Facebook's Recruiting and Retention Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-recruiting-and-retention-problem-2009-4 <comment><USER2> I went to a focus group in SF that turned out to be organized by Facebook (the last question was "what could Facebook tell you to convince you to work there?"-- it wasn't possible to tell up till then, surprisingly) and of the dozen CS students/alumni from Stanford/Berkeley there, none of them put Facebook as their first choice from a list of tech companies (all the large ones + Palantir, Twitter, FB).

Surprisingly, even though everyone had completely different career goals and rankings of companies, everybody had the same answer to the last question: "Tell me where you're headed and how you're going to get there."

</comment><comment><USER3> I interviewed with Facebook in March for a front-end developer role. It was an insulting experience. The tech screen was with some low-level engineer. The first(and only question before I hung up on him) was to write a function in javascript to return the square root of a number.

My answer in 15 seconds: var sqr = function(e){ return Math.sqrt(e); }

Easy enough. But no, he wanted a function that demonstrated an algorithm to find the square root. Ok... I said. I spent a minute trying to salvage some odd details from high-school algebra and basically came up blank. I was thinking, well this isn't going to look good on me. I readily admit to him that my knowledge of figuring out square roots by hand is a rusty, having been out of high school for 12 years(even though in retrospect, this was something we were never really even taught anyway). But surely this guy, who is screening me for my ability to do front-end coding, will move on and start asking me some hard problems about javascript, css, cross browser problems, etc. No.

We spend the next 6-8 minutes with him circling back on his square root problem. I tried a couple more times to answer this question that is _completely_ unrelated to the job I'm interviewing for. Finally, I get so fed up with this moron that my internal ticker clicks over and I realize, "Even if I get this job, I'm going to be dealing with these kinds of nazel-gazing engineers every single day. Not an environment I want to be in." I thanked him for his time, and he acts surprised and says "Are you sure? After everything it took to get to talk to me?". Yes, I say. I'm quite sure. >Click.<

I realized a long time ago what kind of people these are. When I was growing up, the garbage truck would come by on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When we first moved to the neighborhood, we would put our garbage out by the mailbox and some days it would be picked up and sometimes not. We would complain and nothing would change.

After a few weeks, I was standing out front when they came by. I noticed that everyone had their trash bags on the right side of their mailboxes. That morning, I had done that as well. But some new neighbors down the street had put theirs out on the left side of their mailbox. The truck comes by, grubby guys grabbing/throwing, grabbing throwing. All the garbage gone, except for the neighbors. The next time, I purposely left ours on the left side. Didn't get picked up that day.

So that was the day that I realized these guys had their Line In The Sand. It was Their Way or the Highway. They had a really crappy job. Probably crappy lives at home because they're garbage men. This was Florida, not NYC. There's no glamor or high-pay there. This was the one place where they were the kings, the arbiters of Pickup Or Not. This was the one point of control over their lives they could influence, and they grabbed onto with both hands and some toes.

So this little middling engineer at Facebook had his Line too, in the form of a square root function that Had To Be ANSWERED! "You shall not cross!" He exclaims internally. I'm positive he was quite satisfied with himself after I hung up. Some self congratulation at keeping another peasant out of the castle halls. Kind of like the junk yard dog on a chain behind the fence. Smug in barking and keeping away the kids, but still chained to his dog house.

<comment><USER4> Root-finding algorithms, or more generally iterative optimization and numerical solution of equations, isn't something to be sneered at. Sure, it's a front end position, but the ability to do this is something I'd want to know if I were interviewing you, too.

<comment><USER5> Many square root methods have been devised, notable among them the Newton method, devised by the _guy that invented calculus._.

How does front-end design work significantly overlap with this? I would wager that one could quiz the best CSS/Javascript gurus in the world and not a single one would know, nor care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Facebook's "close rate" on new employees it wants to hire hovers around 80% ... for a company with the potential to mint hundreds of millionaires in a rare Silicon Valley IPO, both numbers seem low._

Right, but it's increasingly unlikely that any new employee will be among those millionaires.

<comment><USER7> And that there will be any significant number of millionaires. It has yet to be monetized.

<comment><USER8> > It has yet to be monetized.

Incorrect. It has yet to become profitable.

<comment><USER7> Successfully monetized then. We can play semantics all day, but Facebook has lost a shit ton of money and has no plan to make a shit ton + X(billion) in the near future .

<comment><USER9> it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the _stock_ goes crazy. lots of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.

<comment><USER7> It matters completely, if Facebook can't get a plan together to make tons of money there won't be an IPO to bring in the fuck-you money. Right now they are unprofitable and have no great outlook that would lead to an IPO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's the circle of life (or poo depending oh who you ask)

This same article has been written about Microsoft, Apple, Google and every other successful tech giant,

I should start writing my 'Twitter Retention Crisis' article now, and just insert the names and which companies they left for later when it starts happening.

<comment><USER11> the difference is that at Google the programmers would be working on fun and exciting new things, so it takes a lot longer to get bored with the company...at facebook? What real innovation is there? I mean if you think about it, most of Facebook's features can be written by any programmer.

<comment><USER12> That's like saying work at Twitter is easy because it's just a simple messaging system.

Scaling a system to the level of Google, Facebook and Twitter is the hard part.

<comment><USER13> Actually, I have to disagree.

There was a time when this was the hard part, but at this point the "scale it up" search space has been explored quite effectively by a lot of different groups to the point where the only reason anyone below the "system architect" level would need to know the ins and outs of this particular subject is because the company has a deep-seated NIH syndrome.

Scaling a system to the Google, Facebook, or Twitter level is hard, but getting to half of their size using off the shelf components is not. Getting the rest of the way on this journey is not something that mid-level tool and front-end coders should ever have to deal with. If they do need to know this information then you are doing it wrong...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I could have written this article and I know nothing of the goings-on at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It is all speculation and rumor.

</comment><comment><USER9> facebook is indulging the exact same hubris we engaged at yahoo in the late 90s. after an initial cadre of so-so developers rode the wave up, we decided to believe the hype that we were uber-brilliant and suddenly no one was smart enough to pass our interviews. we made sure of it. in the end we hired mediocore talent because we had pissed off anyone with a brain with our retarded brain teasers and "did you memorize page 478 of stroustrup" type questions.

my interview with them was pointlessly difficult, i pretty much hung up on them because it was obvious that the point of the interview was to provide amusement for the caller.

</comment><comment><USER15> Mark Zuckerberg is great for media PR, because he reminds the old guard of the '90s, when a talented but generally unimpressive 2x-year-old could sell a money-losing company for billions. He's a massive liability for recruiting PR, though, because only a masochist would want him as a boss.</comment>


NPR Podcast: The App Economy, with Instapaper founder Marco Arment - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/31/146152273/the-tuesday-podcast-the-app-economy?ps=cprs

<comment><USER2> In this interview with NPR's Planet Money, Marco tells the story of how he started Instapaper as a site for personal use and then turned it into a side- business. Eventually it grew to the point where he could make a living off it. He discusses the economics of Apple's App Store vs. ad-supported web sites and his experiences with choosing the optimal price for his app. It's a very interesting interview. (18 minutes long)</comment>


Gerald A. Lawson, a Pioneer in Video Games, Dies at 70 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/technology/personaltech/14lawson.html

<comment><USER2> There's a great interview with Jerry here:

<http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/545>

This guy was truly a pioneer and seemed to be at every pivotal moment in the early days of console gaming. It's a must read if you appreciate those old pieces of hardware.</comment>


Google+ asking for birthday now. - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/up/birthday

<comment><USER2> To be fair, you can always click the 'No Thanks' button or make it visible only to yourself, or to your friends, or even to very specific people.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'Visit the Google homepage on your birthday for a surprise!'

Hell yeah, I love surprises.

<comment><USER4> Didn't do anything for me last week...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you read "Rework" yet?  - <AUTHOR>

And if so, how much do you love it?<p>I got it on Tuesday, and finished this morning, so its a pretty quick read. Its extremely clear and concise - I'm going to read it a few more times to burn some of these things into my brain. I'd call it a must read for anyone - working. <comment><USER2> Same here. I caught myself drifting off to personal experiences with scrum meetings that take over an hour and unnecessary management speeches, stalling tactics, the constant interruptions, etc.

If you read SvN you have already seen all the material, it's more of a refresher course and a motivational push to GTFO of here and start something.</comment>


A discussion of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism - <AUTHOR> https://forward.com/opinion/419988/debunking-the-myth-that-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitic/ <comment><USER2> > The first is that opposing Zionism is anti-Semitic because it denies to Jews > what every other people enjoys: a state of its own. "The idea that all other > peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews > cannot," declared Chuck Schumer in 2017, "is anti-Semitism."

What? Overwhelmingly the idea is that states do not belong to ethnic groups (especially in the EU and UN states).</comment>


EFF Challenge Coins for their 30th Anniversary - <AUTHOR> https://supporters.eff.org/eff30-challenge-coins <comment><AUTHOR> EFF is offering Challenge Coins for donations in celebration of their 30 year anniversary. I am not affiliated with them outside of being someone who donates and likes swag.</comment>


Magically Scramble Eggs In The Shell - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ylinedesign/a-goose-that-lays-golden-eggs

<comment><USER2> I'm dubious as to the worth of these as a specific kitchen utensil; most how- to videos I've seen include a jumper as the sole "equipment" required. Maybe two rubber bands on either side to help prevent movement would make it even easier.

> The design process took months of careful exploration and testing. We did > loads of sketches and built functional and aesthetic models by hand and on > the computer.

The resulting product is quite nice aesthetically, but is it worth $18?

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool; I'd like the model for 3D printing my own!</comment>


Judge Rules Qualcomm's Practices Violate Antitrust Law, Orders Changes - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-rules-qualcomms-practices-violate-antitrust-law-orders-changes-11558515533 <comment><USER2> Similar news from a non-paywall site [1]

[1] [http://www.fosspatents.com/2019/05/breaking-news-federal- tra...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2019/05/breaking-news-federal-trade- commission.html)</comment>


Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_merula/ <comment><USER3> History repeats:

[https://github.com/chocolatey-community/chocolatey- coreteamp...](https://github.com/chocolatey-community/chocolatey- coreteampackages/issues/1145)

</comment><comment><USER4> > _received a bill from Oracle for $12,200 for using the company 's > proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides extra capabilities for > the free GPL-licensed VirtualBox hypervisor_

This still means that vanilla VirtualBox is GPL, and can be (freely) used for businesses, right?

EDIT: Looking at the downloads page, apparently so, VB is licensed with GPLv2. The Extensions Pack following that is licensed PUEL. Luckily, in my case, only vanilla was installed. But with VB's nag of new version, the possibility of a licensing bait-and-switch on a newer version and Oracle having left a bad taste... I'm uninstalling VB from all PCs except one or two devices as a precautionary measure.

<comment><USER5> ...also Guest Additions are GPLv2 fortunately

<comment><USER6> Major distros should modify their version of VB to not accept Oracles version of the extensions without (1) informing users about the Foss version and (2) forwarding the user to this page first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is what happens when your legal department is 10 times bigger than your engineering department.

</comment><comment><USER7> Remember kids: Oracle has no customers, only hostages!

</comment><comment><USER8> It is unfortunate that Oracle can't put this effort into fixing their horrible contract management system so that I can get Oracle support quotes on time.

</comment><comment><USER9> All the legacy software firms are grasping for straws like this.

<comment><USER10> What are some other ones?

<comment><USER11> Gitlab is the most modern i can think of.

<comment><USER10> In what way is gitlab legacy software?

<comment><USER12> He must have misread legacy as legendary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hmm, selling software by embedded a purchase agreement in the EULA.

That's innovation at Oracle?

Seems like scammers should be ignored. Anyone can send you a bill, doesn't mean you should pay it.

<comment><USER14> Dear Oracle,

I am ready to pay the bill. Please reply with your bank account details.

EULA:

[ Lots of boring text ] By replying to this e-mail you irrevocably agree to a $50,000 processing fee. [ Lots of other text ]

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For anyone that's curious, it seems you can check whether or not you have the Extension Pack installed with `VBoxManage list extpacks` in the CLI. I get the output "Extension Packs: 0". Not sure if that's the 'right' way to check.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not really sure what alternative people would prefer here.

DRM to ensure it doesn't run at all unless it can contact a license server? Complete with licensing related outages?

Oracle's approach here isn't especially unusual and seems better than video game style DRM. Always run, ping home and let pirates be mopped up asynchronously or (more commonly) businesses that just aren't disciplined about licensing contacted to get proper billing in place.

If you want to sell software users can run themselves, and not just rent via a cloud service, what better approach is there?

<comment><USER17> Lots of software provides base software and free trial of premium features with time limit without a paid license.

<comment><USER16> And so does Oracle. You usually only pay if it's in production. But again - <USER2> some point there needs to be _some_ mechanism to catch people who don't pay. All other alternatives seem to be more aggressive and worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If my employer's C-levels saw this headline, they'd probably just ban Oracle outright and kill me several-VM lab env.

<comment><USER19> Never let a crisis go to waste. Use it as an opportunity to get buy in for time and resources to replace VirtualBox with something more open. If you write code as part of the initiative, and it's not specific to your business, try to contribute it back to the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What are the best alternatives to Virtual Box?

<comment><USER20> Yes .. specifically, I use vanilla VB to drive Vagrant. I noticed that libvirt seems to be an alternative .. does it work well? Any other options?</comment></comment>


Sensitivity Conjecture Resolved - <AUTHOR> https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229 <comment><USER2> The actual conjecture that was proved has a very elementary formulation: if you consider all n-bit words and take _any_ set of more than half of them (i.e. at least 1+2^(n-1)), then this set will contain some word for which there are at least √n other words in the set that differ in exactly one bit position.

For example (with n=64), if you take any set of 1+2^63 (or more) 64-bit words, then for some word in this set, there will be at least 8 other words in the set that each differ from this word in only one of the 64 bit positions.

To illustrate, here's a brute-force verification in Python for the n=4 case, that tries all (16 choose 9) = 11440 subsets:

        import itertools
        n = 4
        m = 2

        def degree(word, s):
            """How many other words differ in one bit position"""
            return sum(1 for w in s if bin(word ^ w).count('1') == 1)

        words = range(2**n)  # All n-bit words
        for s in itertools.combinations(words, 1 + 2**(n-1)):
            assert any(degree(word, s) >= m for word in s)

Note that the test fails (for 48 out of the 11440 sets) with m=3 in place of m=2, so the bound is tight in this case.

</comment><comment><USER3> The proof is fairly short too: "Within the preprint, the proof itself is about a page and a half.

Whenever there's an announcement like this, ~99% of the time either the proof is wrong, or at any rate it's way too complicated for outsiders to evaluate it quickly. This is one of the remaining 1% of cases. I'm rather confident that the proof is right. Why? Because I read and understood it. It took me about half an hour. If you're comfortable with concepts like induced subgraph and eigenvalue, you can do the same."

</comment><comment><USER4> Earlier today when I was looking for potential correspondences between Interval Graph Theory [1] and Flow Graph Theory [2] (Reducible Flow Graphs), I happened upon this 2017 blog post and paper [3] by Jacob Steinhardt: "Does Pigeonhole Degrade Gracefully?"...

      The celebrated pigeonhole principle says...

      If we have disjoint sets S_1, S_2, ..., S_m subsets in [n]
      each of size s, then m (the number of sets) is at most [n/s].

      Suppose that instead of being disjoint, we require that every
      pair of sets has intersection at most 1. How much can this
      change the maximum number of sets m? Is it still roughly n/s,
      or could the number be much larger?

      Interestingly, it turns out that there is a sharp phase
      transition at s = √n .

[https://theorydish.blog/2017/05/30/does-pigeonhole- degrade-g...](https://theorydish.blog/2017/05/30/does-pigeonhole-degrade- gracefully/)

[1] Interval (graph theory) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(graph_theory)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_\(graph_theory\))

[2] Flow Graph Theory [http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/dragon/w06/lectures/dfa3...](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/dragon/w06/lectures/dfa3.pdf)

[3] Does robustness imply tractability? A lower bound for planted clique in the semi-random model (2018) - Jacob Steinhardt, Stanford [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.05120.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.05120.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to preliminary publication (PDF): [http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~hhuan30/papers/sensitivity_1.pd...](http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~hhuan30/papers/sensitivity_1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> I listened to _Right Ho, Jeeves!_ this year from Librivox ([https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g- wodehouse/](https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/)) and I'd second his recommendation for it. Sort of a perfect novel.

</comment><comment><USER6> any practical application outside of complexity field eco chamber?

<comment><USER7> Maybe not now. But there's a sense in which that should be expected. Here's the situation:

There are some biggie problems out there having to do with combinations of discrete things, optimization with such things, etc. For example, this challenge led to the question P versus NP. Bluntly, there is a big supply of potentially tasty nuts there we are unable to crack or poor at cracking.

If want to crack those nuts, e.g., have something "useful", then likely we have to back off on a direct attack via some one bright idea, technique, paper, and chunk of code. Instead, we have to, say, build a _foundation_ , circle around the problem and look for entering wedges, construct some tools, look for related, seeming somewhat promising smaller results that in time we could build on to make progress to the real goal of being good at cracking those tasty nuts.

So, right, maybe we are not sure yet that some result will be useful -- that's sad but just part of the challenge of cracking those nuts. They are tasty but tough nuts to crack. Moreover, such results are about the best we see; we should take, and take seriously, the best we do see.

So, that's part of how research works, for much of the best we know how to do, in pure and applied math. Yes, I know; I know; they don't always make this aspect of research fully clear in freshman calculus!!!

<comment><USER8> I agree. It is wrong to wag fingers saying impractical etc. Lower bound theory is about adversaries against _all possible algorithms_, not just the analysis of a given algorithm. So progress is expected to be slow.

George Polya in his book "How To Solve It?" encourages to think about "What is the easiest problem that you cannot solve yet?" Most theoretical results tend to answer this, and this principle is a good guideline for theoretical research.</comment></comment></comment>


Learning from a year of security breaches - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/starting-up-security/learning-from-a-year-of-security-breaches-ed036ea05d9b#.nvb4m4xqi <comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the best security articles I've read all year. If you're at a startup and don't know whether you have a mature security process set up, drop most things and read this.</comment>


Making Sense of Revision-control Systems - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1595636

<comment><USER2> Now all we need is for the SEI to admit that CMM merely mandating "version control, any version control" is a mistake.

CMM should mandate _fast_ version control that doesn't do the stupid "lock a file when checking out", and is also portable. That would eliminate those goldurned "enterprise" version control systems that are so portable they only work on Windows, require a full time VCS administrator and a DBA to keep them going, and have a workflow built-in.</comment>


Companies Attending Goldman Sachs Startup Event in Las Vegas Today - <AUTHOR> http://mattermark.com/goldman-sachs-is-hosting-a-startup-event-in-vegas-heres-the-full-list-of-companies-who-are-attending/

<comment><USER2> That's a lot of egos in one place.

</comment><comment><USER3> What does it actually mean for a company to attend an event like this? I.E if Adreesen Horowitz is attending, that could be anything from all the partners being present to one associate just checking things out.

<comment><USER4> Your guess is as good as anyone else's, unless you or your friend is present at the event — large VCs / companies (a16z/FB) are less likely to send senior folks; on the other hand, smaller firms like Wanelo or Felicis Ventures could have founder / partner.

One unique thing about investment banks' conferences is they preserve 1-on-1 meeting rooms to connect startup founders to corp dev or investors. Ultimate purpose from Goldman is to seek out the next big M&A / IPO deals and be at the forefront to lead them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The song 'Running with the Devil' comes to mind:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcvtnEvclGs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcvtnEvclGs)

</comment><comment><USER6> Goldman Sachs, shitbags of Wall Street.

Sergey Aleynikov.

Deal with Putin.

Bilking municipalities worldwide.

But wait, there's more:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies)

<comment><USER7> You know, I worked there for a summer (I'm a college student) and after working at a couple other tech firms, I have to say it was an amazing environment and I really loved it. I'm not going to sit here and say they are perfect, but they're far from shitbags and there are many great people there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm at a loss of why associating ones company with Goldman Sachs is considered a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ctrl-f - KKR check, TPG check, Bain check, Silver Lake check.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, what a list. So... if it's the "Private Internet Company Conference" what are companies like Facebook and eBay doing there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably looking for companies to buy.</comment></comment>


Windows 7 Beta Fail - <AUTHOR> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

<comment><USER2> This totally wouldn't have happened to highly anticipated downloads from Firefox or Apple, which can push their terabytes through pipes made of sheer _cool_.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/its-firefox-3-world- rec...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/its-firefox-3-world-record- download-day-but-im-still-waiting/)

[http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Mac-fans- overload-...](http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Mac-fans-overload- Expo-Web-site/0,130061733,139232436,00.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Windows 7 Beta 32-bit build 7000 en_us :

[http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en- us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso)

Windows 7 Beta 64-bit build 7000 en_us :

[http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en- us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso)

I found this on another website, but the links work and it seems real enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> I snatched mine from MSDN two days back. It was actually backed by akamai, I'm not sure why didn't they use the same for non-MSDN subscribers.

<comment><USER3> If I had to take a quick guess, it's because Akamai charges by the bandwidth. While your (paid) MSDN account supports the Akamai charges, the general public will just get leftover bandwidth from various services which is 'free'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm running Win7 from MSDN here. Honestly if you're on Vista SP2 (pre-release) then there not enough difference in Win7 to waste the upgrade time. (Vista SP2 seems to be pretty stable memory wise - no more swapping/disk grinding for me).

Also note, if you have an older ATI video card you may need to boot into safe mode and remove the old drivers to make the screen readable. I had to run the 2nd half of the install blind (it really is beta).

Final note: watch your MP3's - check the release notes. Seems the install damages them.

<comment><USER6> The difference is, not many people in the public have Vista SP2. Whereas everyone can grab Windows 7 if they so desire.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=dca...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=dca54ecc-362a-4b4d-b62b-22780e839a7e&displaylang=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why aren't they using bittorrent?

<comment><USER8> I'm sure their legal team has solid justifications for it. What happens if you can grab it from torrent? There is no agreement between you and Microsoft that you do not own the product or have other rights. The firmly accepted way have a legal agreement is to get an agreement. So no torrent.

<comment><USER9> Maybe, but I think the bigger issue is that the left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing. Microsoft has a viable bit torrent surrogate which would allow them to force a EULA up front:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_Intelligent_Transfer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_Intelligent_Transfer_Service)

"Version 3.0 (November 2007) Adds peer caching which allows users to download content from peers and also serve content to peers [...]"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought this going to lead to the "fix" so that Windows 7 doesn't delete the first 3 seconds of every MP3 you have lol.

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961367>

</comment><comment><USER11> "Urgent information: Your computer needs a scan. You have not scanned for spyware in 0 days".

I was hoping all the niggling non-resizable dialogs and pestering messages would be sorted this time. They aren't, and there are more of them.

Despite that, I like it more than Vista already.</comment>


GiveDirectly Gives Poor People a Year's Income - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/04/givedirectly-cash-transfers_n_7339040.html? <comment><USER2> This sounds great, and I'm certainly interested in following their progress.

I am curious what the effects are on those who don't receive the transfers. (Those who don't meet the requirements, or live in neighboring towns, for instance.) While I'm certainly not saying it outweighs the positive effects, there must be some negative unintended consequences. Someone uses the funds to start a business, which is enough to make an existing business in the field unprofitable for instance. I wonder how much research has gone into those types of side effects.

My understanding is also that direct cash infusions can have undesirable macro effects - basically Dutch Disease caused by aid money instead of natural resources. Again I'm curious to what extent those effects are understood.

If anyone has knowledge or links to resources along those lines, please share! I did find this somewhat more critical review[1] but it still just focuses on the recipients, rather than knock-on effects.

[1] [http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/givedirectly_not_so_fast](http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/givedirectly_not_so_fast)

<comment><USER3> Lots of research has been done on GiveDirectly's effects. See here: [http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- dir...](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- directly#Dothecashtransferscauseproblemsandcomplicationsthatoffsettheirpositiveimpact)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. From that page, the part that most directly addresses my concerns is this:

> Do grants distort local markets? It seems possible to us that a large > infusion of cash into an area could alter economic opportunities for both > recipients and non-recipients. Such effects could be positive (for example > by spurring investment and job creation or by increasing the availability of > retail goods) or negative (for example, by leading primarily to local > inflation). The limited evidence addressing this issue in the RCT of > GiveDirectly's program in Rarieda[1] and the broader literature on cash > transfers points to no distortion. There is an ongoing RCT[2] of > GiveDirectly's program that is testing for macroeconomic effects.

Not a ton of concrete results as yet, especially for the larger macroeconomic effects, but at least from that one study the local effects appear to be minor. Certainly more research would be valuable.

[1] [http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...](http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash- transfers#Whatarethepotentialdownsidesoftheintervention) [2] [http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- dir...](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly#GE)

<comment><USER4> The big problem with these studies and local economies is that results are likely to depend very much on localised factors such as proximity to larger markets, not to mention what proportion of the village actually receives the handout, and how much of the existing village economy revolves around people with more wealth than the handout recipients. I think it's pretty much impossible to give a definitive yes/no answer.

It's also worth pointing out that the "minor effects" are minor because they're not statistically significant for the sample rather than because they're not necessarily there. Haushofer and Shapiro, for example, finds that whilst recipients spend $36/month more, comparably poor non-recipients in a village spend $7.5 per month _less_. The sample size and volatility means the latter part of result isn't statistically significant, but on the other hand it is more consistent with the effects on the poor that didn't receive handouts in these particular villages being negative, and indeed if only a fifth of the village received the subsidy it's even consistent with the benefits being _entirely_ positional, even though the dispersal of the losses amongst a larger population makes it difficult to precisely gauge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting, and a stark contrast to the article about the Red Cross relief:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664983)

jbniche points out: "Just think the impact that would have had if it had been divided up and given directly to each Haitian adult. The adult population of Haiti is roughly 6 million, so we're talking about almost $100 per adult Haitian. Roughly, it's about 1/8 of the per capita GDP of Haiti. Imagine what you could if you were a poor American and received 1/8 of the American per capita GDP after a disaster (~6000 USD). That's a new roof, or a replacement vehicle, etc. It's not life changing, but it would have been very significant, and massive in scale."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9666390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9666390)

and the article supports his point, saying that "A 2013 study in Uganda found that people who received cash enjoyed a 49 percent earnings boost after two years, and a 41 percent increase after four years, compared to people who hadn't gotten a transfer. Another study in Sri Lanka found rates of return averaging 80 percent after five years. In Uganda, not only were the cash recipients better off, but their number of hours worked and labor productivity actually increased."

But for smaller amounts (like the U$ 100 proposed), "One program gave $200 to at-risk Liberian men who were either homeless or who made their income from dealing drugs or stealing. The lead researcher, Chris Blattman, summarized the findings in an op-ed in The New York Times:

"Almost no men wasted [the money]. In the months after they got the cash, most dressed, ate and lived better. Unlike the Ugandans, however, whose new businesses kept growing, the Liberian men were back where they started a year later. Two hundred dollars was not enough to turn them into businessmen. But it brought them a better life for a while, which is the fundamental goal of any welfare program. We also tested a counseling program to reduce crime and violence. It worked a little on its own, but had the largest impact when combined with cash.""

<comment><USER6> Development and emergency response are very different problems. $100 or even $6000 isn't useful if there's no way to get to the things you need to buy, or if local scarcity pushes prices for bare necessities obscenely high. Vaccinations, blankets and tents, food, etc. can be hard to find in a disaster-stricken area. Heck, even finding a way to get at the money can be difficult if the roads and electricity are out.

(I'm not defending the Red Cross, but I would unsurprised if "just give them money" is less effective in the case of disaster relief than in the case of development.)

<comment><USER7> _I 'm not defending the Red Cross..._

Probably a good thing, because AFAICT, they're pretty much indefensible at this point.

<comment><USER8> I'm not having any problem and not feeling ashamed at all defending the Red Cross instead.

If you just give poor people any money in Port au Prince after the earthquake, you simply atract predators that will beat and steal those people living in the streets easily, collecting all this money in the blink of an eye. Rich people in Haiti did not seem to care much for the bad luck of the poor people either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An American architect tried building a school in post-earthquake Haiti. He struggled for a while with growing cost estimates, finding materials, and cutting through corruption and bureaucracy. At the end he thought that just giving them cash would have been better.

> If you could turn back the clock would you just write a check to all the > parents of the kids who go to that school?

> "Definitely," Meyers said.

[http://thebillfold.com/2013/05/giving-money-directly-to- poor...](http://thebillfold.com/2013/05/giving-money-directly-to-poor-people/)

</comment><comment><USER10> A detail popped out at me: that they picked people based on the material of their roof. Organics get money, metal doesn't.

I predict a "fashion" trend in the poor architecture of the region to eschew better roofs even if you can afford one.

I also think that an editor of a newspaper in Kenya and Uganda should do a cartoon where a villager uses his GiveDirectly money to buy a better roof, and then the company takes the money back and accuses the villager of fraud.

<comment><USER11> What is being done to address the perverse incentive this creates to not upgrade your roof if you have non-metal?

As economists I know they know this, thanks to the Lucas Critique ;) But I didn't see what was being done about it.

<comment><USER12> Change "roof" to "food". Giving money only to people who don't have enough food to eat isn't a perverse incentive: there's little point in going hungry to get money; any money you get will be spent on food before anything else.

<comment><USER13> Not that easy. Roof was picked up probably because it's obvious and unambiguous - you literally only have to take one look at a house to know whether or not it's eligible. "Food" is not a well-defined metric, and whatever particular proxy for "food" you'd use, it seems to me that that proxy is much easier to manipulate than roof material.

As for perverse incentives, GP is right that as the news spread, people may save the money they have instead of investing it in a roof in a hope of getting additional money from GiveDirectly in the near future. That's, unfortunately, human behaviour 101. So in time, they'll have to change the criteria they use for distributing grants, and the article hints that they're thinking about it already.

<comment><USER12> Uh, that's not what I meant, though I guess my comment wasn't clear enough.

I'm not saying they should change the criteria to food security/malnutrition/etc. I'm saying that,

1) suppose the criteria was food-related; people wouldn't likely game the system by voluntarily not getting food because, well, eating is pretty high on people's list of desires.

(there are food-related metrics like "reported food consumption" and "malnutrition" that are used to assess the performance of GiveDirectly and charity/aid/welfare programs in general. They are well-defined, even if subject to manipulation. In any case, I understand that the roof criteria is more practical at the enrolment phase)

2) analogously, people aren't likely gaming the system by keeping non-metal roofs, as having good shelter is also very high on most people's list. In fact, one of the most common ways recipients spend the grant money is getting an iron roof.

Also, it's not like having a non-metal roof automatically entitles you to a grant, as this is isn't a nation-wide government program.

GiveDirectly is considering changing requirements not because they think they're including too many (relatively) high-income families with non-metal roofs, but because they might be excluding some people who live in metal-roof houses but are still poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> @5% average yearly return, Bill Gates + Warren Buffet could do this for 8 million people a year, every year, forever, and not eat a cent into their initial capital.

For scale: that's the population of Switzerland.

<comment><USER15> Gates&Buffet are both very invested in philanthropy and extremely data oriented. If they were made aware by someone they actually listen to, they just might do it.

<comment><USER16> 8 million is not a lot. There are >7000 million people in the world.

It takes the two richest people to provide for 0.0022% of the people on the planet.

Too high of a cost for too low of a return. I believe those men think they can solve more than 0.0022% of a problem with their fortunes.

<comment><USER14> Money doesn't vanish into a black hole. It flows.

Those 8 million will no longer have to worry about feeding themselves, educating their children, paying their rent. They can create. A % will create businesses to take advantage of the money flow, supporting themselves and their communities, paying taxes, jobs, export.

Over a single generation you could move from 5% literacy to 95%, for 8 million families. That's a lot of kids and a lot of creators. Fewer babies next gen too if history is right.

Those 8 million will essentially have their greatest fears and worries removed and replaced with joy and freedom. Just imagine the possibilities.

<comment><USER17> >Those 8 million will essentially have their greatest fears and worries removed and replaced with joy and freedom.

well, for a while. then the money runs out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Aid is just a stop-gap. Commerce—entrepreneurial capitalism—takes more people out of poverty than aid." \--Bono

Bono's brave enough to admit this.

Kenyan economist James Shikwati: "for God's sake, stop the aid:". [http://m.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/a-363663.html#spRe...](http://m.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/a-363663.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=https://www.google.co.uk/)

<comment><USER19> Please that's the same bull Ronald Reagan used to spew - That poor people are poor because they choose to.

<comment><USER20> No, it's not.

Let me give you an example. In africa there used to be a great many tailors. This was a profession that was viable and quite respected on the continent long after the western world had gone to pre-made clothes. In part this was because the country had not modernized. Then the aid came. The aid came in many forms, but one of the forms was millions upon millions of T-shirts and jeans. The entire profession of being a tailor has been eliminated (of course except for the very rich people.)

I'm not saying africans should be tailors, but pointing out that aid distorts the market, and distorts the economy and can undermine it if it's not well thought out.

This is what Bono was saying and this is one of the lessons that GiveDirectly seems to have learned.

<comment><USER21> It is easy to see the taylors who go out of business, it is a lot more difficult to see the million upon millions of people those millions upon millions of jeans are now keeping warm.

If we go from aid to commerce the tailors won't come back, but billions upon billions of consumer items will flood into Africa. As the country gets richer there is going to be at least a 300 million women who aspire to owning a washing machine, a generator (or other source of power) and indoor pluming. Say what you want about capitalism and industrialization, but short of something like a first contact with the Culture, no other system on the planet can satisfy those needs. And they deserve to be satisfied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the transparency that there seems to be around this as it makes me more likely to donate the money.

It seems to mean that basically they get 9% of donations to cover various costs. Both non-negligible but also not too bad.

Still would like to know what the "overhead costs" are.

<comment><USER23> When you go to the grocery store, do you interrogate to find out what they spend overhead costs are, or do you ask if the product is worth the price?

<comment><USER20> In the case of buying a product you can evaluate the product directly. This is much harder with charity, so you can look at their financial efficiency to see if your money is helping people or helping the operators of the "charity" to get rich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Alaska paid residents $1,800 in 2014 under its Permanent Fund program (a negative tax).

</comment><comment><USER25> When I get home I'm going to read the article thoroughly and do some digging. I've heard of organized charities failing miserably but this sounds too good to be true.

<comment><USER4> A few points to start you off.

Randomised Controlled Trials aren't at all novel or unusual in international development, despite what the article says. (though some of the parties conducting them aren't particularly inclined to share the data, especially the microfinance guys...)

The survey referenced is here [http://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapir...](http://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapiro_Policy_Brief_2013.pdf)

The margin for error in these studies is high. The study notes that their relative measure of "women's empowerment"[1] for women whose _neighbours_ received money increased by a similar degree to the food security of people that actually _did_ receive money. Plausible? The only viable causal mechanism the survey authors and I can think of that leads women who haven't received any money to be more "empowered" as a result of a few neighbours receiving it is the spreading of rumours that aid money is linked to people treat their women (something randomised study authors would really prefer didn't happen. Subjects trying to second-guess the surveyors' intentions is a _big_ problem) The only other hypothesis that seems to fit is secular trends or differences in village behaviour contaminating the study results, despite the best efforts to control for them. Either way that result is unhelpful, not least because it puts into perspective the surprisingly small proportionate increase in food security

Taking the statistics at face value, they strongly suggest the recipients don't waste the money and don't have it stolen from them, but the non-cherry- picked stats aren't as spectacular as the article makes out

Ultimately, it shows that households receiving $287 in cash had $278 more in wealth later on. Their businesses are larger _but generate no more profit than before_. People receiving a total of $1085 are only $531 better off in assets and actually have slightly worse returns on the businesses than the people who received lower handouts[2]

The one thing this wealth does enable people to do is consume more, quite a lot more ($40 more for people previously spending presumably because they have less need for savings or debt repayments. Whether this pattern continues further into the future (and how that affects their income/assets) isn't studied. Effects on the other villagers' income and wealth appeared negative, but not to a statistically significant degree.

I'm reasonably convinced that at this end of the scale the cash transfers are better than the more fashionable approach of _loaning_ the small amounts of money (with high overheads and commensurately high interest payment burdens on the recipients) but the study supports the view that its a band-aid rather than a solution.

[1]which, reading the full text, is actually a measure of reduced domestic abuse [2]whilst not statistically significant, the result that larger handouts resulted in a _smaller_ increase in revenue is unhelpful

<comment><USER23> Most people, including startups , will inefficiently spend if they get too much money in one series of funding. Cash flush can make you rush to purchase. Better to have a good plan before raising more funds.

Consumption isn't so bad to be worthless. At this level , consumption includes stuff life increased food for better health , which isn't reported in ROI. And a slightly silly analogy: Britain's elevate handouts kept many people afloat but generated one $billion profit enterprise (Harry Potter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know why there isn't an entry for this organization in charitywatch.org?

<comment><USER27> I haven't heard of Charity Watch, but GiveDirectly is one of GiveWell's top recommended charities: [http://www.givewell.org/international/top- charities/give-dir...](http://www.givewell.org/international/top- charities/give-directly)

For background, GiveWell is the most prominent charity evaluator in the effective altruism space, and does much closer inspection of its recommended charities than anyone else. They're highly data-driven and fully transparent. They not only vet the charities expenditures, but the core mission itself to ensure it's a highly effective way at reducing suffering: [http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- dir...](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly)

You can rest assured that GiveDirectly has been well-vetted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> They made a real-time dashboard for a crowd-sourced remittance program.

</comment><comment><USER29> 90 cents on the dollar is extremely efficient. And from the sound of it all the studies indicate it's extremely effective as well.

Don't tell FOX News, as I'm sure they'll find a way to give this a negative spin.

</comment><comment><USER30> It feels odd to call this a startup instead of a charity or non-profit. The normal goals of a startup vs a charity, which seems a better description for the things this company/group is doing _, don 't match well to me (edit in italics: forgot to finish writing this sentence)_. Nothing particularly wrong with calling it a startup I guess, just strikes me as odd.

This seems to be part of a larger turn towards more data and study driven aid than was the standard. Hopefully the larger nation state players can get around to using aid programs to reap longer term improvements vs the current short term and occasionally overall harmful effects some programs have been reported to create.

<comment><USER31> "Startup" by its very definition is simply a company in its early phases. Whether it's a for-profit corporation or a non-profit corporation, the challenges, at a high level, are largely the same. At a lower level, they vary just as much between for-profit and non-profit as two for-profits in different industries vary.

<comment><USER32> Startups are not just young companies, they're companies focused on rapid growth.

The challenges of a company built for exponential growth are very different than, say, a small business, a lifestyle business, or a charity.

<comment><USER31> That's the Valley redefinition of a startup. You don't need rapid growth to be a startup. "A startup company or startup is a business in the form of a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."[0]

Nor do you need to be a for-profit business to seek rapid growth. If we're going to measure based on "rapid growth", GiveDirectly has been a far more successful startup than most YC companies.

[0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company)

<comment><USER33> "designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model" means "designed for rapid growth".

<comment><USER31> Not at all. There are clear examples of when rapid growth has been neither repeatable nor scalable and the companies had to fold precisely because they grew too fast.

Backblaze is a great example of a company that could not have grown any more rapidly than it did. If they had, they would not have been able to source enough drives to continue and would have been faced with some difficult decisions.

Rapid growth is a great goal in some industries. But in others, a long, slow ramp up is better. That doesn't mean you can't have startups in those industries.

<comment><USER34> He said A means B, but you're refuting B means A.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> They should give it to them in monthly chunks rather than a yearly lumpsome. When you're poor it's easy to be financially irresponsible.

<comment><USER3> GiveDirectly does monthly in some areas and semi-annually in others [1]. They are also conducting an RCT on allowing recipients to choose their preferred transfer schedule [2].

[1] [http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- dir...](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- directly#GrantStructure)

[2] [http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- dir...](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give- directly#Behavioral)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Given that most startups fail, one could consider the whole startup ecosystem a form of charity that, hopefully, produces enough wealthy people to keep the wheels turning. With luck, some of the beneficiaries of GiveDirectly prosper enough to start their own charity some day. The ultimate Y-combinator function?

</comment><comment><USER37> A program that gives money to the poor creates a disincentive to get out of poverty through work. The welfare gain from the poor having more money should be weighed against the welfare loss of their working and saving less.

<comment><USER38> That's why it's important that it's a one-time donation, not a recurring additional paycheck. If you give 'the poor' an additional paycheck, yes, it will have an impact on the willingness to work and save. If you give them a one-time donation, on the other hand, they can use it to improve their lives in the longer term, without reducing work. That's what the data (as quoted in the article) shows.

I believe the reasoning for why that should be goes back to the cycle of poverty ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty)). It's harder to make more money if you don't already have more money. By giving a one-time lump sum, you give people the opportunity to dig themselves out of that hole. Eating better, dressing better, buying things that last longer, these all have big impacts on how much one can save and earn. Even getting some basic education helps enormous amounts. In the end, it might even lead to people being more willing to work harder and actively save more money.

<comment><USER39> What's important is that it be an unconditional donation, not that it not be recurring. Yes, a one-time gift is (usually) not contingent, but you can also have recurring unconditional income that's not means tested.

Take out the means testing, and you remove the incentive not to work. They can still work, and, if anything, it lets people get out of the psychological hole where they have to make decisions that aren't utility-optimizing in the long term just in order to survive.</comment></comment></comment>


Designing very large (JavaScript) applications - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cramforce/designing-very-large-javascript-applications-6e013a3291a3 <comment><USER2> You speak so forcefully about empathy and thinking about other developers, and how your decisions impact others.

And yet:

\- [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597)

\- [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623)

\- [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600)

<comment><USER3> I'll be frank—I think these examples reflect more poorly on you and Captain Ahab than on your apparent nemesis.

(I am in no way affiliated with your nemesis, AMP, or Google)

<comment><USER2> How so?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really liked the article

I also wonder how long it will take until people stop doing react just because it is cool. Choosing a framework is hardly-reversible decision and people (architects) should really evaluate all the benefits and all the costs (and their real needs) and not act based on current hypes.

BTW: everybody is blogging about how something is so cool but nobody blogs about how they screwed up. I'd love to read such articles maybe there's a room for new "medium"

<comment><USER5> Do you know people using React because it's cool? What do they mean that's React is cool? And why they should not?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Many good devs do you know that have almostno online presence - <AUTHOR> You know, they don't have their blog, twitter, they aren't active on reddit programming oriented subs, hn, linked in, etc?<p>Basically "nobody" (at internet scale) heard about them except people who have worked with them <comment><USER2> The people I know that are the best at their job? No online presence.

I do know a lot of very _well paid_ engineers who happen to be good at selling their brand on those platforms, however.

They're just not the folks who blew me away in their actual work.

Blog posts just cannot equate to real gritty problem solving in the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty much all of them.

</comment><comment><USER4> All of them.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are many, many.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do you ask?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering about it for a while and while it seemed very reasonable, then I'm aware of very top level of security (basically top level CTF competitors) who are very active on the Internet

Of course they may be an exception, but generally I was curious.

<comment><USER6> To answer your question - most 'good' and perhaps even 'excellent' developers will simply not have a presence online as far as programming goes.</comment></comment></comment>


Should Safety-Critical Software Be Written in C? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@PolySync/should-safety-critical-software-be-written-in-c-1b27adc76e4e <comment><USER2> They didn't use the high-end static code analysis tools for C. This study was done by PolySync Technologies, so they have reason to leave real competition outside.

Run the same thing trough Astree. It can do static runtime error analysis based on abstract interpretation.

You can't prove that a program is free of all runtime errors (that is undecidable), but it's possible to signal all potential errors and that's what Astree does with as little wrong singals as possible.

Of course SPARK Ada is nice and I woudl prefer it, but in practice safety is not language dependent. It depends on the tools and methods.</comment>


Exclude Wikipedia from Google EU censorship - <AUTHOR>

Why won't Google exclude Wikipedia from the censorship? The only reason why someone would want to censor an online encyclopedia is to hide something they did (probably  politicians).
So, Google, please exclude Wikipedia from your European censorship! So something like this could always be found:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_De_Gucht#Controversy
With friendly regards, an European citizen <comment><USER2> This is a law, Google can't just go about excluding things from it. Furthermore, I don't see how Wikipedia is special in this context, it's just a stupid law, easily circumvented because it only censors indexing and not actual content, and only in EU.</comment>


EBay and Paypal will split up - <AUTHOR> http://pages.ebay.com/ebaypaypalupdates/

<comment><USER2> This is old news that was extensively discussed 7 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8387572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8387572)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another case of merger and "synergy" failure.</comment>


Twitter OSCON coding puzzle - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackerrank.com/tests/gfmhcts2/4c514633a989691d5b9e22f6440a2666

<comment><USER2> I get this error - "You can't take this test now. Please contact firstname.lastname@example.com for more details."

Edit : [https://www.hackerrank.com/tests/gfmhcts2](https://www.hackerrank.com/tests/gfmhcts2) seems to be the actual link, but when I try logging in, the error message says that my credentials are invalid.

<comment><USER3> You either have to be registered for OSCON with that email/name or wait until OSCON begins.

Just a guess.

<comment><USER4> used my email which received the OSCON confirmation receipt and the name in that email, no go. Must be waiting for the conference to start?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can somone post the text of the puzzle. I seem to be getting the same error " you can't take.."

<comment><AUTHOR> Even now?

<comment><USER2> "The login id and password combination is invalid. Please verify the credentials."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can you try now? It works

<comment><USER6> nope

<comment><USER7> Can you please try again now?</comment></comment></comment>


An Illustrated History of Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.git-tower.com/blog/history-of-osx <comment><USER2> I was hoping for more.

The illustrations have little relevance to the corresponding OS, and the text is fairly superficial relative to the actual changes in the various versions.</comment>


Be Friends with Failure - <AUTHOR> http://doodlealley.com/2012/10/10/be-friends-with-failure/#

<comment><USER2> This is profound. Not just deserves but demands to be listed on the front- page.</comment>


Exclamation - <AUTHOR> http://yahoo.tumblr.com/ <comment><USER2> While the overall tone of this letter is really nice one thing bothers me. When you sum up the mentioned benefits for Yahoo! and Tumblr there's a great imbalance towards the acquirer. IMHO from the PR perspective it doesn't sound that good, especially that there's not much about the benefits for the users.

EDIT: you can compare how David Karp handled these news delivery, addressing the possible concerns of all parties: <http://staff.tumblr.com/post/50902268806/news></comment>


Mesh networks chat apps to the rescue - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27225869

<comment><USER2> I thought about building a mobile mesh network chat app, with the primary motivation being to enable drivers to communicate with others in range.

Seems like it would be pretty tough to gain enough user base to make it viable.</comment>


Co-founder agreements - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone point me to an example of a good starting point for a good written agreement between cofounders (pre-funding)? <comment><USER2> The way it's usually done (in Silicon Valley) at least, is that all co- founders are shareholders of a C corporation. They buy their shares at a very low price, and the corporation has buy-back rights to those shares in case the co-founder leaves before 4 years.

Note: it's slightly different from regular employees who have stock options. The main differences are: employees don't own stock upfront, plus there usually is a 1-year cliff for vesting, so if the employee leaves before a year, they have nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much for the advice

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you want to incorporate, I would get a startup-savvy lawyer in your area and just use their boilerplate restricted stock and IP agreements for you and your co-founders.

If you aren't ready to incorporate, then just write the terms everyone has agreed to in plain, unambiguous English, and have everyone sign it and give everyone a copy. Note the equity splits, the agreed-upon vesting schedule (standard seems to be 4 year vesting, first 25% after 1 year, then monthly after that, with double-trigger acceleration upon acquisition), what everyone is agreeing to for the IP, and any other rules you might be coming up with for the business.

This just keeps everyone on the same page right from the get-go, and prevents revisionist history later. However, once you get serious, I would go ahead and incorporate.

<comment><USER4> I think that's good advice. Either get a lawyer involved or avoid incorporation and complex legal documents entirely.

One thing that you absolutely do not want to mess up is the IRS' 83(b) election rule: [http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/02/15/what-is- an-83...](http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/02/15/what-is- an-83b-election/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing me to this

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your lawyer.

It's not a DIY project.

Even when it is just small business.</comment>


Need Some Career Advice! - user-on1 Current Position : Senior Software Developer with 8 Years Exp.
Which track would you choose if you were in my position?
1. Get PMP Certified 2. Get Scrum Certified 3. Get PM Role
or
1. Get AWS Architect Certified. 2. Finish AI Nano Degree in Udacity. 3. Finish Machine Learning Engineer Nano Degree. 4. Get AI Engineer Role. <comment><AUTHOR> I am in a similar situation and made a decision few weeks back. I am a senior engineers with 8 years exp. I was getting frustrated thinking that in few years I was looking at a dead end career. I didn't want to max out as engg. manager or director. I was thinking about production management, primarily because most of my ex-colleagues jumped into product management and they are doing well in their career. I was looking for all possible ways to move to product management but in the end I got an advice from someone:

1) As an engineer, your technical skills are more rewarded and valued. You can quickly learn new skills like AI/Machine learning and will boost your career.

2) There is no guarantee that moving to PM role will boost your career. I feel PM skills are overrated and your success doesn't necessarily depends on your skills. Organizational dynamics & politics will also play a major role. In the few years that you will spend as PM, you will loose your technical skills and moving into a new domain will be a big challenge.

I personally choose to stay in engineering & learn AI/Machine learning and moving up the engineering ladder.

</comment><comment><USER2> Recalling Career Advice from the creator of Dilbert:

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more "pretty goods" until no one else has your mix. > [http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...](http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career- advice.html)

There are lots of AWS guys, lots of generalist PMP's. Not many AI engineers with PMP. *Reference Linkedin.

<comment><USER3> Scott Adams is a clever guy, but referring him as "the creator of Dilbert" makes the advice sound like satire :p

Also Cal Newport, MIT computer scientist, says a similar thing - do things that are rare and valuable, which he calls "career capital". I'd recommend the book, So Good They Can't Ignore you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I came to the same crossroads and agonized over my decision for a few months. For context - I am an engineer with over 10 years of work experience currently working in a well-known small company. I am currently working on our Java/Scala services.

Every company I have worked at has been very appreciative of my communication skills and my focus on operations. So I was evaluating product management as a serious choice - as a PM who could also code reasonably well.

These were the questions I asked myself -

1\. Is the new career going to give more control over my time or less (courtesy: Scott Adams's advice in his book)

With PM, I have noticed that your schedule is controlled by the customers you talk to and the deluge of meetings either with engineering stakeholders or the sales/marketing parts of the company

By continuing as an engineer, you get to dictate your hours to a large extent. There are still those meetings that you don't like, standups where people drone endlessly, but you _can_ control most of the time and how it gets spent.

I have also noticed that people tend to forgive you if you don't want to/ care about socializing. They chalk it up to the engineer stereotype and let you be.

2\. Are my skills transferable?

As an engineer, if you care about honing your skills and learning all the time, you'll do well. Mostly have transferable skills that you can take to other jobs

As a PM, this is not entirely true. Say you specialize in medical devices, you are unlikely to get hired by a ride sharing service. The vast domain knowledge you might have built about the market for medical devices might not be useful for ride sharing. Even though engineering problems tend to be similar (scaling, availability), it is not a guarantee.

So I decided to stick to being an engineer while also trying to be someone that is more _empathetic_ to the product org. I will make a genuine effort to slip into the customer's shoes, think from the product perspective regardless of how cliched it sounds when I say that :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you want to get out of software engineering? I think it all depends on what you want in the future.

<comment> user-on1 i want to understand which option will give me more advantages in terms of career growth and job stability, working on technically advanced projects etc,.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The question is only about you. If you have money, you can do what you want next. But if you dont, stick to a job that gets you closer to where you want to go. I dont trust certifications.</comment>


Stop CO2 Emissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/543916/stop-emissions/ <comment><USER2> Lets define and understand the problem before we try to find a solution. The problem is that the climate is changing. The "why" is the big question. Gregg Braden has showed that our planet has a varying temperature for millions of years and we should try to understand what is behind this. One thing is clear and that it is not a higher level of CO2 or less Ozon. It is a smart thing to ask ourselves also the question "Which factors contribute to climate change?". The documentary COWSPIRACY shows that 54% of the CO2 production comes from the meat industry. So the biggest gains are not with "clean" energy but with "clean" meat. CO2 production increases significantly when the population and meat consumption increases so figure out what the priorities for "clean" meat and "clean" energy should be.</comment>


Show HN: Imgsquash – My image compression website project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eashish93/imgsquash <comment><USER2> It's possible to run mozjpeg, pngquant etc.. on the browser (emscripten), to offload servers from this job

Example: [https://caub.github.io/misc/optim](https://caub.github.io/misc/optim)

<comment><USER3> I really like this. Is it maintained? I am guessing the main repo is this one? [https://github.com/caub/im-optim](https://github.com/caub/im-optim)

If not, can people point me to another out of the box solution?

My use case is that I don't want to build an entire image preprocessing/thumbnailing pipeline for image uploads. But if I serve the raw image that the user uploaded, they are typically not optimized for the web. Since I am letting the user upload anything anyway, it doesn't matter whether the image processing is secure (e.g., he can totally reverse engineer the js to upload a non-compressed image, but so what). Client side compression is a pretty elegant solution since you won't even have to pay for cpu cost to process the image. If you don't care to keep the original, it will even speed up the image uploads since they are now smaller. I really see no down sides to doing this?

<comment><USER2> Hey, no, [https://github.com/caub/im-optim](https://github.com/caub/im-optim) runs on node.js, server-side, and it's not maintained. Someone else mentioned [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh) for server-side image optimization, it might be better maintained, it seems to use webpack image optimizers plugins [https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/blob/master/pack...](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/blob/master/package.json#L48). There's also [https://github.com/imagemin/imagemin](https://github.com/imagemin/imagemin) for doing this

For [https://caub.github.io/misc/optim](https://caub.github.io/misc/optim), source: [https://github.com/caub/misc/blob/master/optim.html](https://github.com/caub/misc/blob/master/optim.html), and it runs the following optimizers (compiled with emscripten to run browser- side) from a Web Worker: [https://github.com/as-com/mozjpeg- js](https://github.com/as-com/mozjpeg-js), [https://github.com/psych0der/pngquantjs](https://github.com/psych0der/pngquantjs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a small scale offline alternative I can heartily recommend [https://imageoptim.com](https://imageoptim.com).

So simple, yet so effective.

<comment><USER5> And for Linux users: [https://trimage.org](https://trimage.org) (disclaimer: I made this)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> the chrome team released a similar tool a few months ago ([https://squoosh.app](https://squoosh.app)). I'm curious how these compare.

<comment><USER7> There's also TinyPNG[1] (which also handles jpeg), which offers both an on- site tool as well as an API as a service.

[1] [https://tinypng.com/](https://tinypng.com/)

<comment><USER8> Funny, I would describe it as TinyJPG (which also handles png) :)

<comment><USER8> Not sure why the downvoting, because I do use the [https://tinyjpg.com/](https://tinyjpg.com/) website and when people ask for it the name that comes to mind is _" TinyJPG"_. The opposite of the parent.

Obs: TinyJPG and TinyPNG are the same site

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Take a look at [https://kraken.io](https://kraken.io) as well. Emphasis is on consistency of results and likeness to the original.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing this and well done!

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't see the appeal. Don't you agree it would be better if the user- ran this software on their own machines?

<comment><USER12> At least for me there's been plenty of times where I just want to m I nify a single image, and potentially on a machine I don't have all my dev tools on.

Also I think this is project is a good side project, regardless if it's really "necessary"

<comment><USER13> Exactly. I sometimes upload an image to imgur for the sole purpose of re- downloading it compressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of smush.it from back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does it do face stabilization over a range of images of, say, selfies?

If not, does anyone have a recommendation for which app does this?

<comment><USER16> That's not what image compression is.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my app – Sbscribe, a social RSS feed reader (Google Reader alt) - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
The people who use RSS today are power users. By the general user, Twitter is used as a replacement service for RSS by allowing people to follow websites. Twitter was not designed for this.
Briefly: Sbscribe is as easy to use as Twitter, but powered by RSS and tailored for discovering and sharing content in one interface.
https://vimeo.com/69376016
For all the content you currently discover and monitor using bookmarks, RSS feed readers like Google Reader, and social networks such as Twitter — Sbscribe offers the same experience, in one place.
This is an idea I had three years ago when I realised the value of socially curated news through platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. At the same time, I noticed my non-technical friends were 'following' websites on Twitter. Sbscribe really aims to separate these two concerns — you follow people, and subscribe to websites. It has been in development since January.
I'm planning on launching a private alpha of Sbscribe in August some time (shortly followed by a public beta in October), and I've got a slew of ideas for how I can improve the "subscription graph", as well as plans for a mobile web app. I've gotten to a point where I would really appreciate some feedback on improving the concept and UI. It's also a good time to spread the message with the recent shutdown of Google Reader.
FYI: The service is backed by Node.js, MongoDB, and Redis, and on the front-end I am using Backbone.js and Marionette.js. It would also be great to talk with other developers familiar with this stack.
Oliver <comment><USER2> Looks great!

A couple things:

\- Instead of saying "subscribed" and "following" say "unsubscribe" and "unfollow" and change the colors (Twitter does it this way). That way I know what that button is going to do when I click on it.

\- The top bar seems unnecessary except for search. If your avatar/username are linked to your profile, all of the buttons would be duplicates. Not saying that will work in the long run or be totally discoverable, but I think it could help. You could move the search box to the left hand pane or something if you got rid of the bar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'll take both of those into account :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great! I think you've found the right balance between RSS readers and Twitter.

Just for clarity, Sbscribe is a self-contained social network? One follows someone else's Sbscribe profile, not their Twitter profile?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! And yes, that's right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any plans for adding tags for items which a user favorites, or could you talk a little about how the favorites work? Can I share my favorites? Are they public/private?

</comment><comment><USER5> Wonderful! I was looking for such a Google Reader alternative. Looks great too!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested. Sign me up for the Alpha/Beta/whatever!

</comment><comment><USER7> Bet you bootstraped all the design. Looks fantastic. Is it 2.3.2?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't use Bootstrap, but I quite clearly took a lot of inspiration from Twitter.

<comment><USER7> Wow. Why that? You could build around Bootstrap anyways without any harm. I got tired of doing a new framework each time I start a project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> wow, this looks amazing! If you need any more beta testers, I'd be glad to join in.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks very cool. Great design

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool</comment>


Winning San Francisco's Startup Scene - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/2011/02/san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> 1\. San Francisco has a very vibrant tech startup scene that's unmatched elsewhere. That's the same comment many people from different parts of the world tell me. They all seems to be excited to be here.

2\. San Francisco is small. I'm happy with 15 minutes bike commute. Many of our customers are a few blocks away. This week we are abuzz with a big developer's conference in Moscone Center next block. Such events big and small keep happening through out the year.

3\. The author seems to enjoy drinking and partying a lot. But don't get it wrong. You don't have to drink to enjoy San Francisco. I do none of those but I simply love the natural environment, the activities and the dramatic coastline around here. There are something for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seven year SF/Bay Area resident here. This rings true for me in a number of ways. Two anecdotes:

1\. SF is small. Several years ago I was reading Dreaming in Code. Turned out a guy that I had been working with for a year or so had come from OSF, and sat in the desk the author vacated at the OSF office.

2\. Right after I moved to the Bay Area I was chatting with someone at a tech writing meetup. She mentioned that she knew someone who worked at a company that could maybe throw me a contract, and they did. Things didn't go that great but it got my career going.

</comment><comment><USER4> great post, i dream of one day moving to the city too...it's been a three year battle =/. you did leave out one thing though, what's your drink of choice? and where the ladies at?

<comment><AUTHOR> Gin. Or beer. Or whiskey.

Also there are no ladies in San Francisco.

<comment><USER5> They just don't go to hacker meetups :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who's a) moving to SF in 3 months and b) looking for a job there, this post was encouraging.

I've heard a lot of buzz about SF in the last two months or so, not sure if it's because I'm moving there (and so I stumble on Bay Area news more often) or because the hiring scene is generating more interest.

Anyone have concrete insight?

</comment><comment><USER7> To be followed up by next post: "San Francisco dating scene, city of 6's." ;)

Oh but what fun it is.

One legit addition is the weather is beautiful, just not in June, July, or August, so be prepared to get out of the city a lot. The peninsula escapes the summer gloom, where it's a steady 80-90 every day for like 6 months straight.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that you can jump on Caltrain in sunny 90 degree weather and jump out in SOMA in relative dreary weather continually amazes me.

<comment><USER2> The weather is not dreary. It is beautiful and sunny right now. And it is like this most of the time. I always enjoy the bright view across the bay. The temperature is often on the cool side. This bit you have to get use to. It is actually a great relieve for people escape from sweltering heat elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing that I envy and I'm missing in my professional life is such a vibrant ecosystem and startup scene in where I live.

It's obvious that when you put two talented people together, they create value of 110% * (1 + 1). But when you mix so many of them, the multiplier starts hitting the sky. I've seen so many talents with great potential who already been kind of rockstars in their environments, but who could get so much better if they had such a great community in their city/country.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Working in SF_

If you're not an American, what are your options? From what I've heard you're pretty much out of luck unless you have the money to buy (and then renew) a visa.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm from Seattle (not living there at the moment), and I have heard more than one person describe it as "San Francisco Lite". There is a large tech community there, a fair amount of VC firms, and the cost of living is a bit cheaper. I would encourage anyone considering a move to SF to at least take a look at Seattle before they take the leap.

EDIT: Everything you've heard about the bad weather is true.

</comment><comment><USER11> yup -- great post and great insights. san ef, looks like a cool city, pretty much as thessaloniki in greece is. but skg (thessaloniki, airport code) hasn't that much of tech-scene: it only can be related with booze drinking, bar hopping, the everyone knows everyone thing plus that everything is close to you from everywhere. startup & tech scene is "growing up" smoothly and good—we call it the "sallonikon valley". anyway, again, great post.</comment>


Ask HN: Why Is Beyond Meat ($BYND) Worth $10b? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://thespoon.tech/which-fast-food-restaurants-serve- plan...](https://thespoon.tech/which-fast-food-restaurants-serve-plant-based- meat-or-are-thinking-about-it/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Because _if this takes off_ , and BYND owns the market, they will in fact be worth that and more.

If. But their odds aren't too horrible, and the potential market is rather large.

<comment><USER4> Is it hard to compete with? How would they own the market?

<comment><USER3> Creating lab-grown "meat" that tastes, cooks, and digests like real meat is probably not easy. If they can patent some of their techniques, that could make it very difficult for others to compete with them (depending on how easy it is to find alternatives to the patents).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> $10B is less than a tenth of Nestle's annual revenue, just to lay out the scope of the food industry. If they were public, it would be a cheap deal for them.

A quarter of the world's population are Muslims or Jews, who would probably appreciate the flavor of bacon without actually eating pigs.

At least another 15% of the world are vegetarian/vegan or aspire to be.

There's also the environmental and ethical impact of livestock and the livestock industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because people think it is. Not all people, but enough.

"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" - Publilius Syrus

</comment><comment><USER7> Because more people are becoming aware of the negative environmental impact of raising animals for food, or questioning the ethical implications. When meat analogs become cheaper and taste the same as meat, it's likely that it will become the norm. BYND seems to be well positioned to dominate this market.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know, but their burgers are great and I'm frustrated that they're always sold out at my local stores. Whenever I see a pack or two, I grab and stockpile them instantly.

I hope they start meeting demand soon. I want to give them more of my money.

</comment><comment><USER9> Because it's a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER10> Because we're in the middle of a finance bubble and food fad.</comment>


Raising a Ladder to the Moon, Under the Sea - ____Sash---701_ https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/raising-a-ladder-to-the-moon-under-the-sea/ <comment> harry-wood Am I the only one who was disappointed that this wasn't an article about a plan to _actually_ raise a ladder to the moon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I was hoping this was about some new developments on a space elevator cable, but with the base being out in sea or something.

A space elevator would be amazing, but we don't have any materials strong enough yet to withstand the atmospheric sheer ... or a way to grab and pilot an asteroid anchor into orbit .. yet.

<comment><USER2> Kim Stanley Robinson, is that you??? Reading your comment(whether you intended it this way or not), made me want to read 'The Mars Trilogy' again. If I remember, grabbing and piloting an asteroid above Mars was how they setup their space elevator.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my absolute favourite sci-fi trilogy of all time. The part of the series where he describes the most complex navigation A.I. ever developed by humanity, on a ship that clamped onto an asteroid, setup a factory that mined it for fuel to redirect its course ... it was so incredibly well written, researched and believable. I read it while drunk on a bus and the next morning I just had to go back and read that entire chapter again.

For those who haven't read it, it's a really good series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No thread on submarine cables is complete without a link to Neal Stephensons classic "Mother Earth Mother Board" article:

[https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

<comment><USER4> Hey @cstuder, THANK YOU for that link! I've been a Stephenson fan for decades, and had a Wired subscription for several years, yet somehow never came across this article till just now. Saved it to finish reading later, but had to come back and thank you. So good! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 160Tbps on 8 fiber pairs is impressive. I wonder when we will get residential Tbit fiber, it should not be that far long into the future. Just think of the applications. In comparison a display cable "only" carriage a few Gbit of data per second.

<comment><USER6> I honestly can't think of any applications.

In the same way people bought new computers regularly until they got Fast Enough then sales really slowed, I think we've reached the same state for home-use comms.

BTW Shakespeare's full works uncompressed are about 5.4MB

<comment><USER7> I've often wondered about this. I get about 50mbps at home, and it's essentially more than enough for everything I do. Sure, having a faster connection speed would be great for big downloads, but I've never had any idea what I might do differently if I had gigabit fibre. Even something like 4k video streams fit in several tens of mbps, a family of 4 could all stream different 4k programmes with less than 200mbps between them.

I'm not sure if I'm just suffering a lack of imagination, and don't realise what I'm missing out on.

People who have really fast connections (gigabit): what do you do differently online that those of use with just "quite quick" connection don't?

<comment><USER8> If enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were dreamed up for them.

However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.

<comment><USER9> Being able to subscribe to a high end gaming machine that always has the latest hardware and streams local is one option. Imagine always being able to play games in max resolution and settings with no hiccups?

Or maybe virtualizing presences more often. We could manufacture displays the size of walls right now - and presumably someday OLED that size will be affordable.

Who knows what sort of real time innovations could be made. Ie tracking objects at a small scale for large patches of land. Weather, wild life, idk. Remote controlled drone surveillance for wild fires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> (2017)

</comment><comment><USER11> Here's an overview of all submarine cables: [https://www.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > ... establishes a faster and stronger telecommunications link not only to > Europe, but to the next billion internet users that will come from Asia, > Africa, and the Middle East.

I hate corporate PR so much for things like this. What's the point of talking about Asia? Data to/from Asia goes mostly trough the Pacific Ocean, not through Spain.

<comment><USER13> India, Iran, and the Middle East are also parts of Asia, and it might feasibly be faster to transmit data through the Atlantic than the pacific to get to those places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why it goes up to Bilbao instead of only to Galicia or Portugal? That will be shorter.

<comment><USER15> Landing cable in an area where the largest waves in the world are routinely seen is very 'challenging'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think we'll some form of power link going from UK -> US during our lifetime, maybe via Iceland/Greenland so we can utilise the excess geothermal energy from Iceland.

<comment><USER16> What makes you think that's a possibility? Power transportation over long distances is lossy and thus very expensive.

<comment><USER17> It is lossy _now_ and very expensive _now_. I think what the poster was saying was such barriers may be surmountable in time.

<comment><USER15> I work in subsea power cables, AC transmission is not efficient, HVDC transmission is efficient for long distances. India has HVDC links 1500km long. I don't understand the 'lossy' description, any energy transfer loses energy, when dealing with utilities it is either acceptable or not. HVDC is proven long distance transmission technology.

There is a subsea hvdc link in the early planning stage between Iceland and the U.K. I think it is more likely the financing of the project is not arranged yet than the technology.

The cost of these links is generally cheaper than a new build power station of a similar capacity, so when you can transfer excess generation it becomes cost effective to build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Old article...please add (2017) to title

>Today, September 22, 2017, ...

</comment><comment><USER19> Yet spain still lags behind most other countries in terms of internet connection speeds.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why didn't they explain the need for peanut butter? Food supplies for the crew?

<comment><USER21> They did:

> It's therefore perhaps not a surprise that the laying of the Marea cable > involved not only the latest in fiber optic cable and repeater stations, but > also 11,000 meals.

> This too required a variety of supplies – including 632 jars of peanut > butter.</comment></comment>


Flutter 1.7 Launched - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-1-7-9cab4f34eacf <comment><USER2> 'launched' is a little strong of a word for what they term a 'smaller release'</comment>


U.S. Inflation Remains Low, and That's a Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/us/politics/us-inflation-remains-low-and-thats-a-problem.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> It's hard to argue real inflation is low when housing is up 10% to 20% every year, health care goes up 15% a year, college tuition goes up 10% every year, etc. I suppose the cost of a flat screen TV is down or flat yoy though.

It's also hard to tell the average person that they not losing more of their purchasing power every year is a problem.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why this is downvoted. I'm frankly curious along similar lines myself. I'm going to ramble a few questions I have, skip to my TL;DR for a more concise followup.

I know for a fact that the CPI calculations have been tweaked on multiple occasions, but even beyond that distortion, inflation measures to me always seemed skewed by the fact that they looked globally at such a heterogenous country. For a given person, however, their own labor and capital may not be liquid enough to shift if their local ratio of pay vs. COL isn't up to par; wouldn't that mean a geographic definition of inflation is necessary?

What one should read from the above is that I have a lot of mental dissonance along the lines of the poster; namely that the basket of goods most people consider key to a quality of life IS becoming more expensive in most of the more employment-viable-areas, yet "inflation" as it's stated commonly is flat. If inflation as a metric doesn't denote the trend the OP and I are focused on, what is the proper metric, and from that, why isn't THAT being discussed in TFA?

tl;dr; where is the gap such that common perceptions see inflation in housing and healthcare to be dominating finances, yet "inflation is flat" has become a mantra?</comment></comment>


Show HN: How We Discovered a Virus Infecting Thousands of Fortnite Players - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rainway.io/how-we-discovered-a-virus-infecting-tens-of-thousands-of-fortnite-players-e5dd6fe1ff55 <comment><USER2> Very awesome and interesting read, it is actually crazy how many people will fall blatantly to these sorts of malware/adware injections. Hopefully Malwarebytes at the very least stops this from happening.

Unfortunately the majority of users who fall for this are young kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! What is more surprising to me is just the blatant amount of fraud happening on ad networks that seems to be unchecked. It is a hard problem to detect -- I think maybe AV's should forward reports when possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks so much, great read.</comment>


Report: Intel is cancelling its 10nm process. Intel: No, we're not - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/report-intel-is-cancelling-its-10nm-process-intel-no-were-not/ <comment><USER2> From SemiAccurate's [0] article:

>Update October 22, 2018@3:30pm: Intel has denied ending 10nm on Twitter. The full tweet is, "Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue. We are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report." SemiAccurate stands by its reporting.

[0] [https://semiaccurate.com/2018/10/22/intel-kills-off- the-10nm...](https://semiaccurate.com/2018/10/22/intel-kills-off-the-10nm- process/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273708)

</comment><comment><USER4> Given that 7nm is already shipping in iPhones, it shows how far behind has Intel fallen

<comment><USER5> Not really. 7nm and 10nm are just marketing names. Intel's 10nm (if it ever comes out) seems comparable to TSMC's 7nm (TSMC is the company Apple uses to build iPhone chips).

This is more of TSMC pulling ahead of everyone. No one has a working next- generation fabrication process yet aside from TSMC. Intel is delaying 10nm, Samsung is delaying 7nm, and GloFo is literally out of the race. They gave up.</comment></comment>