Software Engineering Salaries in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://riviteam.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/software-engineering-salaries-in-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> From being involved in the hiring and interviewing process Id say these numbers are about right.

It is interesting though that the average salary difference by experience doesn't change all that much. I'd interpret that as an argument for trying to build income on the side from other sources, starting your own thing or consulting after a certain number of years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Incredibly cheesy infographic (Edward Tufte is displeased.) but some useful datapoints for job seekers.

</comment><comment><USER4> I haven't moved from ATX to Bay Area, but some co-workers of mine have. Roughly speaking it's about 15-18% increase in cost of living from ATX to SF (overall).

Unfortunately, my company was only willing to give 7% salary increase for relocating from ATX to SF.

Granted, this is only one Fortune 500 company, but it would seem the CNN adjustment is a bit high.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have experience with cost of living in the bay area vs Austin, TX? According to the cost of living calculator on CNN Money, $120,000 in San Francisco is equivalent to $70,000 in Austin.

Has anyone here moved from Austin to Silicon Valley or vice versa? How accurate are the online cost of living calculators to what you experienced in person?

<comment><USER6> Having lived in Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin, my estimation is that the amount of money required for a family to live the same lifestyle (owning similar level home, access to good schools, reasonable commute, etc.) in Austin as in Silicon Valley / SF is at least 2x. I'd estimate the differential to be significantly less for someone single or DINK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please, no more infographics...

</comment><comment><USER8> The thing that stuck out for me is that SF is bigger than SV. My co-founders are divided on where we should be. Thoughts?</comment>


David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/david-brooks-and-the-intellectual-collapse-of-the-center.html <comment><USER2> In what universe is David Brooks _centrist_? He's a conservative with no attachment to the center. He's a FiCon/NeoCon who works hard to not criticize SoCons.

The article would be more accurate if it were titled _DB and the intellectual collapse of the Right_.

The article that Chait cites is just Brooks doing what Brooks does best: equivocation. He wants to criticize Trump but can't. So he equivocates Trump and Sanders which is nonsense.

There is no Alt-Left. We call ourselves Progressives and we don't lie about our positions.</comment>


Pinpoint - a tool for making hackers do excellent presentations - <AUTHOR> http://live.gnome.org/Pinpoint

<comment><USER2> This is really cool. Your presentation source is a plain text file, very similar to markdown or restructured text. The presenter window monitors the text file, so you see changes live as you edit. The resulting presentation is very nice.</comment>


Why Existing Databases (RAC) are So Breakable - <AUTHOR> http://natishalom.typepad.com/nati_shaloms_blog/2009/11/why-existing-databases-rac-are-so-breakable.html

<comment><USER2> This article is a very poor interpretation of the facts. RAID works (as long as it isn't RAID-5). High-end disks may have the same failure rate as low-end disks, but the higher performance and lower capacity gives a much lower MTTR, ultimately improving reliability.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author makes a huge leap,

 _"The core, implicit assumption behind Oracle RAC, IBM DB2, and many other database clustering solutions, is that failure can be avoided by purchasing high-end disk storage and using expensive hardware (fiber optics, etc). As can be seen from the research I mentioned earlier, this core assumption doesn't correlate with the failure statistics. Hence I argue that the database clustering model is inherently breakable."_

Taking the fact that drives fail and extrapolating that to mean that large drive arrays are "inherently breakable" is nonsense. Using an EMC Symmetrix as an example I am very familiar with, a large properly implemented storage array is far from breakable. Inside that box you buy is a whole collection of n+2, n+3 and/or n+4 components all built specifically to never, ever break. The only problem with this type of solution is it is priced in the multi-millions. Each.

</comment><comment><USER2> Jeff Darcy tears into this one: <http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2555>

"Letting fear of conventional storage drive the creation of 'solutions' that are just as complex without the benefits of being as general, as well tested, or as well documented is a mistake. (Open but undocumented and untested can be worse than closed, BTW, if the cost of reverse-engineering and fixing the implementation is greater than the cost of licensing would have been.) Such attempts generally lose even when considered alone, and even more so when the effects of fragmentation and incompatibility are considered."

</comment><comment><USER4> "Most existing database clustering solutions rely on a shared disk storage to maintain their cluster state, as can be seen in the diagram below."

In the case of RAC, although state is written to a file called 'voting disk', the actual state of the cluster is communicated through a high speed inter connect which is redundant. Only if the network connection(s) are down, state is exchanged through the 'voting disk'.

</comment><comment><USER5> One feature that this article overlooks is Oracle's Automatic Storage Management feature (ASM) which is very commonly used with RAC. This feature is basically a software level RAID alternative in which you can define striping and mirroring independent of what the hardware reflects.

This article also does not really reflect what is commonly done with SAN implementations.

<comment><USER4> Actually most production databases tend not to use ASM's High or Normal redundancy because the software level redundancy provided by ASM tends to perform very badly when compared to a storage controller driven RAID. External redundancy is usually chosen. ASM is primarily used to easily manage the disk groups when the volumes in the disk group tend to run out of space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> RAC + Dataguard if you use Oracle</comment>


Palmer Luckey is developing new border control technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/4/15738348/palmer-luckey-border-control-tech-startup <comment><USER2> What could go wrong, I wonder.</comment>


Evolution Is Finally Winning Out Over Creationism - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/11/polls_americans_believe_in_evolution_less_in_creationism.html <comment><USER2> Well I always say, if your religion falls apart because men might have evolved from monkeys your religion is kinda brittle.</comment>


Gender differences and bias in open source: PR acceptance of women versus men - <AUTHOR> https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/ <comment><USER2> > To what extent does gender bias exist when pull requests are judged on > GitHub?

As long as we ask gender-related questions, we'll find gender-related answers. Especially noteworthy:

> Perhaps only a few highly successful and prolific women, responsible for a > substantial part of overall success, are skewing the results. To test this, > ...

In other words, the researcher started with the hypothesis that women were discriminated against (as they say in the first part), then was surprised by the result and tried some more. Maybe, from time to time, it would be great to stop spurring the hate against the other gender: 1. Make sure everyone has access, 2. Analyze by some other criteria – It's not because gender is a readily available variable that studies should use it as something significant. Maybe shyness and marital status is more important, who knows.

Apart from not liking the idea of trying to find all little differences based on gender, the rest of the paper is interesting and in series of "Maybe women are X and Y? Here's how we'll check, here is the conclusion."

Last point, an equalitarist researcher would have studied the hypothesis "Is it possible that maintainers are simply kinder to women?". A lot of societal behavior could be explained this way, yet it's never a variable of those studies.

<comment><USER3> That's because the mantra in the media, and outside over and over is that women are discriminated against, and that is obviously the reason for X. I think in particular to Github or other FLOSS software development that it'd be less likely for women to be descriminated against. First, handles online don't necessarily correlate to a male/female persona. I know plenty of grown men who profess their affection for my little ponies. And women who like transformers.

Beyond this, I can't speak for anyone else, but short of having an obviously sexual image in one's user icon/graphic, I'm unlikely to even notice gender, and more likely to look at the code. I would think that not interacting via voice/video tends to do this, and numbs anything that might be gender bias in a more interactive setting.

I've said this for years... (anecdotal experience ahead) I once had a series of IRC discussions with someone about the online art scene (mid 90's) for several days... only ever found out the person in question was not only a woman, but featured in Playboy at one point (after it came out, she subsequently changed handles and reduced her time online). No idea. Being able to interact behind a computer screen is a great equalizer. You can't know for certain if Numb3rsFan12358 is a man or a woman.

<comment><USER4> >Being able to interact behind a computer screen is a great equalizer. You can't know for certain if Numb3rsFan12358 is a man or a woman.

That's one of the things that most vexes me about that push to removing online anonymity. Ostensibly, making everyone interact on the internet under their real name will "prevent harassment and bullying". But I have no idea how anyone with even passing familiarity with internet communities could believe that (cough Wil Wheaton cough).

<comment><USER5> >Ostensibly, making everyone interact on the internet under their real name will "prevent harassment and bullying". But I have no idea how anyone with even passing familiarity with internet communities could believe that

The idea is that anonymous people 'harass' the over-privileged so-called celebrities on Twitter.

Of course if everyone was anonymous then there would be nobody to harass, and if everyone was pseudonymous then at least anyone would be a name-change away from harassment.

Personally I think that one interesting thought experiment would be that everyone sees everyone else as a different name. So we all see totally randomly generated strings as each others' names. If you block someone then they can't just make a new account and go to your profile, because the new account can't see BlisteringOakPlatypus (assuming some sort of gfycat-like scheme), as that name is only my randomly generated identity from the perspective of their old account.

You also can't bandwagon on people: "hey, go harass DribblingPharmacologicalHippopotamus" wouldn't have any effect.

How would you connect with people you know? You could generate a one-use code they could put into their account to find your profile and communicate with you. Or you could generate a code that lets them just view your profile, without communicating with you. Or for either of these, a many-use code. This lets you be a 'broadcaster' like a celebrity on Twitter, but just because you broadcast doesn't mean you have to receive messages back.

How would you find new people? Well on a Facebook-like platform, through friends-of-friends. What happens if you block someone and they reconnect to one of your friends and can then see you again? The same way you deal with encountering people you don't like IRL through friends of friends. You just have to deal with it like a human.

On a Twitter-like platform, you just follow particular tags or whatever, hashtags, etc.

On a bulletin board, you add people that you see make points you like/appreciate/find to be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr is that Github is fair to men and women submitting pull requests. (Women have a very slightly higher chance of getting their pull requests merged for who knows what reason.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've witnessed plenty of gender bias in IT (and my comment history goes into quite a bit of detail in past discussions), but I can't say this article seems to be indicative of it to me.

It appears that when you account for the majority of situations, women actually have a higher acceptance rate then men for pull requests, but in a rather subjective measurement ("identifiably gendered profiles" for "outsiders"), the trend reverses. I don't know that there's necessarily a lot of evidence that maintainers are going around looking for things that identify genders in a profile before they accept a pull request, and if that single measurement is indicative of bias against women in one specific situation, it seems they have even stronger evidence of bias against men in other situations.

There seems to be questionable correlation that requires belief that a unfalsifiable and subjective judgment is occurring. There's no hard proof that this correlation exists to begin with, much less proof of it being causal in nature.

There's plenty of real gender bias and discrimination going on. Let's try to focus on that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Women shouldn't feel like they ought to work. But when they do, they get a "pussy pass".

</comment><comment><USER9> Correlation does not imply causation.</comment>


We Need to Capture Carbon to Fight Climate Change - yaseen-rob https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-capture-carbon-to-fight-climate-change/ <comment><AUTHOR> seems like a carbon tax/credit would help.</comment>


Finally a good place to put your Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-18/bitcoin-custodianship-opens-new-doors-for-investors <comment><USER2> Hmm this is intriguing, unfortunately I won't invest in something as volatile as Bitcoin :/

<comment><USER3> Fortunately I invested in something so volatile. I don't need now to be worried about money.</comment></comment>


The Series A Crunch Survivor's Guide - <AUTHOR> http://blog.launch.co/blog/the-series-a-crunch-survivors-guide.html <comment><USER2> This was an excellent read. I really like how the author presents clear, actionable, steps one can take to address the concerns series A investors might throw at you.</comment>


Trump and Clinton spent $81M on US election Facebook ads, Russian agency $46K - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-ad-spend/ <comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _Josh Constine / TechCrunch: Facebook says Clinton and Trump campaigns spent combined $81M on ads on the platform, compared to $46K spent by Russian Internet Research Agency_

Final paragraph from the article:

Senator Richard Burr closed the session asking the companies to prevent disruption of America's future, abide by Federal Election Commission law, and that they should request anti-trust waivers if they need to further cooperate with each other. It will indeed require a joint effort and strategy sharing to defeat election interference, especially if Facebook, Google and Twitter want to avoid heavy-handed regulation.</comment>


Hassle-free TODO application development - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ErikWittern/TODOit <comment><USER2> This is great. The only commit:

> final commit

> Erik Wittern committed 2 hours ago

If only there wasn't a typo in the readme:

> On top of that, _TODOis™_ uses native JavaScript, runs in the cloud, and > loves big TODO data.

Time for a force push! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn. The launch party was already in full swing when I hit the commit button, and so I missed this mistake...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was the second person to star this repository ... when it wasn't yet cool and trendy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. If you have any questions, please go ahead and ask them either here or by filing issues.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome.. Needs a few //TODO comments in the source

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory I agree, but TODOit is perfect, unfortunately.</comment></comment>


Dear Firefox, I feel sad about you. - deepak-kumar

I have been in web app development since 2008 and have used PHP, Python, ROR, Javascript, HTML, CSS etc with my most favorite browser Firefox and I always loved it. But now FF is not in my favorite browser list instead I just use it for testing purposes to see if things working or not just like you keep testing your app on IE7,8,9 etc.
I did not even realize that since last 18 months or so I am using only Chrome and dear Firefox I was not missing you. I got everything in Chrome I needed (speed, dev tools, no browser crashing etc. etc.).
I did a bit of research and I did get to see rants about FF not doing well (and for chrome as well :P).
And now I don't need Firefox anymore. I just want it to die like IE7. Some of you might say that I am cribbing and not helping FF to make it better.
I don't know if there are more people like me who just use chrome as default browser and feel sad about FF.
I keep running both latest stable & dev/nightly builds of FF and chrome on my multiple machines but chrome outperforms everytime and at least I don't feel the slowness.
Overall chrome ROCKS! <comment><AUTHOR> That's quite a rant :)

1\. My experience: I have not experienced Firefox being significantly slower than Chrome. I personally do not notice anything. Firefox on Android works amazingly (better than Chrome significantly). I have not seen Firefox crash yet.

2\. Your experience: It is just a rant. You are not contributing anything good to this world and the only good thing about your rant is understanding that people might have your problem. Like Mozilla doesn't know this problem and has not done anything towards that. You could have written the same rant more positively, maybe with some metrics and ideally with analysis what must be improved. Firefox is open source browser.

<comment> deepak-kumar My intention was not to sound like rant but if I did then it's my bad. I notice the issues with ubuntu a lot and I was big fan of it as mentioned above but not anymore as you know the reason. I get paid for developing application which work on browsers and not make browsers work fast. The point is big number of devs won't be able to give their time to make browsers better but that does not mean they can't say bad is bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> What Firefox version do you use? While I would expect from Ubuntu to update firefox regularly.

<comment> deepak-kumar FF 25.x.x and FF Nightly build 28.0a1 (2013-11-19). I do see some improvements in latest dev builds.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have problems even with 25 version but again that might be very individual: different sites, different projects and etc.

There is one little thing you can do: enable all reporting in Advanced settings if you have not done that yet. Mozilla will get at least some information that might be later used for browser improvements.

<comment> deepak-kumar Thanks for reminding me the option and yeah with js heavy application/projects FF is not doing well for me atleast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I've had a short fling with Chrome, when it was still fairly new and Firefox suffered from severe performance issues (during the 3.6.x era).

Today's picture is a little different. Sure, on JS heavy web applications and those optimized for Chrome (a few google maps based apps come to mind) Firefox gets outperformed by Chrome significantly.

Considering browser extensions: I still feel that Chrome extensions lack in functionality compared to their pendants on the Firefox platform. For example, I have yet to find a good mouse gestures addon that can restore a closed tab with its' history intact. I don't blame the addon authors, that seems to be much more a problem with the API.

Memory usage with a lot of opened tabs is also an issue for me. On my own machine at home, I do have a lot of spare memory, but at work not so much. I'm a messy person when it comes to tabs, I leave a lot of them open and never close them, because I might need to look up something later on. Firefox is surprisingly memory-efficient (which was not always the case in the past) with a lot of open tabs, while Chrome hogs memory like crazy. On my work machine, it forces the OS to swap and the whole systems hangs frequently.

The last thing is customizability. If I don't like a particular behaviour on Firefox, there's surely a way to change it. Be it keybindings or the amount of lines I want to scroll with one tick of the mouse wheel (There's even a possibility to set different settings for different modifier keys!), for most things there's a setting or (thanks to the rich extension API) an addon that does the job.

TL;DR: Chrome might be faster for some use cases, Firefox still thakes the cake in the overall user experience discipline

PS: User experience and preference is subjective. Competition and choice are good and everyone gets to use the tool of their choice.

<comment> deepak-kumar I must agree to the fact that you can not blame addon authors for any slowdown or memory usage.

</comment></comment><comment> Lorenz-Kraft Hi, i think you should try to deinstall ALL Plugins and ReRun your FF vs Chrome experience. I had somehow the same issue with FF like crashing, being slow etc. I didn't have the time to debug and investigate the problem, so i tried a "blank" FF and everything was smooth again. I think the same will happen very soon to my Chrome too. Most of the time its a stuck/brocken/badly written plugin/extension. The software itself is very mature. If you experience the same problem on MORE than one PC with a clean install, just report it to FF with a description of the circumstances etc. They will fix it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the emphasis of freedom in the Firefox philosophie, but I must admit that I'm using Chrome more and more. This is simply because firefox has more bugs annoying me. A few month ago there was a terrible font rendering bug in FF for several versions. Chrome never had such bugs. It offers a great userinterface with a unified location and search bar. It is fast. It has amazing developer tools ... and so on. I want to like Firefox, but Chrome makes it sometimes hard.

<comment> deepak-kumar +1</comment></comment>


How we test at Nubank [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/1dW4V3stFX0 <comment><USER2> Why do banking institutions or related fintech use functional languages? Is there some more guarantee than OOP flavored languages?

<comment><USER3> I personally would want to use an immutable functional language wherever I can and only not use it if I have a good reason not too. Immutability makes reasoning about programs significantly easier, especially if they rely on concurrency.

And for finance it particular it's a very natural fit because there's just a lot of transformation of data and business logic.

<comment><USER4> So, how does immutability matter if we deal with the database -- which is what holds the state, and is obviously mutable.

<comment><USER5> Datomic is immutable in the sense that what you had for lunch today doesn't change what you had for lunch yesterday, where "lunch" is any arbitrary fact stored in the database.

I.e., you can ask to look at the entire database as it was yesterday, and run arbitrary queries against it.

You can also do speculative updates to it, in the sense of "show me the entire database as it would be if I were to have pizza for lunch".

It models this as a strictly linear succession of assertions and retractions of facts. Yesterday, `A` was true, today `A` is no longer true. While this new fact is recorded, it doesn't change the fact that yesterday, `A` was true.

<comment><USER4> Sounds great in theory.

What we see in reality is that append-only database is unusable without making additional "projections" or whatever you call them, databases that are ready to be queried/updated, with maybe specific denormalizations, indexes and so on.

And oh, btw, those later databases are not "imutable".

<comment><USER5> It's structured so that these operations can be done pretty much instantaneously. Schema is sort of asserted at read time, not write time.

I highly recommend the talk "Domain modeling and with Datalog"[1]. It gives an explanation of how all this works, including indexing.

1: [https://youtu.be/oo-7mN9WXTw](https://youtu.be/oo-7mN9WXTw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like picking Clojure and Datomic has created a great deal of technical debt for them. They started adding Spec everywhere to specify their data because they were having big problems scaling their wild west code base. But now Spec is dead and there's a new Spec2.alpha version.

I don't even know how they have manage to scale datomic to that level, the support contract we had for datomic was only really used to report bugs[0] but they have more than 2000 datomic transactors? ouch.

[0] Yes, too much bugs and slow, but databases are hard so I guess this was expected for a closed-source niche DB with little users.

<comment><USER7> I was at the talk. From having engaged with a lot of organizations working at scale, it was pretty clear they were near the top in terms of not being hampered by technical debt. They have the capability to move quickly and evolve the system in pragmatic ways to dial the knobs towards correctness or speed or functionality or whatever. A tremendous achievement and speaks volumes for the tooling.

There is no "Datomic scale" problem. Datomic transactors are just another singleton service to deploy with your microservice pod. The underlying storage can obviously be consolidated and scaled independently. I don't recall what they're using, would guess it is pg.

<comment><USER6> Multiple datomic transactors can't talk to the same database, even if they share the same storage.

<comment><USER7> Sure they can. Just give them different database names.

<comment><USER6> A different name is literally a different database.

<comment><USER7> A single postgres daemon- a unit of scaling- can support many datomic transactors, each talking to a named "database" hosted by that one daemon.

You don't have to scale your postgres _daemons_ with your microservices- each of which have their own transactor- which would be painful and out of the ordinary for an ops team.

Scaling datomic on top of postgres is no different from scaling any other microservice.

That all said, the architectural point that _did_ sound painful in the presentation- and which is a common pain point in microservice architectures, not unique to what NuBank is doing with Datomic- was having to maintain an ETL for analytics purposes, to pull together all of the distinct microservice- specific Datomic-hosted data sets into a single uniformly SQL-queryable data set. The details of that implementation, and whether it made use of the new SQL interface supported by Datomic, were not discussed. But it smelled brittle and fragile.

<comment><USER6> _A single postgres daemon- a unit of scaling- can support many datomic transactors_

yes

 _,each talking to a named "database" hosted by that one daemon._

No. That would imply distributed writes and break the single write serializability property of datomic. Think about it, transactors don't sync with each other(only one for HA but that's orthogonal).

To put it simply, multiple transactors can share the same storage but only one can write to a single database at a time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Short History of Chaosnet - <AUTHOR> https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html <comment><USER2> The article is correct that contact names were essentially the same as port numbers in TCP. This was a time of great experimentation in LAN protocols (and network protocols, what we would now call layers 1-4 or maybe -5). By the mid 70s most used thicknet (later called 10base5) coax using CSMA with exponential backoff (Metcalf's greatest invention at PARC IMHO), so chaosnet was a local example (of several in New England alone, at the time). There wasn't really anything off the shelf at the time.

CHAOSNET and lispms are historically intertwined it's true, but hardly inextricably so. For example the file servers referred to in the article weren't (until much later) lispms too, but our standard PDP-10 mainframes, so there were multiple implementations of chaosnet immediately, and it was also used for mainframe-mainframe communication (yes, you could transparently use remotely stored files back in the late 1970s). The earliest machines sold by Symbolics and LMI were just MIT CADRs build externally and badged by the manufacturer, by the time they built their own machines the Ethernet standard (also using 10base5) was starting to get traction and their machines used that instead. I did deploy and use a chaosnet system at the Centre Mondial in Paris because they had a KL-20 and some CADRs, but that was a rare case; possibly the only one outside USA, or possibly even outside the east coast of the USA.

Article is correct about the deep ties between BBN and MIT-AI. Honestly at the time of the ARPANET switching to TCP I really thought of the other address types as transitional anyway, so I'm not surprised more address types were never used. Though the whole point of the idea of an Internet was the union of all other networks (and the origin of the idea of the "cloud" \-- a radical idea at the time, though focused on routing) the early model was either protocol-translating gateways or TCP.

When the net switched over from NCP to TCP it didn't really feel like it affected me until 1984 when I could telnet directly from my machine at PARC (a Dolphin or Dorado -- they were also in a machine room with the display and kbd on my desk!) to my machines at the MIT AI lab. It seemed magical not to have to log into an intermediate machine. This was thanks to a pup gateway (pup was PARC's equivalent to chaosnet, or perhaps I should say that the other way as pup was first) and sadly I eventually realized that it wasn't using a chaosnet gateway on the MIT side (the PDP-10s had their own IMPs). But by the time I moved back to MIT this worked in the other direction as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always known CHAOS as the hmmm-that's-weird way of finding out which version of BIND was running:

      $ dig @a0.org.afilias-nst.info version.bind txt chaos
      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      version.bind.		0	CH	TXT	"9.9.9-P5"

I never realised that once upon a time there was an actual Chaosnet protocol...

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh wow, chaosnet is a great name! I learn something new with every post from Two-bit history!

</comment><comment><USER5> There are several emulators that can talk Chaosnet, emulating Lisp Machines and the PDP-10.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is ChaosNet remembered more accurately than Maryland summer parties in 1982? Let's find out!

> Usage of Chaosnet presumably waned as Lisp machines became less and less > popular.

The relative drop in popularity of Lisp Machines wasn't the primary reason for ChaosNet use to decline. Until the mid-1980s at MIT, ChaosNet was also widely used in everyday work on UNIX, VMS, and TOPS-20. ChaosNet was not focused on the small number of research groups that used Lisp Machines. By the mid-1980s, most operating system distributions included TCP/IP. There were more deployed machines that could communicate over TCP/IP than over ChaosNet. However, MIT did not yet have a supported IP network covering every building (where "supported" means either centrally supported by MIT, or supported by a major research lab, depending on the building in question).

The remaining reasons to use ChaosNet were network services and reliability. For example, SUPDUP arguably provided a much better remote-login experience than TELNET, and some (or possibly all) machines implemented SUPDUP only over ChaosNet, not over TCP. There may have been other important ChaosNet-only services on machines such as reagan (more commonly known as "b" \-- for "bonzo") at the AI Lab.

In some locations (possibly only on Vassar Street), keeping the ChaosNet software stack for reliability was worthwhile even though IP was obviously the only way to directly reach the whole outside world. Using the ChaosNet software stack, one could communicate within parts of the main campus as well as NE43, and relaying email to the outside world worked, at least often. That was sometimes the only networking that a person needed to accomplish their work. In building 36 and 38, the earliest set of IP addresses was on the 18.27/16 network. That specific implementation of IP may have involved some type of protocol tunneling or protocol translator. At one time, this was maintained at the Digital Signal Processing Group (sixth floor of 36) and may have run on a machine named yosemite-sam (or some other Looney Tunes character). This was largely successful, but not really "supportable." Eventually, a separate network was built in 36 and 38 using 18.62/16 IP addresses, and any machine wired to that network could not use ChaosNet services elsewhere. Over time (more than a year), every machine moved off of 18.27/16 and onto 18.62/16\. At that point, it rarely made any sense for anyone outside of NE43 to build or enable ChaosNet support on any machines.

Even before this, the cost/benefit became too high for some people to bother building, installing, or enabling ChaosNet. For example, Alan Wu, who was the head of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Educational Computing Facility (EECS ECF) made a decision in the mid-1980s that his staff would no longer compile ChaosNet into the kernel on their BSD machines. The reasons may have included the extra work of a nonstandard build tree, and machine crashes within the ChaosNet code. Similarly, syaadmins in other places saw that it didn't make sense to devote any resources to the small benefits of ChaosNet.

On a larger scale, Project Athena BSD kernels did not include ChaosNet code (or, if they ever did at the beginning, it was discontinued after a while or was never commonly used). However, Athena was probably not a major factor in the decline of ChaosNet. Athena workstations were never connected to unsupported networks such as 18.27/16, and Athena users typically had no SUPDUP use case. ChaosNet use was already mostly gone (outside of NE43) before individual faculty and staff were generally able to request Athena workstations for their offices or labs.</comment>


The end of sprawl - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-end-of-sprawl/2016/07/29/2039a2b8-4d20-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html?postshare=2171469867195892&tid=ss_tw <comment><USER2> I'm curious how certain things fit into city living.

Examples: Rockband the Game. You can't play that game in an apartment in the city without being a total dick to your neighbors. You can play it in a house in suburbia. Arguably the same is true for the home version of Dance Dance Revolution

Another is room scale VR which pretty seems to demand owning a large enough place to have your VR room. Maybe some people can move stuff to the side one in a while but if you have to spend a bunch of time prepping the room every time I can imagine room scale VR to ever get that popular.

Yes I know the world doesn't revolve around video games but they seem like an example of activities that are designed around sprawl. There's plenty of others, many non-game activities as well that, for lack of a better way to describe it, would compel me to still prefer a suburbian house over a city apartment.

I guess what I'm wondering is how much cultural inertia there is for one or the other

<comment><USER3> I wonder what type of cities you've lived in.

I've lived in various parts of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville and we've previously had rock band and currently have room scale VR (it is, in fact, in use as I write this).

Neither had dedicated rooms but the setup and tear down is manageable. Neighbors never complains about the noise, but we also don't set the bass to room-shaking levels.

Perhaps the most significant difference between my home style in my last ten years and the decade previous (when I was a child/teen in suburbia) is that I share much more space. By pooling four incomes (two six figure tech salaries and two low five figure academia/architecture) we can afford places with enough living space to be comfortable.

It makes sense. When I was a child we at least had four people in our suburban house, but even then, it wasn't anywhere near capacity. With four adults in a four bedroom apartment we get much closer to capacity usage. We also make use of parks, coffee shops, and public libraries (CPL's main branch is beautiful) for more flexible space when necessary.

<comment><USER4> > By pooling four incomes (two six figure tech salaries and two low five > figure academia/architecture) we can afford places with enough living space > to be comfortable.

I'm surprised people with six-figure salaries are sharing. Is that common?

<comment><USER5> In Boston/Cambridge/Somerville it is depressingly common. I wish it were within my means to live alone, but even on six figures it doesn't make sense (I refuse to spend 40-50% of my net income on housing). Having roommates (who aren't romantic partners or family) is the worst. I need sanctuary away from people, and for example, it's frustrating when you want to cook and your cooking equipment is left dirty, when the kitchen is already in use, or when roommates have parties while you're trying to sleep. It's not an issue of having bad roommates, but of having people going about their lives independently in far too close proximity. I used to sleep without earplugs, but since moving to Boston I need to use them every night or I wouldn't ever get a full night of sleep.

Having roommates in one's thirties extends childhood much too far.

For me, density is the enemy, and being near nature is the goal. Unfortunately, jobs are in the city and not in the woods.

<comment><USER6> The solution should be obvious: get out of Cambridge/Somerville! I recently moved to Malden and was able to comfortably afford a two-bedroom condo on a senior-level tech salary (I pay under 25% of my take-home in housing). It's super quiet and just on the edge of suburbia, but with a supermarket, the gym, the T, and about a dozen restaurants within easy walking distance. I'm a little over ten minutes from an Orange Line T stop (Malden Center) that gets downtown in 28 minutes and the same T stop has a thirty-minute bus to Central. I live super near three different parks, and the one I go to most often is lightly used enough that I can often sit somewhere, surrounded by trees, and not see another person for an hour or so.

I could Uber to Cambridge, round-trip, twice weekly to go out with friends and still be racking up significantly less expenses than I did when I lived in Davis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main thing I am looking for is privacy. I find that if I have access to private property big enough to take a short walk in nature, maybe a 10-20 minute walk, then my physical and cognitive health improves by huge amounts.

When I lived in urban Boston, and I would go for long runs on the street and through parks, or I would use a rental car to go out to the Middlesex Fells for geocaching, it was like a poor bastardization of what I needed. There were always people around. I could not get into a meditative mood and access any of the cognitively rejuvenating effects that the activities were for.

It saddens me very much that human culture is moving to agglomerative cities, because I believe I am personally extremely maladapted to be able to handle that, so I constantly feel like I'm being squeezed and stressed, even just by my ambient environment, even on a pleasant sunny day when I just take a walk to relax.

It's a very maddening way to live, but I have not found any solution that would let me live with a better compromise that allows me to have private access to nature on my own property and still successfully interface with the industries I work in.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't it be great for you if everyone else moved to dense cities, so there'd be more nature left for you?

<comment><USER7> Ah, but then you can't have a job that lets you live near nature. Even most remote jobs (which have lots of other downsides, like stalling out career progress) require decent proximity to a major city or airport, and high-speed internet.

<comment><USER8> The denser the city, the closer we could have real nature close to the economic centre of the city.

Think of taking all the Bay Area, putting all the economic activity and people who want city living into a small area with 40 story towers, and the rest will be much more pleasant---with relatively easy commuting into the small core for the voluntary country bumpkins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think sprawl will increase when self driving cars become a thing. Long commutes will be a lot more tolerable, parking a non issue, and the cost of owning a car could be reduced with self driving taxis or busses.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the move from the suburbs to the city is a technology issue. There are certainly trade-offs to both of them.

The reason a lot of people (especially young people) have been flocking to walkable cities has a lot more to do with self-identity and lifestyle choices than with just merely commuting time. No self-driving card will change that.

Keep in mind that the opposite is also true. Self-driving cars make city- living (where owning a car is unaffordable and unpractical) much easier, since it increases the access to cars.

<comment><USER9> People flock to cities now for the same reason they've always flocked to cities - jobs. If you don't need to live in a city to work there, that may make many people move.

And yes young people might prefer to live in denser cities. But when they grow older and have a family, they prefer to move out into a town or suburb.

And beyond that, it's just economics. Cities are expensive. They are inefficient economically. Rent is high, they have higher taxes, and the cost of goods is higher. If you could live outside the city, and conveniently travel there whenever you need to, you could save a huge amount of money.

<comment><USER8> Cities are crazy efficient economically. Provision of infrastructure and goods is much cheaper in cities. Commuting sucks (and is one of the few clear drags on happiness that persist, unlike becoming a quadriplegic).

Cities are also more productive.

But: cities are financed wrong in most countries. They could easily finance themselves from land value taxes.

<comment><USER9> Cities are more efficient in theory. In practice, for whatever reason, they tend to have higher costs of living, taxes, and more congested infrastructure/traffic. Until that changes people may be better off economically living away from them.

<comment><USER11> In practice, money is siphoned away from cities to subsidize suburbs making the cities more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Walkable" is on the increase because of demographics: there's a slight bulge in under 30s who are more likely to like urban living; once they start having kids the suburbs start to look more enticing.

Self-driving vehicles are likely to _increase_ sprawl by reducing the travel burden :-(

</comment><comment><USER13> I support ending sprawl, but there are factors that drive people to it. (Perceived or real)

* Quality of education for their children.

* Privacy (space/sound insulation)

* Nature (if you move far enough out, then wonder why wildlife 'invades')

* Investment (housing shouldn't be, but it is; also rent is too high)

<comment><USER14> The "let's move where schools are good" is just a self sustaining effect of some sprawling cities. In most countries "inner city kids" or "inner city schools" means the best schools with the richest kids.

If the inner city is attractive then schools will be too.

Not sure if you referred to nature as a net positive or negative? I have a forest an beach nearby (with the commute to suit my very reasonable price point). I think most wildlife is a positive.

<comment><USER15> I mean, that's true in the US too if you look at schools like Stuyvesant or Trinity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sprawl will continue as countries become urbanized. Africa, South Asia, etc. Sprawl will ebb once pop stabilizes in those countries.

As the US pop has stabilized (except addition by immigrants) we don't expect more sprawl.

</comment><comment><USER17> Where does the idea that you should spend 30% of your money on rent come from? I see it everywhere. Not that I'm questioning it in general, but does it ever change?

<comment><USER18> Ten to fifteen percent is vastly better. It's doable but it's not that easy. You need a middling-good job in flyover country. That's the part that's not that easy - it's harder to justify a gig in flyover country by sheer ability. Companies on the downward slide towards Schumpeterian irrelevance just don't care and so don't bother them with the facts...

IMO, this was what my ( Silent Generation ) parents used as a heuristic. But people saw rising home prices and began the "stretch", and then "stretching" became the standard.

Because of this, I've become somewhat of the Geotaxer fan - if the rent is too damn high, then tax land rents, not income per se. Geotaxes have the aspect that they cannot be passed on to the renter by the rentier.

<comment><USER19> FWIW, my (half of) rent (split with SO) in Montreal is less than 15% of my net income. And I'm not even in software. People see the low engineer salaries around here and are generally reluctant to come, but I find the quality of life to be high and rent to be low.

Of course, there are other aspects to cost-of-living than rent, and quality of life is somewhat subjective.

EDIT: For anyone curious, here is a nifty heat map of rents in the city:

[http://ici.radio-canada.ca/special/cartes/15-06_annonces- log...](http://ici.radio-canada.ca/special/cartes/15-06_annonces-logements- kijiji.html)

<comment><USER18> I had a shot at moving to Montreal in the early '00s. It would have been interesting. Those winters, however..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think that technology will have any significant impact on sprawl. But demographic trends certainly will.</comment>


Ask HN: If one works over 40hrs/week, can they claim more years of experience? - <AUTHOR> If someone were regularly overworked, averaging say 60 hours per week, would it be reasonable to claim 1.5x "years of experience" with a given technology during that period?
Say if someone often worked 70-90 hours per week and worked on holidays and didn't take vacation for 5 years.  How could somehow reflect that experience on a résumé? Would it be fair to at least claim 7 years experience for that time?
Thanks <comment><USER2> No.

Work isn't linear. Overwork often leads to less productive work, so working (say) 100 hour weeks for a year might be less of a learning experience than working 40 hours weeks for two years.

Part of experience is in knowing how things evolve. Best practices change. If you only have 2 years of clock time experience but claim 4 years of "real" experience due to working 80 hour weeks, then that doesn't mean you know to handle the changes from 3 years ago when Framework 2.4 became Framework 3.0.

You also don't have a baseline. A lot of people regularly overwork.

Finally, if someone asks "when did your first use Framework" and you reply 2013 but your resume says you have 4 years of experience, then you will likely be called out for the discrepancy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thanks. I was thinking more from the point of view that programming is a skill and skills develop with hours of practice.

<comment><USER2> Skill development, in the model of K. Anders Ericsson, requires a certain type of deliberate practice, not simply "hours of practice." Moreover, he argues that it's only possible to spend a few hours a day at deliberate practice. The rest doesn't contribute to improved learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you saying you drove your car really 3 years instead of 5 because you haven't used it every day? Or your marriage is 25 years instead of 20 because it was so intense? Will working three part time jobs triple the number of years?

The years of experience are actual years, no subtractions, no adding. It's just a guidance and says nothing about actual technology experience.

A person who claims to work 70-90h per week without vacation for 5 years might attract some companies. Others will say the person has no private life and might burn out soon. Those extra hours work short-term, but long-term they aren't a batch of honor.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's a fair comparison here - what if they only spent 5 hours a week coding? Would they be able to say they have a year of experience after one year of that?

I think when it comes to work experience, a year of experience denotes a year of full time work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would be honest with your history . . . I've been developing with X since Y. If you start to inflate things you're going to fall down a slippery slope where you're not even sure how long you've been doing things and interviews/conversations could get confusing/make you look bad.

Most companies just care that you know your stuff enough to be production so 3-5 years of experience is plenty saying 7 years isn't going to improve your level/pay/experience.

Keep things honest, I wouldn't advertise that you avg. 60 hours per week worked on holidays etc. You'll be better off getting away from that in your next job.

I've done that before and seen people do that for years and when things go bad they are still shown the door like everyone else. So don't be that person. Work reasonable hours for reasonable pay.

</comment><comment><USER4> While you're technically correct (the best kind of correct!) in that a year of experience assumes a 40 hour work week, I don't think anyone would let you add extra years. A year of experience just means you did that job for a year.

I'd recommend against doing that for a resume - you'll be seen as a liar.

</comment><comment><USER6> No. By working extra hours you may gain more expertise but you certainly do not gain time. You can't make time, you can only spend it. How would you reflect working 70-90 hrs/week without holidays? By having senior level expertise, a list of accomplishments and being burnt out :)

</comment><comment><USER7> No and does it really matter? I find that interviewers are open to seeing candidates who don't have experience exactly in the range they are looking for as long as you can impress them with your knowledge. The ones who do are the places you probably shouldn't work anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ppl in Singapore work minimally 44 hrs/week. And generally ppl work way more than that minimum req. If the claim system you asked would be implemented as world standard, I think most singapore residents would be over the moon, rushing to update their resume now.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know for places like top-tier consulting firms (e.g. MBB) people regularly say that 1 yr of work translates to about 2 yrs of typical 40hr/week type of work. I think the highly right skewed distribution of tenure contributes to that.

</comment><comment><USER10> _> would it be reasonable to claim 1.5x "years of experience" with a given technology during that period_

As a general aside, every time I see a resume with something along the lines of: "Java (2.5 years), C++ (5 years)", I cringe a little. Please don't do this. There is something about denoting the exact amount of time you have spent with a specific technology (which we can generally deduce from your work experience anyway) that, at least to me, broadcasts a lack of confidence in your own skills.

<comment><USER11> Ah the old guess the signal/filter cv game. So kohanz cringes, that is one data point, but will the company you apply to cringe if you do it, or cringe if you don't?

<comment><USER12> If "cringe" is a factor in reviewing resumes, you're doing it wrong anyway. Judge people on what they've done, not how they present it.

<comment><USER10> Sure, if you're hiring for a position where written communication skills are unimportant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hahahaha, classic.

Oh wait, you're serious?

</comment><comment><USER14> no (imho).</comment>


How to Store Usernames & Passwords with Two Way Encryption in MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://jeffreifman.com/2014/01/13/how-to-store-two-way-encrypted-passwords-and-credit-cards-in-mysql/

<comment><USER2> This article gives advice that is not only bad, but dangerous. You should never, under any circumstances store a password in a format that can be reversed. Doing so for the password to someone's primary email address borders on criminal - a comprised email can be used to break almost any other account someone may have.

If there's no other way to build the app, don't build it. It's the only ethical thing to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a bit extreme. in order to log into gmail accounts via imap, you have to have the email and password for an app like that: [http://jeffreifman.com/filtered-open-source-imap-mail- filter...](http://jeffreifman.com/filtered-open-source-imap-mail-filtering- software-for-php/)

It's not unethical to build such an app.</comment></comment>


From Student Side Project to Startup - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/from-student-side-project-to-startup <comment><USER2> > If you're like most busy students, you're probably spending about 90% of > your time on some combination of academics, athletics, extracurriculars, and > social activities, leaving 10% for your side project. But for your side > project to even have a chance of becoming a successful startup, you'll have > to flip that ratio and spend almost all of your time on your company.

I've got a high tolerance for risk. This seems crazy.

<comment><USER3> It depends how you do it. If you have the financial means, you can take a semester off (or register only for one easy credit) and focus 100% on your project during that time. That would delay your graduation by ~6 months, but that can be worth it. This is what Mark Zuckerberg did before dropping out completely.

From [1]:

> Mark Zuckerberg strolled back onto the Harvard campus, having taken the > semester off to devote full time to his startup, thefacebook.com

From [2]:

>Despite staying at Harvard for his final year, he's continued to work on TheFacebook "basically full-time," he says. (Saverin took only two classes last semester.)

[1] [http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/11/02/10-years-ago- mark-...](http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/11/02/10-years-ago-mark- zuckerberg-said-to-harvard-im-not-coming-back/)

[2] [http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/24/business- casual-...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/24/business-casual-a- year-ago-mark/)

<comment><USER4> I think the issue here is social. You lose pace with all your friends that you've been going through school with- which can be tough for a lot of people. Plus none of those people can relate to the work you're going through. They probably treat you like you're on vacation.

Maybe this is just good for founders to go through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If you're a student entrepreneur, turning a side project into a startup is > one of the most important steps in your journey as a founder.

Considering the audience that YC is talking to, I get this statement, but I don't think the process of turning a side project into a startup is restricted to the "student entrepreneur". IndieHackers is full of seasoned and experienced professionals (mostly engineers / developers with a few years in the real world) who have turned their side-projects into successful startups with enough growth and income to quit their day jobs and focus on it fulltime. [https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/)

One particularly inspiring story I found on there was that of Tyler Tringas - the guy who created StoreMapper. I do remember he did a Show HN here and I loved it. He says he wrote the MVP for StoreMapper on a plane ride to Argentina, contacted a few of his clients for whom he'd done Shopify work for, and was generating income from week 1. Now he says StoreMapper is bringing in 21K / month

Story here => [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/storemapper](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/storemapper)

> I have no idea how I found the time at the very beginning, since I was > already spending 80% of my time on a startup and 40% on freelancing. But I > built the first version of Storemapper from nothing to live-and-accepting- > payments in one 30-hour flight.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having gone through this process, this is all excellent advice. I would add that if your university has a business school, see what resources they offer student entrepreneurs. In our case, RPI has an excellent business school with staff that offer free services to students:

\- We had entries for business plan competitions looked over

\- We were notified of (and given) relevant grants

\- There was photography and film equipment that could be rented out for free

\- We were introduced to several local angel investors

\- Free tickets + transportation to networking events

\- As a team composed entirely of technical people, we were given a business/financial crash course.

Without that initial support and grant money, I don't know that we would have kept going. We kept chugging along and applying to YC and eventually got into the fellowship (F2 batch).

> Done half-heartedly, the transition can be toxic for both the fledgling > startup and the rest of your commitments.

From my experience, the rest of your commitments kinda go out the window once you switch to 90% company 10% school + everything else.

I have since left the company, and I'm now working to rebuild some relationships I've neglected for the past 2 years.

<comment><USER7> As a RPI engineering grad myself, we had a business school?

Slight joking aside, I do wish that while i was there, I knew more about these services.

<comment><USER8> Heyo! Class of '08\. You?

They had us take, I think, a business class each year, covering the basics of interpersonal stuff, interviewing, etc. At the time I thought it was pretty neat.

In hindsight I still think it was neat, but now I know how much was lacking. There's a lot about RPI I find that way, in hindsight, and mostly because of what you said: you didn't really know about them.

:/

<comment><USER7> '13\. So comparatively inexperienced. We had business classes but not much in the way of 'if you ever want to start a company, we have a incubators for that'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the "flip the time around, 90% on company" part interesting. Is it not possible to do a side project which matures to a small business providing consistent income? I'd be surprised if anyone could create a multi-multi- million dollar company like that, but surely there's something between "10% of time, not going anywhere" and "90% of time?"

<comment><USER10> That's a good observation. I think it comes down to the distinction between a startup and a small business. It's certainly possible to continue working on a side-project part-time and build it into a successful small business, but I would argue that that's not a startup, since one of the defining features of a startup is fast growth. Paul Graham has an interesting take on that distinction here: [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

<comment><USER11> one of the defining features of a startup ~according to Paul Graham~ is fast growth. Much of what he writes about is geared towards the type of startup that YC wants to accelerate - the type of company that could go from college bedroom to bought by Google in 2-3 years. There are plenty of other companies in the startup ecosystem that aren't entirely driven by VC strategies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Enjoyed writing about some of the lessons my twin brother and I learned as we built our college side project into a startup called Meetingbird. Will be following this thread to answer any questions!

</comment><comment><USER12> Biggest issue I see with this article is all of these suggestions assume you can keep motivation for a project as a student.

But, for example, there's an enormous amount of risk in delaying a semester or completely flipping your priorities, and then like most projects, losing interest when it becomes uninteresting/too expensive/fails/you find a competitor that trumps you hands down.

More likely to burn out giving it 90%, too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Agree with everything except:

> how fixing bad meetings could literally improve the world's GDP

This seems a bit much..

</comment><comment><USER14> Quality work, looks good.

Isn't this really just google calendar, though? It looks borderline identical.

Good work though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does "entrepreneur" really just mean relentlessly pursuing riches?

Every person I've met that describes themselves as an entrepreneur is only interested in their own personal wealth, but they always seem to have some bizarre, self-serving narrative about "disrupting" their industry.

Aren't "student entrepreneurs" just young, greedy people who have decided they want to be rich, they just aren't exactly sure where they're gonna get the money yet?

Maybe I'm just old fashioned but I don't believe these mentalities should be encouraged. They are toxic.</comment>


What do you think of "Geek Day" plan hatched on #Internet2012 Campaign Bus Tour? - <AUTHOR> http://www.adweek.com/internet-2012/get-ready-geek-day-washington-144245

<comment><USER2> My two critiques would be:

\- This strikes me as putting the tactics before the strategy. What specific goal(s) is this trying to accomplish? It would be much better to start there and work backwards. (Albeit most likely there is a lot of important information that was left out of the article.)

\- The other issue is that effective lobbying tends to be really difficult unless you're highly trained, have tons of practice, and have good relationships with the senators and congressman you're trying to target or else have an enormous reputation for shipping. Some of the folks you'll want to target are bat shit crazy, others are too dumb to understand what you're talking about, others are already well-informed and you'll be wasting their time, most will have all sorts of financial conflicts of interest, etc.

Again, it's difficult to properly critique this without knowing what it's supposed to accomplish, but those would be my general thoughts.</comment>


Unofficial Instructions in Production – Why Some NES Games Use Undocumented NOPs - <AUTHOR> http://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/1839/621 <comment><USER2> It's more than 30 years since I don't develop anything for a 8 bit computer, and specifically for a 6502 processor, but recompiling as we understand it nowadays it was not possible. You had to code right on the memory addresses, and moving blocks of code was a feature that only advanced tools had.

Sometimes I left 'gaps' between pieces of code filled with NOPs just in case you need to code something in the middle. The problem was when you did not have enough 'gaps' or because of performance restrictions several NOPs could impact in the overall performance of your game. Then I started to play with non documented instructions until I was able to adjust performance and 'gaps' for example.

Maybe those guys had the same problem I had when I developed for Oric computers...</comment>


Creating PostgreSQL Arrays Without A Quadratic Blowup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heapanalytics.com/creating-postgresql-arrays-without-a-quadratic-blowup/

<comment><USER2> _A lot of languages handle this idiom more gracefully._

Actually they don't. You can not resize a (static) array. What you really want is a dynamic array, an array list or whatever you like to call it. In this case you can double the size of the underlying array when you have to reallocate it and get the amortized runtime down but at the price of using up to twice the memory you need.

Maybe array_append is to blame because its pure existence somewhat implies that you are working with array lists and not with arrays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct -- they handle the idiom more gracefully in the context of an array- backed list, not an array. I elided the two as postgres arrays don't quite fit cleanly into either. (For example, evaluating arr[i] is O(i) for postgres arrays of variable width types.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _result := array_append(result, ( 'num=>' || i)::HSTORE);_

Yeah, I've never read a line of PLPGSQL before this, but I can tell by the assignment operator := that this is obviously creating a copy of the array every time you add an element to the array. This would also cause a quadratic blowup and/or a memory blowup in any other language I've heard of, not just PLPGSQL. Anyone who has taken an introductory algorithms & data structures class really should know better than to write code like this.

<comment><USER4> But anyone who has taken a graduate-level data structures course should know how to implement functional sequences with log-time concatenation or better. There are several known techniques.

So your inference is, in fact, incorrect. The assignment must make a logical copy, but this does not have to involve making a physical copy.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but you had better be sure that's what your compiler is going to do, before writing code like `result := array_append(result, new_element)` inside a loop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think highly of Postgres, but this is disappointing. It's well-known now how to implement functional array-like data structures with log-time concatenation. For a good summary see [0].

I think these techniques should be standard practice in programming language implementations.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3271256/implement-an- immu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3271256/implement-an-immutable- deque-as-a-balanced-binary-tree/3274355#3274355)

<comment><USER5> PostgreSQL has array-like data structures with good performance characteristics; they're called "tables."

Edit: my mistake, PostgreSQL calls them "relations."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems guilty of trying to do imperative programming in a relational database, then wondering why the performance is not good. Why use an array and not rows in a table?

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything is denormalized into an array so we can evaluate funnel queries quickly, with no joins.

<comment><USER7> Did you try Clustering with PG (aka index organized table in Oracle)

<comment><USER8> My understanding is PostgreSQL does not have true indexed organized tables (Clustered Index in MSSQL). You can create the table as clustered on an index and it will do it one time, if new data is inserted it is not clustered, you have to manually recluster exclusively locking it. Also this does not help performance nearly as much in PG because the index used to cluster is still a normal index and used normally with indirection. The only performance benefit comes from the fact that the data being searched for might be on the same page saving some disk I/O. A true clustered index the table IS the index, the table is seeked directly. This also saves disk space and some I/O since a separate index is not built redundantly storing the data.

That being said an array should be even faster than a lookup to a secondary table with real clustered index since the array data would be in the row data of the main table incurring only the offset lookup to retrieve. There are definitely cases where hierarchical data structures are superior in performance to normalized ones. You gotta watch out though for hierarchical structures that store keys inline as the add their own space and I/O overhead (See shortening key names in Mongo DB). Arrays are a good choice though, they allow multi-value data inline without key overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> this is classic OO programmer programming SQL

<comment><USER10> This algorithm is O(n^2) in classic OO languages too!

I think what this is is a translation of a classic OO "array.add(x)", which would usually be O(1), into "array = array + x", because that's the closest you can get in this language. However, mapping that translation back into a language you know, that should raise alarm bells, because it looks like it should be O(n) and allocate garbage like mad.

So, rather, i think this is classic insufficient paranoia and self-doubt when doing an unfamiliar new thing.</comment></comment>


Why don't developers make installation wizards on linux? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/256833/why-dont-developers-make-installation-wizards-on-linux

<comment><USER2> apart from this, it would be nice to have an installation wizard for installing a new Linux laptop, would love to have FreeBSD/Ubuntu/Windows with a simple boot menu

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by installation wizard for installing a new laptop? Ubuntu has a nice wizard for OS installation. Bootloader is separate from the os. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

<comment><USER2> installation of just ubuntu is very easy and good indeed. but creating an hdd image with partitions and different OS/*nix flavors is still pain. the bootsectors need to be setup, the Grub2 language is not exactly fun (at least for me). some simple "boot this USB stick, install Linux, install Windows", might be nice. at least for me.

<comment><USER4> The only thing preventing "boot this USB stick, install Linux, install Windows" is that Microsoft doesn't allow that to happen.

Secondly, there are too many questions that need answers which would prevent there being such a simple set of commands. Things like:

'how much space for Windows, and how much space for Linux on your hard drive(s)?'

'what order would you like the boot options to be in?'

'how many logical drives for Windows and how big?'

'how many partitions for Linux, how big, and where do you want to mount them?'

and so on.

But it never hurts to dream <grin>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> nowadays they often do? just run that install.sh!</comment>


JDK 11 is out - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/introducing-java-se-11 <comment> mega-tux so...with the removal of EE, Corba, WebStart, JFX, and several other legacies(?) APIs how much slim is the new JRE? (still don't see the JRE link @ Oracle download page, only JDK). WebStart tech wasn't that bad, IMO. Too little, too late?</comment>


PSYWAR/PSYOPs - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare <comment><USER2> The most (subtly) terrifying book on US PSYOPS I have read is "Men Who Stare at Goats", by Jon Ronson. Read carefully, it demonstrates that the US has engaged in PSYOPS against American citizens for decades, that continues to this day.

If you thought the CIA tried to use ESP against the Soviets, or that the MK- ULTRA program was shut down after it was exposed, then congratulations! Your belief demonstrates the success of the program.

All we (think we) know about those activities is what they chose to publish. What we do know is that the people in charge of the programs got promotions on schedule and retired with full pensions.

<comment><USER3> What makes PSYOPS appreciably different from PR? If foreign governments are going to engage in PSYOPS campaigns against US citizens then it doesn't seem unwise to permit the US IC to do the same.

<comment><USER2> The difference is deception.

A recent practical example was the runup to the Iraq invasion that had the entire US punditsphere (with the rare honorable exception) convinced of a wholly fictitious need.

The result was $5T+ spent on invasion that could otherwise have been spent on, e.g., replacing the coal- and oil-fired power system with renewables, including energy storage systems, with plenty left over to provide college education and medical care for everyone.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Diaries: Getting Your First Customer - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/152/Startup-Diaries-Getting-Your-First-Customer.aspx

<comment><USER2> I remember all the new launches I helped in the past 10 years; and no moment was as good as seeing your first paid customer. it is like first love, and first kiss.</comment>


The tragedy of TrueCar - <AUTHOR>

Problem: how to determine the lowest possible purchase price for a new car. Problem solved -- emphatically -- by TrueCar's reverse-auction process, where buyers, and competing dealers who couldn't help themselves, watched as new-car prices plunged. That was in 2011. Then, within months, thousands of car dealers across the country suddenly stopped dealing with TrueCar. The dealers claim they arrived at this decision individually. The FTC, however, is currently investigating possible illegal collusion and price-fixing. In any case, TrueCar's money came from fees charged dealers who "won" reverse-auction bids to sell cars for less than the other guy. So that model was abandoned in order to protect dealers from themselves. Now, only buyers are able to view bids. Car prices, and TrueCar's profits, have moved back up. TrueCar's original business model apparently contained a contradiction, asking those who stood to lose the most to also pay for the privilege.
But instead of abandoning the efficiency of the reverse auction, perhaps all we need is another revenue model. With TrueCar having lost its nerve, why shouldn't another company offer reverse-auction automobile pricing -- this time supported by advertising on web and mobile? <comment><USER2> I was the COO at AutoRef.

I am a little unclear what you mean by an advertising revenue model. There are two ways to implement this model: 1\. Have dealers pay you to advertise their inventory on your site - similar to AutoTrader and traditional classified sites.

2\. Run AdWords or some other advertisements on the site to earn money.

We had a true reverse auction platform where customers selected 3 identical/similar new/used vehicles and we initially pushed for a charge per car sold model (ie TrueCar). But many dealers had been turned off by TrueCar bad reputation and it's struggles with charging a similar brokering fee, so they weren't interested in AutoRef's service at all.

After that we went for a flat monthly fee but ultimately it was too little too late. So it's possible that your idea could work but we sure had a tough time implementing it.

TrueCar has always had a consistent revenue stream from its acquisition of Zag - which ran the car buying program for many car insurance company's, AAA, etc. This is a definite edge over a startup bootstrapping ad revenue.

Story about AutoRef: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/like-a-carwoo-for-used- cars...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/like-a-carwoo-for-used-cars-autoref- raises-850k-seed-round-led-by-european-car-buying-marketplace-autoscout24/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried shopping with TrueCar as an end-user (while seriously in the market for a car) and found the experience not very good. I put in the make/model I wanted and got a bunch of dealers calling me -- woohoo.

Car dealers seem to exhibit cartel-like behavior in various ways, so it seems like it will be difficult to drive real participation in a marketplace like this without proprietary demand (ie buyers at large scale that dealers wouldn't otherwise have access to).

The used car market might make a better entry point, because it's actually difficult to fully market a used car as a consumer, and aggregators like Carmax are known bottom-feeders, and their bid-ask spread is too high for the value they provide.

Another approach might be to do a hybrid involving car brokers or a merchant model, something more like what Zillow and Stubhub do.

If you do this, please invite me to your beta!

</comment><comment><USER4> TrueCar was never a true "reverse auction" process. At its peak, they had close to 6,000 dealers participating. There are 17,000 new car dealerships in the US. To have a true reverse auction process, you need to have all dealers participating. Some high volume, low margin dealers refused to participate in TrueCar. If you didn't get a bid from them manually, you would have missed the best deal.

CarWoo attempted to create a better system. They actually came close, but ultimately failed.

It's easier said than done. One of the most difficult parts is to get dealers to participate.

<comment><USER5> It says TrueCar has 7000 dealers now here: [http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/27/leadership/truecar- painter.p...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/27/leadership/truecar- painter.pr.fortune/)

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I meant at its peak BEFORE dealers revolted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. All TrueCar claims now is "Don't overpay", the idea is just that TrueCar makes sure you don't get ripped off. It doesn't necessarily push the dealer to the limit on price. Dealers should have incentive to offer good deals though, because they make money through volume.

I think a reverse-auction situation could work very well on a small scale. Maybe you could make a simple app/system for running your own reverse-auction effectively/simply? Keep it relatively small so dealers don't put up a boycott or similar.

<comment><USER6> We already do that at haggledaddy.com :) Actual reverse auction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pardon me for being prickly - but is this a blog post, a question or a call to arms?

Not sure this is the correct format for any of those options.</comment>


Collections (YC S12) is remaking the most basic part of the OS: The Finder - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/14/yc-grad-collections-me-is-remaking-the-most-basic-part-of-the-os-the-finder/

<comment><USER2> I wish them luck in their endeavor. My impression is another aggregator of proprietary web services isn't a need people have. Perhaps I am wrong. Others have tried this, albeit possibly not with the file manager angle, and it doesn't work out. I fear it is even more difficult today than it used to be as most web services do not want to be aggregated and fight against it. Nevertheless, this is a YC company and I hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish you better luck than Eazel:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel>

 _Edit:_ I didn't realize they went public with such a ridiculous business plan. Dot com madness indeed ... [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/22/hertzfeld_spills_all...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/08/22/hertzfeld_spills_all_about_eazel/)

<comment><USER4> Ah yes. A "portal play".

 _snort_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OS X has become "the OS" now?

<comment><USER6> Is Finder meaningfully different from the Windows Explorer, the BeOS Tracker, GNOME's Nautilus or KDE's Dolphin, or is it actually clear from context that every desktop OS has something like this that does the same work?

<comment><USER7> The real question is are they replacing Finder, or the file manager?

If file manager, then they may have a Windows version too. If not, this becomes a Mac-focused article.

Terminology matters.

<comment><USER8> Right - they are referencing Finder which makes me think of the Mac OS. But then showing all the other services on their site makes me think this is something closer to what was Greplin (now CueUp).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wouldn't call "the finder" the most basic part of the OS...

<comment><USER10> To a developer maybe not but to the average consumer the os is the layer where their files and software are, both of which are displayed through the desktop and the "finder" windows. They don't care and almost allways don't know about the drivers or kernel.

<comment><USER11> I'd argue that many (perhaps, most) people use the browser more often than the file browser to access content they're interested in. Orders of magnitude more, I'd think.

I don't think this app is competing against Finder as much as it is with Chrome/Firefox/Safari.

<comment> powershop-co It's not like there is a shortage of file management programs out there. They're basically creating one more, and layering on a bunch of hype about how they're doing something revolutionary

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not sure how iOS or Android handles the file system (officially), but I do know that Windows 8 could use a clean, simple, touch-friendly File Explorer replacement.

I don't believe that the growing scheme of ignoring the file system, especially on mobile devices, and in some cases even forcing you to use cloud storage (to share data between apps, for instance) is an effective solution in the short-term.

</comment><comment><USER13> The ability to search all the assets on my computer and from common online services is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER14> What about Alfred or Quicksilver? How is this different and why do you need a round of funding to support it?

</comment><comment><USER15> That's a really, really OS-ignorant title.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a great idea and I can't wait for some innovation in this area. But two requests to founders is that don't make this a social ads crapware.

1\. Don't do any Twitter or Facebook shares or likes or bullshit of any sort related to social. I want absolutely no garbage from Twitter or Facebook in my local hard drive.

2\. Don't display any ads whatsoever. Price it and ask the user to buy the software. I think Sublime Text 2 does this really well.</comment>


What happens to your data when you die? - <AUTHOR> http://www.datainherit.com/en/why_data_inheritance/easy_use.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting service. Ironically, when I try to 'Open an account for free' IE8 (standard employer issue) reports that the certificate is untrustworthy.</comment>


Apache OpenOffice security hole again, switch to LibreOffice immediately - <AUTHOR> https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/160022919038/apache-openoffice-security-hole-again-switch-to <comment><USER2> I doubt that the 7 remaining users of OpenOffice are unlikely to change due to a security issue. They're used to them by now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Geeks know the score. _Regular users really don 't_. The brand awareness of "OpenOffice" is still _stupendous_ and this terrible zombie software still steadily gets around 100,000 downloads a day. [https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/over_200_million_download...](https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/over_200_million_downloads_of) So make sure people know! LibreOffice is catching up, but 100,000 all-but- unmaintained security hazards a day are an ongoing disaster.</comment></comment>


Python Crash Course with the Mentor - <AUTHOR> http://mentornetwork.me <comment><USER2> Alex needs to work way harder on this if he wants 130 bucks, LOL</comment>


Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

<comment><USER2> This is painful to read. Manipulating and making up numbers, reclassifying demographics ("teens" vs 20-year-olds), and then concluding that we should "concentrate all of our research and political energy on how marijuana affects driving" even though a study was quoted that "increased availability of marijuana is actually associated with decreased car accidents."

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This is the kind of op-ed that poses as hard science, or at best, scientific journalism.

The opinion of the writer is pretty obvious, which is really okay, but it is framed as "research", and a set of conclusions he arrived at, rather than began with.</comment></comment>