Mystery 'Dude' Rattles Turkish Stock Traders With Massive Bets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/mystery-dude-rattles-turkish-stock-traders-with-massive-bets <comment><USER2> So a few things to help make this clearer.

1) The title is pretty misleading, the identity is known to regulators. Most funds will use a sell side bank who has access to the market to put their orders out. Especially for a country like Turkey where it doesn't make much sense to buy your own pipe.

Its just the rest of the market who doesn't know the identity of the firm. This is common in all countries.

2) Developing countries markets almost always have very little liquidity so its not surprising for a firm to come in with a global macro view and move hte market when trying to put their position on.

In fact its the one place where people still act like the opening scene, atleast I think it was the opening scene, from Liar's Poker ([http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B003E20ZRY/](http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B003E20ZRY/)) where the trader tries to bully the market by deciding bonds should go up so he buys a whack of them and then when the market fails to move he doubles down on his bet and buys more causing the rest of the market to go along with him.

You can't really strong arm developed world markets but you still can bully developing countries markets in this way. You are essentially playing chicken.

The problem is always how do you close your position. If buying so much moves the markets then its obvious that selling will also do the same. usually you are forced to sell your position to a big sell side firm who can take the exposure.

</comment><comment><USER3> Turkey was one of the markets I used to cover when I was a trader. Amongst the EMEA emerging markets, Turkey is one of the most popular/active in terms of hedge fund trading. They made a concerted effort in recent years to upgrade their market infrastructure (including the introduction of direct market access, where brokers will sponsor their clients to connect to the exchange electronically).

I think it's unlikely that the new market actor(s?) are taking big directional bets (although it's certainly possible). I think it's more likely that they're market-making or executing futures or index arbitrage strategies (in which case, what would _look_ like a directional bet in the cash equities market would be offset by a corresponding trade in another security or derivative.

</comment><comment><USER4> How is the identity of the investor unknown? Is it that Turkey is very lax on identification requirements and no one really knows who this is? Or, is it the case that _someone_ (the brokerage, I guess) knows, but it's private information?

<comment><USER5> It sounds like it is the latter. The company they mention in the article (Yatirim Finansman) literally translates to "Investment Financing". A name so generic that it just has to be a front. The article points out how this was a small volume brokerage firm that suddenly started executing this entity's trades and started dominating the market in terms of volume.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the name sounds generic because of this:

"Yatırım Finansman (YF Securities), Turkey's first brokerage house, was founded on October 15, 1976 by 13 major banks led by Isbank and the Industrial Development Bank of Turkey (TSKB)."[+]

[+] [http://www.yf.com.tr/YF/en/about-us/yf-securities-in- brief.a...](http://www.yf.com.tr/YF/en/about-us/yf-securities-in-brief.aspx)

<comment><USER5> Very interesting. That's more than enough to at least make them a legitimate financial entity. I wonder how much control the government has over YF at this point in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't help but wonder if the dude is actually another country looking to gain greater control or influence over Turkey.

<comment><USER8> All you have to do to gain control over a middle eastern country is claim that there are terrorists there or that the leader of the country is a tyrant. Seems to have worked beautifully in the past without question.

<comment><USER9> It's Turkey. IT IS NOT THE MIDDLE EAST.

Now, that being said, the political situation there right now is increasingly hellish. What's going on there now is the result of a very long game that has been played out since before the modern Turkish republic, founded by Ataturk.

<comment><USER10> It's not unusual to include Turkey in the Middle East region:

[http://www.britannica.com/place/Middle- East](http://www.britannica.com/place/Middle-East)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hah, the funniest part is, at the time of this writing at least, none of the Turkish news agencies have published this story.

The dude abides, indeed.

edit: now they did :D

</comment><comment><USER12> whats the benefit for the trader doing this and then why wouldn't others do the same?

<comment><USER13> _why wouldn 't others do the same?_

Not many people have $160m to throw around on the Turkish stock exchange. It's a riskier market than the more established western ones.

<comment><USER14> Riskier how? Is it just more volatile, or are you referring to political risk, interest rate risk, or currency risk?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty obvious this is an algotrading fund that has turned up with new kit and happen to be the largest player because the market has so little liquidity.

50p says it's an investment bank or hedge fund familiar to most people who know something about this area, and the people involved might be surprised themselves to find liquidity is so low that they are market making.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how Turkish Stock exchange laws can be this lax, they should have some information in public domain about people trading

<comment><USER17> We have not so many strictly enforced laws to prevent these kinds of activities from happening but many to prevent them from being documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Indeed, the bigger issue may not be who "the dude" is, but what it is, according to Isik Okte, an investment strategist at TEB Invest/BNP Paribas."

</comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone here comment on the rumors that some of the later challenges in Stockfighter.io use the Turkish stockmarket as a real-life backend?

</comment><comment><USER20> The Dude abides

<comment> jay-saint they should have left his rug alone.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DeepSpeech based automated transcription service - <AUTHOR> We have been building a DeepSpeech model with our data for the past year and we have recently hit 95% accuracy on the LibriSpeech dataset. That puts us close to the published results for DeepSpeech 2. However our dataset is conversational audio and we do much better with our own internal dataset compared to PaddlePaddle. Here's a blog post on the method we followed to build our models.
https://scribie.com/blog/2018/03/continual-learning-for-spee...
We have been using this internally in our service and it saves a ton of time and effort during the typing stage. It is nowhere near to the accuracy which our transcribers can achieve, but we are getting close. We are offering automated transcripts free for a limited time. Please do try it out.
https://scribie.com/transcription/free
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> How does this compare to Google's speech API?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning to do a benchmark with Google Web Speech once it adds support for Multi Speaker files. We once tried with our internal test set on Google Web Speech when we started building this and the WER came to be around 18%.

<comment><USER3> I would recommend also testing with IBM's Watson Speech. In my usage it was a lot more accurate than Google and Azure. I also did a couple of tests with AWS and Watson was always ahead. All these tests were with American and British English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In general we're pretty happy with Trint for American & British accents for our stuff (though not to say we won't take a look at what you've got :)). They usually require a bit of tweaking, but it's pretty good. The killer feature for us would be training against people with other accents. You'll notice our transcripts really constitute a pretty big part of what we do, so a good quality transcription service for people with different accents would be an awesome thing.

e.g. clearly once this course leaves early access we'll want to get this copy- edited, and Yan here is British, so even here Trint's not always great :) [https://livevideo.manning.com/module/38_1_1/production- ready...](https://livevideo.manning.com/module/38_1_1/production-ready- serverless/introduction/introduction-to-course)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have provide an option to get the transcripts corrected manually by our transcribers. Would that work for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> By "95% accuracy on the LibriSpeech" you mean a word error rate of 5% on that test set, using your own training data?

<comment><AUTHOR> The WER on LibriSpeech clean test set is around 0.087 and the CER is 0.030. We trained on around a 5000 hours dataset which included LibriSpeech train.

<comment><USER5> So where did 95% come from?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I made a mistake there. It should have been 92% accuracy. Can't find the edit button now.

<comment><USER5> Have you considered using a more traditional HMM style recognizer? The stock Kaldi chain model recipe should get you more like 5 or 4.5% WER on LibriSpeech.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually started our experiments with Kaldi and even built a dataset out of our files to train on. But we found that Kaldi required a lot of data-prep and a long lead time. Our internal dataset is quite large and data prep is quite easy compared to Kaldi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen This is pretty great, I'm going to show it to our UX person who works with transcripts from user testing. The editor feature is pretty great for cleaning up transcripts, and I think it'd be faster to do that than to manually do it as we have been.

The automated process is pretty funny when working with Australian english though!

> Upset is gonna record you forget it out, so... alright, so I just wanted to > start saying, What is your family technology? And I can send a man and I can > use Excel and Word, such the internet use as post things of baseball > pesticides that you... absolutely, absolutely, but a part of not a great > deal.

It's pretty good despite the chaotic stop start of conversations between two or three people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the predictions are bad around the speaker turns right now. We are working on a better turns model and that should fix this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You said its free but I got a $5.90 charge!

<comment><AUTHOR> Try choosing Auto transcribe from the dropdown menu next to the Order Transcript button

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consider saying explicitly which languages are supported by your service because it not written anywhere in the blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does this compare to trint.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are pretty much on par with Trint. They use the API from Speechmatics and by our benchmark, we are better than Speechmatics on conversational audio. We will be posting a proper benchmark numbers soon. We are building a podcast dataset for testing right now.

<comment><USER9> Have you checked out [http://otter.ai](http://otter.ai)? They do real-time transcription in the browser and on iOS and Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm always looking to speed up the transcription process. I'll be sure to give this a try! The editor is especially useful.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems to be tuned to American English - coped poorly with my British accent.

I can't see a way to delete uploaded files. Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> The dropdown menu next to the Edit Transcript button has the delete option. It works best for North American files with clean audio. We will eventually get it as good for British, Australian and all other accents as well. We build a new model every month almost, based on the corrections our transcribers make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What about real time audio transcribing? Will you add support for this

<comment><AUTHOR> Real time transcription is not something we are looking at right now. Our goal with this is to see if we can assist our transcribers and improve the efficiency of our system. So our focus is offline transcription for now.</comment></comment>


Google patent shows possible controller design for its game streaming service - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/9/18257911/google-patent-game-controller-project-stream-streaming-service-render <comment><USER2> They filed a patent for a copy of an Xbox/PlayStation controller?</comment>


Show HN: OneTrueRock – TrueCar for Diamonds - <AUTHOR> http://www.onetruerock.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks like a straightforward but very useful tool when choosing a diamond ring.

Already bookmarked. And passed to friends.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Buying diamonds is hard

We are two engineers who recently bought engagements rings. The process was stressful: we had never done it before, there is some social pressure, it was a significant purchase, dealing with certain diamond stores felt slimey.

We created onetruerock which is a tool to help you find the optimal diamond for your budget: the biggest, best quality and best value for money. Simple.

Mini education: People will throw all sorts of terms at you (4C, cut carat, clarity, culet, girdle, fluorescence, etc). You can simplify it to: cost, size and quality. You want to optimize size and quality for your budget. Our tool does this.

Simplified experience: All you need to do is pick your budget and we show you recommended diamonds. These are optimal for your budget.

In the background we this by scanning hundreds of thousands of diamonds, analyzing them and narrowing down to the ones worth your time.

We hope to never buy another engagement diamond. Our goal is for this site to help others find the best diamond for their loved ones.

Would appreciate any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is the default $7k out of curiosity?

I see there is a $23581 diamond that is the best value if my budget is $24k on wards, even if I go to the max allowed of $29500

<comment><AUTHOR> As a starting value - $7k is ballpark of the average amount spent on an engagement ring. However, of course you can adjust to your own budget.

On your second question - yes - we have good data that the pricing is not efficient. In reasonably large budget ranges there can be a 'great deal' at the cheaper end which is the best buy. There may be bigger diamonds but they will be lower quality. That particular diamond was recently reduced in price and just sold. It will disappear from our rankings shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The search seems to happen pretty fast. What if when you move the slider, it searches in real time? That way it would help me search and see how increasing and decreasing the price affects the attributes of the diamond

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - we have a continuous search and continually regenerate our recommendations in the background.

We are going to work out how to incorporate the ability to show how different prices impact the attributes. There is this link: [http://www.onetruerock.com/marketsummary](http://www.onetruerock.com/marketsummary) which was on way of showing the data. One of our goals is to make what is very complex and multi-dimensional as simple as possible.</comment></comment>


Cardpool (YC W10) Featured on NBC - Sell Unwanted Gift Cards for Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/business/Solution-to-Stinky-Gift-Cards-88004057.html

<comment><USER2> _Like most high-schoolers, Benoit gets gift cards for birthdays and holidays and puts most of them to use. But, if it's a bookstore, it'll just waste away in her wallet._

This makes me cry.

<comment><USER3> The real issue here is the way high school English approaches reading, it turns even great novels into a chore. With journal entries, reading quizzes over minor details, etc etc you can't actually sit back and enjoy the books.

I hated reading in high school, but since then I have found that when I read classics similar to those people read in high school, I enjoy them much more than I did back then, even if it's hard to find the time to do so.

<comment><USER4> I think that goes for lots of learning. When it's forced on someone else's schedule it's hard to enjoy, but when you're genuinely interested it's much more fun and productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If you accept the offer, just mail in your card and within a few days, > cardpool.com will mail you a check.

I wonder how they deal with gift cards bought with stolen credit cards? If the gift card gets cancelled by the retailer after Cardpool verifies it and sends the cheque, they're out the money.

This could be an easy way to liquidate the balance on a card.

<comment><USER6> Also people steal items from places like Home Depot and then return the items for gift cards.

I met a guy who that is all he did. He would steal the items and had his girlfriend return them. Eventually he upped his tactics and started representing himself as a representative from a manufacturer and would do a "recall" of all of stock on a particular item (swiffer wet mop cleaning pads) and he got them all and returned them to other stores.

<comment><USER7> He lived on Home Depot gift cards?

<comment><USER6> I forgot one of his main things was to go through the trash when they threw away items (maybe they couldn't rma them or whatever) and he would return the items to a different store.

He traded the home depot cards for things, cash, trade, he pretty much lived off of it not sure what he is doing now that was awhile ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it annoying that traditional media websites almost never link to external websites.

<comment><USER8> It's not just traditional media, it's a cornerstone of their retarded blog "replacements" too ... linking to any of your own shit = extra ad impressions while a visitor searches for context and instead gets ... every piece of crap Engadget's ever written containing the word Sony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have experimented with this and found that unloading gift cards at a good price is easy via eBay or "contextual ads" or search engine ads. But, there really isn't an opportunity to establish a competitive advantage on the sell side. Competitors will bid up these channels and, importantly, people can figure out how to Google "buy gift cards" once you present this idea to them.

This business is really about finding a way to get people to sell you gift cards way below face value. But however much PR or advertising you do, most people will just Google "sell gift cards." And, again, you will just be doing work for whomever (of the n existing competitors) ranks highest in the SERPs.

So if that is the plan, you are really just trying to build another SERP merchant, but have the added complication of having to deal with fraud when sourcing your product (and I don't think fraudsters need to be super clever to walk away with a lot of their money).

Hopefully they have a better plan.

<comment><USER10> The trade is especially big on eBay, since Microsoft will give you %8 cashback on all 'buy it now' transactions just for using Bing as your referrer to eBay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this the same company that was featured as a start-up in an episode of ABC's Shark Tank several months ago?

<comment><USER12> I think that was GiftCardRescue: <http://www.giftcardrescue.com/>

<comment><USER13> Ugh, talking popover (or whatever you call that).

This one has no popover, supports Costco cards (which, last I checked CardPool didn't) and offers cash or Amazon cards in return: <http://www.plasticjungle.com/pjweb/></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most amusing bug you've encountered? - <AUTHOR> A recent HN thread about Hackintosh gave me the opportunity to recount a favorite anecdote: Many years ago, I was browsing a Hackintosh forum, and I came across a thread titled something like:<p>> Help! Audio only works while I'm moving my mouse!<p>This is my all-time favorite technology problem. What's yours? <comment><USER2> I was working on a frontend issue related to CSS and shadows. There was a card element with a photograph on the left and a white container on the right with some information, and it looked like the shadow below the card was a different color below the photograph than below the rest of the card.

         __________
        |photo|info|
        |_____|____|
        [  shadow  ]

After debugging the CSS and inspecting every element, I couldn't figure it out. I ended up taking a screenshot, zooming in to the pixels in GIMP, and using the color picker to see just how different they were, but it turned out the shadow was the same color! It was the same principle behind the checker shadow optical illusion ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:Checker_shadow_illusion.svg)), where the darker side (the photograph) made the shadow look lighter than the shadow below the lighter side.

Definitely made for an interesting writeup as I closed the issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wrote an algebraic equation systems solver to compute KPIs from user text equations.

The user would upload a spreadsheet file that contains hundreds of equations for different "KPIs", and the solver would go through them, look for the variables in database tables and columns, and then solve the system.

Example:

      kpi1 = sales.clients + marketing.last_year_accounts – kpi2*legal.billable_hours

sales, marketing, legal being database tables, and clients, last_year_accounts, billable_hours being column names. kpi2 is another KPI defined somewhere solved iteratively.

I squinted my eyes hard looking at one equation that used to be solved that raised an exception. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you have spotted it in the equation above.

The problem is the dash[0] instead of the - (minus). It would be "minus", then somehow Excel would transform it to an _en dash_ if I recall correctly. Since I used abstract syntax trees and parsed the equations, it threw the solver off.

I remember at some point, I just noticed a difference in length compared to the - sign.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> Universally I'm a huge fan of the off-by-one errors. Because the index started at 0 instead of 1, or 1 instead of 0, or the range ends one before the given number, or the difference between subtracting two numbers and then using that as a range. Or when you're using < or > when you should be using <= or >= Whoo, there's so many ways to be off by one. Good times.

<comment><USER5> I believe the 'off by one' are called fence post errors. Building a fence, 50 feet, put a post every 10. How many fence posts do you need? Well 50 / 10 = 5 obviously :-)

<comment><USER5> Turns out good old wiki has an article on it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by- one_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error)</comment></comment></comment>


The Great Dropbox Space Race - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace <comment><USER2> I don't really understand Dropbox's pricing strategy. Free is 2GB, which is no-where near enough. But if you want to pay for more, you have to go all the way to 100GB, which is way too much, for me at least. And the only in-between option is to engage in these kind of games or spamming your friends to try to make them sign up. I'm not going to do that.

Dropbox, if you would just offer $20/20GB and $50/50GB accounts I know at least 5 people who would upgrade immediately. I feel like people want to pay, but such a massive and unnecessary jump in capacity from the free to the lowest paid plan is a real problem. And yeah, I do feel a bit personally annoyed about this - I (somewhat reluctantly) pay for a 100GB account; I use perhaps 10% of it.

I really don't care about this viral marketing to school students. Dropbox, concentrate on your actual paying customers please.

EDIT: I checked and I use 7.0% of my 104.2GB paid account allowance.

<comment><USER3> There is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is not good business. People like patio11 make it constantly. The reason is that people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support, and don't actually contribute much to the bottom line.

Ignore for a moment that 100 GB is more than you need. Is $10/month too much for you? Well...

But you don't need to spam friends, there are regularly things like contests (Dropquest 2011, 2012) where you get free space for completing tasks.

And then there's of course the competition.

<comment><USER4> The problem for Dropbox is that they use S3. It's really easy to bypass Dropbox entirely and save money, even if you're non-technical. I use Arq on OSX, and pay only for the amount of data I have on S3 (about $10 per month right now). Dropbox's pricing is a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER5> It is cheaper to store 100GB in Dropbox than to store your own 100GB in S3. It would cost $12.50 plus transfer costs to use S3. It costs $9.99 and no transfer costs (besides your own net access) to use Dropbox. Dropbox is storing a lot more than 100GB, so they get bulk prices.

<comment><USER6> They also take advantage of a ton of redundant data.

<comment><USER4> Not for me, I only back up my original content on Arq (video and pictures, mostly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dropbox reminds me a lot of webmail before Gmail. There were lots of small increments in available space but it was always an issue for users. When Gmail launched wih the promise that users would never again have to manage remaining space they obliterated the competition.

Dropbox is training users to attach a high value to small amounts of space. When a competent competitor launches with an order of magnitude more space it will immediately seem like a much better deal because of Dropbox's years of conditioning their users to think the only value proposition is the physical space.

<comment><USER8> "When Gmail launched wih the promise that users would never again have to manage remaining space they obliterated the competition."

Except that they didn't. For the last few years, Gmail was a distant third competitor in the webmail space. It seems that now they're finally catching up, and maybe overtaking Hotmail/Yahoo. But saying that at its launch it "obliterated" the competition is simply incorrect.

<comment><USER9> They didn't take over immediately (it's a pain to change email addresses, the lock-in is pretty high), but they did force nearly immediate changes from the major players. Hotmail at the time was offering only a few megabytes of storage (!) while Yahoo! was offering 6MB. Within months both providers greatly increased their storage, though not immediately to the level of Gmail, to help retain users.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I think this is a pretty good example of competition and market forces causing all users to have an improvement, even though the vast majority don't know or care about these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see that the rewards for this program are for a limited time (extra 3GB for 2 years). Maybe they realized their free plan + referral space was too generous. I currently have 21.9GB for free on my Dropbox taking advantage of the 18GB of referrals you can get as well as the additional couple GB they give you if you use the "Camera Upload" feature.

If they gave all these students that 3GB permanently that might bring people up to some sweet spot where most of them wouldn't have a real need to pay for the service.

<comment><USER11> I wonder what they're going to do when the promotion time runs out. If they're going to delete or block access to a random 3 GB of data in someone's dropbox, they're going to be dealing with a lot of upset customers.

(Should these people be aware of the fact that their space is going to run out, and have up-to-date backups of their stuff? Obviously. But the hard fact of life is that people do use dropbox as their only backup, and if something goes wrong there, they're going to be a customer support headache.)

<comment><USER12> The way it currently works is that they just don't allow you to upload anything until you're below your limit. They continue to store whatever is there, and do not delete it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really interested that MIT is now top of the board considering it's a relatively small university. It makes me wonder if this is going to become a situation like when Slashdot attempted to poll for best graduate cs department and it was botted to hell and back.

<comment><USER14> I've been sent the referral link about fifteen different times in the past hour from distinct people. It's been sent out on most mailing lists, shared like crazy on facebook and in facebook groups, etc.

<comment><USER15> I have a theory:

Are you less annoyed by the spam because it will benefit everyone at MIT? I think students will be more willing to spam because it isnt seen as being selfish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't really understand what's going on here. Could someone please explain this to me?

<comment><USER17> Better description here: [https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing- the-great-...](https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-the-great- dropbox-space-race/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love how number 1, 2, and 4 are Singaporean :D Nerd country!

<comment><USER19> Well that, and the time difference. Students in Singapore woke up 15 hours before their counterparts on the West Coast of the US.

It's neat to see the effects of a global operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If only I had a university email account. I would just launch an adwords campaign. :)

<comment><USER21> They block dropbox links nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Dropbox are genius at marketing their product. Absolutely genius.

<comment><USER23> Umm not to sound too negative, but genius is a pretty strong word. What about this is genius? Referral programs are hardly anything new.

<comment><USER24> I think the genius he's referring to is the fact that they're trying to get educational institutions and students hooked on Dropbox, who could then go on to deploying Dropbox for the whole university (unlikely, but it could happen one day) and the students can go on to relying on Dropbox for their future projects, potentially upgrading to Pro at some point.

<comment><USER22> Exactly this. Just looking at my posts in my Facebook newsfeed and Facebook groups, this thing went insanely viral in a matter of minutes and people really are signing up for Dropbox and really noticing it (those who haven't been using it before).

The fact that they have a competition among universities and have the "top students" at each university is a massive plus in getting people excited about Dropbox.

<comment><USER25> They need to pump the growth numbers a bit more before the IPO.

Not the profit numbers, mind you, but the user numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> eric-hu As of the time of this writing, there are 4 Portugese universities among the top 10. I would've expected tech-heavy universities to place among the top 10. Is this the case with these schools?

2 Universidade Técnica de Lisboa 3694 8298 points

6 Universidade de Aveiro 2244 4812 points

8 Universidade do Porto 2060 4538 points

9 Universidade Nova de Lisboa 1943 4079 points

<comment><USER26> Yes.

#2 is especially known for its technical institute (IST, where I study), which competes with another one in #8 for the title of the country's best engineering school (the one in Porto has been winning past years' programming competitions).

#6 is known in the country for its CS degree.

<comment><USER27> They are all portuguese tech universities. I have studied at #8.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any word on if Dropbox will ever add the ability to sync arbitrary directories and not only the 'Dropbox' one? That's the reason I won't use their service. I want to see native support that doesn't require workarounds such as symlinks -- their competitors all offer this feature.

<comment><USER29> Do you have a philosophical objection to using symlinks? As of the last time I checked, you also need a symlink for Google drive.

<comment><USER28> I personally don't have a problem using symlinks but it's a user-experience thing. I know plenty of less-savvy friends and family who have a need to backup and/or share things -- Let's say a 'Photos' directory or maybe a 'Taxes' directory. Telling those people they must relocate their directories inside 'Dropbox' is confusing and, depending on the source files, can often break things (in the event of application files that has a particular requirement for the directory structure)

Trying to tell those same users how to create a symlink is unrealistic and should not be necessary for a user-friendly backup & sharing platform.

I didn't want to name drop other competitors because that wasn't the intent of my post, but as you brought it up, I'm talking about more user-friendly competition such as Mozy, Carbonite or SugarSync.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you on the usability issues, but would have expected you to say "won't recommend" instead of "won't use". I have noticed a surprising number of non-technical (70-year old couple at church) people using dropbox, but that could be due to access to technical friends and family (their 25 year old programmer son).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great idea for a viral campaign

</comment><comment><USER31> How will they reclaim the space in two years time for users who, for whatever reason, don't explicitly choose the files they want to keep?

<comment><USER32> I believe the way it works is you simply can't add any new (or update existing) files until you delete enough stuff to make the space available. They won't actually delete your existing stuff. (well i suppose if your account is inactive long enough and they have sent you enough warning email they might, way down the road, simply delete your account. But lets face it, storage is pretty cheap per GB now days. I doubt they will find it necessary to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What other promotions has Dropbox done in the past?

</comment><comment><USER34> That's a great idea to get users!

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems that we can't use this in China.

</comment><comment><USER36> And... NUS wins!</comment>


GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem - <AUTHOR> http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/28/github-streak-end-game-and-post-mortem/

<comment><USER2> I've written in the past about how I love streaks as a motivating tool.[0] It gives a motivation to get up and do _something_ , when you'd rather do nothing.

One thing I try to do on goals that require an action, is not to add stipulations to it like the OP eventually did in the beginning. If you make the hurdle too large you're more likely to break the streak and more likely to fall into inaction, so allowing a small contribution to continue the streak is a net positive. For me, I want to study French every day and I accept that somedays I'm going to be so busy with work that I can only afford five minutes. That's fine--it keeps me motivated the next day and that day likely won't be just five minutes.

I've found it doesn't work for everyone. I personally see it as a game/challenge whereas when I speak to other people they find it overwhelming. As always, there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to motivation. It looks like it worked for OP to get to where they wanted to go, though.

[0] [http://blog.hellopico.com/the-seinfeld-method-dont-break- the...](http://blog.hellopico.com/the-seinfeld-method-dont-break-the-streak/)

<comment><USER3> I myself find _steaks_ to be a motivating tool. Or at least I'm motivated to eat them.

<comment><USER4> Steaks for streaks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can attest to this methodology for increasing self-motivation for OSS contributions. Great post!

<comment><AUTHOR> :D

So _that 's_ why you went on a fuzz-all-the-things spree on Servo!

(Btw, thank you for that fuzzing spree -- you got some interesting use cases for afl-rs and found bugs and now I want to do the same!)

<comment> non-sense Great to see you and other work on rust-lang. It looks like a great open community!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Using a lack of GitHub contributions as a way to disqualify candidates sounds like a really bad idea. Does anyone do that? Seems like a strawman argument.

<comment><USER7> While I do understand that there's possible misrepresentation resulting from judging candidates based SOLELY on GitHub profiles, for those with presentable contributions/projects readily available on GitHub, I feel it makes for a much fairer representation of the candidate than many of the alternatives (whiteboarding, solving algorithm puzzles under pressure, cultural fit tests, etc).

<comment><USER8> Yes, absolutely (and many of those alternatives suck).

On the other hand, there's something of an inherent metrics bias when you evaluate some candidates on one metric and others on a different one. It's very hard to calibrate those two scales, and there's a risk that you'll be tempted to do things like compare one candidate's GitHub PRs to another candidate's whiteboard code. Even if you don't make that comparison directly, you'll never dislike a GitHub-evaluated candidate for not remembering standard APIs, making off-by-one errors (if they have the luxury of a test suite), taking half an hour to understand a problem, etc. You'll never dislike a whiteboard candidate for breaking with existing style, not commenting or writing good commit messages, being a jerk to people who send in support requests as issues, not being able to respond to code review feedback, etc.

If you have unlimited headcount, you might be able to set independent baselines for both styles of evaluating candidates (although tuning them will, again, be hard), but if you're at all comparing candidates to each other, it seems likely to cause one set of candidates to have a much easier time than the other, based on which things your engineers value. And, necessarily, that means you'll be willing to hire worse candidates from one set than from the other.

Using a GitHub profile to bypass a coding challenge, FizzBuzz, or similar is fine. Using it to break ties or to allow a candidate to express "I'm actually good at my job, even though I'm bad at interviews" is probably fine, especially if there are other ways to do those. But having two different evaluation strategies is likely to be unfair both to yourselves and to the candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its great to have a goal to increase participation. However, this seems to be a point of vanity than something beneficial at that point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, initially I started off by having a friendly competition with a senior of mine (both of us FOSS enthusiasts) after noticing my own inadvertant- streak. At that point it was less about vanity and more about competition and fun. Of course, when I reached 50 I was more than happy to boast about it :P

At this point -- keeping it up would be mainly a vanity thing (but I'm not consciously doing so). For the past few weeks I haven't even thought about it unless I open my profile and notice ("has it been _that_ long? Wow."). It's just continued with no conscious support -- I used to sometimes think "hey, did I forget to commit today" (the answer would usually be no, but the point is that I was still asking myself this). Now I don't. Not because I know I've committed, but because the streak doesn't matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> FYI, the GitHub streak can be manipulated.[0] My apologies for the lack of documentation. Basically, since you can modify the author and commit date in Git, you can trick GitHub into thinking you've committed something several years in the past[1] or the future[2]. Some people have written things that allow you even write messages into the commit graph[3].

[0] [https://github.com/zg/streaker](https://github.com/zg/streaker)

[1] [https://github.com/zg/streaker/commits/master?page=710](https://github.com/zg/streaker/commits/master?page=710)

[2] [https://github.com/zg/streaker/commits/master](https://github.com/zg/streaker/commits/master)

[3] [https://github.com/jbranchaud/commitart](https://github.com/jbranchaud/commitart)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I know.

In fact I have a bunch of commits on my github account that predate the account itself because of commits imported from a project that used to be on svn.

As I mentioned in the post; the streak is useful as a personal metric; so if you're cheating, you know, and it's pointless :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how you can go on that long.

You can easily see in mine ([https://github.com/daurnimator](https://github.com/daurnimator)) when I went on vacation for 3 weeks in November/December last year.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if you know, but GitHub's stats depend on the viewing user. Most who look at my GitHub profile will see a streak of only 13 days[1], but my coworkers see 171, and I see 871[2]. If the viewer can't see a repo, it won't show up in the stats.

1\. [https://github.com/ggreer](https://github.com/ggreer)

2\. [http://geoff.greer.fm/photos/screenshots/Screen%20Shot%20201...](http://geoff.greer.fm/photos/screenshots/Screen%20Shot%202015-05-27%20at%2022.20.00.png)

<comment><USER13> Also if you contribute to a clone, it won't show in the stats.

It is a metric for self-motivation, but I guess it can be wrongly used for other things. Is like the "GH is your CV" thing, ignoring that there are other code hosting environments and non public code.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cashflow – Zapier for Financial Services - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, we're Chris and Pedro from Cashflow (https://trycashflow.com). Cashflow is a single connection point for neobanks, payment services, and digital wallets, making it easy to send money between different platforms.
We started building Cashflow only a few weeks ago as part of the Antler startup generator in Stockholm. We have 10 years of experience building fintech products, but it was the Antler program itself that inspired our project. We saw that people from across the world had no great, effortless way of sending money to each other.
The fintech market in Europe is becoming fragmented. Lots of interesting services are popping up, but if you move countries a lot, you still have to fall back to old methods for money transfers.
To be fair, we are not the first to make cross-border transfers more accessible — PayPal and TransferWise are great examples of progress made in this industry. But what no one has done so far is making cross-border transfers as uncomplicated as domestic transfers.
The products in this space still treat transfers as chores, but our observation is that the way people want to transfer money has changed. It has become a much more playful and frequent activity.
The fragmentation and accessibility are two sides of the same coin, and we aim to solve both. Cashflow connects different fintech services, so you don't have to think about what platform people are using. Similarly, we want people to be able to settle debts on a daily basis, without worrying about fees and slow processing.
Cashflow works by using a combination of current banking infrastructure, the new payment directives (PSD2, etc.), and a handcrafted approach where we hold funds in different places.
Today, we're taking our first baby steps; applying the age-old wisdom of releasing something small early. We are eager to hear about your experiences in this area, and what unmet needs you may have. Please comment and sign up for the beta at https://trycashflow.com. <comment><USER2> Confused on who this is for. Landing page says consumers. Opening statement in this thread says B2B/

I'm a consumer who wants to open up one app to send money (in the USA) via either PayPal, Chase/Zelle, or Venmo -- is this for me? If so genuinely curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Kevin, yes, this is for you.

Thanks for pointing this out. We are exploring a bunch of different ways to formulate what we do and for whom, and you're right that the core message became a bit muddled here.

Would love (really!) to hear more about your specific needs. Feel free to email me at email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> (co-founder @ Cashflow)

We've gotten a lot of valuable feedback during the last couple of days. Thank you to everyone who signed up for the beta or had a look.

We just pushed an update with more in-depth info on how Cashflow works, have a look at [https://trycashflow.com](https://trycashflow.com) and let us know what you think.

(We also got a Proof-of-Concept up and running, super excited to share more with you soon!)</comment>


Answer to your mails without opening them with Gmail Schemas Actions - <AUTHOR> http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.fr/2013/05/introducing-actions-in-inbox-powered-by.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Doc here [https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/embedding- schema...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/embedding-schemas-in- emails)</comment>


Irish "Gypsies" (Irish Travellers) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Travellers <comment><AUTHOR> I discovered this while trying to figure out why a town in Texas was named "White Settlement." That town is in the news right now because of a shooting in a church there. \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Settlement,_Texas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Settlement,_Texas) \- [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/west-freeway-church-of- christ-s...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/west-freeway-church-of-christ- shooting-gunman-opens-fire-at-white-settlement-texas-church-today-live- updates-2019-12-29/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Generally, don't editorialize titles (the "I didn't know this group of people existed)") part, as per the guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

If you're still within the edit window, you can update the submission title yourself. Otherwise, you can email the mods via the Contact link in the footer for them to do it for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. I removed the last bit of the subject.</comment></comment>


Why All the Snowden Docs Should Be Public: An Interview with Cryptome - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cryptome-is-pushing-for-all-of-the-snowden-docs-to-be-made-ublic

<comment><USER2> You should delete this and re-submit with the correct URL. [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cryptome-is-pushing-for- all...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cryptome-is-pushing-for-all-of-the- snowden-docs-to-be-made-public)</comment>


Boeing 737 Max Was Plagued with Production Problems, Whistle-Blower Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-whistleblower.html <comment><USER2> >Employees at the Renton, Wash., factory where the Max is produced were overworked, exhausted and making mistakes, Mr. Pierson said in an interview. A cascade of damaged parts, missing tools and incomplete instructions was preventing planes from being built on time. Executives were pressuring workers to complete planes despite staff shortages and a chaotic factory floor.

I wonder how much of this is directly the result of penny pinching by MBA types. I'm gradually coming to believe that non-technical management of technical endeavors is the root of most failure in the engineering domain.

<comment><USER3> Why does HN love to bash "MBA types" so much? The bit you quoted doesn't even have anything to do with any type of technical background. Do you think that only people with MBAs are taught that they need to meet deadlines and obligations? Do you seriously think that someone with an engineering degree would for some reason say "actually we don't need to meet deadlines, I won't pressure you to finish these planes on time"?

<comment><USER4> Honestly, and I'm being really frank here, a lot of the management "expertise" at fortune 50+ firms that come from traditional (re: MBA) tracks has just two tools in their toolbelt:

1\. Meetings to "align"

2\. Cracking the whip.

That's it. That's all they have. They have poor insight into creating team chemistry, culture, focused work environments, mentorship, long-term planning, QA processes, sourcing efficiency feedback, etc. - all those things that are crucial to boosting productivity and creating supersonic teams. The people that _really_ know their stuff and can work miracles are people that have been in the trenches for 20 years, regardless of profession. And they hands-down make the best managers.

That's my honest 2 cents, it's a bit of disgruntlement from working in large enterprise environments with engineering and technology.

<comment><USER3> That's a hilariously narrow minded generalization. If that's your honest opinion then I have to assume you've never actually sat down and had a real conversation with any of these "MBA types" and talked about what they do. My guess is that the reason you think all they do is crack the whip and hold pointless meetings because that's the only interaction you have with them, but I can guarantee you that every organization you have ever worked in has had plenty of "MBA types" working in ways that are invisible to you building exactly the team chemistries, culture, planning, processes etc that you mentioned.

<comment><USER4> I would agree that this is narrow minded - and would say that this opinion is a result of exactly what you mentioned - my interaction with them being fairly limited and clinical, despite them having a direct leadership role in my org.

I would argue that this is the problem unto itself. The idea that a manager can work invisibly "behind the scenes" to create these conditions is the squarest negative stereotype of the MBA - that they are clerical, remote, number-crunchers who don't have an intuitive human grasp of the unique challenges their teams face, because they lack experience where the rubber meets of the road of their organization. I think this Boeing case conforms to this stereotype, as does my personal experience.

But I don't believe they're a scourge, or anything. I quantified it with "a lot" but not "most" ;)

<comment><USER3> When I said they work in ways invisible to you, I did not mean it as they are intentionally working "behind the scenes". It is more likely that your narrowmindedness just blinds you to all of the things they do. The work is probably all done out in the open, and in almost all cases I've ever seen, the "MBA types" specifically seek out interaction with and input from "rubber meets the road" folks (side note: this is another hilarious notion that MBAs apparently aren't involved in "rubber meets the road" tasks), but it's generally the engineers that shy away from this interaction and then blame management for being out of touch.

<comment> chupa-chups In our organization we created a special "department" which is disconnected from the traditional corporate structure.

We're a compound of self-organized teams of Product Owners and Engineers.

Our traditional organization takes 10 weeks for feature X, we need at most 2 weeks, averaging at 1 week (10%).

We have the luxury of delivering the exact same product (as a green-field variant of our classical product as a SaaS solution), so it´s quite comparable in terms of scope.

The main difference is there is no hidden agenda of would-be managers, nothing between the customer than a PO who _knows_ what he is doing (i.e. is doing regular A/B tests, customer interviews, involving the dev team as deep as possible to understand customer requirements).

We were awarded a nation-wide award for digital transformation.

No middle-managers, no HR.

You can reach me @ email@example.com for additional details if you like.

Summarizing: we got rid of all non-relevant management ballast and are able to deliver features at a pace of around 10x of a traditionally managed line.

Overtime: around 0% with a tendency to dip below 0%.

Addendum: the POs are 70% MBAs, but they are good (i.e. they learnt to deliver as opposed to manage)

<comment><USER5> Keeping in mind this whole thread is about the process of manufacturing aircraft, do you think this approach works equally well with traditional manufacturing?

My experience is that these lean approaches work well for something low on the severity scale, like an SaaS solution, but can more easily falter with complex safety-critical systems that blend multiple domains (e.g., mechanical, software, etc.) I think sometimes people interpret the process rigor that gets added to critical design to management bloat.

<comment><USER4> Not disagreeing with you, but worth mentioning proto-lean/agile methodology began with the manufacturing of cars at Toyota.

<comment><USER6> Also worth mentioning that Boeing has their own variant of the 'Toyota Production System (TPS)' named the 'Boeing Production System (BPS)'.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any insight into how BPS addresses software development? I've looked but so far most of the information is related to hardware manufacturing or using software as a tool (e.g., for training).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did any of these production problems relate to the MCAS malfunction though?

Also, this is buried further down in the article than it should be.

> Mr. Pierson and his lawyers declined to answer whether he was seeking > whistle-blower protection or filing a federal whistle-blower case. He has > hired a prominent whistle-blower lawyer, Eric Havian, and could stand to > gain monetarily if he pursued such a case.

<comment><USER8> Compensation for filing legitimate claims is an important carrot to encourage people with inside information to speak out. Whistleblowers are routinely subjected to intense retaliation and professional difficulties when they come forward, and the process of claiming and securing an award takes years.

Everything this whistleblower is saying seems consistent with dozens of other stories which have emerged of Boeing's corroded engineering practices.

<comment><USER7> > Compensation for filing legitimate claims is an important carrot to > encourage people with inside information to speak out

I've found over the course of my life that money encourages all sorts of people to say all sorts of things.

<comment><USER8> That's nice. I'm not sure exactly what you think is happening here, but "make up a bunch of stuff and use it to pursue a whistleblower claim" doesn't strike me as a very appealing or sound strategy for ill-gotten gains. This isn't something that gets litigated in backroom discussions or tabloid news outlets.

<comment><USER7> Have you ever been in a courtroom? Not a lot of neutral statements of unvarnished truth pass back and forth there. Some do, but not many. I am extraordinarily worried about the precedent of paying witnesses for their testimony, which is what this amounts to. However good we think that our reasons may be.

<comment><USER9> Expert witnesses get paid for their testimony all the time.

<comment><USER7> Expert witnesses are paid by the hour, and still get paid whether the case is won or lost. The abuses of honesty in the expert witnesses system are still horrific enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would I believe anything Boing's PR says if nobody went to prison for endangering so many people's lives?

It makes sense that sensors on an expensive plane shouldn't malfunction so early.

<comment><USER11> physical sensors malfunction all the time, and you have a fleet of several hundred aircraft.

You would be _shocked_ to learn how many faults an aircraft can have at a given time and still be allowed to take off. That's what redundancy is for, if everything had to be all-systems-go every time then you couldn't run an aircraft for a week straight. It doesn't matter as long as you have a spare, and it'll get fixed the next time you're in for maintenance.

the issue with the 737 MAX is that there are only two sensors, and so far I don't see that being addressed. One sensor failing should not kill the aircraft, and it should not disable a control regime that is necessary for the aircraft to receive type certification.

<comment><USER12> This observation is incomplete. The problem is not the absence of more sensors. It's that, in order to quickly produce (and sell) the 737-MAX, it was changed so much that its behavior was fundamentally different than that of the 737.

The MCAS system, which was dependent on those two sensors, was developed to compensate for the degree to which the plane behaved differently. And Boeing underplayed how much the performance of the new plane had changed, and hid the existence of the MCAS system from commercial plane pilots, to the point where it wasn't even in their manuals.

Had Boeing behaved ethically, they would have told the FAA that the new 737 required pilot training. But that would have diminished sales and hurt Boeing's stock price. That's the managerial misbehavior that many of the commenters in this thread are remarking on.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max- crashes.html)

<comment><USER13> MCAS was required for certification, in that it increases the linearity of control forces through to a stall. Without it, it becomes easier to enter a stall.

MCAS was not a fix to make training lighter, the aircraft would not be able to get a type certificate without it.

[https://leehamnews.com/2019/02/08/bjorns-corner-pitch- stabil...](https://leehamnews.com/2019/02/08/bjorns-corner-pitch-stability- part-9/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing that strikes me about the Boeing MAX story is that executives made decisions which they were told over and over again would put lives in danger, and so far the likely monetary damages are so small the stock is completely unfazed, and criminal prosecution is a distant, all-but-impossible notion.

<comment><USER14> I don't think the majority of people understand how deep this problem went. Back when they were first grounded, we saw stuff on HN nearly every week. I don't think it got much place elsewhere. Many of my friends are really unaware of how serious the Boeing situation is. Same thing for back when Uber had a new scandal (grey ball, harassment memo, hell map, hiring Eric Holder to run damage control, the other harassment memo). I'd tell friends I refused to use Uber and they were mostly unaware of half of that stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "Mr. Pierson did the right thing by elevating his concerns."

I doubt that Boeing would have been so gracious to Pierson if they had not already been waist-deep in shit.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's worse is that the upcoming MCAS fix is not a fix. If one sensor is misbehaving (seemingly more common than desirable) then pitch-up will not be automatically corrected:

"Boeing specifically highlighted in presentation documents the new MCAS compares inputs from two angle of attack (AOA) sensors as opposed to a single sensor in the original, flawed, design. MCAS will only activate if data from both sensors agree the AOA is too high. MCAS will activate only once per high AOA event. Pilots will be able to override it and the system will not activate automatically a second time. In the original design, the system reactivated over and over. The presentation reiterates the crew can deactivate MCAS by turning off the automatic trim system and manually turning the trim wheel."

[https://imgur.com/a/H5milYP](https://imgur.com/a/H5milYP)

<comment><USER17> Hmm I wonder if that will be accepted. The whole point of MCAS was to avoid getting assigned a new type which would require airlines to pay to have pilots certified on the new type, with MCAS only working and only fixing the maneuvering differences when both AOA sensors agree (and Boeing not making AOA a critical system with redundancy) it will be interesting to see if this still gets the benefit of sharing type rating with the existing 737s. I imagine the FAA is going to be reluctant to just wave them through this time and I wonder if one activation is enough to actually correct the pitch up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The best remedy to runaway quality problems is management by wandering around (MBWA) but that is of course impossible if HQ is in Chicago.

</comment><comment><USER19> "He worries that once the Max is flying again, Boeing — scrambling to make up for the costly delays — will not have changed."

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://archive.is/tKX4Y](http://archive.is/tKX4Y)

</comment><comment><USER21> The title should be "whistle-blower _says_ ", per the headline—did it get automatically truncated?

<comment><USER22> No. Maybe it was just a select-paste glitch. Fixed now!</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Hacker News for DevOps Projects - <AUTHOR> https://devops-projects.de/ <comment><USER2> At first glance above the fold I'm not sure what the site does - I think it would make sense to hit people with your value prop straight away - "an interactive DevOps Board" doesn't tell me exactly what value I will be getting by using the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fully agree. Still not sure what it will do in the end entirely but I'll outline its current functionality better.

For now, it scrapes DevOps Projects (actual jobs you can apply to) from multiple sites and broadcasts each new (and valid) project to the Slack/Telegram Subscribers.

Additionally, you can send the same Bot that informs you about new projects arbitrary URLs (that should be in the same "domain" [aka "DevOps"]) and saves them as a "Ressource". Resources, like projects, will be broadcasted to subscribers.

When subscribing, you can act (up-/downvote) on the links the Bot sends you.

In the end, I personally use it for 2 things:

\- I want to know about latest DevOps jobs (mostly freelance projects) that might be interesting to apply to without parsing mails/sites manually. I just get notified once my favorite job-boards publish a new offering \- I want to save/share DevOps related Links somehow. It's actually what I use HackerNews for pretty often (stying up to date with latest tools/trends/...). Ideally a kind of dynamic, topic-centric (DevOps) and "curated" (Upvotes) Knowledge-Base evolves out of it.

Slack and Telegram come in handy for me as I don't want to use another App for this. You simply broker information through the bot and save/display it somehow so actions can be applied to the information. I wanted this to work without the need to register additional accounts or use dedicated tools. Put simply, I want to combine the simple and high-quality way of accumulating knowledge that HackerNews imposes with a more modern workflow to act (e.g. "I only want to forward an URL I find interesting/important and leave tagging, etc to the machine").

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks more like a job board, does not resemble HN

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the headline was a bit over the top ;) The HackerNews Part (assembling useful information on the DevOps topic) is WIP and currently on the end of the site. I guess this will go into the direction of a resource-board for DevOps- stuff (be it projects, tools, repos, links, ...) that works with user contributions and curation in the spirit of HackerNews to produce quality content people can act on. WIP :) Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, exactly my niche. Does it support filtering for part/full-time and remote only jobs?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm on it. I implemented the Scraping part in the beginning and didn't work on it as much since then because I wanted to Bot-Functionality to complement my workflow for acquiring and acting on this information first.

I guess some of the next steps on the Roadmap will be advanced scraping of projects for tags (e.g. 'terraform', 'kubernetes', etc) and ofc flags like 'x% Remote' or 'fulltime'. Filtering by this info can then be done on the site or by subscribing to only a subset of projects through the Telegram/Slack bot.</comment></comment>


I Want Your AOL CDs - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624 <comment><USER2> Shit, I'm old.

I remember when Wing Commander III came out and I bought a CD-ROM drive just so I could play it. At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most. CD's were #$%^ing _magical_. Suddenly, games and educational programs could make use of _video_. Truly, it was a leap forward in technology.

Just a few years later, at university, the "brotherhood of the golden disk" was passing around the latest games on CD-R's. Diamond's first mp3 players were a curiosity the rich kids had, and we were playing mp3's we'd downloaded off of usenet on an ancient sparc3 that could just _barely_ decode them in realtime. I splurged on a CD-R and suddenly I never had to delete anything ever again. When AOL discs arrived in the mail, it seemed strange that anyone would just give away something as valuable as CD's!

A few years later, I was using AOL CD's as coasters. I had a storage box built for 5-1/2" floppies that was now full of CD backups of files I'd never look at again. USB key drives had yet to arrive so, if I wanted to transfer tiny source files around, I'd burn a CD and not worry about all the wasted bits.

Today, a lot of computers don't even come with DVD drives. Apple never even bothered to properly support Bluray. By the time BD-R drives came out, hard- drives were an order of magnitude larger. Now they're nearly two orders of matnitude larger. Backing up a large hard drive onto BD-R's now would be more tedious than backing up a hard-drive to floppy discs when the first CD drives came out. Depending on where you are, it might actually be faster to transmit data half-way across the world than to burn it to a BD-R disk.

<comment><USER3> Time for old-man-stories about CD-ROMs? Oh, oh!

In high school, I loaned my best friend my life savings, $7000, with interest, $6k of which was used to purchase a CD writer, which he was planning to use to run a data backup service for local businesses (the other $1k was used to buy RAM... I think maybe 16MB?).

Personally, I find several facts in that paragraph kind of remarkable.

In retrospect, I think the interest rate did not reasonably reflect the high level of risk involved. The CD backup business didn't work out, and we had to renegotiate the terms of the loan, but he did pay me back.

<comment><USER4> I had a job with MCI (hell that screams old right there) back in the early 90's. They were developing a new project (Perspective, I believe it was called) that would revolutionize the way that billing was done. So instead of shipping a truckload of paper bills to a company like JCPenny, they would just burn the information onto a CD and deliver it. I recall being told that the CD burner they had bought (which was a box the size of a nightstand) was 100k+.

oh and I think the media cost like $50 per burnable cd (or something like that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> slipstream- When I was busy a few months ago archiving the AOL download areas, I found some undocumented file areas full of AOL betas. I downloaded over 10gb of them.. at 100-200kb/s. There were more, but I figured the rest of the channel I was working with (related to archiveteam funnily enough) would get them... and then AOL killed the downloads back in January this year. (They probably still exist on the servers though - you can still get at the metadata!)

Anyway, I figured a friend of mine might want them; he said he did, so I uploaded them to him (at my crappy 768kbit/s upload speed it took an entire weekend!). Upon completion he said he no longer wanted them.

Um.

Anyway, I just contacted Jason Scott. Hopefully he'll be willing to wait a few days. Or I could just burn the file to a BD-R, I have a bluray burner and a spindle of BD-Rs somewhere that I've never used.

<comment><USER5> > Or I could just burn the file to a BD-R

I find your lack of faith in the internet disturbing.

<comment> slipstream- Haha.

(I really wish I had better upload speed.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone remember the futurama episode where they found a huge pile of garbage floating in space launched by earthlings in the 21st century? Of notable items there were loads of AOL discs.

[http://theinfosphere.org/Giant_ball_of_garbage](http://theinfosphere.org/Giant_ball_of_garbage)

<comment> slipstream- AOL floppies even. Which could have been reused.

<comment><USER6> For several years, an AOL floppy was my go to boot disk for Windows 95 installs and repairs.

<comment><USER7> For several years, AOL was the singular reason why floppies were still made. Then they switched to CDs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may sound kind of weird or even quaint, but this is exactly the kind of awesome archiving work that Jason Scott is fantastic at preserving. Why is it important? Literally tens of millions of people were first brought on-line and connected using software from these CDs. They were connected, often for free, to first AOL's information and other people connected through AOL, and then to one of the greatest human achievements in history, the internet.

I _still_ have friends who have aol email accounts, keeping them alive simply because the switch cost for them is too high.

AOL also helped anchor the tail-end of the East Coast's version of Silicon Valley, the Dulles Tech Corridor/Netplex...a place where literally half of the world's internet traffic passes through.

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

</comment><comment><USER9> I used to collect AOL CDs as a kid. Got a new one every time we went to the grocery store. I'll have to check back home and see whether they finally got thrown out.

</comment><comment><USER10> The best thing about AOL CDs were the plastic cases they came in. These were invaluable back when you would buy spindle of 100 CD-Rs to burn but then didn't have anywhere to put them!

At some point they wised up and started putting stickers on the cases that you could not easily remove. Nevertheless, I still have tons of old CDs in AOL cases at home...

Never kept the AOL CDs unfortunately!

<comment><USER11> I think I still have a clear DVD-sized thin case from about 2001, and a AOL tin that conveniently holds a CPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I collected aol cds as well. I have a 3 1/2 disk of aol version 2.5, the first one that let you connect via TCP/IP. About 6 years back I installed it and I was able to connect over my cable modem. Pretty neat.

<comment> slipstream- You can't do that now. AOL dropped support for clients <= 3.0 back in January this year, and a month or so ago dropped support for clients <= 5.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My parents have tons of these types of CDs from about 1996, I'll have to get them from them.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have 1,000 AOL CDs from v3 to v10

<comment><USER15> You are likely keeping them for a reason, but I'd like any and all unique copies.

<comment><USER14> I too wanted to make art. I had a coworker a long time ago that kept AOL CDs strung with string, it was a good ten feet roll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My dad collected a ton of these, thinking they'd have value someday. I thought he was nuts. I'll ask him if he still has any.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just think of the gold you could mine from the effort to send one million CDs back to AOL: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2440911.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2440911.stm)

</comment><comment><USER17> What's on the AOL CDs?

<comment> slipstream- the AOL client software.

<comment><USER15> AOL Client Software, along with game demos, browser installations, advertising, music, utilities, and varieties of promotional material... depending on which CD, and when it was made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow this brings back some memories. I attribute AOL to all of my programming curiosity and success. When I was around 11 or 12, my dad put in me in front of AOL 2.5 and from there I was curious how things worked. I quickly got involved in the AOL "prog" community and learned how to write small (some times malicious) applications in Visual Basic for AOL. Those were the days haha :)

<comment><USER19> Coding, indexing, and mirroring AOL progs actually changed my life. I got expelled in 8th grade due to my school's network admin claiming I was hacking the Apple school network using Win32 VB AOL tools (?!), which kick-started a series of more run-ins with future school administrators, made my mother so depressed she couldn't get out of bed, and eventually led to me quitting school altogether. I didn't think of AOL as the spark that led to all this until just now.

It definitely had a way of instilling a sort of wonder about what was "behind" all those windows, what was possible, and whether you could get it to do something it wasn't supposed to. Punters were the weirdest thing about AOL, because they could have easily fixed them but seemingly never did. If it stopped working in a new version, a simple modification would make it work again.

<comment><USER18> Ironically Steve Case just came through where I live. I imagine if I was there to meet him I would let him know that AOL is basically responsible for me being a professional software developer.

I remember building all kinds of weird "PrOgZ": punters, mass imers, emailers, scrollers, etc.

So much fun :D

<comment><USER20> Oh man, I was in a group of 'punters' called the seven deadly sins way back, our favorite target was yahoo chat rooms though because they had this voice chat system and if the poor end user left their mic on you could hear them getting hit with a few thousand im's and freak out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Surely there's a line where this becomes copyright infringement?

<comment><USER22> Copyright infringement is only an issue when someone cares.

<comment><USER23> God, I wish more people understood this. Why on Earth would AOL care if someone distributed their 20 year old software enough to sue over it?</comment></comment></comment>


IOS/Android Programming Contest - <AUTHOR> http://www.nsbasic.com/app/contest/

<comment><USER2> hi,i am still trying to creat nsbasic/appstore app. i found it to be a lot of potential. hopefully, i could creat some animated game before the deadline ends. i dread learning objective-c to built ios app, or writing the android app using the native way . nsbasic/appstore open a new door for writing ios and android app . rdgs TsTan</comment>


Math Overflow (A StackExchange site for Maths) - <AUTHOR> http://mathoverflow.net/ (via http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/10/stackoverflow-shares-its-mojo.php) <comment><USER2> This is great but I must know: does stackexchange allow automatic rendering of latex formulas like wordpress? If not then I think this one is going to have a hard time taking off.

<comment><AUTHOR> From <http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/math-overflow/> :

> There's currently no LaTeX support. Obviously, this is the top-priority > feature. This definitely won't be implemented until the Stack Exchange > software is out of beta, but it will probably be implemented shortly > thereafter. In the meantime, do your best. You're welcome to type raw LaTeX, > use basic html (e.g. Ω and x1), or whatever you would > normally write in email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a very neat idea, but the lack of support for latex, or any other way to create mathematical expressions is a bit of a letdown.

<comment><USER4> [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/516406/latex- equivalent-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/516406/latex-equivalent- to-google-chart-api) lists a bunch of possible options that would be rather trivial to integrate (either a modified version of Markdown, or the editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is one's motivation to start a stackexchange site? Sure, you want to make the obscure community you like better, but $130/mo is kind of a lot. Is there any reasonable way to recoup the money?

<comment><USER6> I've emailed FogCreek about this a few days ago, and they stated that Stack Exchange is geared towards corporations currently, but they have been getting a lot of emails about offering a lower cost versions for a more hobby centered site (think photography). They do allow for custom HTML to be added into parts of the site, so you could add ads to generate some revenue.

It's also worth noting that Stack Exchange is free during the beta period (because they haven't implemented the code for fees, Joel had stated that in one of the Stack Overflow podcasts)

<comment><USER7> * They do allow for custom HTML to be added into parts of the site*

But I suppose adding your own ads will be supported when it's out of beta? Otherwise paying the price and having no way to generate revenue seems a little useless...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Visiting for the first time I was sure to see more high school geometry and first year calculus questions. I am delighted to see a much deeper discussion taking place.

</comment><comment><USER9> For comparison with your competition look at

<http://www.mathlinks.ro/>

<http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/> (both sites point to the same forum)

They support LaTeX rendering and are already quite well known.

I wish you success. It will be cool to have something like HackerNews for math only.

<comment><USER10> I'm inclined to think mathoverflow will be more researchy in character than these other sites, which have a math competition tilt. (which means mathoverflow has won me over)

Also, there are some pretty high powered math problem solvers who are active on math overflow, eg reid barton: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_W._Barton> (one of the top performers in the history of the putnam among other things)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The odd thing is that they are paying for beta software (I assume) that has features that link to incomplete pages. I don't get how that's acceptable to a paying customer honestly.

See: <http://mathoverflow.net/issues>

Beyond that, this Math site is an awesome concept and exactly why they made Stack Exchange.

<comment><USER12> stackexchange is free during beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's an idea: filterable categories for StackExchange, instead of a new site every week.

<comment><USER14> Allowing new sites with individual branding is how they make their $$</comment></comment>


SpaceX successfully launches and lands a used rocket for the second time - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15861622/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-landing-success-buglariasat <comment><USER2> Musk tweeted that the rocket booster used "almost all of the emergency crush core" which, according to the article, "helps soften the landing".

Can someone explain what this means? What is an emergency crush core?

<comment><USER2> Ah, I believe I understand now. Here's an older tweet from Musk which mostly explains it: "Crush core is aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Easy to replace (if Falcon makes it back to port)."

<comment><USER3> This was a hot enough landing that they used a 3-engine hover-slam to reduce fuel usage. Their last attempt at a 3-engine landing burn was also their last landing failure. When a landing goes slightly wrong, the crush core is the first thing to go... and this time it successfully did its job.</comment></comment></comment>