The Website Obesity Crisis (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#crisis <comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445) 129 days ago with 1122 upvotes

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's a story in itself that a problem noted by an older article is still relevant enough to be discussed. In the 6 months since, has the industry even _looked_ at this or is it even worse?

A fast-moving industry needs equally-fast solutions. If 6 months can pass and people are still talking about a problem as if it was yesterday, then not enough has happened. Some ideas of more that could be done: talk to your web- developer friends; have them talk to their managers; start publicly shaming bloated web sites; submit issues and/or pull requests to web browser projects with ideas for how to fix HTML; or something.

<comment><USER5> The web isn't near as fast moving as you imply it is.

Website have always been to big. We've been using huge Javascript libraries for the last ten years to add minor functionality.

Even using Flash for websites was a common standard!

The problem is that speed and usability are almost always considered less important than flashy animations and other bullshit that no end user actually wants.

I think this post will be relevant for years to come. I don't think web developers will ever learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While a nice article that I do agree with, it's not exactly accurate.

90% of website size is media (images, audio, video, etc). Discounting that and saying that a 1MB page is so much bigger than just the text it delivers is silly and doesn't really make a point. Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe not, but that's subjective and most people would rather have images and decent UI.

It's true that ads are another factor, and it's slowly being solved, but ultimately comes down to the wrong incentives across the industry. The more annoying/heavy ads work better and pay more so everyone from advertisers to agencies to publishers will continue to optimize toward them until something changes (which might be adblocking). This isn't a technical problem so much as business and politics.

However, the publishers these days *are pretty short on tech talent and mostly use off-the-shelf CMS systems like wordpress (which are already bad software) and then just layer on their plugins, themes, and ads to create the mess we have today. Again no easy way to solve that without talent either on the pub side or in the platforms themselves. Some progress being made here with things like facebook instant articles and medium.com hosting.

Overall, the web definitely has a cruft problem, but it's not really that bad considering all the various channels of information access, and it's all slowly getting better.

<comment><USER7> > Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe not, but that's subjective and most people > would rather have images and decent UI.

The rise and success of cruft-stripping-as-a-service offerings like Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, etc., seems to indicate that a not- insignificant segment of consumers think that a "decent UI" is _less_ UI.

<comment><USER8> As far as I can tell the main appeal of most of those is "I'll read this later."

<comment><USER9> It is, but many times, I end up using Pocket or Instagram because the text is presented in a way that is simply unreadable for me, and neither Firefox's Reading Mode nor Clearly (when I use Chrome) help.

<comment><USER10> I think you mean Instapaper

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I usually have a fast connection and reasonable data limits available, so I don't worry too much about how much stuff my browser needs to pull down to render a website. However, there's another type of bloat that absolutely kills my browser and that is all of the JavaScript.

One of my computers is a netbook-ish Lenovo x131e from a few years ago. It runs everything I need it to very well, except for web browsing in Firefox. Many pages cause the browser to completely choke for a few seconds while the JavaScript does its thing.

I finally broke down and installed NoScript and it feels like I'm browsing the web on a brand new computer! Pages load fast and render quickly. If JavaScript is required, I can enable it on a site-by-site basis. There's also the privacy and security benefits, but my main issue was performance.

I used to think that people who browse with JavaScript disabled were being silly, but now I understand why someone would want to do that.

I know that part of the problem is Firefox and part of it is the under-powered computer. Browsing the same sites in Safari on a 6-year-old MacBook Pro isn't nearly as painful and, generally speaking, I leave the JavaScript alone on that computer.

<comment><USER12> In fairness, your 6yo mbp probably has a much faster CPU and more ram than the newer netbook... It's a hard sell, especially now that newer cell phones even are starting to have beasts of CPUs...

But I agree, JS is a huge issue... I notice it most on click-bait type sites on my cell phone. It's really pretty sad, all things considered.

<comment><USER11> You're absolutely right. It's certainly not a fair comparison at all, they're very different machines and I was satisfying different needs when I purchased each one.

For the sake of fairness, the rough specs are:

The ThinkPad:

* Lenovo ThinkPad x131e, 11.6", purchased late 2013 * Core i3-3277U processor * 8GB RAM (aftermarket upgrade) * 500GB spinny drive * OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 * Embedded graphics * Firefox browser

The MacBook Pro:

* Mid-2010 MacBook Pro 15" * Core i7 - dual core, not sure which model * 8GB RAM (aftermarket upgrade) * 512GB SSD (aftermarket upgrade) * MacOS 10.11.4 * Embedded and discrete graphics * Safari browser

So yeah, it's hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great stuff, I watched the video presentation too. The audience clapped at the part where he shows the pyramid illustration of the web - HTML followed by huge chunk of crap, then surveillance at the top. Obviously he is not alone in recognizing the problem.

I'm glad to hear Google are planning to label slow sites. We need this. Bloated websites need to be held accountable.

On mobile devices too, we need a browser option to stop loading any further data for a given site after a defined point. So if the browser has received 3 megabytes of a page so far, it stops and asks the user whether to continue with downloading. It might say how many cents this one website has cost them so far (if the user has setup this feature).

Fair enough "modern web, modern features" but most of the modern features we enjoy are improvements to browsers, servers and javascript. There's no reason why this can't mean keeping page size steady while enjoying new features.

<comment><USER12> A lot of it is library cruft... Angular + jQuery + jQuery library, and all it's components (used or not) and all the related components.. and then the iframes for ads, loading in their own different version of jQuery, and related... etc, etc...

It's pretty bad in a lot of ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Calling this a "Crisis" is definitely blowing this out of proportion. True, websites have grown by a lot over the past decade, and so has functionality, take a look at your favourite websites on the waybackmachine and see how god awful most of them looked just 6-7 years ago, compare the functionality they provided vs what we have now.

Yes I agree some websites do really need to go on a diet, loading unused css, js and multimedia has to be removed, but 1-2MB is not a reason anyone should be throwing their hands in air screaming CRISIS!! Definitely I would applaud anyone who would spend their time optimising their websites to be as small as they can be, but Jesus Christ 2BM and we have a crisis... no way!

I for one think this is a sign we are making progress a very good thing, we are improving as a community and we are getting more out of our web.

<comment><USER15> I just got a text this morning from my phone company: "Your exceeded your monthly 500MB limit". It's probably not a _crisis_ , but it has some quite real economic consequences if I have to download 2MB worth of nothing whenever I click a link.

Yes, Adblockers to the rescue. But you know, Apple doesn't support Adblockers on an iPhone 5 for whatever stupid reason.

<comment><USER14> See the main problem then, is not a problem with if websites are obese or paper thin, the question is are websites and our browsers doing a good job of using already existing features for helping users.

I think we should be complaining about developers and admins who doesn't enable gzipping, we should be angry with the fact some websites don't even bother setting headers to cache static resources. We should not be throwing out hands up in air screaming crisis because our web is becoming more useful.

<comment><USER13> "Useful" doesn't need to mean bloated. You seem to miss the point that many websites these days are bloated even basic articles. We don't need a V8 engine and oversize tyres to go buy milk and bread.

You're forgetting that mobile devices quickly run out of cache memory. This includes iPads. You might visit a news site once every few days, but quite often the same resources need downloading again and again because your iPad has not kept them in cache memory because it ran out already. Desktop browsers have a lot more capacity to keep web resources cached.

Not only that, but RAM memory is also limited on mobile devices. Forget about expecting multiple websites to remain in memory across numerous tabs. My iPad3 can pretty much handle only one tab open. If I switch tabs to another website, then switch back, the whole page loads again. A less bloated web would help this issue.

And then there's accessibility for low-speed areas. Did you even read the article?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love this article/presentation or whatever it is.

I often react very positively when websites are super-fast today. Especially on a mobile device, it is worth a lot to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love this from the article:

These Apple sites exemplify what I call Chickenshit Minimalism. It's the prevailing design aesthetic of today's web.

"Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."

</comment><comment><USER18> Just took over a website for a paying client, local small business. Found out their previous developer was some rockstar guy, thing was packed with frameworks and nuttiness.

Built a scraper and converted it to something using Markdown in a weekend, I barely used any of previous dev's "code."

Sometimes all you need to dig a hole is a shovel.

<comment><USER13> Nice. There's certainly money to be made for making crappy slow websites better and faster. The trick is convincing clients their site looks and performs like someone's homework assignment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We need a decent @media equivalent in HTML.

We need a bandwidth @media selector (that is kept up to date with recent conditions by the browser).

We need optional (viewport conditioned) lazy loading built into the spec.

It's time for these features to become part of the web stack, but maybe we need a codified mediaQuery.js first.

<comment><USER15> All of this is unnecessary. Because it's actually possible to build lightweight and fast and yet beautiful websites. The available tools aren't the problem. The problem are the people who design their garbage collectors called websites.

Someone in another thread suggested to colorize the address bar based on bytes transferred and/or requests made. Maybe it'll wake people up if they visit a website and it has some nice dark red color to show how much bandwidth is wasted.

<comment><USER19> Your observation that it's possible to build xyz type of websites does not adequately discount the necessity of such features.

I'm talking about improving those lightweight and beautiful websites even further. I implement some of those features on every project, to deliver the maximum content & experience quality in every network and device condition possible.

You can't seriously try to shoe-horn the entire platform into whatever your vision of beauty is. Please keep an open mind about a complex future medium, that can effectively accommodate Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Photoshop, Open Office, Google Maps, Skype, Auto CAD, Grand Theft Auto VR, ...

<comment><USER15> Point taken and I'm sure, you (and I for that matter) would benefit from your suggestions. But it wouldn't change anything for the existing bloated websites, because they _could_ be written in a lightweight way but aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fun fact: Despite the hyper-cautious (2015) in the headline here, the AMP page described, the one that Google said they were going to fix, still redownloads the same video file every 30 seconds, thus making it, still, theoretically unbounded in page size.

The NPR page about ad-blockers which was 12 megabytes without an adblocker and 1 megabyte when using an adblocker is now 1.4MB with an adblocker and "only" 1.9MB without -- to display about 1,100 words.

The medium article that was over a megabyte seems to have removed the pointless 0.9MB invisible image.

</comment><comment><USER21> If 1MB is obesity then what is this page? [https://www.javapoly.com](https://www.javapoly.com)

<comment><USER22> The website loads in 9 seconds (Chrome 50), the processing of the (peg$parseKeyword) functions takes 4.5 seconds of time during loading which causes the gap in the waterfall.

One look at the function would cause severe ingestion in most people.

<comment><USER23> (You wanted the word "indigestion". Ingestion means something quite different. Though I suppose if someone was prone to eating when depressed, it could work.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it may be worth specifically excluding Images from some of these checks. Or adjusting for what can be compressed in the images themselves. Though it's enough to say that they can be a huge portion of a site.

That said, I was able to boilerplate Preact + Redux for creation of a control that will be used stand-alone and the payload is about 16k of JS (min+gz), and under 1k of CSS [1]. The methodology I used could very well be carried to more "full" applications. There's very little reason most modern web applications can't be way under 500kb payload (excluding images). In this case I wanted more modern tooling, workflow, but a fairly light datepicker modal... I feel most datepickers suck. Could it be lighter? yes[1], but I wanted a little bit of a different approach. In the end it works...

All of that said, the biggest points of code bloat are usually in bringing in an entire library instead of only the pieces needed, especially bad with UI controls... I really wish more people would use/extend bootstrap from source here. It's really easy to do... usually I copy the variables file, copy the bootstrap base file, create a mixins file, and then update all the references in the copied base. From there, I can comment out/in as needed, and be fairly light.

Of course, fonts are another source of bloat, I'd suggest people start leaning towards using svg resources embedded in JS strings, and only those icons needed... all modern browsers support svg well enough in this case. Other web fonts should be limited to 2-3 includes of 1-2 families... that's it. Any more and your design is flawed anyway.

With webpack + babel, it isn't so hard to keep your applications structured, and much more minimal.

[1] [https://github.com/tracker1/md- datepicker](https://github.com/tracker1/md-datepicker) [2] [https://dbushell.github.io/Pikaday/](https://dbushell.github.io/Pikaday/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps we need smarter tools and better cooperation. For instance, I bet a large part of code in large websites is shared with some other website. Why can't our tools figure out if this is the case, and then create some kind of "shared library" to be used by both websites.

<comment><USER25> Maybe. That seems like it should be relatively easy to measure with a caching proxy, right?

In my experience, most site slowness is related to slow loading ads. Since installing an ad blocker a few months ago, I really haven't had any complaints about web speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just take the time making _your_ website slimmer. Do not care about the others and rape the benefits having more visitors than the others. It is egoist, but this is the only way companies are going to move, if the competition is getting more visitors because of slimmer websites. If this practically does not change anything, then, this is a false problem.

For my website (chemical databank) I was able to measure the benefits of reducing the page size with more visitors from countries with poor Internet connectivity.

So, just do it and enjoy the competitive advantage as long as you have it! This is the best way to get things moving.

<comment><USER27> ahem *reap

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Actual figures on the 'crisis'

[http://www.httparchive.org/interesting.php?a=All&l=Apr%201%2...](http://www.httparchive.org/interesting.php?a=All&l=Apr%201%202016)

Average of 2.3MB with 60% of that being images. 50% of that content can be cached for a least a day.

</comment><comment><USER29> For the last 20 years people have been saying "web pages today are too big." And for the last 20 years they've continued to get bigger.

The right size for a web page depends less on the opinion of random developers, and more on the website's owners and users.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yeah, I did this

[http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/](http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/)

</comment><comment><USER31> I was reading an astronaut's biography a few days ago, talking about the transition from the moon missions (where every half-hour was planned and accounted for) to Skylab (where people were working in the same place for long enough that it became necessary for them to have free time). And on one level it's a huge waste to have someone on the ISS where it's costing $x000/minute to keep them up there playing candy crush or whatever. But it's also a sign of maturity, that we are no longer desperately squeezing out every minute we can possibly get up there.

I think we're somewhere similar with the web. Internet is plentiful enough that we don't need to scrape and squeeze every last kilobyte. Maybe medium takes 3mb to render a simple plain page. That's ok.

(I do wish a lot of sites would up their information density though. Above all I wish I could get a full-width page, not a phone-width segment down the middle of my widescreen display. At home I've started using a stylesheet that disables max-width on all elements, and I've yet to see a site that looks worse that way)

<comment><USER32> > Internet is plentiful enough that we don't need to scrape and squeeze every > last kilobyte.

For you and I, perhaps. For the people on 2G/3G or worse, trying to read a simple article, modern web pages are hilariously heavy. The whole point of the web was openness. This is why Facebook, Apple and Google have all developed their own solutions to this problem: FB Instant Articles; iOS News app; Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.

If these companies are taking it seriously enough to develop solutions, there must be a real problem or serious sections of the market being missed/obstructed by the failure of publishers to build their websites _responsibly_.

And in general, no matter that heavy pages can still load quickly for me on my privileged broadband connection, it still pisses me off when it takes 3-5 seconds for a page to load when I know it should fundamentally take a second (or less) to show me text and some associated images whenever they're in the viewport.

Google AMP is the best solution for the web so far, but it's a step backwards to XHTML/WAP and mobile subdomain sites. The correct thing would have been to hit websites with genuine SEO penalties for shit mobile performance. This is especially true because AMP doesn't even work on older mobile browsers.

The biggest reason why the web needs to care about every single byte of overhead? Because native apps barely have this problem. Neither side, native or web, is going to simply be killed by this, but the value of websites and web apps will decrease if they do not prove to be viable vehicles for content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As much as I want to agree with the article I really can't. All of the things that people claim as "bloat" are basically necessary for a website to work in a modern fashion...

Layout frameworks (eg Bootstrap) tackle the problem of developing a site that's readable at resolutions from 320px wide on a two year old phone up to a 5K iMac. That is _not_ a trivial task, especially if you need UI components.

Application frameworks (eg Angular) make it _much_ faster, and consequently a nicer experience, to maintain user state, load content, navigate around template driven pages, etc.

Media content has grown with resolutions and pixel densities. 10 years ago we were looking at websites on 1280x1024 displays, with no rich media. Today a consumer facing website has retina quality video. That's going to impact the page weight.

Being wasteful is a minor problem; everyone has fast broadband. Everything is cached at various layers from the browser to the service worker to the CDN to the origin server. Browsers are _really_ fast. With some clever "cutting-edge- even-though-its-been-around-for-years" stuff like http2 you can fetch things in parallel.

 _Obviously_ websites should be optimised. No one should be downloading media or libraries that aren't used. Animations should be hardware accelerated. Sites shouldn't be running in debug mode ( _ahem_ AngularJS _ahem_ ). But all in all, what we get in a browser these days is _far_ better, _far_ faster, and _far_ more functional than websites were a decade ago. We could go back to the "works without JS, stateless on the clientside, roundtrip to the server and a whole new page for every click" world I learnt web development in, but I really don't want to. It was rubbish.

<comment><USER13> I'm face-palming at your comment, and I'll take the bait.

Firstly, there is no such thing as "retina quality video". If you mean 4K, then say 4K. "Retina" is Apple marketing spin for their high density displays that you seem to be using to describe a standard of video. More to the point, websites are not pre-loading 4K video that is counted towards page weight.

To your claims about needing bootstrap for presenting a page on small to large screens. There are numerous easy methods for making a site readable on small and large screens that don't require shoving layout frameworks in and relying on them to make things look good. Learn HTML. Learn CSS.

> _" Being wasteful is a minor problem"_

That statement would be great as an ironic t-shirt, but otherwise is yet another facepalm.

> _" everyone has fast broadband"_

Great news. With that assumption out of the way, we can get on with pre- loading retina video and throwing page-weight caution to the wind.

> _" Everything is cached"_

The utopian world you live in sounds great, but mobile devices are known to be very bad at both long term resource caching and short term memory caching - <USER2> in multiple open browser tabs.

The point of the article is that even basic articles are bloated whales that waste precious bandwidth on mobile. On desktop, common sense design is replaced with "touch friendly mobile-first impressionism" for actually _less_ accessibility. When spinning globe videos and 2000 pixel auto-playing slideshow presentations in a vast landscape with hamburger menu in corner is considered the "modern web", we need to take a hard look at what modern should be.

The improved functionality you're talking about does not need to mean bloat or excessive amounts of data to drive simple things on websites.

<comment><USER33> _Firstly, there is no such thing as "retina quality video". If you mean 4K, then say 4K. "Retina" is Apple marketing spin for their high density displays that you seem to be using to describe a standard of video._

I don't mean 4K. I mean transcoding video assets to specific resolutions that match the website's responsive breakpoints, with 2X resolution versions for high pixel density displays (eg retina). Pushing a 4K video down to someone whose browser viewport is 800px wide is the sort of wastefulness people complain about.

<comment><USER13> I think you mean images. Nobody is doing that with video.

Streaming video quality might be dynamically adjusted according to client bandwidth, but the topic here is unreasonable page weight and bloat. Streaming media has nothing to do with page weight.

I think I see the point you were trying to make though. Our devices have larger screens and more pixels, so fill every last one of those pixels up to the max with content, and then some. Many marketing and advertising folks would agree with you, while many developers are scratching their heads wondering why they just built a "chicken shit minimalist" website. Beer and a paycheck dissolves the care factor.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What user data protection techniques should I absolutely know about? - <AUTHOR> I'm in a startup. Big companies have dedicated teams for security and still face leaks etc. What are some of the essential things about security that I need to know about? Some I can think of are:
1. Don't implement stuff on your own 2. If you don't need it don't store it 3. Assume you're already hacked. Isolate different areas of your system
What other simple things are there that would go a long way in protecting a user's data? <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto- shredding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding) helps to deal with backups.</comment>


Get ready for a new economic era - <AUTHOR> http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/internet/get-ready-for-a-new-economic-era

<comment><USER2> Tee Vee "helped to create entirely new products that could never have been sold without TV. "

I'm not sure I buy that. Isn't the accepted wisdom about advertising kind of opposite that? I mean, as an adult residing in the USA, you're not supposed to believe too much that advertising tells you, maybe not anything more than the address of a business or that some particular business sells some particular brand of product.</comment>


Why I Removed AVG from my Computer: A tale of abusive anti-virus-ware - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesharklady.com/?q=why_i_removed_avg_my_computer <comment><USER2> This is an old article. I also removed AVG after seeing this ridiculous behavior, but after updating it on a different machine I realized they had seen the error of their ways and fixed this issue. They have since removed the error sign when the link checker is disable, and as far as I can see remember they now allow (at least custom) installation w/out the link follower at all (as my installation doesn't even have it!).

I do notice issues when AVG does it's weekly scan - the computer runs quite a bit slower - but besides that I've got no problems. I was upset when they released the version with the noted problems, but since they quickly released an update with fixes I'm happy enough to continue to use AVG. Everybody makes mistakes!

<comment><USER3> Do they still hijack new tabs in Firefox so that they show some crappy search page? Because that was the deal breaker for me.

<comment><USER2> Not in my install, at least. I will admit the scanning is more obtrusive than I would like, but besides that there are no irregularities like that that make it an annoyance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I too uninstalled it. I have a ridiculous multi-core system with more RAM than anybody really needs; I have been unable to even mildly slow it down since I built it -- until I installed AVG, which slapped ridiculous scan bottlenecks on every disk read, every download, every link click, every application launch, every _thing_ I could do on my box.

It's almost worse than actually having a virus. At least you can uninstall it. Now my machine is back to it's usual, quick self.

<comment><USER5> Oh yeah, it's a pig. But most anti-virus programs are pigs.

My experience: my XP computer got very slow over time: just booting Windows took 20 minutes.

I kicked off AVG and now it boots in about 2 minutes.

If that is not a pig, then I don't know what is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is lucky she didn't get round to noticing the AVG (Yahoo) toolbar that appears in your browser. You hide it then next time you start up you get a helpful "I have noticed you have disabled the AVG toolbar, I have re-enabled it for you so that your system is fully protected." message.

<comment><USER7> This was the last straw for me. I've purchased more than 60 licenses of AVG for business computers, after being impressed by how well the free edition of version 6.0 worked on my home computer.

With each subsequent release, they've just added more crap, and gone same way Symantec did. Aside from updating their virus database, I haven't noticed a single useful improvement in years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't unique to AVG, but it does make you wonder what goes through the heads of corporate managers who decide how to "improve" their products.

Products seem to follow this cycle:

\- 1.0 - neat idea, needs more

\- 2.0 - wow, nice!

\- 3.0 - okay, I can only use some of those new features, but not bad

\- 4.0 - um...I suppose it's nice for people who do that kind of thing

\- 5.0 - okay, at least they're supporting $NEW_OS_VERSION now; wait, that's odd, someone's added a toolbar

\- 6.0 [read: 5.1] - where did these ads come from, and who said I needed an auto-updater?

\- 7.0 [read: 5.2] - web integration? and where's all this extra CPU usage coming from?

\- 8.0 [read: 5.3 beta 3] - I can't tell what the new features are...but now I have to go for coffee while it starts up

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm going against the grain here, but I'm glad Microsoft is going to release free antivirus software. I don't want to worry about choosing one of these third-party products and having my browser hijacked or whatever.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. This is one of those things that really should be dealt with on an os- level. They could push updates through the same channel as the os security patches.

<comment><USER11> Yep, it's not like Microsoft has ever hijacked any other software to shoe-horn in their own useless stuff.

</sarcasm>

See .NET) Framework Assistant in Firefox.

<comment><USER10> Of Microsoft and Symantec, I'm not sure who I trust least. In any case a Microsoft virus checker wouldn't have to - indeed wouldn't benefit from - seeking attention. That, in it self, would probably lead to a better product. There are other technically sound arguments for letting Microsoft deal with security issue, such as the fact that they know how the system is built (At least in theory).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AVG has all sorts of other problems including obtrusiveness ([http://www.flickr.com/photos/xdrunkagainx/3652625815/sizes/o...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/xdrunkagainx/3652625815/sizes/o/)), insane advertising, and generally buggier and worse since its 7.5 release.

</comment><comment><USER13> She boldly declares, "Grisoft just lost a customer, and I'm guessing it won't be the last." It seems an overstatement to call a free AV user a "customer".

Those looking for a free A/V solution should check out Avira, though you'll have to disable the annoying upgrade popup.

<comment><USER14>
      Those looking for a free A/V solution should check out Avira,
      though you'll have to disable the annoying upgrade popup.

Avira AntiVir Updates to Version 9 – Make It More Usable: [http://www.tipsfor.us/2009/03/18/avira-antivir-updates-to- ve...](http://www.tipsfor.us/2009/03/18/avira-antivir-updates-to- version-9-make-it-more-usable/)

<comment><USER15> Yes! I was going to ask if anyone used it, and what did they think of it, because there's been a long time since I don't work on a windows machine on a daily basis, but at the time I did I used Avira.

I was just wondering if after the years that passed it had become less good or something...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't run antivirus, instead I configured a secondary account and then removed the admin privileges on my primary one. This has the added effect of preventing Skype from installing annoying browser toolbars.

</comment><comment><USER17> I use free A/V Avast and I love it. It is very good and I would recommend to anyone considering a free A/V.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is making me rethink about installing AVG on my fresh Win 7 install.

<comment><USER19> Do yourself a favor: Turn UAC all the way up, and forget the antivirus. Your system will still be fast and snappy, but you'll still be notified every time tries to do something it shouldn't

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I used clamwin, the windows version of clamav. That is after I used AVG for a while and went through the same experience. One good thing about using open source application is that they wont ask you to upgrade to some paid version later.

<comment><USER21> ClamWin is ok, but the scanning time is very slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just installed AVG's latest version after reinstalling Windows 7 (to upgrade from Beta to RC.) I remembered from using AVG during Windows 7 Beta that they included that link checker, and I hated it as well, so I did a custom installation instead of the default/recommended installation, and I was able to not even install the link checker. Now I do not have the exclamation mark thank god. Also, I didn't install the AVG toolbar either, so it's not nagging me either. Usually when you have an issue with software installing things you don't want, it's simply because you didn't do a custom install.

<comment><USER23> I do find it amazing how many people don't hit custom on installs like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I uninstalled AVG ages ago. The resource consumption was what did it for me. As for the other complaints, they're not really such a big deal once you learn how to deactivate features that you don't need, and to set it so that AVG doesn't notify that you've deactived them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Never ran into those problems but I did do a custom install and never installed those components.

I run Opera as well so would never the link scanner to begin with.

I do agree those parts of the AVG are horrible.

</comment><comment><USER25> I haven't had anti-virus software on any of my personal PCs since MS-DOS 6.22.

Number of virus/spyware infections: 0.

Performance gain when compiling/building: Immense.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just stop using anti-virus? What's the point>

</comment><comment><USER27> We have AVG 8.5 at work and it's killing our machines.

</comment><comment><USER28> I stopped reading in the second paragraph after this: "A freeware is a software"

</comment><comment><USER29> Why are we seeing this kind of crap on Hacker News? This belongs on digg.com</comment>


Vista Speech Recognition - Equation Editor in Word - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs6zW4zP83c

<comment><USER2> Vista Speech recognition works exceptionally well for me personally, and another person i know i recommended it to, it worked great for her as well.

This person has either not done the speech "training" or the computer cannot "hear" him clearly.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be working way better than any of the speech to text recognition software I have used. And the fact that you can not only convert speech to text, but control the software is just crazy..

<comment><AUTHOR> I've met people who have used DragonSoft's software for several years and gotten it so well trained that it really does work like we would expect it to at dictation.

Echoing KM's comment below, training is important. I had a Newton some years ago and I noticed that if I really drew the serif part on, say a 'C', the newton had a much easier time recognizing my handwriting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was able to set this up on my Windows Vista laptop, I got it to work pretty well. But I can type faster than voice recognition can understand me so I stopped it.</comment>


Apple wins patent on 3D projector that needs no glasses - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/369879/apple_wins_patent_3d_projector_needs_no_glasses/

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the patent - [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,843,449.PN.&OS=PN/7,843,449&RS=PN/7,843,449)</comment>


The Ulam Spiral of Primes (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/06/22/the-surprises-never-eend-the-u/ <comment><USER2> Semi-related, I once noticed an odd thing about low prime numbers which (as far as I know) nobody else has made note of: if you look at the natural numbers 1, 2, 3,...n, and keep track of how far each one is from a prime number, there are a lot of palindromic sequences in the progression.

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1338059/why-are- the...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1338059/why-are-there- palindromic-subsequences-at-random-among-this-sequence)

I am not particularly talented with programming mathematical quandaries, but if anyone else wanted to analyze this further, it could perhaps be an avenue to interesting results.

<comment><USER3> I think your obervation is due to palindromes in the differences between primes themselves.

I worked through your example for the integers 8 to 16, the sequence being 3 2 3 0 1 0 3 2 3.

The sequence of numbers we observe is due entirely to the locations of the primes 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and 19.

The differences between these primes is 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, which is again a palindrome. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reason your original sequence is palindromic. If it is, the question is then whether palindromes in distances between primes are unusually common.

<comment><USER2> You are correct! Great observation.

<comment><USER3> Weird, someone else pointed out the same thing on stackexchange around the same time I did. I guess they must have come from here.

<comment><USER4> I also came close to pointing that out, and then I noticed that it only makes palindromes of this sequence more probable, rather than guaranteeing them (see my comment on Math SE).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably related to Prime Generating Polynomials [1]. Euler first noticed that `n^2 + n + 41` is prime for the 40 integers n = 0, 1, 2, ..., 39. A second-order polynomial should look more or less like a line when plotted around a spiral like this.

There are also third-order prime polynomials, which you might be able to see when visualizing the primes in 3d.

[1]: [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Prime- GeneratingPolynomial.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Prime- GeneratingPolynomial.html)

<comment><USER6> It's simpler than that. All primes greater than 2 are equal to 2n + 1 for some n. And since each side of a spiral is 2 longer than the adjacent one, you get a slanted line. You'd have just a blob of bunches of line, except that they thin out. (Primes > 6 are 2 * 3 * n +/\- 1, then 2 * 3 * 5 * n +/\- [1, 7, 11, 13].

Also, prime series _are_ palindromic. Integers relatively prime to (2, 3, ... p[m]) form a repeating series with period 2 * 3 * ... * p[m], and within each series they are the integers not "knocked out" by the given primes; e.g., 2 * 3 * ... * p[m] +/\- [p[m+1], p[m+2], ...]. So the pattern is symmetrical over the period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I once had a surprising moment when I plotted the graph of (p + q) vs. pq for primes p and q and observed the points forming streaks of dots. While surprising at first, it could be explained trivially with a little bit of analysis.

I have saved the graph here: [https://github.com/mycask/rsa- graph](https://github.com/mycask/rsa-graph)

Spoiler Alert: The section named 'Streaks' right after the graph plot has spoilers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's what a 3d projection of it looks like ("prime numbers projected in the z-axis to their values"): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ0murDJgf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ0murDJgf4)

And another one with a different technique ("viewed as a surface such that -1 is a prime and 0 is a composite number"): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECgsgC13ILg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECgsgC13ILg)

</comment><comment><USER9> Isn't the answer to "Why do they cluster on diagonals?" Really mundane? The answer of course being: horizontal and vertical lines are forbidden because all non-diagonal neighbours of an odd number are even. Then your mind focuses on all the runs because that is what the human brain does.

<comment><USER7> Here is a quick experiment to show that the Ulam spiral indeed appears to have more prominent diagonal lines than a spiral of randomly chosen odd numbers even when the dimensions and the number of points in both spirals are same: [https://github.com/mycask/ulam-vs-random](https://github.com/mycask/ulam-vs- random)

I have plotted a 99x99 grid in this experiment. One can plot larger grids to see that the difference between the two grids (the Ulam spiral and the random spiral) becomes more apparent with larger sizes.

Update: After I made these text-plots, I found that Wikipedia has much better graphical plots that demonstrates the difference:

\- Ulam spiral: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_1.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_1.png)

\- Random spiral: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Randomly_black_odd_number...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Randomly_black_odd_numbers.png)

<comment><USER10> > 200x200 spiral number grid with odd numbers that have a 23.38% chance of > being coloured in black.

This doesn't seem to take into account that big prime numbers are less "likely" than small ones.

<comment><USER11> The square root plays a role in the distribution of primes as well as in the area of a circle. The former is involved in an upper bound for the numbers to be checked performing Sieve of Eratosthenes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now I'm thinking about schemes where you iterate through lots of different permutations of visualizations, in at least two and three dimensions, and then somehow calculate a score for how interesting the pattern is.

Maybe using a sort of contrast algorithm like autofocus for a camera. If it looks noisy and random, then that's not an interesting visualizations.

</comment><comment><USER13> Whenever I see prime visualisations, I go down a rabbit hole of investigating prime numbers in search of a better factoring algorithm. I'm no great mathematician, so I always come up better educated but ultimately fruitless. :)

I have this nagging idea, though, that there must be a deep relationship among: 1. the polynomials on which the primes are clustered in the Ulam spiral, 2. algorithms to factor numbers, and 3. recovering information "destroyed" by addition. That is, if you ask me to find the factors of C = A × B, the information about which prime factors went into that product is preserved by multiplication, but if you ask me for the factors of C = A + B, I can't say much about how the factors of A and B relate to those of C, can I? But if I _could_ , I suspect I could factor numbers efficiently. Something something information theory something entropy…

Anyone have any pointers to reading materials along these lines?

</comment><comment><USER14> A different page got submitted a while ago, and it has more detail: [http://www.numberspiral.com/index.html](http://www.numberspiral.com/index.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296129)

</comment><comment><USER15> Something that I've always wondered is what these prime spirals would look like in greater than 2 dimensions.

<comment><USER16> I wonder if there are any 3d space-filling curves that "make sense" for this type of analysis. You somehow have to wrap points around (0,0,0) in a way that has nice properties like the spiral. For instance, zig-zagging around a 3d box [1] Probably has too many 2d "artifacts" (I'm not a mathematician).

The 2d spiral has these really nice properties that contiguous numbers are adjacent, it is approximately symmetric for any rotation in R2, and each number is only +ε farther away from the origin.

[1][http://vgalt.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/3d-labyrinth.jpg](http://vgalt.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/3d-labyrinth.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> one should note that except for the number 2, all primes are odd so they are bound to be constrained to the "black squares of a chess board" so to speak

<comment><USER18> The same applies to any set of the first n primes. Each prime generates a waveform that destructively adds. 2 eliminates all even numbers. 3 eliminates all multiples of 3 - but has some overlap with 2.

Turns out the additive sequence to never hit any multiples of 2 or 3 is {+4, +2}

Not much more complex than 'only the odd squares' yet now we are eliminating many more false positives.

We can continue to construct the additive sequences for the first N primes. This is known as the First Differences of Reduced Residue Systems Modulo Primorials. Hardy and Littlewood studied the statistical dynamics of these ordered sets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The electronic musician Max Cooper used the Sacks Spiral in his live AV setup for his album Emergence. His lecture isn't the most concise but he touches on a lot of things that might be interesting to this crowd. He talks about the Sacks Spiral at about 3 minutes into this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFjIk_CnRUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFjIk_CnRUM)

He also sells a t-shirt with it for the music or math nerds interested: [https://everpress.com/max-cooper](https://everpress.com/max-cooper)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is very cool, thank you for sharing. I wonder if at least part of the structure comes from regular structure of major sequences of gaps (e.g., remove all even numbers and all factors of 3 and what is left is of the form 6k +/\- 1).

If so, I would expect those to wash out a little for larger squares. I have some plotting to do when I get home

</comment><comment><USER21> Here is some HTML5+Javascript code for Ulam spirals if you want to play with it. [http://silveiraneto.net/2013/05/14/twin-primes-visualized- ov...](http://silveiraneto.net/2013/05/14/twin-primes-visualized-over-an-ulam- spiral-in-html5/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This could be an interesting application for machine learning. Train it to notice what defines an "interesting" geometrical pattern and then have it graph prime numbers in thousands of different ways and see what it finds. You could even apply it to things like colors, waveforms, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you had square blocks and arrange them, having a prime number of blocks means that you can't arrange them in a rectangle. So I would think (as a non- mathematician) that it shouldn't be surprising that the "corners" would appear when doing this.

Or rather the non-corners.

</comment><comment><USER24> Numberfile did a nice video on this phenomena. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFuR97YcSLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFuR97YcSLM)

</comment><comment><USER25> [2010]

<comment><USER26> Thanks, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's a star map!

Well, probably not.

</comment><comment><USER28> > an awful lot of primes occur along the set of lines f(n) = 4n^2+n+c, for a > variety of values of b and c.

Should be "n and c".

<comment><USER29> I think it was intended to be f(n) = 4n^2 + bn + c.</comment></comment>


Police launch fraud investigation into Revolut - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/de63f33c-34e6-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5 <comment><AUTHOR> It's possible to bypass the paywall by going through Google via the web link above.</comment>


Kids go on expensive buying sprees in iPhone games - <AUTHOR> http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/science-and-technology/2010/12/kids-go-expensive-buying-sprees-iphone-games <comment><USER2> It would be nice to fast-forward beyond this gaming era in which microtransactions take the form of purchasing your way past one level of rote gameplay mechanics only to arrive at a higher level of the same rote gameplay mechanics. And in which these companies thrive because players haven't figured out how empty their games are.</comment>


If computers can do journalism, why not law? - <AUTHOR> http://truthonthemarket.com/2011/09/11/coding-legal-arguments/

<comment><USER2> Simple: AI lawyers will get ruled illegal. Judges systematically favor the interests of the legal profession: <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=976478> Very clearly, a lawyer appliance is NOT in the interests of the legal profession.</comment>


Show HN: CodePair - etherpad + codechecker + analytics for interviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit2/codepair

<comment><USER2> For the nay-sayers out there: You have _clearly_ not been anywhere near the hiring funnel of a tech company. The sheer number of people with impressive academic credentials, even with industry experience, that can't code a for- loop and reason about it is _staggering_. Anything that facilitates actual, hands-on coding early in the process and on an actual computer (as opposed to whiteboards or paper) is a very welcome addition.

<comment><USER3> > _The sheer number of people with impressive academic credentials, even with > industry experience, that can 't code a for-loop and reason about it is > staggering._

I read this a lot on HN, and I've been doing a lot of hiring. Still, not only I've never encountered this case, but I have a lot of trouble imagining how one could get "impressive academic credentials" in CS without being able to write simple algorithms. Not that I don't trust you, but this is honestly beyond me.

Or maybe people lie more often than I expected on their resumes.

<comment><USER4> I'm in India, still a student, and I can only speak for the situation in my university, but in my class, a 80%+ student once asked me how to disable the antivirus. Another 80%+ student thinks cryptography and email spoofing are the same thing. This is from last year CS graduates in one of the better private colleges in the state.

A student in IT uses google to search for google, then uses that to search for facebook. Another good student couldn't write a "separate the digits in a number" program. Another top student couldn't write a "selection sort and then select alternate elements" program. The top nerds use drag and drop programming. A friend who runs an IT outsourcing company told me about all the candidates with fake experience certificates who can't code a Hello World program.

All these people have impressive academic records - Good GPA, graduation from a reputed university, research papers, internships.

That's not to say everyone's like that, I've seen great programmers too in my college, but the majority of people I've come across fall in that category.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had coding interviews via phone/Skype + browser since I started applying a couple of years ago. I'm not sure why anyone would be depressed.

It seems like a lot of posters here just don't like being interviewed on any terms except their own. It's a very snooty position to take, but I suppose there's enough room for those types of people as well.

I prefer this over some companies who (seriously) have a great phone-only interview with me, only to reject me after looking at my GitHub. I also don't blame them for not dropping a lot of money to fly me out to meet them when they wouldn't even know if I'm qualified or not. This is a pretty good medium, I think. This is only second to my preference for being given a project and a few days to do it, but I wouldn't fault a company for whatever method they chose, unless it was downright asinine.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really cool! A few things though:

* You probably have your reasons, but requiring an email to simply test it out is too much IMO. I don't want to go through the email invitation dance, I don't want spam in the future, and I don't want to wait; so, I practically always refuse.

* In general, the ratio of marketing info to specifics is too high; in other words, more details would be nice, such as: I see it supports 16 languages; ok, great! So, what are they...? (mind you, I wouldn't be asking if there was a public demo)

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you check now? You don't need an e-mail to use.

<comment><USER6> Perfect! Thank you, I'll actually go and kick the tires now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One anectdote, for whateever it's worth - Our company adopted online code testing, in which the screening interviewer (as opposed to the entire interview team) tossed out sample coding questions, and had the candidate write code real-time with feedback from the interviewer - it COMPLETELY revolutionized the quality of candidates that started coming in for in-person interviews, and increased the percentage of candidates interviewed in person being hired from around 20-30% up to 70-80%.

The single greatest advantage of "pre-testing" candidates is that the amount of time engineers had to spend interviewing candidates was reduced dramatically. A secondary advantage for the candidates, is that they didn't have to waste their time coming in for interviews for jobs that they were really not qualified for - win all around.

I don't understand how anyone can't see that it would be useful to determine whether a developer can code prior to coming into an interview.

All of the top engineering managers (by that, I mean the ones who are really effective at hiring and retaining great engineers) have always told me, that part of the interview for a developer who is expected to code, is that they should demonstrate their ability to code, during the interview.

I'm not sure why being asked to demonstrated this ability online is considered an issue.

<comment><USER8> I had an opposite experience - years ago, I drove 8 hours for an interview. Got there, was asked some basic perfunctory stuff that could have been done over the phone (they knew I lived in a different state). I'd brought a printed portfolio (laptops weren't _too_ common, wasn't sure if I would have wifi access, etc). I had printed code samples ready to discuss, and offered them, but was told "no, that wouldn't be fair to the other candidates who can't bring example code".

I was slightly flabbergasted to say the least. That said, I was offered a job (after a second 8 hour drive to meet the owner the following week), and I took it, and it was a pretty darn good gig for the first year. But... "not fair to the others" is just odd reasoning.

Like you, I think understanding if someone can do at least basic programming ('basic' relative to the skill level you're hiring for) should be a non-issue. _How_ it's done - automated tests, screen sharing, etc - may be up for debate.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true and a lot of people relate to automated testing as something to ask about hard competitive style programming challenges. It can be fun too. Eg: [http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html](http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We have modified it so that you don't need to signup or provide your e-mail: [https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit2/codepair](https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit2/codepair)

Check it out! Thanks for the feedback

</comment><comment><USER9> Naysayers: This product is not for you. It is for the interviewer's benefit. You are not the one paying for it so your "depression" due to tools such as this is almost a non issue.

If you don't want to do a technical interview such as codepair, then don't. I'm sure there will be other candidates who wouldn't mind.

Now the question as to whether or not this is effective in gauging the actual resourcefulness of a potential employee - that is a little less certain. I'm sure their are other factors beside one's ability to answer coding problems that play into the overall ability of a potential employee.

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess I should be impressed with this product but it's actually just depressing.

Obviously this is just a tool and it's up to the companies how to use it, but I think we all know how that will work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey bretthopper, thanks for the feedback. I didn't quite get your comment of being depressing. Could you explain? or feel free to e-mail me: vivek [at] interviewstreet

<comment><USER10> I was referring to long standing problem of tech interviewers of getting caught up in academic style programming questions as if they're representative of the work that's actually done in a company.

While the product looks awesome, I'm assuming it will be used to cargo cult bad coding questions instead of companies really trying to do something different with their interview process.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious what you consider to be "cargo cult bad coding questions."

When I do phone screens, I generally do two coding questions, plus several other technical questions. The coding questions are a fizz-buzz level warmup question (not fizz-buzz itself, but something fairly trivial that any programmer should be able to do in 5 minutes), plus a more real-world question that requires walking over the filesystem, looking for particular things in particular files.

Beyond that, I do non-coding technical questions that are based on actual problems I've had to solve on the job, and actual technologies that we use every day like standard networking protocols (HTTP, TCP, DNS).

This seems like it would be fairly useful for my coding questions. So far I've done them in Etherpad or Google Docs, and told people not to worry about the precise syntax since that can be hard to do in such a different environment and without being able to run and test your code; then I inspect it manually and look for obvious logic errors. However, something like this would be fairly helpful in letting people write real code and run it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shameless plug for my sideproject I'm currently working on, [http://hiresync.io](http://hiresync.io) which is aiming to do much of the same thing.

<comment><USER13> Hey Kaizhi,

Small world, eh? Hiresync looks awesome! I wish you the best of luck with it. Really love the simplified interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure how I'd feel about doing some coding before I even went through other parts of the interview process or meeting the team I'd be working with. This sends me the message that I'm going to be a COG in some system.

Sending a potential candidate something like this might be a turn-off to a lot of candidates (especially in this marketplace).

<comment><USER15> I've done interviews like this before, with the interviewer asking me questions through Skype or phone with an Etherpad or similar document open in a browser where we can share code, and I haven't been bothered. The key point is that (from what I can tell) this is supposed to be used live, as part of an interview, not as a pre-screening process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome. I always ask people to code in phone interviews and I use Googe Docs.

You will be surprised at the number of people who have good resumes but cannot code at all. Watching someone code even a simple Fizz Buzz problem will help you understand the person's programming abilities better.

</comment><comment><USER17> At my last gig we used Stypi or Google Docs plus a phone to do live code exercises, and CodePair likes like a step up from that.

But what we're running at my current gig is sending a trivial problem ahead (after an initial phone screen) and then asking for extensions over a Google Hangout with the candidate doing a screen share. This lets people work their way in their own environment with the language of their choice, and do any boilerplate or other overhead up front.

It's not perfect - I'd prefer not to require someone use or make a Google+ account, but it's the best I've seen so far.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't help but feel nervous every time the mouse moves to the top right of the screen, narrowly missing the "End Interview" button in the animation...

I'm sure there's the a confirmation dialog or something, but I'd be afraid of accidentally hanging up on the person the whole time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there's a confirmation dialog :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For anyone looking for a similar take with a larger focus on real-time REPL experimentation during the coding interview, check out: [https://coderpad.io/](https://coderpad.io/)

<comment><USER20> Suspiciously similar. Which came first, CoderPad or CodePair?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/93884663-eb5f-4926-8d1...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/93884663-eb5f-4926-8d16-f430573d0e46/3545a93e2e8ebca0c47c8007475cf36b) CoderPad checker is actually powered by interviewstreet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hate code interviews and hope that they won't exist in the future.

<comment><USER22> This is still a better alternative to code interviews by whiteboard though. (or worse, code interviews by _phone_ ).

<comment><USER23> > code interviews by phone you're joking right? would you speak the code out > loud like so:

a equals list open bracket range open bracket ten close bracket close bracket new line

or is it more abstract, like:

create a list from 0 to 9 and store it in a variable called a

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why isn't there more information like a list of languages/compilers etc? The site needs to say more than "contact us" or try an interview to figure out what you can do with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Adding them. As far as the languages and timelimits, here you go: [https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges/faq/view](https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges/faq/view)

<comment><USER24> Are all the tests canned? Wouldn't people be able to figure them out ahead of time and prepare the right answers?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can create challenges on your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Impressive. But this product also makes me depressed. It dehumanizes the interview process. My question is why don't you just have a challenge server, like facebook?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do. The challenge server at facebook is also powered by us. This is for phone interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is pretty cool but part of the interface is confusing me. What do I put into the input field? Or is it just using the input defined in the question?

<comment><USER27> You will have to enter the input for your code there. Example: For the sample code given (which is for finding the largest element of an array), the input would be something like: 5 1 5 10 0 3

which represents an array of length 5 with elements 1,5,10,0 and 3

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is pretty cool for phone interviews, but I certainly do hope that people refrain from using this as their only method of interviewing candidates.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hey I'm the guy behind the Etherpad Foundation, wanted to just say thanks for the Etherlove :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the CSS issues. Can you check?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some CSS issue. Fixing it.</comment>


InvisiBuy - Anonymous online buying alternative to Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.invisibuy.com

<comment><USER2> This is not anywhere near anonymous. All transactions go through "InvisiBuy", and you're trusting "InvisiBuy" to not keep records or even willingly give information to the Government. BitCoin may have it's flaws, but it's better than this.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. We recognize that customers do have to place some level of trust in us as a company, however, we've pledged to delete all individual transactional data 30 days after a transaction is completed.

Our customers do have to trust that we'll honor this pledge, but it is in our best interest to do so, since our entire model is one of retaining customer privacy. We try to limit the amount of information we collect on customers in the first place, and delete it soon (30 days) after.

Thanks again for your feedback, we need it to improve our service!

<comment><USER4> Most kinds of transactions that require anonymity are illegal. Considering that police investigations crack most cases within 72 hours after the crime's been committed, I think you have a snowball's chance in hell of having your business take off. You either do not keep any records at all, or this is not a business. BitCoin's already eaten your lunch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meh. Still centralized.</comment>


Any App with the Word "Metro" in the Title is Insta-Failed in Win8 App Store - <AUTHOR> http://blog.markedup.com/2012/08/new-change-in-the-windows-store-tos-any-app-with-the-word-metro-in-the-title-is-insta-failed/

<comment><USER2> "if Apple can spend $60 million putting an iPad trademark dispute to rest, then why wouldn't Microsoft spend what it needs to keep the brand that's heralding the new area of desktop and mobile application development on their flagship platforms."

Maybe because there's a difference between a small Chinese company fighting to stay solvent and a multi-billion dollar retail entity with a presence in much of Europe and Asia?

<comment><USER3> Add to it that the Metro group is not some competitor nor an unrelated business, but a major retailer that sells and will continue to sell windows PCs. It doesn't look like a dispute microsoft would want to win just for a cool name it didn't bother to legaly check first.</comment></comment>


There isn't anything magical about it: Why more millennials are avoiding sex - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/there-isnt-really-anything-magical-about-it-why-more-millennials-are-putting-off-sex/2016/08/02/e7b73d6e-37f4-11e6-8f7c-d4c723a2becb_story.html <comment><USER2> Okay, I'll bite.

Isn't the elephant in the room obesity? Is it possible we are less sexually active because people are turned off by unhealthy weights, and being in the "healthy" BMI band now makes you an elite minority?

It'd be easy to demonstrate this isn't true, if we had something like "obesity is mostly middle-aged people, young adults are roughly unaffected" or "weight and number of sexual partners are actually uncorrelated" or something. But I wonder.

<comment><USER3> The suggestion that millennials are having less sex because they are unattractive seems far fetched. I'm not sure what obesity rates among millennials is - but I'm sure if enough of them were that fat, it would sort of become the new norm and standards for attractiveness would change accordingly.

I think the real explanation is the the curve in the graph, we had 3 for greatest generation, 5 for silents then jumping up to 11 during the boomers, then declining slightly during x and declining further during millennials.

I bet if we could extend the graph back historically we would see the vast majority of human generations were closer to the greatest generation in number of sex partners. This looks to me like there was an increase in sexual promiscuity during the sexual revolution, the effects of which are tapering off as humans return to their normal sexual habits.

<comment><USER4> > if enough of them were that fat, it would sort of become the new norm and > standards for attractiveness would change accordingly.

The most attractive women have always, everywhere, had a waist-hip ratio of around 0.7 ([http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves...](http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves- ahead-the-science-of-female-waist-to-hip-ratio-and-at.html)). That would rule out obesity as the new norm of attractiveness. I assume there is also a formula/ratio for attractive men that rules out their being obese.

Also, people are known to lie about the number of sexual partners they have had ([http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/st...](http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/statistics_on_sexual_partners_cant_be_right_specialists_say/)). Could that be a factor here?

Finally, the article focuses on age of first sex and number of sexual partners, not frequency of sex. It doesn't rule out millennials having more frequent sex with fewer partners.

Stop press: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large- number...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number-of- young-people-experience-sex-problems-study-finds)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that this resembles the trend in Japan that many attribute to their lackluster economic situation post real estate/bubble collapse in the early 90s and the subsequent dirth of lifetime salaryman type job oops.

They are called the parasite generation, the herbivores, etc.

Some good things about it, some bad. Good in that fewer neglected children of patents who were not prepared, bad in that our current economic model depends on pop growth...

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's because the millennials are less likely to own a car, more likely to live with their parents, more likely to have a huge debt (student loans), and less likely to have a job.

I can see how all those facts could put a damper on having lots and lots of sex.

<comment><USER7> Also might be worth looking at the rate of anti-depressant use and the impact they may have on sex-drive

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was a time when you kind of had to hook up to get experience. Now, you can google just about anything and talk to people all over the world, day or night. You don't have to go expose yourself to a bunch of risks to get a clue.

I don't see that as a problem and I bet many millenials don't know how to put their finger on why this is just not an issue for them. They weren't around when their parents were hooking up to figure out some basics and they just take their enormous access to information and life experience at their fingertips for granted.

<comment><USER9> People know how to have sex instinctively. You don't need to do a lot of hooking up to figure it out.

<comment><USER10> Definitely disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Porn and hookup apps have commodified sex to the point where it isn't necessarily as liberating or stimulating as it once was.

That being said, I'd be interested in seeing this broken down geographically. I live in a big east coast city and let me assure millennials are having a lot of sex.

<comment><USER12> Why are hookup apps making sex less stimulating? Because they cause people to have more sex. I can't see any other reason.

So what you're saying is, young people are having less sex, because they're having more sex?

(take this as tongue-in-cheek, I don't think you're really making that argument)

<comment><USER13> It's the chooser's dilemma. Girls are having to many options and can't make up their mind so they end up with nothing. Same reason even very beautiful women end up single and childless in their 40's.

<comment><USER14> > Same reason even very beautiful women end up single and childless in their > 40's.

I thought that was because they spent their 20s-30s focusing on college and their careers, and just as they had extremely high standards for those, they also had extremely high standards for men they dated, so they ended up not "settling" for anyone.

I'm just over 40 and have dated a few of these urban-dwelling women who 40 and up, never married, no kids. There's a ridiculous number of them in DC. In my estimation based on personal experience, they're all incredibly picky and won't date a guy unless everything is absolutely perfect. In my case they tend to lose interest very fast because I live outside the city presently so I'm not conveniently located. To be snarky, they seem to all want a guy who's over 6' tall, looks like a model, dresses like he's on the cover of GQ, makes $300k/year, and lives across the street from her. And I actually meet a couple of these criteria to some extent: I'm over 6' (which seems to be very rare here on the east coast I've noticed...), I have a good-paying job (though not $300k/year good), and I'm told I'm very attractive, particularly for an over-40 guy as I'm thin and in great shape and frequently confused for someone 10+ years younger; my deficiencies are that I don't dress like a GQ model (more like an engineer who wears polo shirts all the time), I'm not outgoing and gregarious (I'm a software engineer....), and I don't live in the hip part of town these women all live in. The last such woman that seemed to be seriously interested in me (a 40yo lawyer) dumped me after a few weeks because of the distance, or so she said, even though this was something she knew about up-front. Oh yeah, these women also don't like guys who are separated or recently divorced (good lucking finding a decent guy at 40+ who's never been married or was divorced years ago). And AFAICT, they are not quick to jump into bed with someone, in fact quite the opposite (and these are not conservative religious women either, they're all liberal Democrats AFAICT, though really more like "limousine liberals"). Sorry for the rambling, but the thing about single, childless, pretty women in their 40s is something I have recent and direct experience with so I couldn't help going off.

<comment><USER15> You have a very interesting background and experiences. As a 40 something software engineer I see a bunch of my friends getting divorced and not having much success in the dating pool. I can think of one person very similar to you in almost every way, he can't find anyone to date.

<comment><USER14> If you'd like to chat more about it, I'd be happy to compare notes. I'm always looking for more people in the same boat as me.

Are these friends of yours in or near metro areas? If so, which one(s)? From my research, if you're a single guy in the Bay Area, you'd better be happy with celibacy, and Seattle isn't much better. But NYC and DC are full of single 35-45 women (but they're all incredibly picky IMO as I said before). The problem, however, is that if your friends are all software engineers, they're more likely to be in cities that have more men than women. NYC just isn't a very good place for a SW engineer, unless you love finance and HFT (and what I read about the work environments in those places is not good, and you'll have no free time for dating anyway), or web development. DC is mostly defense-related stuff, and in my experience there, the defense stuff is all _well_ outside the city proper (defense contractors are cheap bastards I guess), whereas all the upper-middle-class single women live in Georgetown or near Dupont Circle or something, since they all work downtown or at the university, so you're looking at a minimum 45-minute drive to visit each other.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an absolutely horrible profession to get into if you're a hetero male who isn't an ultra-conservative churchgoer and wants to be able to date attractive professional women: it places you in locations that are far from these women, and keeps you in social circles that are completely alien to them, and in work environments that are devoid of any such women. I really wish I had gone into the medical field instead, honestly. In my experience, engineering is a great field if you're either an ultra-conservative religious person who wants a stay-at-home wife in a low cost-of-living region, or you're asexual and want to live in Silicon Valley and dedicate your life to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article admits that millennials are still having plenty of sex, but the small percentage of millennials who isn't having as much sex is slowly growing. This implies, either that:

[a] some people who had more sex in the past have less sex now; or

[b] some people who haven't yet had sex are waiting even later to do so

These are somewhat different circumstances, even if the article conflates them, and even if some of the underlying causes apply to both groups.

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't sex over-rated though? Obviously it is the funnest activity evolution has ever given us but the associated social/resource costs ruin it. From a Millenial's perspective, previous generations have put sex on a pedestal because there were few better things for them to pass the time with. Now we not only have sexual agency(toys + porn) but we also have the world's information and media at our fingertips.

I know it isn't the intention of the well-done article but the premise does feel like the jock making fun of the nerd who simply has different priorities and better things to do.

I wish these statistics cared less about generational changes and tried to plot sex-drive changes for everyone by decade. I'm sure we'd see it plummet after widespread acceptance of the internet and discrete shipping.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not a millenial, but this quote sums up my attitude towards dating

> "For an average date, you're going to spend at least two hours, and in that > two hours I won't be doing something I enjoy,"

<comment><USER16> Don't dating sites, or merely texting for a while before a date mitigate some of that feeling? The parties involved can narrow down a range of activities that they'd like for a first date.

In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist. First impressions matter insofar as 10 minutes into the date you start to get an idea whether you and the other person is truly on the same wavelength, and about 30 minutes in, you know for sure.

If it's working, you're connecting with another person, and you can plan something more engaging for the next encounter, and if it didn't work, you're only out the price of a drink. Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile?

<comment><USER14> >In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist.

You mean like the US? If you're in any kind of decent city, there's plenty of nice coffee shops which aren't Starbucks. If the only coffee shops around are Starbucks, you're living in a shithole.

I usually propose to meet at non-Starbucks coffee shops for my first dates too. It's nice because even if the date is a bust (as it always is...), I now know of a new coffee shop.

>Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile?

I really don't know because I don't hang out with Millenials that young (that guy in the article was only 18 IIRC), but I kinda doubt it. I think that guy was just a freak. He talked about how he just likes to sit at home in front of his computer with 3 different screens showing 3 different things at once (video game, movie, other) and focus on making money. I really don't think that's normal, I think the article's author managed to find one of the weirdest people possible and then try to present him as representative of all younger Millenials.

<comment><USER16> > If the only coffee shops around are Starbucks, you're living in a shithole.

I don't disagree, but in my opinion picking a very mainstream, arguably mass- market, but still decent place for a first date over the one-of-a-kind local shop is useful signalling.

It makes it clear that you're not trying to impress by the choice of venue and you're not trying to project a particular lifestyle, and is a form of expectation management.

I don't believe that the hardcore multitasker in the example, gaming but somehow still money-making, typifies the average millennial either, but since the population of non- sexually active millennials is a subset, perhaps he's less of an outlier in that group.

At the risk of subjectively overgeneralizing in the other direction, perhaps that some of us perceive none of these anecdotes as very typical 'young people' behavior suggests that quirkier people have less sex than people whose behaviors and opinions wouldn't have stood out to us as much. Or we could just be too biased to what we think is 'normal' behavior. It's an intriguing point.

<comment><USER14> >I don't disagree, but in my opinion picking a very mainstream, arguably mass- market, but still decent place for a first date over the one-of-a-kind local shop is useful signalling.

I was mainly objecting to your line about "countries where coffeehouses actually exist." We have those in the US, they're all over the place. Just not in small towns or shitty (usually smaller and Southern) cities. Just open Google Maps, pick any metro area with at least 1M people, and search for "coffee". You should easily find something that's not Starbucks or Panera (though I will admit Panera is pretty good, it's my favorite corporate chain by far, but make sure to go to the corporate locations and not the franchises if you can). They aren't all one-of-a-kind local shops; there are plenty of local or regional chains around. I'll take any of those over Starbucks.

But for your "useful signaling", that can be played different ways. Picking a Starbucks when there's better convenient alternatives, to me, says that you're possibly a mindless consumer drone who just buys whatever's popular without putting any thought into your consumption. Maybe I'm just biased, but from my own experience, Starbuck's product is generally sub-par, and their shops are generally too small and overcrowded compared to their competition. Not really the kind of place where you can sit down with someone and have a nice, quiet chat. Maybe they used to be years ago.

You're probably right about quirkier people. Maybe the Millenials have a higher proportion of quirkier people than previous generations. The internet certainly can be blamed for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if these numbers would change if one included sexting. I have a feeling that a growing portion of both relationships and sexual activities are being held over the internet.

<comment><USER20> But is that really "having sex"? I know we had the discussion of what constitutes sex during the Clinton years but still, I feel like anything that doesn't at least include physical stimulation of some sort (in the same location) isn't really having sex. "Sexting" is more like flirting or "dirty talk".

I wouldn't consider phone sex (to go back to previous years) the same as having sex. It's like leaving a sexy note in your lover's or spouse's pocket to find at work or calling them up at lunch to ask them to guess what you're wearing.

It's definitely on the spectrum of intimate activities but if I've only had sexy video-call time or sexy Snapchat exchanges with someone (but not actually participated in anything in person) I would definitely not consider myself to have had sex with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel sorry for these people, quite frankly. You've been busy, eh? I see, I see.

</comment><comment><USER21> 8 seems like a pretty reasonable number. It was much lower before that...

</comment><comment><USER22> The curse of the Otaku is spreading....

</comment><comment><USER23> It's such a major liability to have sex with a girl, impregnate them, be stuck with a kid all while job prospects suck too.

I say this is a side-effect of Millennials forgoing pretty much a lot of comforts that boomers have come to enjoy, like owning a home or owning a car.

Austerity in every sense of the word.

Also, as a male millennial, I can honestly say that the climate to be promiscuous has never been less inviting.

<comment><USER24> First of all do not take this personal, I am trying to react in general on a whole generation and not blaming them as each generation deals with life they get confronted with. As a generation X person I think that the millennial generation is quite risk averse. You can see this in many fields, from political correctness going over the top, to risk aversion in music and culture, and even when it comes to building relations of which sex is a part. I do not know or try to point why this is but it does stand out from what I see around me. I feel very fortunate to have lived through punk music, squat housing, crazy ass parties and taking risks in my life, it made me stronger minded against what other people think of me and more confident in life.

<comment><USER25> > risk aversion in music

What do you mean by this? That you haven't heard anything original in music since you were a kid?

<comment><USER24> Why are you trying to play it on the man? you must know better than that, my generation heard and made many great tunes...

<comment><USER26> _my generation heard and made many great tunes_

Every generation will say this (which is probably the point the GP was trying to make).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>