show icons for mobile apps in Windows Explorer. Also has "Go to app store" shortcut.</comment>


Running Node.js apps in production - <AUTHOR> http://fhemberger.github.io/talks/nodejs-in-production/#/cover <comment><USER2> An indication to use the arrow keys would be appreciated.

Having read through it, it's a nice short guide to show Node.js in production, I especially liked that you highlighted the need for proper error/exception handling. However, I think it might have been served better as a blog post</comment>


The History Manifesto [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/file/57594fd0fab864a459dc7785/historymanifesto-2Oct2014.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Stewart Brand on Twitter "This is an outstanding book on long-term thinking. It makes the case for a much stronger role for historians in the public discourse and policy."</comment>


How Not to copy your SSH private key to your servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=site:pastebin.com+%22-----BEGIN+RSA+PRIVATE+KEY-----%22

<comment><USER2> Why would people copy a private key around?

Generate the public/private pair on the client machine and the _public_ key is the one you put on other machines to SSH into them.

<comment><USER3> if you want to set up seamless logins of an account to anywhere from anywhere, you need to copy around both because any node could either be on the client or server side of the challenge and response.

<comment><USER4> Seems like that's a serious edge case. Most times (IMHO) you'd be going one direction.

And if you do require both directions, you should generate separate keys on each host and just exchange the public ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely correct, but it's actually pretty common to distribute that public key all over hell and then start shuffling the private one around between the ones you find yourself ssh-ing off of. At my last job, this practice among wayward sysadmins caused me a lot of gnashing of teeth.

<comment><USER5> Wrong move though - really there should be one key per machine - and then ssh- agent set up properly to take care of the intermediate machines so you can bounce around. Using the same private key on multiple machines is just asking for trouble when you need to revoke something...

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, believe me, I know. That's why I said it caused me much gnashing of teeth. SSH, particularly OpenSSH, is such a thing of beauty. It's a shame most sysads that I've dealt with abuse it like it's rsh and telnet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reason that the first hit has "penis" embedded in the base64 is that I posted this to Reddit last night :-). I figured this sort of thing would be old news for HN, but judging by this having gotten 8 points in 12 minutes I guess I was wrong.

<comment><USER7> Old news for the man that hacked Hacker news, but certainly not for mere mortals like me :-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, Twitter only allows 140 characters, so...

</comment><comment><USER9> So whats the attack vector here? You have unknown users private key to a unknown service. Of course you should keep your private keys private, but exploiting this takes quite a stretch.

<comment><USER10> Key oriented scanners exist, in fact they became wildly popular after the 2008 Debian openssh randomness debacle.

You should rekey your network on a regular schedule at least as often as you change your passwords.

<comment><USER11> _at least as often as you change your passwords_

So, never? [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/04/11/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/04/11/please_do_not_change_your_password/)

<comment><USER10> I'd missed that story, it has a point, in that passwords are a very poor solution to that problem. But, if you're going to use them, you should change them regularly.

But you should write them down and keep them in a secure location. Just like you keep a backup of your private keys...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or pastie.org if you prefer:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Apastie.org+%22 -----BEGIN+RSA+PRIVATE+KEY-----%22)

<comment><AUTHOR> I caught this via a friend of mine, and I tried it without a site: search and mostly came up with too much noise to signal in the results. I'd imagine that a lot of "paste over the Internet" sites have this problem, and I'd bet SSH keys aren't the only juicy bits you can find.

Another fun one to find Cisco VPN configuration files, many of which have an encoded (reversible) password within: [http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Apcf+Main+Descripti...](http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Apcf+Main+Description)

 _headdesk_

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Techies almost always consider themselves quite smart. However, a big fraction of them are _egregiously_ ignorant of important technical matters. Security has always been a problem area as far as this goes.

(OO and compiler/language implementation are two more!)

This would be a good topic for interviews!

</comment><comment><USER14> Like with the whole "sniffing tor exit nodes" thing [1], you do wonder if it's actually the original owners who fails to protect their data, or if it's someone else [2].

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2007/09/security- expert...](http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2007/09/security-expert-used- tor-to-collect-government-e-mail-passwords.ars) [2] <http://pastebin.com/f4b10cc33>

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh wow. That made me laugh as it caught me a bit by surprise since I expected yet another security blog.

Nice find and nice tip, I must say. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey now! What's wrong with security blogs? :P

Security (both physical and infosec) is one of my biggest passions, and I've been writing about it for plenty longer than a decade. Granted, for the first several years, it was a pile of .txt files in an "e-Zine" but still...

<comment><USER16> I don't think that he thought there was anything wrong with it. He was expecting a write-up of 'what not to do,' but instead got Google search results for the Darwin awards, so he laughed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What? Pastebin and the Google cache is a perfectly legitimate backup strategy!

</comment><comment><USER18> Why would you use anything other than scp?

<comment><USER19> Because you're still in the process of _setting up_ an actually secure SSH in the first place?

If you're serious about security, scp is not secure (open to man-in-the-middle attacks) until you've transferred keys via some other channel or use a PKI that you actually pay attention to.

<comment><USER20> Say what? scp is perfectly secure (not open to man-in-the-middle attack) without transferring any keys or using any PKI. scp (just like ssh) asks you to verify remote key fingerprint on first connect.

<comment><USER21> This only works if you _know_ the remote key fingerprint in the first place. If you're setting up new servers, it could potentially be compromised.

But that is being ultra-paranoid in my book.

<comment><USER22> If you're setting up a new server, you either have physical access and can use a keyboard and monitor to look it up, or it's hosted by people you are paying to do such things as tell you the key fingerprint.

<comment><USER23> Just to be clear mbreese is talking about if you have just set up a new server like a vps and when you first ssh/scp to the server you accept a compromised key such as through a MITM attack but as he said this is highly unlikely to occur.

<comment><USER24> I setup a VPS on Linode, and they actually added the SSH RSA/DSA key for the 'admin console' login (Lish) when I asked about it on IRC. So, for first-time setup, you can lookup _that_ key, then from there, lookup the system key itself. This avoids a compromised key, at least from you to Linode.

Hopefully Linode doesn't have any internal gremlins.

Of course, the weak point there is SSL where the keys themselves are transmitted, but it did well to quell my paranoia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> even gist.github.com

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site:g...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site:gist.github.com+-----BEGIN+RSA+PRIVATE+KEY-----&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=)

only a few actual hits in there.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not that you'd want to do so, but if you're inclined to use a pastebin for such things, I have <https://privatepaste.com> which does not expose pastes to indexing unless specifically requested in the vhost configuration.

<comment><USER27> That's a nice service, but it is still no option for transferring private keys.

<comment><USER13> Indeed. Why would anyone trust a 3rd party website with the private key?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I burst out laughing after clicking that. I feel bad for those people.

<comment><USER29> It's particularly funny because on the one hand, these people are doing something of non-trivial technical sophistication, and on the other, they have zero understanding of what they're trying to accomplish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am confused, how did these keys get put on paste bin? Did people place it on paste bin thinking each paste is private?

</comment><comment><USER31> check out Johnny Long's Google Hacking Database, full of examples like this <http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb/>

</comment><comment><USER29> I think I just heard tptacek's head explode.

<comment><USER32> Really? I think I just heard his bank account increment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> lol, funny to see people who are presumably knowledgeable about internet completely forgetting about security

</comment><comment><USER34> This would be people posting their private key by mistake when someone asked for their public key to put in an authorized_keys file. Hopefully the geek on the other end told them "WTF go burn your key and start again".

<comment><USER34> I know, because I run a free shell server and I used to ask people to provide public keys, maybe 1/20 would send me the private key instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Dumbos, all those keys aren't even encrypted. Some people should not be allowed to use a computer.

</comment><comment><USER36> google is often used by script kiddies to find common vulnerabilities in websites.

<comment><USER37> really ? gosh, that is news

<comment><USER36> So what is the news in the case of the link posted by the op?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> that are all on pastebin, not on "your server". so these are all worthless keys anybody can generate in a second on a linux box. thats not news.</comment>


Ask HN: What can I buy for under $50 that will most dramatically improve my life - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There are two ways to go with that question.

Option one: What will most dramatically improve your life _economically?_ That will almost certainly be some tool that you can use to create a side income stream. (In the third world, it's often a sewing machine.)

Option two: What will most dramatically improve your _quality of life?_ That depends. What inconvenience most annoys you? Could you solve it by buying something that costs less than $50?

</comment><comment><USER3> A dog from animal shelter is free, spend that 50 on accessories and food for it. Seriously, go get a dog.

<comment><USER4> Getting a dog is a great idea (especially from a shelter), but I just want to set realistic cost expectations here.

My fiance volunteers for PAWS and it is typically a minimum of $350 in fees to leave with a dog. Also, dog food can add up (the dog we recently adopted needs grain-free food due to an allergy) so it's about $750 a year for a 28 lb dog (I would say minimum of $300 for cheaper food). Then you should take your pet in once a year to the vet and get heartworm, flea & tick medicine, etc (another min. $350 a year). And you'll probably want to get your dog a doggy bed, collar, leash, treats, etc. Obviously anyone can cut out or short cut some of these expenses, but this should be the minimum spend expectation in my fiance's opinion.

<comment><USER3> Well, obviously there are some reasons to live in Russia :) Every animal shelter is more than willing to give you a dog for free, dog food (a really good one) is around 50USD per month for a 55 lbs dog, annual vaccine is 12USD and rabies vaccine is free (government-sponsored). Heartworm, flea & tick medicine - 10USD every 3 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A rescue puppy and a bag of dog food.

</comment><comment><USER6> A change in your perspective. Buy some really good, perspective transforming books and read them. Sorry I don't wish to offer advice on which books at this time, but there must be some such books for you somewhere.

A change in perspective can be incredibly powerful. And valuable. And I think, anything that can alter the way you see the world and yourself dramatically, is probably the most dramatic way to alter your life.

</comment><comment><USER7> Raspberry pi3 I used mine to get a new job that almost triples my income.

<comment><USER8> I have one on order. Can't wait. What job were you able to use a pi3 to prepare for? Thanks!

<comment><USER9> I've worked in large scale Linux systems administration for a decade. The pi is a really great way to get started in my field (although of course I am saying this as an established professional, not someone who learned on them)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That sounds like enough for 10 cups of coffee, so 5 coffee meetings/dates. Ask a stranger out. Turn an acquaintance into a friend, or reconnect with a friend you haven't been in touch with. Buy a former colleague a cup of joe, and ask how they are doing. Buy a potential colleague at a different company a cup, and ask them if they like their current job.

</comment><comment><USER11> Buy a pillow that fits your sleeping pattern.

</comment><comment><USER12> Spend it on someone you love.

</comment><comment><USER13> This may not be what your looking for but there are two things that will improve your life the most. Health and Knowledge.

So either a some dumbbells/kettlebell or a good book. You might be able to buy both....

<comment><USER14> if you live someone that has public libraries, there's no need to buy books. spend $0 on a library card

<comment><USER12> and you can use your body weight for exercise, spend $0 on dumbbells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mechanical keyboard with cherry MX blue switches. Especially if you type every day for a living (programmer, writer).

<comment><USER16> 50 USD is tight though..

<comment><USER17> Just gotta keep an eye out for a deal, I think there was one on /r/buildapcsales for $27 recently.

I paid around $60 for a Corsair a couple of years ago. I'm sure slightly less fancy brands or models go for under $50 once in a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can get a lot of Yogi Soothing Caramel Bedtime tea [1] and get very good nights of sleep for a year.

[1] [https://www.walmart.com/ip/23658486](https://www.walmart.com/ip/23658486)

</comment><comment><USER19> I would say the best thing you can make for $50 is a space bucket so you can start growing. All you need is a tutorial, a light bulb, seed, power strip and you can upgrade as you go.

[http://imgur.com/a/ASyEY](http://imgur.com/a/ASyEY)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'll be counter-cultural. Get a Bible.

</comment><comment><USER21> 5 coffees with people you find interesting or dinner with a close friend =)

</comment><comment><USER22> Bidet or weed

</comment><comment><USER23> A USB battery pack for recharging my phone made a big difference for me.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1-Insta pot on discount 2- Ralph Waldo Emerson's collection, namely self reliance.

</comment><comment><USER25> A secondhand bicycle

</comment><comment><USER26> Your first opera ticket.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sleeping mask</comment>


Going into space for 1,000 days presents a series of health risks - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/boldly-going-into-space-for-1-000-days-presents-a-series-of-health-risks-39442

<comment><USER2> Nobody is ever going to put a permanent colony in microgravity. Colonies will either be on the surface of a planet/moon, or will use a tether-and- counterweight to generate artificial gravity through rotation. How to do this has been known for decades, if not centuries ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity#Rotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity#Rotation)), and is trivial compared to the huge engineering challenges of cost-effectively launching thousands of tons of life support equipment to maintain a viable population.

<comment><USER3> Whatever the environment looks like, I think it will take at least several generations of offspring (born and live their lives in space) to adapt to the new environment (unless we truly can replicate the space environment almost identically to earth).

If you think about it, how many millions of years has natural selection spent adapting humans to Earth? It's almost as if genetic engineering is the only possibility that humans will adapt quickly enough to make outer space viable as a livable environment.

<comment><USER4> How is that supposed to work? The pressure of natural selection has already stopped in most countries, individuals that would have been removed from the gene pool in more resource constrained times can now reach old age. And that is a good thing!

We would be venturing into genetic engineering to breed "space humans", which is at least problematic.

<comment><USER5> Natural selection has not stopped ant can not stop.

Here in the USA, currently trans fats are killing people. Some people can tolerate trans fats more than other people can. We evolve to tolerate them.

The same goes for every other not-good-for-you kind of thing we eat. People who tolerate it (or find it nauseating) will survive longer.

Now that many do survive to old age, natural selection can work to eliminate menopause. Today there are those who hit it at 30 and others who hit it at 50 or even later. Some leave more offspring, and this is all that is needed to drive natural selection. We evolve, and always will.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft's Google complaint not an April Fool - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/microsoft_google_monopoly1/

<comment><USER2> For reference, other takes on this story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391675>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391546>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391424>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391237>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391051>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390999>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390721>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390430></comment>


59% of Amazon Sellers Are from China - <AUTHOR> https://www.ecomcrew.com/amazon-sellers-by-country/ <comment><AUTHOR> 59% of all third party Amazon sellers are from China. 35% from the U.S.. 4% from Hong Kong. And the rest from various countries.

20% of ALL sellers are from Shenzhen alone.

<comment><USER2> all is inaccurate. and the title is inaccurate.

it's sellers of the top 2000 products, which is "only a few hundred results".</comment></comment>


FastAPI – Easily create robust, standardized API endpoints in Rails and Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thestorefront/FastAPI <comment><USER2> I'm confused as to why view logic is being moved to the Model layer, directly breaking MVC. Why is this better than using the tools in Rails that already exist for every use case here? Is there a performance increase?

<comment><USER3> I came here to say the exact same thing. After having worked on/scaled an API that served >100k requests per minute, I feel I can say with some experience that defining your JSON in your model is a very bad idea.

A classic example that we ran into repeatedly: Assume you want to have an endpoint that populates a user's profile (for the user to see). You probably want id, name, email, age, location, created_at, updated_at, etc. However, when exposing this same user instance through an endpoint that publicly aggregates users (e.g. search), sending over all those fields is 1) overkill, and 2) raises privacy concerns.

So far, my favorite approach to this problem uses the ActiveModel::Serializer gem ([https://github.com/rails- api/active_model_serializers](https://github.com/rails- api/active_model_serializers)). It moves the JSON logic to something more akin to a view, and provides an easy way to present instances differently depending on the context.

<comment><USER4> I don't think there's actually a good way to solve this (that I know of) for applications with complex enough permission and role hierarchies.

Once you need a list of all the glass marbles with their attributes, but can only see the color of marbles you supervise, and only the radius of a marble if it has a shooter role and only the names and emails of marbles ranked above you... ...and so on... it becomes a situation where each result has to be filtered item by item pretty much. And the filter hierarchies will snowball like tribbles.

<comment><USER5> The `djangorestframework-composed-permissions` package for DRF gets pretty close to handling this situation effectively. Basically roles and permissions arbitrarily composable with boolean expressions.

Although you can model permission hierarchies, I think there are enough corner cases that it's worthwhile to declare permissions as explicitly as conveniently possible.

API Docs: [https://djangorestframework-composed- permissions.readthedocs...](https://djangorestframework-composed- permissions.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks cool. My (current) favorite rollout for APIs with Ruby/Rack/Rails is Grape[0] with ASM[1].

[0] [https://github.com/intridea/grape](https://github.com/intridea/grape) [1] [https://github.com/jrhe/grape- active_model_serializers](https://github.com/jrhe/grape- active_model_serializers)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a little scared that this builds SQL statements directly. Did you consider at least using prepared statements? Was there such an awful performance hit using ActiveRecord, or something that couldn't be done with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep --- couldn't effectively use and parse subqueries with ActiveRecord alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why was this even created? ActiveModelSerializers or Rabl works just fine

<comment><USER4> The reason this project (and many others like it) exist is pretty obvious: Lots of people have to build different kinds APIs using rails, get some experience with Rails, discover it sucks for building APIs out of the box (to much anti-DRY repetition, doesn't deal with auth/permission dichotomy well), and then proceed to roll their own API layer/Auth layer/Permission layer because either:

a) information on existing solutions is hard to find/not obvious or otherwise in the world of unknowns to the author

or

b) existing solutions are too generalized or otherwise structured in ways that don't work for whatever real world particular business cases.

I ran into this with permissions in my current project. Nothing _obvious_ in my realm of knowledge fit (sometimes I suspect this happens because projects only advertise their basic features clearly). So I now have a massive custom permission layer.

Sometimes you also end up with things like this by accident - you need one thing, it's not worth going whole hog to begin with, but then suddenly stuff gets tacked on until you have a whole system you never set out to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would I use this over ActiveModel::Serializers?

<comment><AUTHOR> The goal of this project is for easy model accession / querying via JavaScript or some other external interface. The most powerful part of this implementation, I would argue, is the filtering of endpoint data via request.query_parameters.

This allows for "people/?age__gte=25" and other simple logic filters that can be communicated over the HTTP request, and is standard across all models and endpoints.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't you easily accomplish the same thing via the ransack gem?

[https://github.com/activerecord- hackery/ransack/wiki/Basic-S...](https://github.com/activerecord- hackery/ransack/wiki/Basic-Searching)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm sure you could --- in combination with ActiveModel::Serializer.

Our approach was meant to attack a combination of common, specific problems (standardized way to output API data, queryable with logic via HTTP parameters, a single SQL query to collect and aggregate data) with a dead simple, low-overhead solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea, but I would be really reluctant to use a gem that has no tests, especially when the core methods are clearly not trivial, a bunch of them are ~100 lines long. Not that the number of lines tells how complicated a method is, but I think it is a good indicator.

<comment><USER11> I was going to say the same thing. I wouldn't even think about touching this gem. Multiple methods close to 200 lines long, all in a single file with no test suite. I shudder to think what the cyclomatic complexity of the 'api_comparison' method is. Have fun contributing to this project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's named 'Fast' API. Is it any faster then using Active Model Serializers?

</comment><comment><USER13> There is grape, grape-swagger, grape-swagger rails, and a bunch of other gems for creating API's. They work amazingly well, and have a pretty active community. They have solved a ton of issues: Jsonp, Cors, authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and DOCUMENTATION. The auto-generated Swagger documentation is a real thing of beauty.</comment>


Scheme.forth.jl: Scheme in Forth in Julia - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tgvaughan/scheme.forth.jl <comment><USER2> To really go through the rabbit hole, I wonder if one could then use this as Julia's parser, which itself is written in Femtolisp (a scheme).

<comment><USER3> You'd almost have a quine relay: [https://github.com/mame/quine- relay](https://github.com/mame/quine-relay)

<comment><USER2> Wow, that is impressively insane!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like you could use this to build a chain of platforms for the hell of it.

Prolog in Elixir in Python in Scheme...

<comment><USER5> You're going to have a hell of a time implementing elixir in python.

<comment><USER4> It'd be a lot harder to implement Python in Elixir!

<comment><USER5> Would it? The basics of the language are at least easy, you might have trouble when python drops into it's ffi. Same holds in the reverse; you can't easily do elixir ffi in python.

FFI aside, I don't see a good way of implementing Kernel.spawn/1, Process.monitor/1, etc. in python, without rebuilding the entire erlang VM from scratch.

<comment><USER4> It's a lot easier to implement an immutable language in a mutable one than vice versa, or so I'd assume, never having tried.

But yeah, I'd assume you'd have to build the VM first. A lot of work.

<comment><USER5> You can mock mutable variables in actors. Actors and genservers are a first class module in the standard library. Elixir is not Haskell. There are plenty of places with accessible statefulness/mutability, it's just shielded in a functional wrapper and made slightly difficult to dissuade you from using statefulness unnecessarily, so you make fewer coding and concurrency mistakes in annoying places and you can focus on delivering features and solving hard problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Was gonna try it, but it failed to install the forth.jl package. Then I went and looked at the forth.jl github page and it says:

> Be aware that forth.jl requires Julia 1.0

Whereas on the scheme.forth.jl page it said:

> (forth.jl requires version >=1.0)

At any rate it doesn't install in Julia 1.4.0:

> ERROR: could not find project file in package at > [https://github.com/tgvaughan/forth.jl](https://github.com/tgvaughan/forth.jl)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm loving all these little projects embedding languages in Julia.</comment>


Covering Science at Dangerous Speeds - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/opinion/pandemic-science-publishing-journals-how-to.php <comment><USER2> This is such an important discussion. There are clear pros and cons to enforcing speed limits on science. How do we decide what those limits should be and how we enforce them?

In principle, I'm a believer that the cure for misinformation is more information. If people don't realize that, prepublication study websites are exactly that, you fix it by telling them. Not by omitting reporting on them completely.

What's missing is the assessment of probability. What does the scientific process look like, where in it is this piece of information, and based on that, how likely is it to be accurate and impactful?

We cover sports in a way that allows educated and casual observers to enjoy them and learn extreme amount of nuance. How do we apply the same lessons here?

<comment> dawg- >I'm a believer that the cure for misinformation is more information.

The idealist in me agrees with this wholeheartedly. I think it's true for people with a certain discipline in their thinking(i.e. scientists, academics and the like), who will always keep their convictions open to new information. But the vast majority of people don't operate that way. People get a certain narrative stuck in their head, and then they filter information to fit that.

Plus, we have access to more information right now than any humans in history, yet the state of human knowledge is still dominated by rumors, myths, tall tales, and mystery. We have all this quasi-religious cognitive machinery and thousands of years of oral culture behind the evolution of our brains. Maybe rational scientific decisonmaking is an anomaly in human history, or even worse, just another myth?

>We cover sports in a way that allows educated and casual observers to enjoy them and learn extreme amount of nuance. How do we apply the same lessons here?

This is an interesting thought. The average American can watch a football play and break down incredibly complex concepts of what just happened. Arguments over what constitutes a "catch" during instant replay often spiral into downright philosophical territory. The difference is that sports happen really fast - and you can watch them live while drinking beer. Maybe we should turn science into a team sport and have them do it in an arena in front of 80,000 people. Bring out some cheerleaders, air all the pickup truck commercials, and Shakira can perform at halftime. The winner gets a big trophy.

<comment><USER2> > We have all this quasi-religious cognitive machinery and thousands of years > of oral culture behind the evolution of our brains. Maybe rational > scientific decisonmaking is an anomaly in human history, or even worse, just > another myth?

Or maybe, we've made tremendous progress over the past thousands of years, and will continue to do so. Give it time. Extend your time horizon. In a few more millennia, we may be much more enlightened than we are today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The author of this is a cofounder of retraction watch. Which is an invaluable source of information in research. Not just for the press, but for scientists themselves! I once used retraction watch posts to figure out why a prominent pair of papers in my field was withdrawn. Turns out it was a number of flaws.

</comment><comment><USER4> While advice on how to cover the research more accurately, I feel like this article misses the bigger point: is all this breathless coverage necessary? What possible benefit could the general public derive from reading endless articles about poorly vetted research...</comment>


Ask HN: Should a CTO be expected to be the last out of the office? - <AUTHOR> I recently took a position as CTO at a seed stage startup. Having been in an administrative position before where I had worked 50-60+ hours a week for years, I've ascribed heavily to the philosophy of working smarter not harder. Ideals like "Work life balance", and "agile principles about sustainable development". I recently had a discussion with one of my peers at work and he remarked that he has never been at a company where the CTO was in the office less than the average engineer. He also felt that its nearly impossible to wear a manager hat and a maker hat at the same time in under 40 hours a week, quoting Paul Graham's maker/manager schedule. He mentioned people at AirBnB and Square, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg were all those who worked many long hours.
I feel extremely divided about this. I worked around 40 hours a week and feel like I'm taking away from my personal life and might even be nearing burnout at half the duration this particular peer is working. Measuring productivity on duration is silly to me, and I'd rather ascribe to the model of work where what counts most is prioritization and output. I realize there are major deadlines 2-3 times a year which may require sudden bursts of focus and attention, but that's why I would push back and reduce the time I work weekly the rest of the year.
What is the appropriate level of work/life balance expectation for a CTO for different stage startups (pre-seed, series-a, series-b, post-acquisition) and how does that differ from the expectations on the people that a CTO might manage?
Is my position on work-life balance tenable? Are there examples of successful startup founders who worked smart as opposed to long hours? Did I just land in a particular culture that is incompatible with my orientation towards productivity? <comment><USER2> I hope you have the courage and conviction to stay true to your principles and see them through. Hopefully your startup peers (or at least the CEO) brought you on board for not just your technical expertise, but your leadership and management style.

Being a leader means implementing policies in good faith while trying to tweak them to the specific startup's culture.

Max Schireson (ex-CEO of MongoDB) recently stepped down for precisely this reason. He wrote a great blog post about attempting to manage the balance between work and family responsibilities that you may find helpful.

[http://maxschireson.com/2014/08/05/1137/](http://maxschireson.com/2014/08/05/1137/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like your peers level of commitment is not inline with yours. This can turn into a pretty significant problem.

IMO, one of the roles of an early stage leader is to set an example for the work ethic expected. Those long hours aren't sustainable forever, so when it's time to throttle back, it's the leaders job to set that expectation as well.

For us that has generally meant that the leaders needed to take time off and also encourage others to do so.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think a CTO is expected to work at a burnout pace, but I do think they set the tone for the rest of the engineering team. That is, I would expect a lower-level engineer to see your pace and do ~maybe~ 75% of it. So in effect, yes, I think you'll often be the last person in the office, because others will pace off of you.

<comment><USER2> If the OP has specific examples of working smarter vs. harder, one hopes this can be demonstrated through concrete examples and coaching for exactly the reason that "others will pace of you."

If the OP cannot demonstrate this to his team, then unfortunately it will be an uphill battle attempting to maintain any semblance of work-life balance in this instance if the culture already demands 50-60+ hrs per week.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree with that, and I hope he _can_ demonstrate that to the team. I wish it was the other way around really. I wish entry-level folks (fresh out of college, tons of energy, no responsibilities at home) would naturally try to outdo / outpace the senior people to prove their worth, but alas I haven't seen that happen much.

But one other consideration: as a c-suite executive, nobody else in your department really has any idea what you do all day. When you leave for a few hours they don't know if you're going to meetings or walking your dog. I've had superiors who left far earlier than me on a regular basis but I never assumed that their day was done; I really had no idea what their calendar looked like, and just assumed that only part of their day was allocated to face-time-with-the-developers.

I think you can use this to your advantage. If you play it right, you can stop working without anybody really knowing it, and most people will assume you work way longer hours than you actually do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The CTO _should_ be expected to be the last out of the office.

At 5pm on Monday through Friday.

God help her/him if s/he's there on weekends.

</comment><comment><USER6> A CTO (and any other C-level) should be measured on delivering results, not on schedule. If they can deliver in 30 hours, fine. If they need 60, so be it, but maybe they aren't cut out for being a C-level. I've carried a CTO bag a couple of times in my career, and if I'm working 60+ hours week in and week out, I'm certainly questioning how I'm doing my job. It usually means I'm not delegating correctly.</comment>


Ask HN: Are software/process certifications a business that provide little value - <AUTHOR> I have been exposed to certifications all along my 20  year long carreer and have always looked at it, as a poor justification of having good knowledge on a subject.
So to me, certifications are merely business model that wants to sell you value which does not really exist.
E.g Everyone can pass a SCRUM certification exam, not everyone can be a scrummaster. <comment><USER2> It depends on certification, its level, market demand, scarcity of specialists.

I am currently preparing for AWS and GCP architect/engineering certs and I find preparations as some way to solidify my years of knowledge and experience in the field. I think also certification is good way to be recognized in consulting market, especially as I work remotelly from nearshore country.

My friend last year obtained AEM Developer certification and with proper self- promotion he got flooded with queries and his rate doubled overnight. He got years of prior AEM experience.

I find popular certs like Scrum or entry Java certs valuable today mostly for junior level specialists to get foot in the door easier. However for experienced engineers a proven track record and a network is more benefitial.

Also, some big companies and govement agencies recognize or even require contractors to be certified in given technology.

<comment><USER3> Do you think AWS certification can help the fresh cs grads to get job?

<comment><USER2> Possibly. But even doing training with exercises or a pet project on the platform should teach one some valuable stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are some certifications that do appear to provide real value: the Red Hat certifications and the PMP certifications come to mind. I've also heard that the Microsoft certifications provide value as well. These are typically certifications that you do need to study for and probably spend some time learning new subject material. I do agree that many if not most certifications don't provide much value.</comment>


Using Social Networking to Find a Lost Child (Please Help) - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/pages/Find-Teuta/154076771275315

<comment><AUTHOR> We are hoping that if we can get this viral in Georgia and California then somebody might recognize her and help her get home. We have a support base in Georgia right now, but if anybody in the California area is willing to help broadcast this along then I and perhaps her family might be eternally grateful.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell You need a Facebook account to even view that page.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearch...](http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PubCaseSearchServlet?act=viewPoster&caseNum=1151329&orgPrefix=NCMC&searchLang=en_US)</comment></comment>


Spectacular consulting d-baggery in alleged leaked Pepsi rebrand proposal - <AUTHOR> http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/in_brief_the_wrong_kind_of_bre.php

<comment><AUTHOR> "Have you ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? MORONS!"

<comment><USER2> Whenever I see anything this over the top, I can't help but picture it being written by Alex Vayner.</comment></comment>