Ask HN: Are you interested in a ARM CI service? - <AUTHOR> Some time ago I bought a Raspberry Pi and started using it for my hobby projects. The problem was that my normal workflow is: code something in my PC, push it to GitHub, and test it with Travis (and build a docker image with DockerHub). The problem is this solution doesn't work well when targeting ARM. DockerHub does not compile ARM projects and Travis runs in x86.
After searching a lot I found that my best option was using a self-hosted CI, but Jenkins, the one I know best, is not an option because of the lack of memory in the Raspberry. So what I did was to create my own CI server in Golang that could run with really low memory usage and I thought it might be very useful for other people.
I would relly love to offer it as a service or make it open source.
Would you be interested in a project like this? <comment><USER2> On x86-64 Debian hosts you can install binfmt-support an qemu-user-static packages. You'll need to copy the qemu-armeb-static binary inside the container image.

Then you just build inside a container normally, and the kernel will run the ARM binaries inside qemu-user, translating the ARM system calls to x86-64.

If you don't control the host (ie, someone else's hosted CI service), you can do some sleazy hacks documented here: [https://resin.io/blog/building-arm- containers-on-any-x86-mac...](https://resin.io/blog/building-arm-containers- on-any-x86-machine-even-dockerhub/)

I've been meaning to try copying a cross-compiler and cross-binutil into the container, to make things faster (no need to binary-translate ARM gcc/ld to x86-64), but without statically linking the compiler/binutils, it turns into a library nightmare. In theory this should be possible with multi-arch, but I haven't invested the time to try to make it go yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're at all serious about doing dev work on arm for non-micro/embedded systems, you should probably look at: [https://softiron.com/products/overdrive-1000/technical- speci...](https://softiron.com/products/overdrive-1000/technical- specifications/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would use an arm virtual machine and still use jenkins.

Or get a beefier arm platform, such as the nvidia ones.

implementing from scratch is too much effort.

<comment><USER4> you can also consider cross compiling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Open sourcing sounds good. Offering a service without big beefs behind sounds suicidal. There a lot of big companies with big arm servers, who could offer that as gitlab/GitHub CI integration. Problem is the SW maintanance for them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Share the link! I'm building a list of all the commercial and open-source CI systems/SaaS/OpenSource projects out there.

<comment><USER7> You've got GitLab CI on your list already, right? :) [https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/) It's open source (it's included in GitLab CE and EE).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how do you tweak and see changes in an opensource desktop software? - <AUTHOR> I want to play around, tweak an open source desktop app (the gui of soapUI).
Do I need to always reinstall it to see the changes/tweaks i made in its source codebase?
How do I even start?
clone the code from its github repo to a folder on my machine?
 then What? <comment><USER2> The first step is to be able to compile it. Just clone and compile it. There are usually hidden dependencies, secret configuration, a few missing technical details, ... You will be busy at least for a week until you can compile and run the original version without modifications. (You may have to ask in the mailing list of forum of the project to get some help with the details.)

Once you have the original version running, ask again.</comment>


Data furnaces arrive in Europe: Free heating, if you have fibre Internet - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2015/05/data-furnaces-arrive-in-europe-free-heating-if-you-have-fibre-internet/

<comment><USER2> There's a datacenter in Helsinki that pushes its heat to a district heating system.

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki- data-centre-heat-homes)

<comment><USER3> Nice article. It certainly works at scale because of the economies. I think this distributed system has potential but there are some issues. There are also some things they could do to make it better if the trial is a success.

Using resistive heating (which is what this is) is not very efficient (even if it's a by-product). A better way to heat your home is to not waste power and use it instead to run an electric heat pump (which are _over_ 100% efficient). There is a good analysis in the "Mythconceptions" section at the end of chapter I.11 of the excellent "Sustainable Energy — without the hot air" [0] on p71 (p84 of the free PDF).

That's the downside but there are some interesting applications. They could enable you to host your own personal cloud on the box in your home. So you know where it is.

You could vary the operating time of the servers so they only operate (or at least only run at 100%) when heating is needed. This could be based on the season, an external temperature sensor or weather data. Processing could migrate between the hemispheres of the world depending on the season.

The load could also be varied based on the local grid demands and power mix. Various real-time data sources are available that report on how green the current energy mix is [1] [2]. You can even just measure the frequency of the electricity to see how well generation is matching consumption. This is known as dynamic demand or demand shaping and you can even be paid by the grid operator for it so it could be a good business model. It would also be nice if they partnered with green power companies that buy their energy from renewable sources.

[0] [http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html](http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html) [1] [http://www.earth.org.uk/_gridCarbonIntensityGB.html](http://www.earth.org.uk/_gridCarbonIntensityGB.html) [2] [http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/](http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/)

<comment><USER4> > Using resistive heating (which is what this is) is not very efficient (even > if it's a by-product).

If heat is a byproduct it _is_ highly efficient to actually use it rather than waste it. Here the electricity would be used either way for the processing tasks. The system would be inefficient if it just ran busy wait to produce heat, but that's not the case.

> A better way to heat your home is to not waste power and use it instead to > run an electric heat pump (which are over 100% efficient).

"100% efficient" makes no sense, let alone "over 100% efficient", you're talking about coefficient of performance (the device's energetic ROI). If you ignore what the system is actually doing, the eRadiator thing has infinite efficiency since you're not paying for any heating (aside from installation costs, which you also have to pay for a heat pump)

<comment><USER5> The over 100% efficient means that the heat produced in the room is greater that the energy taken from the wall plug. This makes sense for me.

<comment><USER4> That's not how thermal efficiency works. And if you don't care for actual thermal efficiency, the energy taken from the wall plug is irrelevant if you're not paying for it.

<comment><USER5> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Heat_pumps_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Heat_pumps_and_refrigerators)

The expression "coefficient of performance" is used instead of efficiency for heat pump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ...And no data cap, and don't mind a chunk of your bandwidth being used, and don't mind a locked box with an always-on and encrypted connection to who- knows-where in your house. I'd also worry about what happens if/when it breaks down. (For instance, if the power supply fails. Or whatever: there are pretty much always single points of failure on such things.)

A neat idea in some ways, but I'd be wary.

<comment><USER7> > _and don 't mind a locked box with an always-on and encrypted connection to > who-knows-where in your house_

Do you fear hidden microphones, cameras and other sensors? If not, then what's the harm?

<comment><USER8> Since you have no control over it (aside from ripping it out of the wall), you're at the mercy of whoever runs the box to adequately secure it. When it gets hacked, any shady business conducted by the miscreants will be emitted from /your/ IP, so you're exposing yourself to TOR exit node level liability.

You might be able to work around that.... but it depends what's running on the box. If it's a backend server for some organisation (database, etc) then you could have some sort of tunnelling router between it and the fibre that routes all packets back to the organisation's datacentre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l See also "Heating houses with 'nerd power'" from last week at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581588) .

</comment><comment><USER9> What about the electricity costs to run the machines?

<comment><USER10> It's a cost-sharing agreement, so electricity costs are split between the data-furnace provider and the home-owner.

<comment><USER11> Half the time it would be "off" (during summer), so that means I will pay for 100% of the actually used energy? In that case I'll stick with natural gas for my heating. Also this arrangement should not be called "free".

<comment><USER12> It's installed on an external wall so when you turn the heater 'off', the heat is redirected to outside. They will apparently also reimburse you for energy used.

<comment><USER11> That's what I mean, off means it's still "burning" but I get no benefit. And according to ihsw the bill is split leaving me with: In winter: Gaining 50% of the power in heat (don't know how that compares heat-wise to natural gas) and in summer, wasting 50% of my own paid-for electricity. I actually doubt if ihsw's comment is true.

<comment><USER13> The bill is not split -- it says they reimburse you for the measured power usage of the device. Nowhere does it say that this only applies when the heat is being directed into your house, that I could see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can you turn them off? Obviously you don't want to run a heater in the summer.

And if so, wouldn't the resulting (massive) underutilization of hardware erase whatever savings the data center would realize from not having to deal with heat?

Not to mention the other (massive) costs of remote servicing, like literally rolling trucks to replace a hard drive. And 1000W is not even one standard space heater. I like the general idea but this decentralized in-the-home concept seems about as well thought out as their logo.

It would be better suited to a centralized application like the heated swimming pool: year round usage, enough density to achieve economies of scale in servicing and providing site security.

Or how about this: locate your next data center near a town with a district heating system, so you can tap into it and pipe waste heat directly into homes. (Sweden has lots of waste-to-energy plants that burn trash to generate electricity and hot water heating distributed through networks of pipes.[1]) In the case of Sweden you wouldn't even have to build out much infrastructure; it's already there. I wonder if anyone has explored this?

EDIT: I just saw ville posted about this very idea. Cool.

EDIT2: jessaustin notes that they keep the server running constantly and probably use a powered heat pump to vent it outside during the summer. (Which still raises questions for me about the efficiencies.. small scale heat pumps probably aren't as efficient as a large-scale data center implementation.)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating)

<comment><USER15> The article mentions that the furnace vents waste heat outside when you don't want it. So, yes, it's running all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Or a fuse blows?

Or a kid pours his cup of sticky soft drink in the vents (heaters need to have vents right, almost certainly at the top). Anyone who thinks something can be "tamper proof" has never lived with a 4 year old.

<comment><USER17> They surely use redundant, encrypted storage. MaidSafe is a distributed "cloud" storage protocol that does that: [http://maidsafe.net/](http://maidsafe.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cloud&Heat are another company doing this in Germany: [https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html](https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html)

<comment><USER19> And a French one: [http://www.qarnot- computing.com/technology](http://www.qarnot-computing.com/technology) Qarnot computing

<comment><USER20> Another French one: [http://www.defab.fr/](http://www.defab.fr/)

They're heating water for consumer purposes. I met one of their founders yesterday, they're pretty neat!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be very interesting to hear their security analysis and conclusions. The article's casual use of the term "tamper-proof" doesn't sound credible without details.

</comment><comment><USER11> The reliability issues that are mentioned are no problem with enough redundancies of course.

My fiber optic connection is 50/50 even though the line is (the way it is used now) able to do 500/500\. They should aim for deals with ISPs for my excess bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER22> When it's in the "push heat outside" mode on a hot summer day, there is a significant amount of air to pump, in order to dissipate a kilowatt. I wonder how noisy is the unit in this case.

</comment><comment><USER23> I heated my room in college for 4 years using nothing but a Q6600, never turned on the radiator once. Nice solution, but probably will have issues cooling for anywhere that has 90F summer temps.

<comment><USER24> It must be pretty warm where you live. I had a couple of Q6600 upped from 2.4GHz to 3.2GHz, and that wasn't enough to heat the room. It was in Russia though...

<comment><USER4> > It must be pretty warm where you live.

Good insulation and small surface also helps. You won't heat up a 2-story house with just a computer, but a well-insulated dorm room is more than feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I always thought of Bitcoin as an implementation of this idea.

</comment><comment><USER26> What happens in summer?

<comment><USER27> TFA:

 _To be eligible for the eRadiator, your home has to have... "an external wall" ... and the external wall is needed for venting (if you "turn off" the eRadiator, the servers don't actually turn off; the heat is just pushed outside)._

Admittedly, without active refrigeration this is unlikely to work too well when the temperature outside is over 35 C.

EDIT: they don't mention separate electric supplies, so presumably the unit has a way of tracking its power usage and reimbursing the homeowner. Otherwise this is just a scam, because far more efficient electrical [EDIT: thanks 'votingprawn!] _heat pumps_ are available for less initial cost. However, the non-scam scenario seems only to make sense as a business in cold locations.

<comment><USER28> Makes complete sense in Scandinavia, Iceland, Alaska, etc.

<comment><USER27> Is this a correction? A clarification? Was it insensitive to describe those places as "cold"?

<comment><USER28> A clarification. For instance, there's plenty of cold in Antarctica, but no fiber and not enought dwellings. In Scandinavia, high fixed broadband penetration is actually combined with cold most of the year. (JFYI, Finnish official definition of summer is temperatures above +10°C for entire 24 hours.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seems ideal for running TOR exit nodes. Except for the home owners of course. I wonder if their TOS forbids this?</comment>


For Big Data Startups, Consulting Comes First - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/technology/in-big-data-shepherding-comes-first-.html

<comment><USER2> Makes sense when you consider that that's the order of business at the big enterprise IT behemoths too. IBM for example: services first. Makes arguably more sense for new tech. Just a matter of time before we see some consolidation and acquisition on the space

</comment><comment><USER3> A smart article. Finding the reusable services than can be readily translated from one application domain to the other has always proved to be a challenge in this area.

I've found the consulting part (for scientific applications) to be fun, but it's not scalable.</comment>


Are we in another bubble? Empirical data from CrunchBase - <AUTHOR> http://www.kevenlin.com/entry/are-we-in-a-bubble-empirical-data-from-crunchbase

<comment><USER2> I worked at TechCrunch for a year focusing mainly on CrunchBase data analysis.

There are a number of problems with your analysis:

I suspect you are using founding year. Unfortunately there is a tremendous lag between when a company is founded and when it is entered into CrunchBase. The same is true of funding data in particular where we saw only around 20% of fundings within a quarter of happening and only about 70% a year out. That is due to CrunchBase's continued growth (it's much better known now) as well as a natural reporting lag.

Second, CrunchBase is a very new product and as it turns out data is only reliable as far back as 2007 and even that took a lot of work. Some time has been spent pushing to get more accurate data further back but it is scattershot at best.

(Possibly, can't tell) CrunchBase investments are stored in a number of currencies, did you make sure to recalculate them? Yen can really cause problems :)

Lastly, your NASDAQ chart is from 94 - 2005 which never overlaps with reliable CrunchBase data even by your own admission. I suspect that graph will be a bit more telling and worrisome potentially: [http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...](http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1299226777603&chddm=1699990&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC&ntsp=0).

I do not necessarily think we are in a bubble and I am happy to see people diving in on data I just wanted to point these things out as it would be irresponsible not to.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it also be the case that well funded startups and super angels are much more likely to disclose sources and levels of funding to TechCrunch at an early stage for the PR than they were back when TC was a popular blog rather than a big-name publisher?

Presumably there are also some sort of editorial policies over what sort of startups merit inclusion in CrunchBase? The 2010 _drop_ in startups covered by could easily be a reflection of reduced interest in covering smaller startups that don't effectively court TC and don't disclose relevant funding data.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure the amount or willingness of sources has changed that much since the AOL acquisition though it is possible.

But there is definitely a huge selection bias of contributors. People love to disclose when they invested in the hot startup and neglect to mention their big mistakes retroactively.

I suspect the biggest reason for the drop is just a smaller team and less commitment like the OP said. There has been a lot of headcount flux at TC for awhile and even more so since the AOL deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take this with a grain of salt.

CrunchBase does not by any means offer stable and comprehensive picture over the years. It has been maintained with different levels of commitment, especially for entering in old data (since Crunchbase did not exist in 2000).

CrunchBase is a great resource, but doing those kinds of statistics without appropriate research of how consistent is the coverage is at least sloppy if not willful negligence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. The data is not consistent but it's probably the most well-maintained and accessible data (with its api) to my knowledge.

That is the reason I look at investments from 2005 since most investments prior to that were not entered.

<comment><USER4> The data is useful, but not in a way you used it.

I don't think you did a good job of disclosing or the problems that might lie in the data.

Since I've been following crunchbase both from the data perspective and from the perspective of how much resources TechCrunch is devoting to it, I can assure you it varies wildly.

Also the editorial policy has changed a lot in that period, in about 2007/2008 they started putting much more emphasis on international start-ups. So there are specific skews that you should be aware of and disclose them in the blog post.

So I think you did a nice job, but conclusions are not to be trusted at tall. Yes it might be the most well-maintained open data out there, but it does not make it in any more useful for this kind of analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A 38% decline in number of startups and a 31% increase in investments!

Also the underlying assumption seems to be exponential increase is the only reason for a bubble.

<comment><USER6> This was what struck me, it seems to be a fairly clear pointer to a lowering of standards (unless someone can come up with a convincing reason why start ups have suddenly got significantly more viable in the last couple of years).

"This is actually a great time to be a startup founder" - yep, so was 1999, no business plan needed, just a half baked idea and people will start throwing money at you. This is not necessarily a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's no discussion here about revenues. Wouldn't the only reasonable metric indicating a bubble be over-valuation of companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> It would help but most private companies don't report annual revenues.

<comment><USER7> Sure, well any conclusions in the absence of valuation or revenue data seem moot to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't trust CrunchBase for reliable trend data because its coverage over time is unlikely to be consistent. But, a similar analysis based on legally- required (and thus comprehensive) SEC Form Ds might give stronger insight.

At least two Form-D watching services have been mentioned previously on HN:

<http://stealthmodewatch.com>

<http://www.formds.com>

Though, I think they're relying on easier electronic access that may not go back more than a few years.

</comment><comment><USER9> "In 2010, there was actually a 38% drop in number of new startups."

Pffttt.... where did this come from? Is it not that after two years of a lousy economy everybody's saving were tapped out?

</comment><comment><USER10> Based on the last graph we aren't in a tech bubble _yet_

We are just entering the last quarter of 1998.

<comment><USER6> Or that we're in a bubble, it's just not quite as large as the last one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I doubt the failed startups of 2000 - 2006.. etc fully represented in CrunchBases database. This alone could account for the curve.</comment>


NYT reporter: "81% ICOs were scams" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/978323730551078912 <comment><USER2> To be clear, it's a NYT reporter tweeting the findings found in this blog post by the Satis Group -- not necessarily tweeting this as something that he would himself publish in the NYT under his byline: [https://medium.com/satis- group/ico-quality-development-tradi...](https://medium.com/satis-group/ico- quality-development-trading-e4fef28df04f)

</comment><comment><USER3> From the author of the tweet, "since tweeting this, i've heard that @ccatalini's team at MIT has looked into ICOs and gotten very different numbers: somewhere between 5 and 25% of ICOs are frauds. He hasn't published his full research, but will be interesting to see what accounts for the difference."

<comment><USER4> "somewhere between 5 and 25% of ICOs are frauds."

IPOs have a 0% fraud rate historically. Maybe ICO needs to be renamed so as not to be confused with IPO.

<comment><USER5> Is this meant to be sarcasm? There are tons of fraudulent publicly listed companies.

<comment><USER6> I think there is a difference between "IPO is fraud/scam" and "the company behind the IPO is fraud/scam".

Most ICO's I've looked at haven't produced anything but fancy blog posts (and in some cases, the DNS registration has expired). I think I've invested into 2 or 3 (didn't invest much, 10 or 50$ at most so it didn't hurt much and I stopped by now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems low tbh.

<comment><USER8> I think they mistyped "100" as "81"

<comment><USER9> Maybe it's hex. 129% of ICOs are fraudulent.

<comment><USER10> If it was a hex percentage it would still be 81/100, or in decimal 129/256 = 50.39%

<comment><USER11> Would rather store percentages in single bytes, so let 0xFF / 0xFF = 100%.

0x81 / 0xFF = 129 / 255 ~= 50.59%

<comment><USER10> Makes a lot of sense, but maybe a slightly longer bow to draw given that we would never us xx/99 as a percentage in decimal :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 8% going on to trade on an exchange seems extremely hard to believe. Assuming most of them were ERC20, they could be traded on DEXs quite easily

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd be interested to know the percentage weighted by USD notional amount raised.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am actually surprised by that number, in that I expected it to be a lot closer to 100%.

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/97838862051082240...](https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/978388620510822401)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd say 100%, but I'll take 81% too. Any ICO from a non-government entity is very close to a scam by definition.

(Heck, money from government entities is close to a scam itself, but at least it has better guarantees than "we're certain this crypto code is OK" and "a 18-year old implemented an Exchange in PHP from his parent's basement, you should really trust your coins (and real money) there").

<comment><USER17> Ethereum was also a scam, which would have given you 10,000,000% profit?

<comment><USER16> Whether there would be profit in something or not, is hardly the criterion of it being a scam.

In fact a lot of scams can be hugely profitable -- even ponzi schemes if you're not at the lower layers.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but a scam is knowingly screwing someone over.

Is it a scam when you invest in promising technology that, yes, could not work out?

<comment><USER16> > _Yes, but a scam is knowingly screwing someone over._

Oh, most of those people do know -- or should know better.

> _Is it a scam when you invest in promising technology that, yes, could not > work out?_

In "technology that might not work out" alone, no.

In "BS application of technology just because it's in fashion, with no business content" yes.

<comment><USER17> You're making the assumption that crypto will fail 100%, which is arguably not a smart thing to say, because no one knows for sure.

Furthermore, Smart contracts are a business content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "statistics for 2018 show that of the 74 offerings completed so far this year, around 76% will end up in the red." Are ICOs a fad or are they here to stay? [https://www.investing.com/analysis/whats-behind-the-lower- nu...](https://www.investing.com/analysis/whats-behind-the-lower-number-of- icos-200299877)

</comment><comment><USER19> And what percentage are actually going to deliver a useful product/protocol that delivers significant value that justifies the investment?

</comment><comment><USER20> "· Gone Dead (pre-trading): Succeeded to raise funding and completed the process, however was not listed on exchanges for trading and has not had a code contribution in Github on a rolling three-month basis from that point in time."

I don't know ICO mechanics well but why is this a criteria? Can anyone explain?

*Edit: I mean the code contribution in Github portion

<comment><USER21> presumably an inactive repo suggests they arent spending the money on development

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> counting random posts on bitcointalk that got money? im sure he discovered internet recently

</comment><comment><USER23> This seems like bs. I would look at ICOs that arent clear scams. Using something like icodrops list.

<comment><USER24> You mean, you'd look at specifically the place which does some initial filtering on submissions to count how many of them are scams? That's starting with a biased sample. That's not how you get good statistics.

<comment><USER25> I guess it's a question of who's asking. Practically anyone can whip up an ICO, and there's a finanvial incentive to do o, so obviously the majority of ICOs will be lousy offerings. Knowing how many in total are fraudulent is interesting, but for most people the question is how many of the non-obvious scams are still scams.

It's like if you analyzed every piece of fiction ever written and concluded that nearly 100% of fiction is awful. That's probably true without any prefilter, but most people will get their books from a curated selection of some sort and will not find that conclusion very useful. Instead, they'll likely conclude that just 90% of everything is crap. ;)

<comment><USER26> The obvious answer to a hungry reader to avoid bad fiction is to read the NYT book review.

The answer to a hungry investor to avoid bad ICOs is to... ?

The obvious answer seems to me to be "avoid ICOs for the time being."

Is there really another obvious answer to that?

<comment><USER27> Just like with any other investment - unless you know the subject you plan to invest in, simply don't. It's the same for stock exchanges, properties, and so on.

Having said that, there appear sites like IcoDrops (for ICO), and Trivial.co (for post-ICO) that help people make informed decisions.

<comment><USER26> What is a sound decentralized app that was curated by IcoDrops where the app depended on blockchain-based tokens and could potentially scale up to millions of users based on that same blockchain?

Or that isn't possible, what's a decentralized app that is still valuable technology which doesn't need to scale up like that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cox Loses in Willful Infringement Trial  – Owes BMG $25M for Users' Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.law360.com/telecom/articles/739353?nl_pk=ec36e714-14a3-4dbd-8fcd-4c613ee5505d&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=telecom <comment><AUTHOR> Cox was accused of knowingly reactivating accounts of repeat infringers in order to maximize subscriber revenue. A federal jury in Virginia agreed today, holding Cox liable for willful contributory copyright infringement.

Will substitute a non-paywalled article when one becomes available.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No paywall: [https://torrentfreak.com/cox-is-liable-for-pirating- subscrib...](https://torrentfreak.com/cox-is-liable-for-pirating-subscribers- ordered-to-pay-25-million-151217/)</comment>


Computers Without Borders is born \o/ - <AUTHOR> http://www.cwb.io At the origin, this place was just to have a cool email adress ... days after days it comes out as a need for all to express their voice as this place too but for free software / hardware and then to help and spread all over the world. The fact is that most of people here do not have trouble with computers, software, hardware LAN ... But in some place on this world some people at this time just never touch a keyboard. Computers Without Borders just offer to be this link with us and them, to help that people to discover on their 1st boot the best of GNU/Linux-libre. You have a hacker fiber in your hart and want to spread your best all over the world? Come on to www.cwb.io and join the Computers Without Borders Green Arrow Volunteers! <comment><USER2> I simply can't take any group seriously if they can't even get grammar right at all. If there are a few typos, that's one thing, but things like this:

> How a Society at the XXIth Century can be free without Free Software and > Free Hardware?

Are just nonsense. I would even understand a few glaring grammar errors if it was at all possible to understand, this really isn't.

It's also hard to understand what they're trying to do. It seems something about spreading free soft-/hardware but what are they going to do to accomplish this?

EDIT: I just realized, the grammar mistakes make it look like they just typed it in whatever their native language is and piped it through Google Translate.</comment>


Australia blocks access to Wikileaks, $11K/day fine for linking to it (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/australian-government-adds-wikileaks-to-banned-website-list-585894 <comment><USER2> Why is it that 90% of the stories we hear involving Australia and technology are about stupid moves by the government? Is there something unique about Australia?

<comment><USER3> Selectivity bias. Australia doesn't do much else that would be worth mentioning in these circles (when was the last time an Australian startup did anything interesting) while the actions of the government are exactly the kind of news that gets posted here.

<comment><USER4> _> when was the last time an Australian startup did anything interesting_

How about Wireless networking? <http://www.csiro.au/science/wireless- LANs.html>

You're welcome.

<comment><USER5> This is a good example of Australian innovation (far from the only one), but CSIRO not really a "startup", it's a national research institution.

<comment><USER4> It was developed by a team of five researchers:

[http://www.csiro.au/news/CSIRO-wireless-team-wins-top- Aussie...](http://www.csiro.au/news/CSIRO-wireless-team-wins-top-Aussie- science-award.html)

Maybe not a startup in the strict sense of the word, but pretty close - especially when you consider the limited funding available to most scientists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (a) Google this:

site:.gov.au blog +comments +submit -moderate

(b) Pick a blog. For example:

[http://agimo.govspace.gov.au/2010/11/18/independent- review-o...](http://agimo.govspace.gov.au/2010/11/18/independent-review-of- the-ict-reform-program-released/comment-page-1/)

(c) Add a comment. For example:

I am concerned that the rights of Australian citizens are being unjustly impinged. To fine someone $11k per day because they choose to link to a website is a slap in the face of free speech and free citizens of the world.

<a href=<http://www.wikileaks.org> >wikileaks.org

</comment><comment><USER7> I often forget how much we take for granted our right to free speech in America, until I read a story from a country that doesn't have the same constitutional protections.

<comment><USER8> This is tangential, but I only appreciated Greek airtravel when I had a TSA agent grope me when entering the US. In my case, I actually _experienced_ your lack of constitutional protections (or constitution in general, in airports), and I have another such experience to look forward to when leaving.

<comment><USER7> The trouble with our constitutional protections is that they only mean something when we stand up to enforce them.

There's been an awful lot of trampling on the Constitution in the past decade or so.

<comment><USER8> Well, for what it's worth, I'm standing up by objecting to the strip machines at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could the title of this be changed please? This was from March 2009 and is unrelated to the Wikileaks cablegate thing. (Having both on the same page is confusing a lot of people)

<comment><AUTHOR> Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not just about Wikileaks, but all websites deemed objectionable by the government. Remember the original motive behind such laws: protecting children online.

<comment><USER7> I'd call that less of a "motive" and more of a "rationalization."

<comment><USER11> Actually the scary thing is I think that it really _is_ the motivation.

Good intentions are usually the culprit when bad things happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Easily circumvented; just link to a site that links to WikiLeaks. If many thousands of such sites appear, the government won't be able to keep up with them.

EDIT: And if they try to outlaw the transitive closure of sites that link to WikiLeaks, they'll probably soon find that's most of the Web.

</comment><comment><USER13> STORY IS FAKE.

Aussie here, I have access to wikileaks.org right now from my Sydney-based ISP. There is no internet censorship in Australia as the idea is politically dead for now.

Yes, it wikileaks was added to _a_ blacklist, one that is used by government employees at work. Basically no one uses that list.

Submitter 'mcantelon' needs some banhammer for fake stories.

<comment><USER5> The story is correct, the headline is misleading.

The article says it's on the ACMA blacklist, and if you link to a site on the blacklist from an Australian website then you are eligible to be fined. Whether anyone has since been fined for leaking to Wikileaks, I don't know.

If/when our abomination of an internet filter idea comes in, then it will become blocked by the filter. I think 2013 is the soonest anyone thinks that will happen.

<comment><USER5> (article seems to have been shown incorrect/outdated as of today: [http://www.zdnet.com.au/wikileaks-removed-from-acma- blacklis...](http://www.zdnet.com.au/wikileaks-removed-from-acma- blacklist-339307604.htm) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "March 17th 2009"

</comment><comment><USER15> The filter isn't mandatory at this time, I think some ISP's are either test running it or have done so in the past. It may not actually happen, at least for the next 3 years, it may not pass if they reintroduce the legislation.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article (as well as being old) is also false.

"Currently, the ACMA list of prohibited URLs that is notified to accredited filter providers does not contain any URLs within the Wikileaks website," the ACMA told ZDNet Australia in a statement. "Since April 2010, the ACMA has investigated two complaints about specific pages of content on the Wikileaks website, which both resolved to content found to be not prohibited."

[http://www.zdnet.com.au/wikileaks-removed-from-acma- blacklis...](http://www.zdnet.com.au/wikileaks-removed-from-acma- blacklist-339307604.htm)

</comment><comment><USER17> I can access Wikileaks from Australia just fine, I guess the ban has been lifted since March '09 (the date of this article)?

<comment><USER18> Same here. Definitely not blocked anymore...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fine for linking to Wikileaks made me lol. And what if there isn't a link, one can do a Google Search and find the WikiLeaks website. It's not necessary that you make a link to the website, so you can access it. Second, people won't probably read Wikileaks directly but analysis and summaries by newspapers and blogs.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article is from March 2009. I haven't heard of a single fine being issued for this.

As a side note the internet filter mentioned in the article never received enough votes and the government minister in charge of the program conceded that it likely never will.

</comment><comment><USER21> >While Australia's list of blacklisted sites currently stands at 1,370, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that that list could increase to around 10,000 sites – most of which are of illegal pornographic content, but could also includes sites that house incendiary political discussions.

yep. WikiLeaks is like a political pornography - in the sense that everybody knows about and does "it", yet it is a "bad" thing to publish details of "it".

</comment><comment><USER22> G'day mates... you should organize a mass protest in australia... go buy a bunch of wikileaks.org shirts and wear them in public like people did with the DeCSS shirt. <http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/08/37941>

</comment><comment><USER23> Australia: _sigh_. I used to think that a nation originally populated by England's criminals would be less likely to initiate stupid police actions like this than it seems to be -- but that was naive thinking on my part.

</comment><comment><USER24> Australia is one of the few so-called "good guy" Western/democratic countries that seems to be out-creepy-ifying the USA lately. And that's hard to do.</comment>


UNIX/Linux Sysadmin Tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/12/50-unix-linux-sysadmin-tutorials/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheGeekStuff+%28The+Geek+Stuff%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> 30 - For Linux users, learn how to use ip (and the tools included in iproute2) instead of using ifconfig, which is part of net-tools, they are deprecated.

A good resource for that: [http://andys.org.uk/bits/2010/02/24/iproute2-life- after-ifco...](http://andys.org.uk/bits/2010/02/24/iproute2-life-after- ifconfig/)

45 - Use LVM always if it's possible.

<comment><USER3> Interesting - i had no idea that ifconfig and route were considered deprecated - googling did not turn up a lot of information fut I found corroboration with wikipedia and a linux foundation article: [http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networ...](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/net- tools)

And the developer page shows no activity in a long while: <https://developer.berlios.de/projects/net-tools/>

I am a bit embarrassed to know nothing about this as I have blithely been using ipconfig and route over the last few years.

One command that I have been using from the newer suite is ethtools - that is really useful. I like the very detailed interface error counts

<comment><USER4> Minor nitpick: not ipconfig, but _ifconfig_ (from interface config).

<comment><USER3> aargh - you can tell that I learned Windows before Linux

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> #51: Bookmark nixCraft, articles.slicehost.com & the Linode Library.

</comment><comment><USER6> On a related note, I am planning to start a site dedicated to Linux sysadmin tutorials. They will be in-depth guides on how to achieve a particular result, rather than quick "How to..." guides.

For example, some of the first posts will be:

Building a global, centralised logging system with open-source software and Splunk

Using Splunk as a front-end for munin monitoring data

Dynamic kickstart files (for automated RedHat installs)

Are there any topics you like to see on the site?

<comment><USER3> Where/When will this be?

For my interest making some of the low level processes more understandable would be great.

Recently I came across a sysadvent article on stracing 'ls' it was exactly the kind of thing that is useful to me. (quite probably an HN or reddit/r/programming link)

Also in the "Land of Lisp" book learning what the bit operator 'ash' does was a real eye-opener.

Both of these things are pretty basic for someone with a CS or EE background. But I think a lot of sysadmins come from other backgrounds. A bit more than a decade ago I was a grad student in a Literature department and found myself inexplicably attracted to Linux, OpenSource and started to try and extricate myself from Windows gui-ness. Eventually landed a sysadmin job about 5 yrs ago after taking some CS courses and some DIY learning.

In short I have real weaknesses in math and low level understanding of what is happening at the kernel level - I really treasure things like the 2 mentioned articles as they shed light on what is going on at a lower level.

<comment><USER6> Not for a couple of months - I need to get my startup in beta first, but the sysadmin tutorial site is next on my to-do list.

I read the "stracing ls" article (I think it was posted here), which was fascinating reading. I am planning to write higher-level tutorials rather than dissecting low-level commands, although now that I think about it a mix of the two would be better.

Thanks for the feedback - if there are any specific areas you would like to see covered do let me know, and I'll do my best to include them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Backing up with `dd` is stupid.

<comment><USER8> Some tools work better than others for an individual's particular situation - but _backing up_ is _never_ stupid.

<comment><USER3> Good point - the question is 'under what circumstances is dd a better/only choice for this task?'

I think if you are in a rescue mode and are in a limited env (busybox/ ash type of scenario) then it is very good to know how to backup using dd...</comment></comment></comment>


Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/interview-with-gmail-creator-and-y-combinator-partner-paul-buchheit <comment><USER5> > I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while > sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by > gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, "Man I am so > tired. I need to go home and take a nap." I went home, but as soon as I got > there I realized, "I'm not tired anymore."

Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curious if this has been studied at a psychological or neurological level. As in, why do we feel tired/sleepy in these kinds of environments (as opposed to say anxious or restless)? Personally I've experienced it at least some of the time at almost every desk job I've ever had.

I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way.

I also don't think it's the same kind of mental exhaustion you experience when working on something really challenging, like trying to crack a very hard math problem or something. Clearly in these situations the problem is that the tasks at hand, if any, are neither complex nor difficult.

<comment><USER6> Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes:

In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if they're doing something they actually care about. He gave some examples, one involving special forces people, and concluded that the primary source of tiredness for most people is lack of motivation - lack of interest, or not being able to feel there's a goal to all the work one is doing.

While my opinion is that Carnegie was exaggerating a bit here, I won't deny that this rings very true to my experience. As a programmer, I don't get physically taxed by work, and I very rarely get mental exercise too (most programming on regular web jobs is just plain tedium). But I do feel really tired on the job very quickly, and - back when I was a regular employee - <USER4> feeling used to evaporate almost immediately when I clocked out for the day.

I can even give an example from yesterday - lots of work and a visiting a doctor made me really tired by the evening, but I decided to sit down and write some code for a side project. My tiredness was gone immediately, and after 2 hours of cranking out code, I had to force myself to go to sleep, in order to have any energy for the next day.

<comment><USER7> I was literally talking about this exact phenomena with the wife last night. It's almost impossible for me to be bored if I'm doing nothing. I could fill years of daydreaming, just in my own head. However, give me work tasks that I have no interest in, and I'll feel so bored/lethargic/unmotivated that just keeping my eyes on task and moving forward requires mental exertion.

When I was young, apparently this meant I had ADHD (Throwing this in as a snide comment to expose my opinion of how my primary schooling treated this symptom in children EDIT: I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD. The medicines I was given gave me ticks that took decades for me to get rid of and altered my mental state in terrible ways, and it meant that instead of inspecting WHY I felt this way, I simply got shoved chock full of pills and then booted/put with other misfits, which just made the focus problem worse. The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for things that didn't matter).

I took issue with that, largely because I find the response to be eminently logical, and built coping mechanisms to let me succeed in spite of it, but the underlying driver is still there.

I realize this is such an insubstantive comment, but it's a topic I've tossed around in my head for many many years now, and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other professional adult" and hearing others express the same root is somewhat reassuring.

(I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping mechanisms" when I feel this way.)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I feel the same way you do. Please, leave me with nothing to do; I'll manage. Left to my own devices, I have 20 ideas 5 trains of thought to explore per minute.

> _I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I 'll > admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD._

I get it. Child AD(H)D seems definitely overdiagnosed in the west; from what I read, giving medication seems to be the easiest hack to get kids to survive modern school system. But personally, I just want to have an expert opinion on whether or not I might have adult ADD, simply because I'm running out of plausible hypotheses, and this one fits well. I was depressed in the past and worked through that. I had anxiety issues, but they're almost gone too - <USER3> don't generally feel debilitating background anxiety anymore, unless I'm seriously falling behind on my obligations. The only unresolved thing left is the anxiety and weakening I feel in context of working.

> _The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit > for things that didn 't matter_

I still feel like this. In a better world, this would be fine. Alas, we're not there yet.

> _and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with > doing your job like every other professional adult"_

Yes, this is _exactly_ how I feel all the time, and had since entering the workforce. I have decent skills, I don't struggle with technical challenges. I only struggle with this fundamental friction. I look at people around me - friends, coworkers - and they all seem so productive and relaxed. Hell, my wife is the exact opposite of me - she's so good at getting things done at work she puts David Allen to shame. So yeah, it's reassuring to know that I'm not alone in this state - so thanks for sharing!

> _(I realize this is tangential, but if you 're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, > check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping > mechanisms" when I feel this way.)_

Not a fan, just a casual listener. But I'm always open to any coping mechanism for this particular problem.

<comment><USER8> ADD is not over diagnosed. It's probably more prevalent in the population than we think it is. The medications are not specifically harmful in a potential misdiagnosed case... they are just not effective. And there's multiple medications which have difference efficacies for different people. That being said 80% of people with ADHD find medication effective.

Dr. Russell Barkley has a book on it and also several talks on youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7QuWchHvOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7QuWchHvOY) [http://www.russellbarkley.org/](http://www.russellbarkley.org/)

But you should get screened if you feel it would be beneficial. Find a doctor that specializes in ADHD/ADD. The way most adults find out they have ADHD/ADD is when they take their kids in for screening, usually due to school issues.

Depression, anxiety are co-morbid with ADHD/ADD as well.

Here's a good talk on one women's experience with ADHD. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiwZQNYlGQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiwZQNYlGQI)

<comment><USER7> My behaviorist wife and mother (Freud would have something to say about me, wouldn't he) would tend to disagree with your first statement (overdiagnosis) with the caveat of "within certain populations." We focus a lot on kids, unfortunately often under the age within which the DSM actually supports these sorts of diagnoses.

I would personally disagree with your "medications are not specifically harmful in a misdiagnosed case." I'm not encouraging people to avoid seeking whatever help they see fit, but rather to not whitewash over the very tractable impact it had on a rather dark year or two of my childhood, and the lasting aftereffects. I honestly don't want to start a heated debate about whether or not to medicate, moreso call out to others who had a similar negative outcome that they're not alone and that it's not impossible to develop healthy coping mechanisms without pills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> His reason for why he's a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn't fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it.

My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn't allowed on the systems because I wasn't an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to do that was to remote into unused boxes in the lab. (This was back when it was easy to get onto an intranet and hard to get on the Internet — it's exactly the opposite now!) The systems that were usually available were these crappy diskless Sun workstations that booted over the network. They didn't have enough memory to run emacs without paging and paging over the network is a recipe for frustration. Plus if someone logged in and the system was slow the first thing they'd do is try and find out why, which might lead to them wondering why I was on that system, just who I was, etc and that was a bad direction for me. I also couldn't talk to people in the labs since I wasn't supposed to be there, so I was entirely self taught, and emacs seems like the sort of thing someone has to evangelize to get you over the initial hump.

Anyway, that's my story — what's yours? :)

<comment><USER10> My first time using Linux on my desktop I used to have video card issues a lot, which means I'd get locked out of an X11 environment and be stuck in the console trying to fix things. I didn't have another machine to use to search the web for help so I was just kinda on my own.

I used to just hit <Tab><Tab> to get Bash to print all possible commands, and I'd just try random ones until I found one that would let me edit text, and vi was it. It was pretty fun learning how to even quit vi, let alone edit any text, but I was pretty determined back then.

That's mostly how I learned Linux back then: just hit <Tab><Tab> and try out any random command that looked interesting and see how it worked.

<comment><USER11> That seems both like an interesting and a very scary way of exploring your system. If you're careful, by checking manpages if present and running with the normal --help flags before trying anything else, you're probably fine; but it seems dodgy nonetheless :p

I wager you didn't know about text-based browsers like lynx? I'd say that would have been a solution to your predicament.

<comment><USER10> I eventually discovered lynx as well (or maybe it was elinks that I used first?) which ended up being a pretty big help in these situations.

But yeah, it _definitely_ was a scary way of doing things. I spent pretty much an entire summer repeatedly screwing up my Debian machine and having to reinstall before I understood enough things to be slightly less dangerous. (Running "ed" by accident was memorably awful... Good luck figuring out how to quit out of ed if you're brand new to Linux.) Luckily I kept my important stuff on a separate hard drive which I left unplugged in situations like these. My main drive just contained my windows and linux partitions, and I would be _damned_ if I was going to reboot into to windows to look things up. :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Why did you decide to leave Intel?

> Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and > one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a > sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and > all alone): I'm like, "Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap." > I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, "I'm not tired anymore." > Working at Intel was a draining environment, and I knew I wanted to leave.

I had a very similar experience at Intel. The best analogy would be like being in a sexless marriage.

</comment><comment><USER13> <If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of s __t. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they 're evasive and dismissive.>

Actually, letting charismatic founders deliver a triple-scoop of their enchanting story isn't the technique I'd recommend. Both the good ones and the bad ones got this far by being very persuasive.

Do reference checks instead. Find people who worked with them for a while, and have moved on. When you're doing this with great founders, you'll hear a mix of pride and fatigue. (There's a steady refrain among folks who worked for Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. "Best years of my career, but totally wore me out.")

For the charlatans, you'll hear: "It all sounded wonderful at first, but the longer I stayed, the clearer it became that the employees, investors and customers were all being played."

<comment><USER14> i agree with you, interviewing the founders is not a proper way to go about it. paul is full of it. there is no way past 50 or maybe 100 employees that you are going to have or be able to request an interview with the founders. and if you did pull it off, your time allotment to ask questions of them would be 10 minutes.

but, how would you do a reference check on larry, sergey, or holmes? none of whom held a job before they founded their respective companies. as will be the case with most startup founders. are you going to stalk their college friends?

<comment><USER13> So in the land of journalists, this is what we do every week. Something like this can be an effective strategy.

Find a couple current employees or associates who come across as stable and thoughtful. Invite them out for coffee, dinner, a long walk, etc. You want to talk alone, outside the office. Spend a little time on social rapport, including taking an interest in them as fully-rounded people. Candor needs a foundation of trust and mutual respect. Then ask open-ended questions that make it easy for people be helpful without feeling that they are on the spot.

Some examples are:

\- What attracted you to the company?

\- What's the work tempo like?

\- What's some advice for the best way of getting along with the founder/CEO? (This is a safe way for flaws to surface)

\- We all make mistakes occasionally. What mistakes are forgivable at this company? What's unforgivable? (Think how the Theranos answers would have differed from Google answers.)

\- What's surprised you since joining?

\- What delights the boss? What gets the boss angry? (Plenty of chances for signaling here, too.)

\- What kind of people stay here and thrive? What kind of people quit?

\- What would I need to do to be successful here? -

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately it's really simple:

1) extreme luck in what you grow up with, the hobby you pick (linux)

2) extreme luck in getting a job offer with stock that would x10000 in value.

3) extreme luck in accepting said job offer (it was the only one he got)

That's right. He didn't even have a non-obvious decision to make. Seriously.

4) on top of that also being very smart and dedicated

I mean all due respect for this guy, but he is like a lottery winner explaining how to win the lottery. The path he's laying out existed at one point in the past, but it no longer exists. He even says that, that it was REALLY hard to see that path was a good path. In fact, most such choices lead to disaster (failed startups), not success. He "chose" by being obsessed with other things than the choice ...

Well, perhaps the path still exists but it's gotten downgraded from "guaranteed multimillionnaire" to "good job, good living, good pay". Like factory worker in the 70s good living.

That said, the guy is still incredibly smart and that was certainly a necessary condition for his success. So I guess you can't say it's 75% luck and 10% talent and 15% effort, it would be more accurate to say it was 100% luck and 100% talent and 100% effort. If any of those had been a mere 99%, it would not have happened.

But for his path. It's cheaper and certainly easier just to buy a $100 mil lottery ticket.

</comment><comment><USER16> Welp, now that my Imposter Syndrome has returned in full force, any concrete advice on leveling up in engineering skill (other than getting hired at Google circa 1999)?

Edit: I now see that Paul coined the "Don't be Evil" slogan[0]. I'm curious what his thoughts on its removal and what that portends for Google today. u/paul?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540)

<comment><USER17> Get hired at any place where good engineering is done, or at a startup where no engineering is really done and you get to make the calls about how engineering is done. Work for 10+ hours a day, and on your free time read about engineering from blogs or books, see conference videos, and go to conferences.

After 4 or 5 years of doing this you'll maybe know enough about how "everthing works" and what books says how to do what, or what company did what in what way, or the "state of the art", at that time you can start doing original contributions in order to not fall back.

Oh and also the Imposter Syndrome sometimes never really goes away :(

<comment><USER18> This seems like generally good advice, except for having to spend every waking moment using your brain for work. Balance is important. Spending some of that free time on learning engineering is good advice, just not all of it. Make sure you spend some free time with friends/family, physical activities, and relaxation.

<comment><USER19> > Balance is important.

Not for everyone.

<comment><USER17> Balance is sometimes overrated because most of the expectation about how to be a great professional comes from overzealous 9 to 5 mediocre professionals. That doesn't mean life is about burning out and crashing against a wall of mind wrecks every few years of course, but for many people it's possible to keep let's say a 85% work 15% hobbies, relaxation and workout and society needs those guys at their maximum capacities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to be unhappy because then we'll go buy "solutions" for our unhappiness.

I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.

<comment><USER21> Looks like his answer assumes that "before", people were happy. I don't think this was ever the case. More so, being unhappy might be itself an evolution tool.

<comment><USER20> I think that "before" more people were unhappy because the two lowest levels of Maslows pyramid wasn't fulfilled but when you reached level 3 and above you could just live your life and be mostly happy. Now we have people that have it all, level 5-persons, that are more unhappy with life than happy. And that, I blame on the business of creating artificial needs that you never can fulfill.

Me being revolutionary in this context is refusing to play the game. Not chasing a career at all costs, not playing stock market games, trying to minimize my wants, focusing on relations and specifically not participating in The Great Social Media Mindfuck Experiment.

<comment><USER22> >trying to minimize my wants

This is an effective solution which I also try to do that in my life recently. And the bad thing is, it's become more difficult to get rid of the whole "game" trap, when you continue to play even if you get bored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders > are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes? Right, that's > the worst combination: smart and full of s __t. I think you have to > interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, > insightful answers, or if they 're evasive and dismissive.

What are some examples of "hard questions" that we can ask?

<comment><USER24> I think you can determine if they are evasive and dismissive without needing hard questions. Ask about their history. Ask them about their leadership style. Ask them how they resolve conflict in their organization.

If they have good answers to those questions that don't feel like canned responses, then go dig deeper. Ask their employees about their leadership style - do the answers match? Does their resume and google-stalking match their story of their history? Ask the team about organizational conflict resolution. You should get similar responses.

Also, think about whether they talked to you like a leader. I've had interviews when I really enjoyed talking to the potential boss, and it felt friendly, and those turned out to be sub-optimal leaders. But the good leaders I've worked for interviewed in a way where I was comfortable, but challenged by the questions, and they stayed focused. They didn't chit-chat or make friends (at least not beyond just a few quick minutes as we got started), they drove towards getting the answers they needed to see if I was right for the job, and they gave me opportunities to ask questions back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > startups have tremendously high variance. Most startups are s __t. There 's > a few of them that are really exceptional, and if you land at an exceptional > one, you can do really well. If you randomly pick something, you'll probably > have a bad time.

Great words of wisdom. How does one find a great one though? Even for YC with their expertise and experience, most of the startups they fund are not great.

<comment><USER26> Are they trying to solve hard problems? Do they have talented engineers? (Though I guess you only find out after working there for some time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > "wow, these people [Yahoo] are idiots, and we're going to roll over them." > From then on, we just kept winning deals and squashing other companies. That > was exciting."

I wonder, what kind of deals were Google making at this point in time? What was their product? Sure, they had a web page that could search the internet, but how did they monitize on that? Did they offer custom site search solutions?

<comment><USER28> How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing sounds beyond that

<comment><USER29> If you're a hyper competitive person, you probably will want to crush your competitors. And since competitiveness is a must to be CEO, makes sense that this is how the game is played

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more > like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median > engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they > would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess.

This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession.

Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else?

<comment><USER31> Bracing for down votes but I think that's garbage. Once the system has been precisely defined in code (even poorly, especially when poorly!), refactoring it is a much smaller task, it's also a 'smooth' problem (there are no hidden problem mountains that sap your drive as you discover your expectations were way off week after week) because the problem is all there in front of you, in ascii. You are also motivated to look good because people do mis-compare these non-comparable tasks. I've refactored my own code, I've refactored others' code, I've had my own code refactored. Every refactoring iteration is almost always a lot faster than the last, and there is almost always a benefit in performance, though maybe only iteration #2 provides a really big boost when #1 was a rush job. You just need to be a good engineer who knows how to write well organized, well patterned, and performant code. It's important to remember that engineering, like design in general, is an activity done under time constraint, every iteration is an opportunity for more time, and it's also a fresh break/perspective on the problem. I love refactoring code.

<comment><USER32> It's not just about code. In any non-trivial system you have a bunch of components, and any minor occurrence of "bad design" that affects boundaries, protocols, configuration, deployment, persistence schema, upgrade procedures, etc, can lead to huge complications down the road if there's no one to catch this early. Mediocre engineers will only make it worse and worse, and you'll get something super complex that costs big bucks to maintain. If you have someone capable of detecting & fixing such bad patterns early enough, in extreme cases that person can be considered a 1000x engineer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and > one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a > sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and > all alone): I'm like, "Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap." > I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, "I'm not tired anymore." > Working at Intel was a draining environment, and I knew I wanted to leave.

Ironic that's exactly how I felt at Google (minus the cubicle). So did a friend of mine quitting with me.

<comment><USER34> So, who's the new 'Google' now?

<comment><USER35> Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix still have some of the best talent in the bay. They also push out a lot of amazing projects (PyTorch, React, Go, Chromium, Tensorflow), although Netflix much less so.

At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.

<comment><USER36> Netflix have Chaos Monkey, Spinnaker and Jaeger. Maybe not industry leading but still better than Apple.

<comment><USER37> Jaeger is Uber.

<comment><USER36> You're correct there. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like how so many professionals sort of stumbled into programming. This might even make a good Ask HN if it hasn't been done already. I myself stumbled onto this weird copy of Visual Basic on a warez site one day. It was this like...portable version I guess? It was just a standalone app. Anyway I downloaded it and started playing around. That, and I was once stumbling around an old Windows 3 computer and just executing files to see what they did and when I ran QBASIC I was like..well hello.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone know of similar articles or videos like this with career advice from great engineers?

<comment><AUTHOR> While it's not a perfect match to your question, YC has been putting out so many amazing videos during Startup School the past few weeks which you might want to check out if you haven't already. For example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW- GePDwn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-GePDwn4)

The channel sorted by new: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=dd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through > the different layers and protocols and systems.

I find this a bit limiting, certainly they should think across multiple layers but some of those layers exist beyond the systems.

<comment><USER41> As a people style thing I've encountered two broad types of engineers - <USER4> intuitive types, and the detail types. Neither type is wrong but it's a different set of desires and interests. The detail type wants to ponder every corner case and every possible use (that the specific engineer cares about). The intuitive type can find this infuriating. They'd rather just build it and learn as they go. They have aesthetic tastes and feelings about different layers and they just go with their gut. I've seen both types be very effective. An intuitive type with good taste Will just have a sense of what to build and roughly why, but with many specifics left open. A detail type who is good can get to the neatest parts of a problem(maybe even rephrase the problem a bit differently) and solve it well, so well that it builds a foundation that everything else fits into easilt and with less grief. I think for both types a key aspect is being curious about the right things. Everyone has a different list of things they find interesting and other things they find to be grunt work and/or limiting as you said. Being aware of your own list of these is useful. Adding things to the list that the industry will hire you for could be called career management

<comment><USER42> I think I fit both of those. When I start working with something I just want to throw something together and get it working learning as i go. I believe you never fully understand what you need to build until you've tried it.

But then I like to step back, read up on the underlying components and rebuild from scratch making sure i understand every possible flow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > You joined Google because you were deeply interested in Linux. Is there a > technology you're equally excited about today? This is a question which I > would be curious for someone else to tell me the answer to! The closest > thing I can think of is Bitcoin and crypto. I'm pretty sure they would have > captured the attention of 21 year old me.

Can relate so much with this article. Maybe because we're around the same age. Crypto reminds of me of Linux and the early days of the Internet. I see the potential and that's why I'm working in it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?

<comment><USER45> This question misses the point I think. The differences aren't going to be that they type 1200 wpm or something that would be interesting or obvious on video. It would more likely look like someone spending time thinking carefully, not (necessarily) at a keyboard, thinking about really needs doing, how to best do it, what the user needs and will value, and they might write 1/3 of the code of a median engineer. The actual coding won't be dramatically different on video.

<comment><USER44> I'm not saying 10x are fast at typing. I just wanted to see how fast someone can use emacs as the person from the interview.

<comment><USER46> It's not writing real code (except for some examples), but this guy's got some chops: [http://emacsrocks.com/](http://emacsrocks.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > When they sat down with me they said, "we want you to build an email > something."

As I understand Paul began work on Gmail in 2001 at the time Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were market leaders. Interesting Google execs knew they could do better, even though Gmail didn't officially launch until over 3 years later.

<comment><USER48> it's been widely reported that gmail was a 20% project to start with. That seems inconsistent with this version of events.

<comment><USER49> Maybe he was already working on something email-y, and they noticed?

<comment><USER50> But that's not what he reported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I was struck by the similarity of working for a Startup and having the chance to gain mad skills, and the process of field promotions on the battlefield that I have read about in fiction: A whole other gear for advancement (aka dial set to 11).

</comment><comment><USER52> Its interesting that the people cited aren't here commenting...

</comment><comment><USER53> I love how he perceives/explains a number of his career choices around avoiding anything "big company".

</comment><comment><USER54> > technology you're equally excited about today? : Bitcoin

I am surprised he didn't add deep learning / brute force computation making new problems accessible.

</comment><comment><USER55> The title could really benefit from an Oxford comma.

<comment><USER56> This is my new pet peeve, especially when it's at all programming-related. Anyone dealing with code should know readability is a big deal. I can parse a sentence better with that extra comma without having to reread any part of it. I don't see why its ever left out.

<comment><USER57> It's an optional feature of the language. Sometimes its exclusion does lead to ambiguity, but other than that, it's a stylistic choice, and preferences on usage diverge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> [Off topic] Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves engineers in the US? Is there a reason beside the fact that it is probably not regulated? Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order which requires an engineering diploma.

<comment><USER59> > Can someone help me understand why computer scientists call themselves > engineers in the US?

Someone with a Bachelors (or less) who builds systems by writing code is not a computer scientist. That is a less appropriate title than engineer.

> Here that would be so totally illegal if you are not a member of the order > which requires an engineering diploma.

Yes, we know Canada is almost uniquely psychotic about this. I, personally, think it is ridiculous, and I state this as someone who holds an accredited engineering degree (EE) and originally considered pursuing licensure.

That said, I do think software engineering is in dire need of some actual engineering discipline. This industry also is in dire need of title bifurcation; calling everyone "software engineer" regardless of what they actually do, just because they touch code, is ridiculous.

<comment><USER58> I mostly agree with you, but I still think it makes no sense to not have a regulated title. I mean you can't become a civil engineer if you don't study civil engineering, why is it different for software will remain a mystery to me.

<comment><USER60> I think the field is too new and fast changing to have fixed standards to examine people on. Civil engineering has been going on for at least 2000 years on the other hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> _Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems._

When someone claims to be a "full stack engineer" this is what they are claiming. But the reality is always webdev.</comment>


The 17-Year-Old That Yahoo Paid $30M Was Licensing His Startup's Core Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-17-Year-Old-That-Yahoo-Paid-30-Million-Was-4388011.php

<comment><USER2> Well, I said just yesterday on a thread that I hoped someone would do a follow the money in this deal as there's a lot that's strange about it. Doesn't mean that there's necessarily anything nefarious but it does mean that of we live in an age where investigative reporting is not completely dead it makes sense for someone to at least poke around this a bit and find out all the details.

Yahoo doesn't get the technology from the transaction (summly doesn't own it). Yahoo doesn't get any particular talent on the transaction (there isn't a team of tech wizards they're buying for that 30million). They're not getting a huge number of users (tons of apps have a million users - still a drop in the ocean on Yahoo's own user numbers). So what is this deal all about?

<comment><USER3> There's a million users, and then there are a million users...Summly isn't a flatulence emulation app for smartphones and their users are probably more valuable, e.g. they consume written news. What news they are interested in may also be valuable as business intelligence.

<comment><USER2> I suspect on a given day there are many HN readers with apps with a million or more downloads who aren't getting sniffed at... Looking at what this app does it is not clear to me that this particular user base is especially valuable...

<comment><USER3> If one ran a news portal, one's perception of the value of Summly's users might be different.

Likewise, one's perception of the value of those user's selection among news items might be valued differently than another user group's selection among flatulence noises...particularly if one's revenue was anchored in advertising as is the case with Yahoo.

To put it another way, assuming that Yahoo is run by incompetents is more likely to be an error than its converse.

<comment><USER2> I don't assume anything. I don't assume Yahoo is run by incompetents. I don't even think that incompetence is the best explanation for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a question that's been bugging me for the past few days (threads ;) :

Has anyone actually _confirmed_ that Yahoo paid $30M? As in, seen an official statement or reviewed the actual deal docs? Because as of now it seems like the only actual source for that number is Kara Swisher on AllThingsD, and that's her saying "sources tell her".

I ask because I wonder if one of the big twists in this story is that, perhaps, Yahoo didn't actually pay $30M. Maybe they paid $10M. Or $1M. And perhaps this whole shebang is a big, big PR blitz -- that's working spectacularly.

Folks pay $2M for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time. This story has, so far, gotten Yahoo a LOT more than 30 seconds of exposure. It's everywhere (my extremely non-technical and non-nerdy biz partner emailed me an AP news link this morning - he's my "masses" filter).

One question I have is - what would the consequences be if they did leak an incorrect amount? I mean, would shareholders have a right to be upset? "You leaked to the world that we paid $30M and in reality, we...we...got a better deal? Oh. Cool."

It reminds me of a joke I have with some friends about an acquisition someone did a few years ago. They announced the deal as being priced at "Under $50M", and the news reported and celebrated this $50M acquisition. Now friends say things like "I, too, happen to have Under $50M in my wallet at this very moment!" ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> His father is a VP at Morgan Stanley. Deal was done from day 1.

Stop over analyzing, it's not a regular startup, it's not playing the same ballgame you or I play. No value was required. The usualy rules do not apply.

Daddy hooked his fish.

<comment><USER6> Smart rich people typically don't get rich by just giving away large piles of cash to the children of other smart rich people.

<comment><USER5> Public stock money isn't from smart rich people.

<comment><USER6> You think it was just straight embezzlement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Forgive me for having to ask this, but can anyone link me to a cogent argument made here on HN as to why this particular story inspires so much fixation? After the Nth front page story here I'm still having trouble understanding why everyone is so wrapped up in it.

Supposedly the Spock-like logical minds of HN are immune to the wunderkind mass media story hook; so what gives?

<comment><USER8> Spock like what? HN is more like "Sports Fans" from SNL. This story is our version of "should they have recruited LeBron straight out of HS?!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ... And if it was from SRI it means it probably didn't work nearly as well as advertised. Even with Apple's help Siri is still a joke.

<comment><USER10> Works well for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        By the way: None of this is meant to take anything away from
        what founder Nick D'Aloisio did with Summly. That guy is a pure
        hustler, and he earned every penny of his millions.

How can they say that after suggesting:

        Maybe Yahoo has decided spending $30 million to give one of
        their disappointing startups a safe landing is a way to get on
        their good side.

If the deal was for Yahoo to gain favour with the investors (lining their pockets; Nick cashing out being an irrelevant side effect) how on earth did he "earn every penny"? If that is true then he was in the right place at the right time with the right investors.

<comment><USER12> >"earn every penny"?

>"he was in the right place at the right time with the right investors"

What's the difference between these two?

<comment><USER11> If you count his work as including acquiring the investors then I guess you're right, that might explain the word "hustler".

If you count his work as being building the original application, creating a brand and then being involved with the business that was sold then the company being bought only because of the investors means his work was immaterial to the sale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This confuses me...

"The acquisition was led by Yahoo HR boss Jackie Reeses."

HR is leading investment decisions at Yahoo? I looked up this person and she is based in New York and her title is EVP People and Development at Yahoo!

<comment><USER14> Makes sense if it was an acqui-hire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like how the last sentence of the article completely contradicts all the points made in the rest of the body.

<comment><USER2> Yes indeed. That was needless pandering so we wouldn't think they were trying to be mean to a teenager.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds more and more like everyone involved in this at Yahoo did zero research prior to making this acquisition. Well, either that or Yahoo was determined to kill any competition before possibly rolling out with a similar product. Regardless, it puts Yahoo in an awkward position.

</comment><comment><USER17> What if this is just one big fuckup on Yahoo's part and they can't admit to it because they'll look like idiots?

I.e. they somehow forgot to check the actual technology.

The more I read about this, the more I think this could be the case.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a pretty poor attack on a startup that managed to get itself acquired for more than most of us will ever sell a company for.

As Peter Thiel says there are two kinds of companies: companies who go from 0 to 1 (SpaceX, Tesla, maybe Google) and companies who go from 1 to n (globalization of technology).

Summly clearly fits into the 1 to n bucket, but so do a lot of other companies. Would people be pissed if Github got acquired? I see no outcry for a $100 million dollar round of funding for a company that is built upon open source software.

How is github any different than Summly from a 'renting' of technology perspective?

<comment><USER19> I almost down-voted you, but then I thought about it and I think you have a point worthy of discussion.

The core of Github is open source, which allows for interoperability and confidence, but what they have built on top is proprietary and community- engaging. Just like managing email infrastructure, there is a lot of nuance and domain expertise that comes from experience only. Come to think of it, it seems a lot of open source technology is so loosely built (configurable/ flexible), that it requires serious expertise to actually run it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really?

"Despite speculation on the Internet that Summly only licensed its summarizing technology from SRI International, an independent research institute, Mr. D'Aloisio said the technology was developed by Summly and that the company owned 100% of the intellectual property behind the service."

[http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/03/26/what- does-30-mil...](http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/03/26/what- does-30-million-buy-you/)

<comment><USER21> Do they define licensed as owned (for this particular purpose)?

<http://summly.com/technology.html>

Summly's internal team partnered closely with SRI in building our app.

Innovations from SRI International have created new industries, billions of dollars of marketplace value, and lasting benefits to society—touching our lives every day. SRI, a nonprofit research and development institute based in Silicon Valley, brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, new products, and spin-off ventures. Government and business clients come to SRI for pioneering R&D and solutions in computing and communications, chemistry and materials, education, energy, health and pharmaceuticals, national defense, robotics, sensing, and more. Visit sri.com for more information.

"Summly came to SRI International with a core concept to solve the information overload problem, which is especially challenging for mobile devices because of their limited screen size," said David Israel, Ph.D., program director in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. "Building on SRI's expertise in machine learning and natural language processing, the Summly team is creating a new type of content, providing understandable and relevant summaries tailored for mobile devices."

<comment><USER22> _a new type of content, providing understandable and relevant summaries tailored for mobile devices_

I'm waiting for them to patent it and then sue newspapers for using headlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> KeenSkim will soon launch an iPhone version, after developing it's own in- house tech.

<https://www.keenskim.com/static/KeenSkim_iPhone_app.htm> \- sign-up for reminder when ready

<https://www.keenskim.com/>

</comment><comment><USER24> Is this what some people like to call "killing it"?

</comment><comment><USER25> Don't hate.</comment>


Magic Leap – How It All Began - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNSwXlQcou0 <comment><USER2> From Wikipedia[0]:

Magic Leap ...

      ... working on a head-mounted virtual retinal
      display which superimposes 3D computer-generated
      imagery over real world objects, by projecting a
      digital light field into the user's eye

      ... raised $1.4 billion from a list of investors
      including Google and China's Alibaba Group.

      ... estimated ... worth $4.5 billion.

      ... has not released a product to the market.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Tragic Leap</comment>


Introducing FastJson - <AUTHOR> http://therobotsbrain.blogspot.com/2011/03/introducing-fastjson-library.html

<comment><USER2> fwiw, I've had a good experience with yajl in the past.

<http://lloyd.github.com/yajl/></comment>


Edit Chrome input boxes with any editor (Linux) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ooddekcmdpjicehjkgobdopbkgepmahj

<comment><USER2> This looks quite interesting, but it seems a little strange that it uses a HTTP server to effectively provide little more than a textbox editor. Has anyone tried it? If so, is the HTTP server accessible from the local network?</comment>


Share HN: Rilke on how to be an artist (1903) - <AUTHOR> "Let me ask you right here to read as little as possible of aesthetic critiques. They are either prejudiced views that have become petrified and senseless in their hardened lifeless state, or they are clever word games. Their views gain approval today but not tomorrow. Works of art can be described as having an essence of eternal solitude and an understanding is attainable least of all by critique. Only love can grasp and hold them and can judge them fairly.
When considering analysis, discussion, or presentation, listen to your inner self and your feelings every time. Should you be mistaken, after all, the natural growth of your inner life will guide you slowly and in good time to other conclusions. Allow your judgements their own quiet, undisturbed development, which, as with all progress, must come from deep within and can in no way be forced or hastened. All things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth. To allow the completion of every impression, every germ of a feeling deep within, in darkness, beyond words, in the realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and patiently the hour of the descent of a new clarity: that alone is to live one's art, in the realm of understanding as in that of creativity.
In this there is no measuring with time. A year doesn't matter; ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful. Patience is all."
Letters to a Young Poet, 23 April 1903 <comment><USER2> They asked: "are you an artist?"

The question quite sublime.

For truth be told, in recent months,

It's not the first of times.

The first was in Los Angeles

A pre-opening event

He who questioned me sure was,

Thus knew quite what it meant.

So thrown aback I did reply

With an honest heartfelt question

"Why life is art, isn't it?"

A smile, then nought was mentioned.

And come again, the question did,

Before I left that nation.

But identify I have not yet:

In ambiguity lies elation.

Then half a world away today

In leftist lands anew

An art college in Kerala

Invited, I took my cue.

Walking about I could not see

The show that was promoted

Behind door one a library

The second looked quite _verboten_.

Some students came and talked to me

While each of us did smoke

My country declared, they then decided

To get to know this bloke...

They asked: "are you an artist?"

The question quite sublime.

For truth be told, in recent months,

It's not the first of times.

 _Are you an Artist?_ (June 2011) [http://stani.sh/poem4.pdf](http://stani.sh/poem4.pdf)</comment>


US senator Elizabeth Warren wants to break up tech companies - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/08/senator-warren-app-store-breakup/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just my 2 cents: Apple currently offers a great user experience in terms of app quality, stability, design, etc... That's because they have a total control over what can and what can't be uploaded to their app store. They run extensive analysis over each one of the apps that are being submitted to the app store and they reserve their right to reject an app even if the slightest bug occurs. That, at the end of the day, turns into a very positive user experience.

My question is: Would it be actually good for the end user if Apple is forced to lose control over the app store?

<comment><USER2> Apple could easily continue curating and vetting quality apps. The problem is that users buy a phone, own it, and can't decide what to run on it.</comment></comment>


Practical Ways to Become a Great Designer | UX Movement - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/inspiration/practical-ways-to-become-a-great-designer

<comment><USER2> That's a really long video to say something so simple:

You need to practice your craft away from work if you want to be great at it.

He lists a bunch of reasons why, and spends a lot of time driving them home... But I think the time is wasted.

Good designers/creators/developers/etc already do their craft away from work. Bad ones have a million excuses why they can't or won't. I can't see him changing anyone's mind as to whether they hone their craft in their free time or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was one of his points when he refers to working in your "sandbox", but there were some others like mentorship, collaboration and writing.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Share an interface for your ML Model in 1 line of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gradio-app/gradio <comment><AUTHOR> If you're more of a landing page person: [https://gradio.app](https://gradio.app)</comment>


Show HN: Covid State Testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.covidstatetesting.com <comment><AUTHOR> Friend of mine created this page within the last 2 weeks. Features are being added and its being tweaked daily. Details at the bottom of the page.</comment>


Comparisons of powerful API testing tools - <AUTHOR> http://apitesting.bigstickcarpet.com/ <comment><USER2> A bit old school, but there's also Soap UI from Smartbear -- I know, horrible name, but you can test REST APIs as well. [https://smartbear.com/product/ready- api/soapui/overview/](https://smartbear.com/product/ready- api/soapui/overview/)

There's also Runscope (I used to work there) -- recently acquired by CA. [https://www.runscope.com](https://www.runscope.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome list of testing tools, had no idea Stoplight had a test product. Crazy how much faster prism is.</comment>


Grunt by Example - A Tutorial for JavaScript's Task Runner - <AUTHOR> http://www.brianchu.com/blog/2013/07/11/grunt-by-example-a-tutorial-for-javascripts-task-runner/

<comment><USER2> great tutorial! definitely a must read when learning Grunt</comment>