Smooth CoffeeScript - <AUTHOR> http://issuu.com/autotelicum/docs/smooth_coffeescript

<comment><USER3> The book's homepage is at: <http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth- CoffeeScript/>

<comment><USER4> The killer feature of <http://eloquentjavascript.net/> is the console, where you can run and modify the examples, and do the exercises. Do you plan an interactive HTML version?

<comment><USER3> Several of the examples in "smooth" are quite different from "eloquent" and use a http or websocket server, so they require the node.js runtime environment and can not run only in a browser. The setup I use is to have the text next to me on a tablet and a text editor that can run CoffeeScript directly on my laptop. It also takes know-how and time to produce different versions in EPUB and HTML. I tried some free conversion tools but the results were poor. I would like to fix issues and add material, there is an issue tracker on the project page, where errata and suggestions are welcome.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few suggestions if you really want to support other formats:

\+ Pandoc[1] - a Haskell program/library to translate markups from one format to another (supports LaTeX, which I think you're using).

\+ Leanpub[2] - a service that lets you write a book as Markdown or HTML and then easily publish and sell it in multiple formats (PDF, EPUB, Mobi). They do all the conversion for the output formats for you. I don't think they currently support LaTeX, but I have a recollection that they're working on it.

Having said that, it's not necessarily your job to provide us all the formats we might want. (Though going with Leanpub may provide you with a simple way to make a little money for your troubles.)

[1] <http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

[2] <http://leanpub.com/>

<comment><USER3> Well, I did not say that I really wanted to support other formats. Here are my reasons:

JavaScript has always possessed an inner, lisp-like beauty. CoffeeScript allows that beauty to shine through the surface of the syntax. I have tried in Smooth CoffeeScript to let the visual design reflect that in the way the code and text is presented.

I mentioned that I have tried converters and realized what the problems are (beyond lacking support for hyphenation, kerning and ligatures). The book's text is interspersed with code in a fixed width font. Line breaks and hyphenation marks has to be avoided as much as possible in inline code, because they can be highly confusing - does it mean a minus there or what? Then comes CoffeeScript's whitespace awareness, that means that code blocks have to be scaled, it is very confusing to use word wrapping. I have had to hand manage the typesetting by sometimes tweaking the code text, the font sizes or rewriting sentences to avoid formatting issues.

All my devices are capable of presenting pdf quite well, so I have also not felt the need to produce other formats. I checked at <http://ebook-reader- review.toptenreviews.com/> and it seems all ebook readers have some support for pdf.

If the reason for other formats is to avoid Adobe, then on the Mac there is a built-in preview utility with excellent pdf support. On Windows Google Chrome has its own pdf support built-in. With this book Chrome does say that there is something it could not render correctly, but I have not been able to find what that something might be. It looks good to me.

Creating the book in pdf has been quite labour intensive - maybe due to my lack of experience in this kind of work - so the prospect of repeating that a couple of times for HTML and EPUB does not appeal much to me. If someone else feels strongly enough about this to dedicate their time and energy to it - <USER2> uses freely available tools to do it - then I will be happy to host the result on the project site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a fan of Eloquent JavaScript. In my book on CoffeeScript (<http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript>), I recommend it as a resource for readers who want a thorough introduction to JavaScript. So obviously, I think it's pretty damn cool that someone ported his book to CoffeeScript (albeit with modified examples). The inclusion of Underscore.js as a standard library is, I think, also quite sensible.

Of course, there's a fundamental philosophical difference between my book and Smooth CoffeeScript, which is highlighted on the book's front page:

> Why no JavaScript? Because it is difficult enough to learn one programming > language at a time. This book does not assume knowledge of JavaScript or > another language.

I, on the other hand, think that it's important to understand JavaScript in order to work with CoffeeScript, and that CoffeeScript is not well-suited to being a first programming language. The situation will improve as tools for debugging CoffeeScript become available, but even then, it's unlikely that you'll use CoffeeScript for a real project without reading documentation (and code) for libraries written in JavaScript.

But hey, I'm happy to see anything that gets more people hooked on CoffeeScript. :)

<comment><USER3> Smooth CoffeeScript is a book about programming, problem solving, looking into how algorithms work, and learning from it. Those things really appealed to me in Eloquent JavaScript.

Smooth CoffeeScript uses CoffeeScript because it can express the code much more clearly than JavaScript, but the book could have been written in another language; Python for example.

I created it because it was a book I would like to read. It is great that there is now a handful of resources so you can pick what suits you best when you decide to learn CoffeeScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is some crazy stuff going on here. Awesome examples and really opened up my mind on taking advantage of what CoffeeScript allows.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice. Would be great if it was available in EPUB format.

<comment><USER8> I tried converting to epub and it lost all the code formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is going to be a great read.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there an html version?

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I missing something? The default area where the book loads is way to small to read anything, and it may be the fact that I'm so zoomed out, but this looks like it was scanned it or something. Blurry and not leveled...

Direct link to a PDF: [http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth- CoffeeScript/Smooth%20C...](http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth- CoffeeScript/Smooth%20CoffeeScript%20Web%20Optimized.pdf)

<comment><USER12> If you enable flash and click "Click to read" it'll go into fullscreen mode. Not exactly intuitive...

<comment><USER13> It's also just plain frustrating to read. The first page turn moves the page controls over, and then every subsequent page turn takes almost an entire second for its goofy animation to finish.

Why do so many e-reader/document-reader sites/apps insist on replicating old paper books buy forcing you to pause and watch a dumb animation on every page turn?</comment></comment></comment>


Everybody is exhausted - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/02/26/its-not-just-you-everybody-exhausted/372030002/ <comment><USER2> The United States is presently set on a course of self-destruction, and there appears to be little one can do about it. What would you have done if you were on the Titanic and you had already decided to be a gentlemen and let the women and children have the life rafts? I would have went and listened to the band. So it is with the United States. Just do your thing, be kind to people, and live your life in a way where if everyone did so the ship would right itself. To do otherwise is suicide.</comment>


Standardizing OpenAI's deep learning framework on PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/openai-pytorch/ <comment><USER2> At work, we switched over from TensorFlow to PyTorch when 1.0 was released, both for R&D and production... and our productivity and _happiness_ with PyTorch noticeably, significantly improved.

Back when we were using TensorFlow, whenever we wanted to try something new that wasn't already provided out-of-the-box by existing APIs, sooner or later we would find ourselves _wrestling_ with its machinery, especially for models with more complex control flow.

TensorFlow _feels_ like it was built from the ground up to scale up to billions of users and all kinds of devices, with developer productivity and happiness a secondary priority. PyTorch _feels_ like it was built the other way around, prioritizing developer productivity and happiness; other considerations were secondary.

That said, we are keeping an eye on Swift + MLIR + TensorFlow. We think it could unseat PyTorch for R&D and eventually, production, due to (a) the promise of automatic creation of high-performance GPU/TPU kernels without hassle, (b) Swift's easy learning curve, and (c) Swift's fast performance and type safety. Jeremy Howard has a good post about this: [https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai- swift/](https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/)

<comment><USER3> > TensorFlow feels like it was built from the ground up to scale up to > billions of users and all kinds of devices, with developer productivity and > happiness a secondary priority. PyTorch feels like it was built the other > way around, prioritizing developer productivity and happiness; other > considerations were secondary.

I recently moved from Google to Facebook and this is how I'd characterize most of the differences I see: Facebook optimizes for your ability to make progress above everything else. Google, not so much.

<comment><USER4> Seems to hold up for most google stuff I tried. E.g. kubernetes and angular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've started working with Flux [1] in Julia, and it's so elegant and such a great experience :). Just look at this definition of a U-net model for image segmentation: [https://gist.github.com/haampie/bceb1d59fd9a44f092f913062e58...](https://gist.github.com/haampie/bceb1d59fd9a44f092f913062e58d482). Apart from that, you can write your own custom loss functions in pure Julia that run efficiently on the GPU, language level automatic differentiation, proper integration with other packages. If people are moving away from Tensorflow, then Flux could be a solid alternative as well.

[1] [https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl](https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl)

<comment><USER6> IMO, these kinds of functional abstractions look nice on paper, but are a pain in the ass to actually use. In practice, you'll want to print out things in between each layer, you'll want to log each layer's activations, you might want to redirect a layer into another network, etc.

Both PyTorch and Tensorflow have purely functional abstractions, but they're relegated to super basic functionalities.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, can you clarify on what you think is a purely functional abstraction?

Flux is incredibly flexible and can do all sorts of things that are not limited to purely functional code and Flux is capable of many things that are straight up impossible or infeasible in PyTorch or TensorFlow (with or without their 'purely functional' abstractions).

<comment><USER6> Super late reply, so it's likely you won't see this... (Too bad HN doesn't notify on replies).

I'm not complaining about Flux in general, I'm talking about the specific example (the UNet) he brought up that he uses to claim that Julia is so elegant.

Can you elaborate on what Flux can do that Pytorch can't?

<comment><USER8> At this point, the DiffEqFlux neural differential equation library fits the neural ODE example from the original paper in 29 seconds [1]. The forward pass of torchdiffeq on trivial ODEs without neural networks takes 47 seconds [2] (and of course adding in neural networks makes it a lot more expensive). This is a massive real-world difference. It means that the Julia packages are building animations by looking at real-time fitting plots, while it's a hours long ordeal in PyTorch. Being able to use optimized packages instead of hardcoding a simple version of things really pays off in the long run, and here using a real ODE solver suite is not a small difference but rather it's multiple orders of magnitude. That's the real benefit of differentiable programming.

      [1] https://github.com/JuliaDiffEq/DiffEqFlux.jl#training-a-neural-ordinary-differential-equation
      [2] https://gist.github.com/ChrisRackauckas/cc6ac746e2dfd285c28e0584a2bfd320

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who has used both PyTorch and TensorFlow for a couple years now, I can can attest to the faster research iteration times for PyTorch. TensorFlow has always felt like it was designed for some mythical researcher that could come up with a complete architecture ahead of time, based on off-the-shelf parts.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, no wonder PyTorch has beaten Tensorflow so thoroughly in the last 3 years, going up from 1% of the papers to ~50% of the papers (TensorFlow is now down to only 23% of the papers):

[https://paperswithcode.com/trends](https://paperswithcode.com/trends)

<comment><USER11> According to the methodology on that page that would classify the standalone version of Keras (using _from keras.models_ imports as recommended by the Keras docs) as "Other". (I tried finding source code to verify this, but couldn't find it)

And if that is correct, then I'd be astonished if the vast majority of the "Other" papers aren't Keras. I work in ML and I don't think I've seen a paper that didn't use PyTorch, TensorFlow or Keras in years.

And is that's the case then almost certainly there are more that use TF than PyTorch: Pytorch is 42%, TF is 23% but Other is 36%.

(In terms of biases, I _hate_ working in Tensorflow, and much prefer PyTorch and Keras. But numbers are numbers).

<comment><USER12> Jax?

<comment><USER11> Are there any papers that use it for things other than demonstrating Jax? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Perhaps I should have specified "papers outside those introducing new frameworks, or around speed benchmarking".

There are a bunch of interesting papers using custom libraries for distributed training, and ones targeted at showing off the performance of specific hardware (NVidia has a bunch of interesting work in this space, and Intel and other smaller vendors have done things too).

<comment><USER13> It's still early days for JAX, but there's neural tangents [https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02803](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02803) and reformer [https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04451](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04451) from iclr.

<comment><USER11> I agree about it being early days.

Reformer is a good example that I'd missed.

Neural Tangents is another paper demoing a framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Happy to see PyTorch get some love. The company I am at made the same switch and everyone has loved PyTorch. It has more expressive power than Tensorflow 1.x (there are models that cannot be done with static graphs) and is simultaneously much easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there any equivalent of TF Serving for PyTorch? We have been thrilled with how robust and easy it is to deploy our models to production on the TF stack, and it worries me that the inertia in the deep learning community seems to be toward PyTorch.

<comment><USER16> Have you checked out Cortex? It's an open source platform for deploying PyTorch models easily. I wrote an article for the PyTorch blog about it: [https://medium.com/pytorch/how-to-build-production- software-...](https://medium.com/pytorch/how-to-build-production-software- with-pytorch-9a8725382f2a)

GitHub: [https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex](https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex)

Full disclosure/shameless plug: I work on Cortex

<comment><USER15> Thanks! I was not aware of this and it looks fantastic. Is it in the roadmap to target GCP, or even just a generic Kubernetes cluster?

<comment><USER16> GCP is on the immediate short-term roadmap, and we're investigating on- premise, but don't have a firm timeline on it quite (we're still a small team).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is second large framework making the switch to Pytorch.

[https://medium.com/syncedreview/japanese-unicorn- preferred-n...](https://medium.com/syncedreview/japanese-unicorn-preferred- networks-migrates-its-dl-platform-to-pytorch-a509ac8f4ba0)

</comment><comment><USER18> If PyTorch had a viable way to convert models to run on a mobile GPU or DSP, that's all I'd ever use. Currently I have to do my research in PyTorch and then laboriously port to TF to convert to TFLite, which kinda sucks because TF is full of bugs, and there are gotchas due to differences in how ops are implemented.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a surprisingly unintelligent move from OpenAI. It adds corporate inertia to something as mundane as choice of DL framework.

Imagine you worked at OpenAI. Imagine you wanted to experiment with Jax, and that it turned out to be the best solution for the problem. Now you can't ship without a solid technical justification.

Except, it's not really a technical justification that you need. You need corporate clout. You can't just be a junior engineer and make a decision that goes against corporate policy. That's the point of having a corporate policy.

I can hear a thousand people about to type "C'mon, OpenAI isn't a normal corporation." But it is. Every corporation is a normal corporation. And having policies against specific tech should make productive programmers pause.

People get jobs at companies based on whether they use React or Vue, for example. And in DL, a programming library is basically a programming language, so it's one step more powerful than that.

Here's an example. Pytorch, as far as I can tell, doesn't support running code on a TPU's CPU. (I could be wrong about this!) When you enumerate the list of accelerators available after connecting to a TPU, you get a list of 8 entries. That means they only support executing code on the _cores_ of a TPU, not the TPU's CPU. This is a huge difference. It means you're restricted to 8GB on TPUv2-8's (which you get on Colab) instead of 300GB.

Does that count as a solid technical justification to use Tensorflow for a research project instead of Pytorch? Who knows. But who wants to be the odd one out on corporate politics? Especially if a project doesn't generate any tangible results, which is often the case for research.

<comment><USER20> Or they see this problem and that's why the policy is sanely phrased as follows:

        Going forward we'll primarily use PyTorch as our
        deep learning framework but sometimes use other
        ones when there's a specific technical reason
        to do so.

<comment><USER19> It never works out this way in practice. You need corporate clout to go against corporate policy. That's the point of having a corporate policy.

 _Of course_ they added that caveat. That's probably how this idea got through in the first place. Just point at the caveat and say "But we're not _really_ throwing all the other frameworks under the bus. If everyone decides it's a good idea to use something else, we'll use something else."

Except that likely won't happen, because now as a junior engineer you need to convince N other people that using Jax was a decent choice. And it's against your company's culture to use anything but Pytorch.

This battle of Tensorflow vs Pytorch is bad for everybody involved. OpenAI released a lot of cool and important code related to Tensorflow. They did GPT-2 (tensorflow 1.x), blocksparse (also tensorflow), memory saving gradients (tensorflow 1.x), and now they're announcing they'll likely never be releasing such tooling again. Memory saving gradients have been hugely helpful to us for scaling our models beyond the normal limits.

<comment><USER21> What you're ignoring is that the switch isn't from nothing to Pytorch, it's from Tensorflow to Pytorch. It's only favoring one library over another. Your scenario with Jax hasn't changed, and such tooling is going to be released for Pytorch instead of for Tensorflow. I suspect you're only against this because you prefer Tensorflow to Pytorch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just FYI I looked at PyTorch for the first time now, and unfortunately they require Mac OS users to build it from source in order to get CUDA support:

[https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/](https://pytorch.org/get- started/locally/)

Please if someone at PyTorch is reading this, put in a request to make CUDA support the default on Mac OS.

Also, it looks like PyTorch doesn't currently support OpenCL:

[https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/488](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/488)

I can't tell by the issue comments if it's been added yet or if they plan to use Intel's oneAPI or similar.

To me, these are prerequisites for switching to PyTorch. Hopefully someone can clarify the state of these thanks!

<comment><USER23> Hi I am a PyTorch maintainer.

NVIDIA has dropped CUDA support for macOS: [http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/11/nvidia-drops-macos- support-...](http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/11/nvidia-drops-macos-support-for- cuda/)

This was pretty evident for a few years, and it's one of the top reasons for us to not provide official binaries with CUDA support -- the maintainer overhead was way too much. We did work to make sure it still builds with CUDA support from source (with a contbuild) but once CUDA 10.3 or 11 releases, we have to drop that too.

<comment><USER22> Ah thanks for that. One of my biggest concerns right now is that since SIMD won out in the performance wars, and has come to be dominated by the video game industry and proprietary players like NVIDIA, that we are missing out on a whole possible tree of evolution in computer science.

For one, that we don't have easy access to MIMD, so we can't easily/cheaply experiment with our own simulations for things like genetic algorithms.

20 years ago I wanted to go into AI research and make a multicore FPGA (say 1000+ cores) where each one could run its own instance of an OS, or at the very least an isolated runtime for something like Lisp. But the world has gone a completely different direction, and that's great and everything with all the recent advances in machine learning, but it's like comparing rasterization (what we have) to ray tracing (what we could have had). Current implementations are orders of magnitude more complex than they need to be. I've written about this a bunch:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17759391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17759391)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17419917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17419917)

So I guess short of this, I hope that PyTorch can at least provide a cross- platform performant SIMD implementation. Which I had hoped OpenCL would be, but maybe it's too much like OpenGL and we need something a level of abstraction higher for easier vector processing without all the worrying about buffers and moving between CPU and GPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's somewhat disappointing that research is the primary motivator for the switch. PyTorch still has a ways to go in tooling for toy usage of models and _deployment_ of models to production compared to TensorFlow (incidentally, GPT-2, the most public of OpenAI's released models, uses TensorFlow 1.X as a base). For AI newbies, I've seen people recommend PyTorch over TensorFlow just because "all the big players are using it," without listing the caveats.

The future of AI research will likely be interoperability between multiple frameworks to support both needs (e.g. HuggingFace Transformers which started as PyTorch-only but now also supports TF 2.X with relative feature parity).

<comment><USER25> > It's somewhat disappointing that research is the primary motivator for the > switch.

They are a research organization, how is that disappointing?

<comment><USER24> Making AI more open is synonymous with making AI more _accessible_ , which (IMO) is much better facilitated with TensorFlow/Keras versus PyTorch.

Many AI tutorials imply that the more complicated an AI approach is, the more effective it is, which isn't practical, especially for newbies without a deep background.

<comment><USER26> Accessible to whom? What makes tensorflow/keras more accessible than pytorch?

<comment><USER24> Accessible to _non-researchers_ , especially those with a programming background but not an AI background.

The TF/Keras approach advocates the _minimum_ amount of code necessary and effort needed to make model changes, with sensible default configurations and layer architectures.

<comment><USER27> Minimum=/=lowest effort.

Especially with the caveat of "with a programming background", it is far easier to reason and debug through PyTorch with just Python knowledge, compared to TensorFlow/Keras, which sooner or later requires you to learn a condensed history of TensorFlow/Keras development to understand why things are the way they are.

In my opinion,

      import lib
      lib.train("imagenet", "resnet50", epochs=10)
      lib.eval()

is NOT a good example of a beginner friendly library. It's a thin wrapper facade that hides all of the actual complexity behind "Train ImageNet in 3 lines of code!"

<comment><USER24> Fair; maybe minimum isn't the right word. More like "minimum without full abstraction."

The Keras examples are a good reference (e.g. [https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/keras/classification](https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/keras/classification) ); even without an AI background, you have a sense of both what's going on how to tweak the model to improve it.

<comment><USER28> The reason why Keras became so popular is that it borrowed a lot of concepts from Lua Torch (which predates even Theano). And anyone who worked with Torch immediately sees it reading Keras code. But Torch was Lua and naturally it received less recognition than it deserved. Your will not lose anything by simply moving to PyTorch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think it was just a matter of time till TF would get superseded by PyTorch. The only reason we kept TF on prod is the java api which allowed us to quickly load and serve TF models. I spent so many sleepless nights trying to port Torch model to TF back in the days and make it work the same as Lua based prototype. Whole TF "experience" made us switch to plain Python services model throwing away all the boilerplate Scala/Java code for TF. It doesn't happen often in tech that a better engineered product gets more traction and recognition eventually and I am glad that PyTorch did.

<comment><USER29> Pytorch actually got an experimental Java API in version 1.4 (about two weeks ago), if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I believe these days one has to know both, TensorFlow (Keras) and PyTorch; most new research is in PyTorch and most deployments are in TensorFlow. Academia can afford to run on PyTorch only, stable businesses on TensorFlow only, but for individual developers they need to know both.

</comment><comment><USER31> For folks interested in Julia and RL, I've been involved in [https://www.lyceum.ml/](https://www.lyceum.ml/) a set of tools for continuous control problems like robotics.

It's pretty quick.

<comment><USER32> Yeah!! Let's switch to Lyceum!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Has anyone taken the course mentioned "Spinning Up in Deep RL"? I've been meaning to learning some Deep RL and I was wondering if this is the best first step.

<comment><USER34> The lecture series and reference material by David Silver: [http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html). You can then supplement that with "Spinning up in Deep RL" for more hands-on experiments.</comment></comment>


Derelict Places - <AUTHOR> http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/index.php

<comment><USER2> Is there a similar site for the US?</comment>


A good summary of possible problems with fixed exchange rates (in China). - <AUTHOR> http://www.fabricegrinda.com/?p=176 <comment><AUTHOR> Not so startup or entreprenerial, but everyone should understand the implications of interest/exchange rates especially if you want to do anything globally.</comment>


If Froyo and Google TV is the best Google has to offer, they're in trouble - <AUTHOR> http://jmarinez.typepad.com/blog/2010/05/if-froyo-and-google-tv-is-the-best-google-has-to-offer-theyre-in-trouble.html Google missed the mark with Froyo and Google TV at IO and Apple will eat their lunch. <comment><USER2> Is this a subtle parody? The fact that every second item involves this fanboy threatening Google with Apple's patents is scary if not.</comment>


Google Please Hire Me - <AUTHOR> http://googlepleasehire.me/ <comment><USER2> As someone who is known to hire people once in a while I always get really suspicious when "What other say about me" sounds like the stuff I see further down the page.

Who would ever actually say something a long the lines of

"Matthew brought a combination of vision, strategy and execution that can rarely be found in one individual. His brand development and messaging at launch resulted in demand that exceeded expectations…an ideal talent for the product marketing executive that is looking for the next rockstar to add to their growing team."

I mean "his brand development..." really?

That is so written to sound serious not to actually sound like something other people would say about Matthew.

I would much rather trust stuff like:

"Matthew is one of those guys who get it. He is fun to work with and very knowledgable and have a good track record of successes"

<comment><USER3> In my experience it's not uncommon for a boss to have people draft up their own recommendations when it comes time to find a new place to work and then just sign them afterwards.

<comment><USER4> I'd say more often than not that's the case I see. Is it ethical, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a programmer this resume repells me, it is full of bullshit marketing terms and this appears to be the kind of guy who wants to earn top dollar just for being an important marketing guy who supposedly can do wonders, of which there are droves.

<comment><USER6> Just for the record, there are good marketers and bad marrketers; the good ones don't talk like that, and don't live their life around buzzwords.

<comment><USER7> In my experience, using buzzwords is really useful...if you want to work for the kind of company that is impressed by buzzwords. On the other hand, if you want to work for thoughtful, innovative people, it is best to be genuine, passionate, and knowledgeable about the product(s) you wish to market. I'm also a firm believer that marketers who want to work in technology should learn to program - inevitably, they will have to learn from engineers and a little bit of experience programming makes that process so much easier.

Unfortunately, when I suggested those things at a recent alumni meeting, the response was less than positive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've downloaded this guy's resume ([http://googlepleasehire.me/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/Resume...](http://googlepleasehire.me/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/Resume-of-Matthew-Epstein-Product-Marketer-Digital- Strategist.pdf)) and while I'm aware he's doing something that I don't know much about, I am puzzled by the 'technology' thing in his skills chart. Can someone give me a hint what does he mean by giving himself 6 skill points in it? Same question for 'research & analytics' and 'social media' - these terms are so vague that their meaning is close to none for me.

<comment><USER9> Generally, I do like skill charts that look like RPG character sheets (so much so, I've been using this paradigm for my own skill profile <http://udos.name>), however as you said this particular one seems indeed a bit devoid of actual information. Even if the categories were meaningful, what's the point in having a scale of 1 to 7 when the lowest outlier rating you give yourself is 4?

<comment><USER10> I just signed up for an account just so I could post how awesome that skill profile is. Some site really needs to copy this idea.

<comment><USER11> After reading this post, I decided it was a good time for an inaugural post.

Here it is. How am I doing?

Your skill profile incorporates two of my favorite things: P&P RPGs and employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In norwegian we have a word for this, 'kleint'. In danish 'kikset'. Which means a high level of embarrassing.

<comment><USER13> I think the English word would be _awkward_

<comment><USER14> How about cringeworthy? Def: Causing feelings of embarrassment or awkwardness

I could feel my toes curling at certain points. Funny, but not perhaps what was intended...

<comment><USER12> Cringeworthy describes the feeling very good :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "request an interview" has an odd tone given how eager this guy is for a gig at Google.

Also, one thing I wonder about these reverse applications: you're screwed when it comes time to negotiate your package, aren't you?

<comment><USER16> So, am I the only one here who feels like this is an obvious (and funny) parody? Or are all the "serious" comments critiquing the video/website/C.V. just another level of irony?

<comment><USER17> It seems to be done either genuinely or as part of some larger campaign to promote himself / see if he "could" get an interview: <http://matthew- epstein.com/land-a-job-at-google-journey/>

<comment><USER18> the "waah I didn't get to play all my cards" thing is weird. he wanted a google interview, he got a google interview, holster your guns matthew, the fight's over

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't really know about this kind of reverse applications. Looks like the guy would work for Google just for the name.

        I invested over $3,000 of my own capital to create a
        marketing campaign that would get you to notice me.
        I haven't been that desperate to get someone to notice
        me since my first highschool crush.

Desperate? Really? What if Google calls to offer an under payed job?

But, hell, marketing is a so different universe that this could really work.

<comment><USER20> This kind of 'fanboyism' for companies seems kind of unhealthy to me.

<comment><USER21> Unhealthy yet totally not surprising. From lowest-common-denominator pop culture all the way down to some obscure programming language community you see the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> These are getting a little long in the tooth, wonder if they'll continue to be effective for much longer.

<comment><USER20> He should have recorded a Youtube video asking Eric Schimdt out on a date.

<comment><USER23> You mean, on a g+ Gangout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Was this an attempt at a Rushmore parody? As that's what it felt like.

On a serious note, it concerns me slightly that over the entire website the moustache is mentioned more than any credible reason why Google would actually want to hire him.

Equally, on his resume - his top ranking skill is 'Using Microsoft Office' - when compared to his other attributes ranking, I would say that's slightly worrying. i.e. You rate yourself more of a master of Microsoft Office, than you are of digital marketing skills.

Finally, this seemed to be released on the 29th of July, and only has 506 views - currently, it seems to be failing slightly on a digital marketing front. (Although this may change now with a top of hacker news / inevitable post on Techcrunch, effect)

<comment> mkr-hn 506 is plenty if one of the 506 is the one the poster was trying to reach. Reaching the right people is more important than reaching a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmmm being desperate used to be a bad thing. Maybe I am old school.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. Being modest was a virtue too. I am definately old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A guy tried something similar (called "Can Google Hear Me") a few years ago: <http://www.cangooglehearme.com/>

<comment><USER11> Aaron Stanton actually has a product, which is what he was trying to get in front of Google - www.booklamp.org

It's an interesting concept - Pandora for books. I spent some time looking at it as a potential complementary technology for a reader app I worked on a few years ago.

Fairly rudimentary algorithm at that time, but it's conceptually interesting and worth burning a couple of cycles watching the intro video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I tried sending a reverse resume to Google. I sent in cupcakes with the URL of the custom-domain-resume-website on it. Got lots of hits from Mountain View and Atlanta on the day, but in the end didn't even an email saying "no thanks".

Oh well.

This guy's app is clearly way better than mine was :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it just me, or does anyone else feel these "please hire me" news stories are irrelevant on a site that is centered around people starting their own companies?

Still, I wish him the best of luck.

<comment><USER29> I don't agree. Interviewing and employment are vital for any start-up company. And those reverse applications certainly have some ideas that enrich that field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think there is a need for a reverse job portal which is open. So candidates can post their resumes, profiles, videos etc. to this portal and also select the categories or companies for which they want to be considered. Any employer can search for the candidates on this portal and contact them.

The idea is that the data is open and not in control of a job portal. There can be some security measures to keep the data safe and stop the spammers.

Not sure if something like that is already there.

<comment><USER31> Sounds like <http://linkedin.com> to me.

<comment><USER30> Not sure about linkedin. First of all you need an employer subscription to see the data for all the users. Also, for most of the users the data they put on linkedin is not very structured. It is mostly the dates of employment and sometimes a very general description about them. The features that can distinguish such a site is that candidate data can be open and there is more structure to it and the primary purpose of the site is getting a job rather than business networking.

<comment><USER32> This is interesting. You could also add things like geolocation, matching a la okcupido and other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't know if he'll be hired by Google, but I can see him working in the film industry as an actor: it reminds me Borat!

<comment><USER34> I'm not the only one... sweet. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> in the skills section of his rrsume, apparently SEO and web design are basically the same thing: "Web Design/SEO"

That speaks volumes.

<comment><USER36> They both go very much hand-in-hand. Not saying they should be a single entity, but when you are at-least designing a website you should be aware of what "SEO" tricks are good and bad for the site.

SEO is so bad anyway in my opinion - should be more about User Experience and Usability

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My understanding (from what I've read on HN, and similar sites) - getting a Google interview isn't too hard. A PhD helps, a stunt like this helps, but you really just need to convince them that you _might_ be useful.

Getting through Google's possibly broken interview system is the difficult part.

Still, this looks like more fun than writing a traditional resume.

<comment><USER38> Yeah what was running through my mind when watching was why Google? Why not something a bit more challenging? I read that they are hiring 6,000 people this year. Why not start a startup instead, and try and get into a great incubator program?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It already worked for him (well, if it's true). "Day Two: Google Contacted Me. Well, that was quick."

<http://matthew-epstein.com/land-a-job-at-google-journey/>

</comment><comment><USER40> Would have been better without the video...

<comment><USER41> Totally agree!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> But was it even his idea and execution?

You can't really tell that much from this video. He had others involved (for shooting at the very least) and we don't know if he edited it, wrote the script or if any of the ideas were his or a friend. Not that anything was spectacular of course.

He should have at least put at the end some "credits" or even commentary on what part of it he was responsible for.

The video is trying to say "I'm creative and resourceful enough to do this video" but we don't know his actual role in the video other than that he was able to appear in this part.

<comment><USER43> He has credits of people who helped him at the bottom of his website. We live in the same city and I have a similar website out as well www[dot]hiremeaccenture[dot]com

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Well I think I'll be plagiarizing that resume layout, slick and precise.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm an intern on the Mid-Market Product Marketing team. I reached out to Matthew to see if I can give him any help/advice now that he's already got the referral in.

<comment><USER46> I'm sure he appreciates it, but I'm fairly certain his primary interest is with the Market-Making Pre-Market Product Marketing team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Are Google going to be interested in SEO? Anyway, good luck!

</comment><comment> johnx123-up Not gonna _judge_ his skills or resume. But, I'm sure that he'll get a call from Google. Only very few guys can do _anything_ like this. What if Google rejects? Will any other employer be able to work with him then?

</comment><comment><USER48> the video is very off-putting.

<comment><USER49> too much "ron burgundy"

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> For more details, see his blog post: <http://www.matthew-epstein.com/land-a- job-at-google-journey/>

Google contacted him a day after publishing it.

<comment><USER51> I get:

"Your browser (Internet Explorer 6) is out of date. It has known security flaws and may not display all features of this and other websites."

Which is funny as I have the latest Firefox...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Those questions were reasonable. It is supposed to test your strategic thinking skills. The attitude seems a little cold, according to your description in the article.

I used to work for Google in Sales.

</comment><comment><USER43> I also have a site that I am using to try and land a job. <http://www.hiremeaccenture.com/>

</comment><comment><USER53> Update to the story is here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2844001>

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm getting a 503 error. I would hope Google would hire people that can keep a site online.

I know, usually it would be very mean. But given the purpose of this site, for it not to be able to withstand the "HN effect" (is there a term for this? Penny Arcade have "wanged", which is my personal favourite) seems like a fairly gross oversight.

</comment><comment><USER34> Matthew Epstein: Cultural Learnings of America for getting the job you dreamed.

</comment><comment><USER55> For gods sake, its a parody.

<comment><USER56> I really hope so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> title should be "how NOT to get hired by google"

</comment><comment><USER34> Wait wait I've seen this guy before... Is he Borat? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat> Hahahahaha.

</comment><comment><USER58> He reminds me of Stephen Colbert.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why Google? Why not Apple?

</comment><comment><USER60> server is down

</comment><comment><USER61> Did it work?

</comment><comment><USER62> what a c __t. bad bad bad borat parody. not funny at all isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't see his online marketing savvy reflecting on the way he chose to promote his own skills in the market.

Especially that he's saying "In this case the product is me, Matthew Epstein.". You're calling yourself a _product_ and yet you don't market that product remarkably, IMO.

Best of luck anyway, hope you'll get a good offer out of this.

</comment><comment><USER29> Isn't the "LATEST TWEET" section supposed to show an actual tweet? It's blank and only has a twitter icon that links to his twitter account.

</comment><comment><USER63> Lol.

</comment><comment><USER64> ok, work for Google, but, be very careful to reveal high value ideas to Google! \-- ghostnasa.com/posts/008moonprize.html \--</comment>


Great Startup Insights from Lisa, CEO/Nomiku – W15 YC – Interview  Valley Talks - <AUTHOR> http://www.valleytalks.com/lisa-fetterman-ceo-of-nomiku-sous-vide-cooking-appliance/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, Lisa from Nomiku is one of the YC graduates (W15) that I recently interviewed for my new show Valley Talks. It's a great talk about raising over $1 milion on Kickstarter, bulding a hardware & software product, graduating from YC, running a startup with a spouse and more. Check out the video!</comment>


Dear Hollywood: You're Not Even Trying Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chrisdrane.com/?p=42

<comment><USER2> > You're Not Even Trying Anymore

That's not true, Hollywood is trying -- they're trying to make the stockholders happy. Sequels of movies that did well in the box office, predictable plot outlines that have been proven to appeal to moviegoers, dozens of nearly identical films based on what has worked in the past -- this is good business.

Remember, film-making is not primarily an art form, it's a business. The highest-paid, most respected producers and directors are those who stay within budget and create commercially successful films.

Want to change things? Stop paying to see typical Hollywood films. Go to small art theaters, or rent or buy small, well-reviewed independent films that won't be displayed at your local multiplex. Don't patronize mass-market theaters, instead acquire and see the sort of films only seen on college campuses and art houses.

Example -- do you want to see Scarlett Johansson in "The Avengers" or in "Lost in Translation"? "Lost in Translation", a small-budget project written and directed by Sofia Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola's daughter), is an absolutely terrific film, well worth your time. "The Avengers" is pure eye candy, and a pretty good film as major action-film productions go, but it just can't compare to "Lost in Translation".

My point? You have choices. Vote with your feet.</comment>


Almost out of the uncanny valley - <AUTHOR> http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/post/122102666801/skin-stretch-computer-graphic-research-from-the Better link http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/SkinStretch/ <comment><AUTHOR> link to the paper [http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/SkinStretch/](http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/SkinStretch/)</comment>


Ask HN: Ideas man vs  Practical Man - <AUTHOR>

I've been reading HN for quite a while now, since the 'beginning' as you might say.
I'm ashamed.
I don't know how to code to a build standard and won't have the possibility to learn. Now I'm good at coming up with ideas but havn't the faintest how to put them into action. I've got a notebook jammed with ideas in different fields but no practial way of going about things. For the record I'm a CAD technician with IT support capability.
In essence my query to you is : How do I take my ideas for startups and run with them without turning into a pointy haired boss.
EDIT: You know what... it always happens at the right time. http://paulgraham.com/start.html <comment><USER2> Assuming you want to find a technical co-founder you will need to bring valuable skills to the table. If you have truly amazing ideas this could be _maybe_ 50% of what you bring to the table, but more likely your ideas will be 5-10% of your contribution, because once you get going on an idea you are going to need to iterate and at that point you need everyone to be bringing ideas to the table.

The essence of a pointy-haired boss is someone who has a lot of ideas (which may be good or bad), but is so entrenched in middle management that they have no idea how to actually get things done. As an engineer I love when people have great ideas, but I hate when I'm the only one working 16 hour days because the non-technical folks think their job is to tell me what to do then wait til it's done.

What constitutes valuable contributions? Well, I think Spencer Fry said it better than anyone else around here ever has: <http://spencerfry.com/whats-a- non-programmer-to-do>

<comment><AUTHOR> I half remembered that post, thank you for the direct link.

If you where in my position now - what would you do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest you seek out a good partner that balances your strengths and weaknesses.

I have read something (don't recall what or where) that talked about people who were failures until they found the right partner -- like song writers that could do one part of it but not all of it and didn't get successful until they found a partner that was really good at the part they couldn't do but who couldn't do the piece they could do. (I think this is the story behind Gilbert and Sullivan.) So I would suggest you first look for information on how to find a compatible partner and then later go find that partner.</comment>


Few words about `Accept-Language` header - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@project2501/few-words-about-accept-language-header-5b4ffb184b2c <comment><USER2> What is the rationale for sites selecting a language using GeoIP instead of the Accept-Language header? The user is literally telling the site which language they prefer. Plus a user can change their browser or OS language settings more easily than move their IP address. One argument I've heard is that few users know how to change these settings, whereas GeoIP benefits more users than it hurts.

FWIW, in my testing, Chrome and Firefox use their own language settings instead of checking the OS settings. Edge does.</comment>


Review my startup: Speechable.com - <AUTHOR> http://speechable.com Speechable™ is a free photo service that lets you easily upload and add speech bubbles to your photos and share them with friends via email or on Facebook®, MySpace®, Orkut, blogs, and message boards. <comment><USER2> You've got a little too much advertising on there, and it looks a bit unprofessional to me.

1) Instead of squeezing your content between two vertical ad banners, move all your advertising to the right side, and put your content on the left. Putting all of your content between two giant banners gives me the impression that you don't care about your content, and you're more interested in pushing your ads.

2) I would probably ditch the Comic Sans for a cleaner looking font, but that's just me.

3) I would move your content higher 'above the fold', and clearly delineate when it starts. For example, the current top image is 'Message from Jellied Awful'. It looks a bit weird cause of all the extra whitespace in the image itself, and I can't tell if it is supposed to the part of the page, or if it is user submitted content. Putting a border around it might help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I think those are some good suggestions. I admit ad placement is not something I'm good at. I'll continue to work on the layout a bit.

<comment><AUTHOR> done.</comment></comment></comment>


Why we don't need more women in tech... yet - <AUTHOR> http://jolieodell.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/ <comment><USER3> I'm not sure this argument stands up to the facts. Women have been pouring into every discipline over the past twenty+ years. That's a significant number because we're now talking people born in the 1990s, which can not be said to be a decade untouched by feminism. Women are graduating with more degrees then men now, women are the majority on campus, and the proportions are rising. Every discipline, engineering and computer science no exception, has been soliciting for women and minorities for decades now.

And yet, as pointed out in the article, the percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women is going _down_ , which I think is an acceptable proxy for the presence of women in tech. Yet numerous other "male" fields have been entered and in some cases dominated by women. The very same women who were raised on Barbies and ponies.

Is the _only_ theory that fits the facts that somehow, virtually uniquely across all the fields into which the women have come streaming in, despite equal if not at times greater solicitation for women to come in to the discipline, computer science has somehow escaped the incredible dominance of political correctness on campuses and managed to create this fantastically and uniquely hostile environment for women, and therefore has some sort of major responsibility for changing itself? The _only_ hypothesis?

What about this one: In an environment where a thousand voices are shouting for the women to come study $X, it doesn't take very much of a natural disinclination towards a certain discipline for it to very, very rarely be the top choice for a woman. It's not as if there aren't disciplines unbalanced every bit as much in favor of women, and for the same reason; it doesn't take much natural disinclination, for whatever the reason, for a field to very, very rarely be the top choice for the man.

Every year that goes by like this, every year that the STEM initiatives get even more strident and better funded, every year that women continue streaming from our very-politically-correct lower schooling systems into our very- politically-correct higher schooling systems and choose not to study computer science, I find the hypothesis that computer science is somehow deficient that much less compelling. If computer science were any more solicitous of women we'd have to _draft_ them.

(Note: For once I do not necessarily mean "politically correct" as a slur. For the purposes of this message, I merely mean that the idea that primary or higher education has been systematically structured against woman for the past twenty years is absurd. The _suspicion_ of sexism in this environment, in this timeframe, is enough to end your career advancement, if not your career itself. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to consider a hypothesis other than the "deck is stacked" hypothesis that we've been using for something like _fifty years_ now and consider just for a moment some other hypotheses, in the interests of science.

I am also confining myself to the question of the education time; even if the workplace is somehow hostile to women today, the ultimate solution to that problem is graduating more women into it; between that and the copious and rather strong laws on this front it'll work itself out after that.)

<comment><USER4> Here's actual data: <http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/cwsem/PGA_049131>

What "natural disinclination" do you think women have, exactly? They don't like math? Women received 47% of math undergrad degrees in 2002 and that number has been stable for 20 years. They don't like computers? The physical sciences use computers pretty heavily, and women received 42% of undergraduates degrees in those fields in 2002, compared to 28% in 1983. They don't like the geeky sci-fi image? 42% of astronomy degrees went to women in 2002, compared to 25% in 1983.

Engineering degrees are still male dominated, women only got 20% of those, but that's still 7 points higher than the 1983 number. The percentage of computer science degrees that went to women decreased from 36% in 1983 to 27% in 2002, to 18% in 2008.

At least we can agree that there's something unique about computer science that it goes against the trend.

<comment><USER3> I think you think you are disproving my point with those numbers, but I think it reinforces it. In what exact manner has the computer field failed to be accepting of women in the way that somehow math and the other physical sciences haven't? In the strongly-politically-correct environment that all women entering college have grown up in (and I reiterate my parenthetical in my first posting for those who may have forgotten), can someone show me exactly what it is that computer science and engineering have somehow failed when the evidence clearly shows that efforts to reach out to women have been very successful on the whole?

Is tarring thousands of people with the charge of rampant sexism _really_ the only hypothesis we can discuss every time this issue comes up?

You ask me what "natural disinclination" I think women have, but you're getting the logic backwards. I'm suggesting that if you look at the data that it may suggest the idea that maybe there is a natural disinclination, not that I axiomatically assert that there is one and therefore it is the explanation. Can we at least _consider_ that hypothesis, rather than implicitly and rather frequently accusing engineering of being somehow the sole holdout of troglodytes and evilly conspiring to hold down the little girls, who have somehow managed to transcend all the other evil conspiracies in all the other fields but just can't seem to shake this one?

<comment><USER5> I think you misunderstand. Your point is that computer science, as a field, has done many things to attract women and that it has still been unsuccessful. Furthermore, since so much effort has been put forth in this pursuit, the computer science community cannot be held responsible for the gender inequality.

I'm not sure that that is what you are trying to convey, but that is about the clearest argument I can read from what you wrote. If this is indeed your argument, then it sounds like you are in violent agreement with the author of the article. The major difference appears to be that you argue the gender discrepancy is just women's preference whereas the article posits it to be a consequence of gender mores (an admittedly subtle distinction).

If I have misunderstood, I'd be interested in clarification.

<comment><USER6> Um, I _think_ that jerf is trying to say that your figures can be interpreted another way. For example, maybe back in '83, computer science was comparatively friendlier towards women than other maths-oriented degrees, such as engineering, medecine, and astronomy. But as these other degrees have become less mysogynistic, they have successfully taken women away from maths disciplines that had previously been comparatively friendlier to women. It would be interesting to know how the percentage of women choosing maths-heavy degrees has evolved over the same period.

<comment><USER7> According to the link above, there were approximately equal amounts of 24-year-old men and women getting bachelor's degrees in 1980, but undergraduating men proportionally outnumbered women in natural sciences and engineering 2.66:1. By 1998, bachelor's degrees had increased by 34% for men and 85% for women, but in NS&E the increases had been 23% and 110%, leaving the proportional gender ratio of NS&E undergraduates at 2.14:1. Notably, engineering degrees for men fell by 21%, which had a larger impact than women entering.

I didn't hunt for post-bubble figures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As one of those elusive women in tech... I don't know. I have mixed feelings on the whole issue and usually try to avoid it, mostly because I just don't see it as a big deal. I've never felt like an outcast or that I didn't belong in this field because of my gender, nor have I ever been made to feel like the center of attention because of it (thank goodness). It just is.

Of all the women I know personally, only one other works as a programmer. The others seem to have no interest, and not because of some social pressure or stereotype, or the long hours, or some perceived gender bias, but because the work itself just doesn't interest to them. So I don't see why it should be a big deal that they're not doing something they don't want to do.

I guess the question then becomes could/should the industry be made more appealing to women? Maybe. I have no idea how that could be accomplished, though.

Maybe it's not the industry that's the problem, but the lack of exposure to it. Mothers are big role models for little girls, and with less women in tech to begin with, there aren't as many of them to spark that interest in their daughters. Maybe more encouragement from female teachers and geek dads would do the trick.

I was a perpetual tinkerer as a kid, always building, creating, experimenting, and what have you. My father encouraged it. He kept me in a steady supply of lumber and nails, bought me chemistry sets, erector sets, a telescope, radio kits, helped me build my first computer and bought me programming books. By high school, I was a licensed HAM radio operator who was writing programs, designing circuits, wiring houses, and training search dogs.

I guess I never did fall into the stereotypical gender role I was supposed to, but it was never pushed upon me, either, nor was it discouraged. I simply followed my interests and was encouraged and allowed to do so. I try to do the same with my own daughter and, yeah, she's a bit of a geek in the making.

Anyway, this is getting kind of long and rambling. I'm not sure where the problem lies, but I'm still not convinced it's as big a problem as it's made out to be. It's kind of like asking why there aren't more 20yr olds in the folk music industry. Answer: because they don't want to.

<comment><USER9> A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with just a computer was close to her personal idea of hell. She likes to interact with people, meet new people etc.

Now granted this is just one data point. But, for me at least, it opens the door to a different hypothesis:

1\. Women have a significantly different nature of the work / salary trade-off from men. 2\. Reduced interaction with people is a put-off for women. 3\. Thus, only half of society is really willing to do the geekiest tech-sector jobs, which puts a premium on the salaries for those jobs.

<comment><USER10> This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.

I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry- level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but when you first take the job you'll spend at least a couple of years dealing mainly with just the computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I blame John Romero.

John Romero, for those who don't know (or used to know, before his name faded into obscurity over a decade ago), was at one point best known for his work on idSoftware and his creation of several milestone games such as Doom. He then split off to release his own game, Daikatana, a move that garnered a particular amount of hype. The message at the time in 1997 seemed to be, "Video games are cool. So maybe _making_ video games is cool?"

As a young high schooler in 1997, reading about John Romero in the late 1990s basically made me want to be a programmer. He was the proverbial "rock star," right down to the ridiculous hair and outfits (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romero_3designers.jpg>).

By now I've probably jogged your memory and you know the end. Daikatana flopped and Romero ended up with so much egg on his face he pretty much faded into obscurity. The rock star programmer died as a concept (only to be resurrected 8-10 years later in job descriptions for companies wanting brilliant 25 year olds willing to solve all their problems and work for peanuts).

I believe an alternate reality exists, where John Romero succeeded, Daikatana was a smash hit, and the art of programming truly entered pop culture celebrity. Romero's dizzying fame and fortune soon found him in dizzying benders in Vegas. His successors continue on the trail he's blazed, bedding supermodels and entering rehab in six month intervals. Smash hit video game after smash hit video game is released, their programming teams rising in notoriety, and a Hollywood exec glances over a spec script and thinks, "hmm, maybe we should make that show about programmers." The working title is changed to "Turing's Anatomy" and then it's released, featuring Dr. Meredith Turing, who works as the principal engineer for the Seattle Grace Gaming Company, where she heads a team of programmers in solving software problems with unorthodox diagnostic approaches, while struggling to prevent the expectations of her genius grandfather from overwhelming her.

Is that reality better than what we're dealing with now? I have no idea. I do know though, that in that reality, women make up 50% of computer science students.

<comment><USER12> I highly doubt that the failure of one company caused all women to give up on software development because it wasn't cool any more (Carmack was equally or more of rock star). Especially since _working_ for a game company is one of the most grueling experiences in the software industry. On top of that, as "famous" as he may have seemed, I challenge you to find someone who didn't play computer games that even remotely knows who he is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm usually wary of this topic, since it's both overplayed and has a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, but Jolie's posts are what it _should_ be like — high on facts, low on melodrama, and coming to an actual, pragmatic conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER14> This clearly isn't the heart of the article, but are transgendered people really underrepresented in tech? It's anecdotal, but I'd estimate that 90% of the transgendered people I've met have been in tech.

<comment><USER15> All kinds of social outcasts seem to be over-represented in tech. It's like that one lunch table in school where everyone who wasn't popular sat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a journal paper about a year ago by Sapna Cheryan called _Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender Participation in Computer Science_ that you can read here:

[http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Courses/ILT/ILT0010/Ambientbe...](http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Courses/ILT/ILT0010/AmbientbelongingHowstereotypicalcuesimpactgenderparticipationincomputerscience.pdf)

The dumbed-down version is here:

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps- wo...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps-women- computer-science/)

In short, it appears that CS has a serious grassroots marketing problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think that, apart from a slightly misleading title, this article is really well done, and gets to the core of the matter. By and large, I think, society starts conditioning for gender roles very early-girls get dolls, guys get erector sets. (in general)

But it certainly doesn't _have_ to be that way--there's no reason why people can't get more engineering-oriented toys for female children as well, and I'm sure most people who read HN would be more likely to get toys along those lines for their children, regardless of gender.

The issue becomes, then, convincing society at large that this is an issue that needs attention, and that the typical gender roles and toys only reinforce inequality (like representation in tech). That, unfortunately, is difficult, when some (very vocal) people refuse to acknowledge that there is any discrimination in society, and many would think that changing culture around toys is "just being PC."

Such a large change would take a massive effort. While the STEM initiatives going on today, especially those directed at minorities, are a step in the right direction, for them to be effective, I think they'd have to get a _lot_ more mainstream awareness--right now, some people are aware of them, but the majority, in my experience, are not, and even among those that are aware of it, not many a) think it's a good idea and b) care.

Perhaps if a bunch of celebrities got behind it, ads were taken out online and on primetime TV, and politicians started caring? Maybe calling politicians to support STEM initiatives, especially minorities, could help?

<comment><USER18> I'm not entirely convinced that "society starts conditioning for gender roles very early". You'd have to show me hard data. On the other hand, there is fascinating evidence to prove the reverse:

Case in point is David Reimer, who received the first ever sex re-assignment surgery conducted on a developmentally normal child at age 22 months. David became Brenda.

"At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns."

<http://www.slate.com/id/2101678/>

<comment><USER17> Hm, that's an interesting story. (Somewhat weird and immoral that they would change someone's biological gender before they have the ability to understand what's going on, much less consent, but we can look at the case.)

I don't think that Reimer's case disproves what I say--I was dealing more with the _roles_ which the genders often play, and the _fields_ to which men vs. women are more likely to enter, while this case deals with gender _identity_. Gender identity is likely not something which is affected significantly by environmental changes, but it is far more likely (I unfortunately don't have numbers and don't know where to look--does anyone know of a relevant study?) that gender roles could be significantly affected by upbringing.

There's no natural reason why women shouldn't go into tech, other than that it's a male-dominated field and that women are, in modern society, often encouraged to avoid such fields.

<comment><USER19> As sad as the story is, I find it a bit of a stretch that a boy would "naturally" tear off a dress at age 2 either, since children of both sexes were dressed in such manners for many centuries. It seems much more likely that he'd picked up cues that he was supposed to be male and was rejecting things that his culture told him were female.

<comment><USER17> It's entirely possible that he did. Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Formation_of_ge...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Formation_of_gender_identity)) says that "studies estimate the age at which gender identity is formed at around 2-3."

It's probably both cultural and biological in this case, I'd imagine. (it could be that he'd learned that dresses were associated with females through cultural conditioning, but he mentally knew on some level [maybe subconscious] that he was male, or something along those lines.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have been a professional software developer for 10 years now. Today on my way to work I have realized once again that in all those years, I have not held a single job that was any fun at all. (Not for want of switching - <USER2> longest I ever lasted at one company was one year).

Programming is fun, but programming jobs suck. At least the vast majority of them. Save for starting my own business, my hopes are close to zero to find a fun programming job in the future.*

Maybe women are just better than men at figuring such things out and going for jobs that are more fun.

This would also explain the decline of women in tech since the eighties. I suppose cubicles and all that only appeared around that time.

* I would like jobs like Data Mining for Backtype or TheSixtyOne, but jobs like that are rare. I also don't have the required portfolio yet.

</comment><comment><USER21> I largely agree with the conclusion, but where are all these people who claim that women working non-tech jobs in tech companies magically count as tech jobs? This is the first time I've ever heard the issue framed this way. I've _always_ heard it framed as a problem with the number of women choosing CS and math degrees and making it out to industry.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why aren't there women in technology today? Probably because they're smart enough to stay away. Technology today, particularly startups, is an ego driven, fad chasing death-march.

What sane person would want to spend their time with emotional children reinventing the wheel and following every fad that comes along? Instead you could work in pr, or management, or even cabinetmaking.

So why don't we have women in tech? Because they have more foresight than us.

<comment><USER23> That's pretty sexist, isn't it?

<comment><USER24> Trashing the field isn't sexist. Bitter, maybe.

<comment><USER25> I think the implication was that it is sexist to imply that women have better judgment than men, and that this causes them to stay out of tech. It's the first part that's sexist, not the second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've heard many stories about people who tried to raise their girls like boys, only to find that eventually they would still crave for pink stuff. Edit: pink == girly, I didn't mean explicitly pink

<comment><USER26> Those stories may be correct, but they are inevitably misguided. The blue-for- boys and pink-for-girls convention seems to be a 20thC invention: <http://histclo.com/gender/color.html>

<comment><USER20> I am sure it is somehow culturally induced, but it might not be in the control of the parents to prevent it? There is other environment besides the parent's home.

<comment><USER26> I absolutely agree with you that it is cultural influence - that's my point! There is no specific relation between gender and colour, it is entirely culturally-induced.

Parents may say that they have raised their child gender-neutral, but that is to some extent impossible since gender-norms are all around us, often unconsciously so. When they see their child craving gender-specific toys, it's more likely an indicator that they have not been as successful as they would wish to be.

<comment><USER20> It's not so easy to change culture, though. Also I think at least some parts of culture have evolved because of biological differences between the genders. I don't think women will ever be exactly the same as men - unless we all converge on some new androgynous type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883)</comment>


Are universities failing entrepreneurs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/column/1380/a-university-for-entrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> I was under the impression that universities were institutions that distributed knowledge, not entrepreneurial skill factories.

FYI, many schools have had entrepreneurial programs for years (maybe even decades in some cases.) These aren't new, maybe more popular today, but certainly not new.

</comment><comment><USER3> Universities are failing the progression of thought, period. Few are actually encouraging people to share ideas freely; many are "open-minded" as long as your ideas are leftist and not too offensive.

I'm a high school senior and many colleges I've looked at and applied to have stricter regulations on speech than high schools and super-limiting workplaces.

Papers are being assigned with minimum length requirements, experiments involving drugs are being squashed, and political correctness is often being held higher than freedom, honesty, and the exchange of ideas.

So what I mean by all this is that, yes, to look at this progression towards bullshit and think "Maybe I'll learn to run a business there" is nonsense. I think it's good that entrepreneurs are spending less and less time with "higher" education. Get the fuck out and start actually building things.

<comment><USER4> I attended the university with "the worst free-speech policies in America", and we had an active Objectivist Society and a Republican Club that spent its time trolling the rest of the (very left-wing) campus. They spoke quite freely.

The issues tend more towards the administration wanting to prevent a riot and passing speech restrictions than towards "Free Gaza" hipster-activists actually managing to really suppress speech through heckling.

If you think that a minimum-length requirement on a paper is an odious suppression of your rights, I advise you to:

A) Right a truly concise paper and pass it in with a note justifying its brevity on grounds of said concision. Warning: only the best writers can really do this.

B) "Get the fuck out and start actually building things." You might make a good sum of money that way, but you won't ever learn or think much. Just another thoughtless capitalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not always sure it is up to the university to help entrepreneurs in a formal way.

However I was impressed when our neighbors to the South (Univ of Mich) created a Masters in Entrepreneurship.

<http://entrepreneurship.umich.edu/>

Details are scarce but judging by Steve Blank's enthusiasm it hews closer to Lean Startup than a traditional MBA.

Yet when I posted it in a local forum the consensus was the money for the degree would be better spent for startup capital.

</comment><comment><USER6> Universities are not going to 'make' entrepreneurs. That trigger usually happens a lot earlier in life. Take for example, the "Montessori Mafia" that includes people like Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Will Wright, Jimmy Wales, Julia Child, and Sean "P.Diddy" Combs. The common thread among them is that they all were educated in a Montessori environment ([http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the- montessori-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori- mafia/)). At a very early age, they were empowered with and nurtured to exercise their minds in ways that coincidentally make for successful entrepreneurs. I'm not saying Montessori is necessarily the only way to do this, but I think if you spoke to 10 entrepreneurs, a majority would point to experiences in their youth as having had an impact on their path.

Someone else that speaks to this is Sir Ken Robinson (Changing the Education Paradigms): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U>

</comment><comment><USER7> Universities, by nature, have very rigid course structure that must be followed. Add other responsibilities like administrative formalities and deadline based work and universities become the last place an entrepreneur would be found. For example, if you watch the show Numb3rs, one of the issues that the crime-solving math proff has with the university is his lack of presence to teach and guide students. That is, what I believe, the problem with universities. Perhaps the online universities will resolve these issues as there will be faster processes and online paperwork that could be done at leisure. ( I ha e not read the article yet)

<comment><USER8> You know what else has administrative formalities and rigid deadlines? Running a business. Suggesting an entrepreneur avoids these things is rather silly.

IMHO the larger problem with universities is (in CS, at least) their subject matter largely provides theory and foundations without enough practical exercise.

I realize it's a place of higher learning but graduating students who have never written larger applications than a few hundred lines of code is a disservice to the students who will have trouble adapting to coding in the real world.

<comment><USER9> Where did you attend University? Most other computer science majors I've met encountered at least two classes during the course of their degree which involved a semester-long software project that was iterated according to new concepts introduced in the course.

<comment><USER10> Second this. A "project course" is a required part of the CS curriculum where I attended college, and that's almost always not the only project course you'll take. I did one every quarter for three years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Those who can do, those who can't, teach. Why would you expect to find anyone who could teach entrepreneurial skills in a college? With the exception of a few institutions that hire actual entrepreneurs (eg, Steve Blank) most professors simply don't have the skills or experience.

Check the resumes of the professors at your local (or favorite) institutions. How many of them (if any) have experience as a founder, let alone just operational experience in a startup?</comment>


A Quick Look at Support Vector Machines - <AUTHOR> https://generalabstractnonsense.com/2017/03/A-quick-look-at-Support-Vector-Machines/ <comment><USER2> One thing that I discovered recently which surprised me (while taking the Udacity SDC)is how effective and resilient these "older" ML algorithms can be. Neural networks was always my go to method for most of my classification or regression problems for my small side projects. But now I learned with the minimal dataset I have (<5K samples), linear regression, SVM, or decision tress is the way to go. I got higher accuracy and it's about 10X faster in terms of computational time!

<comment><USER3> Yes SVMs are still great models. The advantage neural nets have over them are that they can do automatic feature extraction. By the time you get to the last layer of a neural net, you are basically just doing a simple logistic classification, but the features coming in have been learned from all of the previous layers.

I've even seen people use pretrained ImageNet classifiers, chop off the last layer and use an SVM as the actual classifier, and it works very well for some problems.

<comment><USER4> > automatic feature extraction

Hope you have a *ton of data, otherwise it's not gonna happen

<comment><USER5> And a lot of tweaking of configuration parameters until it's "automatic".

<comment><USER3> This was true maybe 10 years ago. Not so much anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aaah, I was hoping for an explanation of the kernel trick. I think that is the hardest concept in support vector machines.

<comment><USER7> I think I can help with that.

The article nicely explains the data transformation so that it becomes linearly separable. But the trick to the kernel trick is no to transform the data at all.

What you do is use a learning algorithm that doesn't need individual input vectors, but instead only needs their dot products. You then imagine a magical high-dimensional space where your data is (you suppose) linearly separable. The trick is that you never actually transform your data to that magical space — you don't need the input vectors, remember? You only need their dot products. So you define a function that given two vectors in your normal input space returns a scalar. Assuming your function behaves in a sane way (go read about the required properties if you need to), you can think of this function as a dot product. In some kind of magical space — you don't actually care much. You will never transform your data, it might not even be possible to: the most common gaussian kernel is defined over an infinite-dimensional space. But hey, who cares? You take your SVM, give it your kernel function and input data, and off it goes, working as usual, except your dot products are no longer computed in your input space, but in your magical infinite-dimensional space.

It's both really clever and really simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! However, I think the author should have spent a a few more words and figures to distinguish support vector machines from standard perceptrons. Maximum margin classification and the definition of 'support vectors,' in my experience, helps demystify the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great! Any follow-ups describing kernels?

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazingly well written. Short and to the point, humbly sharing something cool!

</comment><comment><USER11> Many aspects of Machine Learning boil down to optimization problems.

<comment><USER10> Well all of them do. In ML we always try to select the best description for a dataset, and that involves minimizing some function that represents some kind of goodness of fit

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> well, that really was a quick look. Any reading-recommendations about the kernel-functions? How do they work and why are they fast?

</comment><comment><USER13> Best name for a blog ever?</comment>


Larry and Sergey Won't Respect You In The Morning - <AUTHOR> http://flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482/ <comment><USER2> I could care less what Larry, Sergey, or anyone else thinks. I'd rather have respect from myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder: a) Where else YC advertised. b) If they stopped after "News from the Front".

<comment><USER4> We advertised in Facebook once. We never met anyone who saw either this ad or the FB ad, so we never bothered again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this meant to be a double entendre?

People that work for big companies, don't earn Larry and Sergey's respect "in the morning". So big company employees == sluts.

PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME, HOW CAN I GET A JOB AT THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH?

<comment><USER6> "PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME, HOW CAN I GET A JOB AT THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH?"

Just walk into any Wal-Mart[1]; I'm sure they've got applications lying around somewhere.

[1][http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/perfo...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/performers/companies/by_employees/index.html)

<comment><USER7> I guess the catholic church is bigger. At least is the biggest employer in Germany according to official statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If people need to be coerced or prodded away from a cube job, they are not startup material. Maybe GOOG is the YC entrance exam.

<comment><USER9> Your upbringing has a big influence on the type of career that you'll consider. Someone who is "startup material" might simply not have been exposed to the right stimuli.

<comment><USER8> If they haven't been exposed, in the area where that ad was posted (Stanford) they are comatose or clueless. In either case, who has time to "stimulate" in a startup context? My guess is a person like that would end up being a net drag on moving quickly and executing.

<comment><USER10> You would be surprised how few people at Stanford have any idea what's going on in the tech world.

Most people are so caught up in studying for the next exam or finishing the next problem set that they let all these opportunities pass them by.

<comment><USER11> In my opinion, this is true at Berkeley as well.

<comment><USER8> Is anyplace in Cali sacred? I feel like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz. Pull back the curtain on these places, and there's nothing there...

<comment><USER11> No no, I'm not saying California isn't a good place to be. Let me elaborate.

I've been in the Bay Area for about 18 years and I absolutely love it here. If I wasn't raised here I probably wouldn't have gotten interested in startups. You read about this stuff every day in the newspapers, and when you drive around on the highways you pass by the offices of hundreds of companies. As a programmer and an aspiring entrepreneur, I don't think I'd be happy anywhere else.

SoCal is also great. I was in a high school business club and we used to go down there all the time for conferences. Santa Monica, San Diego, etc. all kick ass. The way I think of it is, NorCal is where you go to work, and SoCal is where you go to vacation.

Like I said, I really don't see myself living anywhere else in the world besides California. I just wish Berkeley students were more enthusiastic about startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's 1% of chance an entrepreneur would look forward for a job.

<comment><USER13> Being an entrepreneur type (at least I like to think so), I can't stand working for someone else. I hate it, I absolutely can't stand to sell myself short, which is what I feel working or someone else is. That said, before I started reading PG's essays, I had no idea of the "other option". I hadn't even considered web startups or not working for someone else. I didn't even know what it was that bothered me about working for other people; I always just thought it was the "daily grind" getting old. Of course, I realize now that I just felt like I was getting all I could out of my abilities, like I (hopefully) could in a startup.

So while I may not have been "looking forward" to getting a job, that was all I ever considered. I think that may be true for a lot of people. Now, of course, I don't even consider it, except as a last resort. I can't even stand being tied to the work associated with my Fellowship (for grad school), and that is much more open-ended.

I guess my point is that advertising like this is definitely valuable. There are individuals out there like myself who have the drive and the talent and simply aren't aware of any opportunities outside of the status quo. Thank goodness I took that random Lisp course....

<comment><USER8> I didn't think of it from that perspective, but I can see how that would work in your case. Maybe I'm just looking at it from the wrong angle. I took it as someone who knew the deal and just didn't want to do it because of a job offer from a cube farm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> is there no way to get funded by ycombinator in between the winter and summer founders programs?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this real or a photoshop job?

<comment><USER16> real... look at the deformation and ridges and translucency

<comment><USER17> Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.

<comment><USER18> The pixels are off. I can tell. I look at pixels a lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study: Alcohol 'most harmful drug,' followed by crack and heroin - CNN.com - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/01/alcohol.harm/index.html?eref=rss_us&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_us+%28RSS%3A+U.S.%29 <comment><USER2> Report from the BBC, and _much_ dicussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1855713></comment>


TweetNaCl: how cr.yp.to's developers got carried away by the carry bit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.skylable.com/2014/05/tweetnacl-carrybit-bug/ <comment><USER2> Funny how small is the world, I reported them the same bug on February 13th, you might have been first though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW I reported mine on 2014-04-22. Was yours about the sizeof(u32) issue, or the carry bit?

<comment><USER2> It was only the carry bit [1] and the _saved space_ mention from the ChangeLog.

[1] [http://seb.dbzteam.org/blog/2014/04/28/tweetnacl_arithmetic_...](http://seb.dbzteam.org/blog/2014/04/28/tweetnacl_arithmetic_bug.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like TweetNaCl could use a bugtracker or a mailing list :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> cr.yp.to is Daniel Bernstein. Was TweetNaCl written by Bernstein? I thought not.

 _5 minutes later:_

Yeah, I should have read this more carefully before jumping in to comment. Sorry. Previous comment preserved as a monument to my dumbness.

 _5 seconds later:_

Dammit, Edwin caught me, too. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The paper on TweetNaCl lists him as an author, and its a subdomain of cr.yp.to: [http://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/papers.html](http://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/papers.html) [http://cr.yp.to/papers.html#tweetnacl](http://cr.yp.to/papers.html#tweetnacl)

The bugreport was actually acknowledged by Peter Schwabe.

Did djb actually write every line of TweetNaCl? Probably not.

<comment><USER3> I actually didn't know he wrote any line of it; I feel like I remember him writing about the person who actually wrote it. But I think I'm wrong about that too. It's a neat post you wrote.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Shuttlefinance.com, the Employee Benefit Savings App - <AUTHOR> https://www.shuttlefinance.com/ <comment><USER2> What a great way for companies to add value to their employees' total compensation package.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea.

I like the idea of an employer getting some insight into employees financial goals. To a limited extent.

My question is, which employers are on-board with this, and are they hiring?

</comment><comment><USER4> I really like this idea. Have been thinking about wanting to use something like this for our team for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic... curious to see how they fit into and find willing employers in service economy.</comment>


Statement from U.S. District Judge Esther Salas (re: online privacy) - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/sLWJPlAIPvE?t=220 <comment><USER2> She wants privacy for federal judges, not for people in general.</comment>


ASK HC:Best Wordpress Themes? Willing to Pay - <AUTHOR>

Looking for great wordpress themes... hopefully with three columns and 'widgets'. I am willing to pay as well! <comment><USER2> check out mine at <http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds>

</comment><comment><USER3> Try Blog Oh Blog.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Cloudera doing good? - <AUTHOR> Is the outlook good for Cloudera and other commercial Hadoop companies ? <comment><USER2> No. Most of them have no USP, just a lot of professional services revenue but no moat. (In the devops age, all of those GUI management tools are value subtracting if anything)

<comment><USER3> It isn't specifically a Hadoop company, but MapR is significantly different in that there are many unique selling points for the products, an ability to address legacy as well as forward needs and most of the revenue is high margin product sales. The proof is in the pudding (less than 1% attrition over life of company)

(I work there)</comment></comment>


Enormous Mosaic Image of Websites Against SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://chrisacky.posterous.com/enormous-mosaic-of-websites-against-sopa

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone wants the 2000+ .zip file, I can host on S3 if there is a demand for it.</comment>