Huge Virus Breakthrough Could Mean a Cure For the Common Cold - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5679451/huge-virus-breakthrough-could-mean-a-cure-for-the-common-cold <comment><USER2> Same story, different source:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860241></comment>


Eligible (YC S12) Wants To Be The Stripe For Healthcare Transactions - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/22/yc-grad-esther-dyson-backed-eligible-wants-to-be-the-stripe-for-healthcare-transactions/ <comment><USER3> best of luck to them. very hard area due to regulation and compliance issues. you better like being audited.

i just wonder if it's clear to them that this likely will be a national company? scaling this past the US will be very, very hard - this is using patient data, which is highly protected and in a lot of cases is not allowed to be hosted outside national boundaries.

this is my first litmus test for enterprise start-ups btw - does this work outside the US? the US market is big, but a lot of enterprise customers are multi-national and do not purchase completely local solutions.

<comment><USER4> Every insurer like this, however, is US focused, and a lot are per-state. The only corner cases are US citizens overseas and visitors in the US.

Also, to a first approximation, the world healthcare market for private insurance is the US.

<comment><USER3> I don't get what you're saying?

There is a large private insurance market outside the US. A lot of private insurance is augmenting state-run schemes, just look at Germany - <USER2> Krankenkassen system is not that different (lots of players, government mandated, plus private additions if you like shorter wait times or private hospital rooms).

What I was trying to say that if you're limting yourself to a single market like the US, the growth potential is not that big, same for your target market size and ultimately the amount of money you can make. as an investor something like Workday has more "fantasy" in terms of potential growth than something that caters to a very limited, national audience.

The company I work for launched a similarly national product and killed it after 6 months. Would have worked in the US, but then what? Our other stuff is truly global, so now that we cover the US fairly well we still have a lot of growth in OUS markets.

<comment><USER4> The number of people outside the US is big, but the financial value of secondary-to-national-insurance medical care is tiny, and the rules are really simple and transparent (often, it's a single vertically integrated secondary provider -- like BUPA in the UK -- billing for vertically integrated health providers like Kaiser in the US is also fairly simple). I only know the US and UK rules in detail, but the UK is actually simpler than even most US single- payer systems (e.g. DOD TriCare duty) in terms of recordkeeping. (this is largely a good thing for non-US countries!)

I'd be pretty comfortable building a health insurance eligibility service which only covered California. Covering the entire US market is well over 50% of the value in that market.

The unknown are places like China and Africa which have much more limited health care markets today, but which are rapidly evolving. It's reasonable to think they might adopt other systems than what they're using now (largely government-direct or charity or cash private doctors). Maybe the big US companies will be successful in promoting a damaging product (US-style health insurance) to other countries, like we did with cigarettes, but I sincerely hope not.

Stripe, on the other hand, absolutely must expand into other countries, or else the "Stripe of Europe" or "Stripe of China" might someday be able to challenge Stripe.com over who is the "Stripe of the USA". And Stripe is still tiny compared to the market even just in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is indeed a hard problem to solve. Glad to see someone attempting it. I think partnering with one of the major insurance providers should help kick- off the product at great scale and learn a lot.

All the best!

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this works fine for basic eligibility checks where it's just a matter of is it covered or not. But the real pain (and where hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars are spent) is in radiology. There is a lot of friction put into place (think RBM's) to make it difficult to order any imaging.</comment>


Examining Henry Kissinger's Uninformed Comments on AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.skynettoday.com/briefs/kissinger-ai <comment><USER2> In general I wouldn't heed advice from war criminals.</comment>


My Amazon interview experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.jayhuang.org/blog/my-amazon-interview-experience/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this sort of thing happens. At Intel, I got the silent treatment _after getting an offer_. It was for an implementation (RTL -> circuit) position. We chatted about schedule and it was apparent that they wouldn't actually have a pressing need for that sort of thing for at least six months, and that they were hiring as they could and they expected to be hiring implementation folks for at least another six months to fill all of their reqs.

When we got around to discussing start date I asked if I could take a few months off between jobs and start in a few months. The hiring manager (who was an engineer, not a recruiter) stopped responding to my emails and returning my calls. Months later, I asked a friend of mine what happened and was told "X is busy". Too busy to spend five seconds responding to an email? Really?

Today, that hiring manager is at ARM and I declined an a chance to interview in his group when I found out who was in charge. I think I dodged a bullet; I can only imagine what working for the guy is like.

By contrast, I applied for a job I was completely unqualified for at another company around the time I interviewed at Intel. I didn't expect to even get an interview, and I didn't. But I still got a nice snail mail rejection notice. Many years later, I now work for that second company.

Like I said, I don't understand why this sort of thing happens. Putting aside kindness and basic human decency, even if you're completely selfish, it costs basically nothing to be polite, and the benefits are pretty large. Conversely, being rude gains you nothing and has noticeable costs.

<comment><USER3> I got the silent treatment twice when trying to interview at Yahoo and once with Google. In all cases it was at the stage between initial recruiter contact and agreeing on a date for the first phone screen. I later found out (by looking up the recruiters on LinkedIn) that both of the Yahoo recruiters had left Yahoo and now worked at Apple. Ever since then I started wondering how big the impact of recruiters turnover is on candidates getting stalled.

<comment><USER4> I had a similar experience at TomTom. I applied for a position, got a positive reply, tried to schedule for an interview. After that I did not hear anything for quite a while, so I e-mailed again and, in case they had e-mail problems, called the recruiter. He promised to call me back, which he obviously did not. Later I learned (also from LinkedIn) that the recruiter had moved to another company around that time.

Funny enough, until this day (months later) the position is still open and it gets reposted every now and then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Long-time Amazon employee here.

I have to say that I despise with every fabric of my soul the lunch interview. I wish we didn't do it to people and I decline as many of the lunch interviews I have to give as possible--I don't think I learn much from the candidates as they are starving and tired and trying to put food in their faces. The best candidates tend to answer your questions instead of eating, making you feel rude for eating yourself; the worst candidates take big long thoughtful bites to stall answering.

It is definitely one of the more broken things with the Amazon interviewing system and I wish it would go away.

<comment><USER6> One thing I like about Google's process is that we take you to lunch, but explicitly tell you "this is off the record, no feedback will be submitted. Ask any questions you want, or just chill out and eat."

<comment><USER7> >explicitly tell you "this is off the record, no feedback will be submitted. Ask any questions you want, or just chill out and eat."

And people fall for that?

<comment><USER8> Well, it's true. But if you're paranoid you choose not to believe it.

<comment><USER9> Till about 2006, the lunch "interviewer" was able to put in feedback, but was specifically told that they were not supposed to do it.

Except for some smart alecks who would put in "Candidate held fork in left hand, was neat eater" I never saw anything beyond "n/a" or similar non- feedback. Most often I would see a savvy recruiter pair up the lunch with the referrer so they could catch up with their friend and it would act as the 'sell' part of the interview slate.

<comment><USER10> _Most often I would see a savvy recruiter pair up the lunch with the referrer so they could catch up with their friend and it would act as the 'sell' part of the interview slate._

This is a functional and smart practice.

<comment><USER11> This (lunch with referrer) happened to me when I was interviewing there and I agree that it is a smart move. It put me at ease. Presumably by the time you are there for an on-site, there aren't any questions of fit left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I interviewed at a small company. I came in, talked to several people, cruised through some coding problems, and left with smiles and handshakes. Sent the usual thank-you email, too.

About three _months_ later, after I'd long written them off, I got a call from them. They'd "been busy" and asked if I could come by the next day. This time, I met with several people working on the projects I'd be helping them with (mostly porting code to platforms I had a ton of experience on). Everything was looking good. Then the HR guy said something like, "you don't seem very excited." Since no talk of an offer of any kind had come up yet, I was severely tempted to remind him that, after the last time I came in, I didn't hear from them again for months.

The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from me, give me a call."

Fuck that. From the moment I left their building, I never gave them another thought. As expected, I didn't hear a peep from them.

Employers like to complain about how hard it is to find talent, but then they behave like this. It's as much our evaluation of them as it is their evaluation of us.

I've been on the other side of it, too. Being made to interview candidates when we have absolutely no need for additional people, or for groups wildly unrelated to anything I do in the company. I wanted to tell the people, "look, you're probably never going to hear from us again because, frankly, we don't need anybody, and nobody in engineering has any idea why we're interviewing you."

<comment><USER13> > The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and > handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from > me, give me a call."

I might have been inclined to respond, "you don't seem very excited." :D

<comment><USER14> You're funny.

I might say, I express my excitement in other ways. (cue a joke about is that a banana in your pants or are you just happy to see me)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I started a non-tech business about 10 months ago. Food, actually. I go to work every day, but my business, though profitable, isn't large enough yet to hire. Of course, there are limits to what I can do as one person, so it's likely that I will eventually hire.

This week and next, I've had a young man who I already knew helping me. The restaurant where he works is currently closed for two weeks, so I took that as an opportunity to give him a chance without either of us making any commitments. I already knew that he had a great attitude (well beyond his 20-year-old age), so this was more of a way to see how well he did in my line of work and to let him evaluate what I do and how I like to do things. For both of us, it was a way to confirm that we'd work well together.

In some areas, I've gone out of my way to accommodate him and his circumstances. I asked what he's paid at his current job so I can pay him more than that (by percentage, a good amount, less so when viewed as an hourly rate). I talked through with him paying on a schedule that fit his needs (weekly, it turned out). I took him with me on deliveries to see how I handle customer relations. I had him come along when I spoke to a potential new customer, one that in his presence agreed to receive product from me. I've openly shared my expenses and revenues.

It's articles like the one linked here, along with my own employment history, that taught me there are equitable and forthright ways of treating people. As a business owner, I want to do those things, whether with employees, customers, suppliers, etc.

What I often tell myself, and share with others, is that there are certain things I must do. For example, I have no choice about certain licenses I must have, or tax filings, etc. But everything else is a choice, and I want to make my choices conscientious of the needs of those with whom I work.

</comment><comment><USER16> I had a similar experience when I interviewed with LinkedIn almost two years ago.

I remember two rounds of technical interviews with two people in each. In the first I was okay but in the second I did very well.

Then a director came in and interviewed me. After a good chat about technical things and their overall vision for the future he walked me out of the building and mentioned that after what he'd heard from the interviewers, he'd have HR send me an offer on Monday. I was excited!

After nothing happened for a week I emailed my recruiter (in house) and asked what was going on. She said she'd call me the next day but did not. So I decided to drop it for a while.

A month later I sent yet another follow up email and she finally called. Obviously it was rejection.

I felt the whole thing could've been handled better.

<comment><USER17> Experiences like that are very weird...it makes you wonder if they're actually interested in making an offer, and just completely change their minds, or whether they have no intention of making an offer but for some reason think it's less awkward to just give extremely positive feedback, and then fall off the face of the earth. The worst is when they apologize and give the excuse that they have been very busy...because it takes so long to send an email that says "Thanks for coming in but we decided not to move forward".

<comment><USER18> I know exactly what happened there: he didn't get the headcount signed off, hoping that he could say "well I've already made them an offer" to force it through, and HR said nope, you tried to do an end run around us and we're not playing ball. It's happened to me, at a company that is notorious for doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is my experience about Amazon interview.

We were graduating from a very reputed institute and we were supposed to go through a screening test. So there was a programming test.

We assembled in the building where their HR lady was supposed to co-ordinate. Since the AC had some issues we all were sitting close to the window instead of the front row.

First she shouted \- Guys I want to you'all to sit in the front and not at back. (Since it was a live randmized programming test there was no fear of "groupwork").

We said we do not want to do that to which she responded with this :

"You guys want a job or not ? If you want a job and want to answer the test you will come and sit here else you will walk out of this room."

Then she told us the common password. We requested her to write it on the board. She refused. I will tell it one more time and you guys will have to listen else forget the test she said.

I realized that I dont want to work for Amazon.

<comment><USER20> Was this in India? The US hiring process is very different.

<comment><USER21> I wondered this also. From interacting with people on careercup.com (which is absolutely flooded with people from India) it seems like they are pushed through a lot of written tests, both for programming and for general aptitude. Definitely a lot different experience they go through over there. Wonder if it has to do with there being so many people.

<comment><USER22> In US, you mostly hire for specific roles....developer, or QA or some such thing, even if straight out of college. Most colleges here are good..you can trust the grades to about 75% accuracy. In India, in college recruiting, your plan is to hire relatively bright people and train them later. And you don't trust the college's grading. For this purpose, you also conduct an aptitude test. If they pass a cut-off mark, then you consider them for a programming interview or for in-person interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While for me they were polite enough to call for rejection, but I still found the interview process little 'old school' at Amazon. For example, they asked me to write code on white board "Exactly as I'd write it on Computer, - AND - which is ready to go into production" (yes, these were the words). Really, you want me to hand-write code on whiteboard and also work as a pre-compiler and a compiler? I hope that's not the way you work.

Another friend of mine (who was rejected twice) was told to do the same thing - but at the end of it, the interviewer captured the photo of the code from his cellphone to properly evaluate it later. REALLY? You are not able to even evaluate the 'production ready' code someone else wrote, and you ask others to write it!

<comment><USER24> If I hadn't already heard from enough people I trust that working as a developer at Amazon sucks (depends on team, from what I hear, but I've heard lots more bad than good) your interview experience alone would be sufficient to get me to not bother interviewing with them.

I love them as a customer though!

For some reason their recruiters attempt to recruit me quite a lot (via LinkedIn, email, etc) despite the fact that they have no office in San Diego and I have no interest in living in Seattle.

<comment><USER25> _I love them as a customer though!_

I recently read "The Everything Store" and and my take away was that customer is the only relationship you want with Amazon. Everyone else gets hosed.

<comment><USER26> I had the exact same feeling. Bezos' and Amazon's approach actually made me question how far would I go to build a billion dollar company. The customer experience is bar none the best I've seen at a company, but deep down I'd hope there would be a way to do it that wouldn't require leaving so much collateral damage.

-edit- Wife was talking to me while writing this post, hence, errors. -edit-

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Only seven interviews? You got off easy. I had 10, for a freaking sales job. 3 on the phone (one each with HR, sales, and a sales engineer), then they flew me across the country for a day of interviews - 7 back to back to back...

The thing is, 5 minutes into that first on-site interview I knew I was wasting my time. They hired a new East Coast Sales VP. He started the week prior. When you get hired as a sales VP what you do is bring in all your old cronies from previous jobs. You don't ever make your first hire somebody you don't know. Even though I nailed the interviews (they told me I handled the case study as well as anybody does) I knew there was no way in hell I would get an offer.

I was right, although I did at least get a polite rejection email a week later.

BTW, I probably had my lunch interview at that same sandwich shop.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have interviewed with a lot big tech companies(Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle etc). I interviewed with Microsoft in Dec 2013, and I found their process was the best and really well planned.

First I was brought into a giant conference room with 12 other candidates and the recuirter gave us the overview of the company and gave us the itinerary for the day.

Then we had our interviewers come into the conference room and call out people's names to take them to indivisual rooms for interviews. After each interview we were brought back to the conference room and given a 10ish mins break to have snacks etc.

After the 3rd interview the recuirter took all 12 candidates to a very informal lunch, which basically acted like a sale pitch for the job.

Every single interview I had, had been working for the company for 10+ years and was extremely humble about their work. I especially liked the fact that they openly accepted their past mistakes and told me how they were fixing them.

After the final interview the recuirter passed around a sheet where we filled out our available times in the next 2 days to talk to the recuirter about our results.

I interviewed on a Friday and I got a call from the recuirter on the next monday with an offer.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've done interviewing as an engineer. It's pretty much totally easy to give a quick reply to someone who has reached a final state in the interview process.

Here's an example:

"Sorry, we decided to not move forward with your application. Best of luck in your future endeavors".

Very canned, very corporate. But it's real easy to copy and paste, then email. Brings closure to the candidate and frees them up to move on. Also, it's just plain kindness.

<comment><USER30> I wasn't trying to be sarcastic. My thought was, is there something different you call yourself, or some different niche that helps you avoid that kind of treatment? I should have been clearer in my question.

<comment><USER29> Sorry. No, I meant that I was interviewing people from the perspective of an engineer, not as a manager or as a recruiter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> To other readers - this post is 92% typical post-interview review, but the last 8% is a big WTF on Amazon's part. So... if you're short on time, feel free to skip to the end.

<comment><USER32> I've seen the "radio silence after enthusiasm" routine from other companies large and small over the years, from startups to Apple and LinkedIn.

<comment><USER33> Oh yeah. I, normally, put the company which does that in my blacklist. I give bonus points if it is a small startup which interviews a couple of people a week and still can't manage to do it. Extra bonus points if they contacted me first. Yes, it does happen.

Once a person from a local startup suggested to send him my CV at a meetup, 2 more people from they same company suggested to do the same. I got invited to come over, was told that there is no actual position so they just would see if I could fit in somewhere. Sounded very positive at the end. Sent a follow up thank you note. Never heard back.

<comment><USER34> I've personally interviewed a substantial number of candidates (phone screens and in-person interviews) for Amazon.

Amazon is very prompt about responding to candidates, but no decisions are ever made until the interviewers have a chance to sit down in a room together and discuss. So I don't know how the recruiter at the end of this account could have said half the things he is supposed to have said.

This account sounds like a specific recruiter made a series of huge errors and just kept on compounding those errors with bad decisions. That or there are some factual inaccuracies in the account.

In any case, my primary point is that I wouldn't write off an entire company due to what are likely the mistakes of a single individual, the recruiter who is supposed to be communicating with you.

<comment><USER35> _In any case, my primary point is that I wouldn 't write off an entire company due to what are likely the mistakes of a single individual,_

Well, actually, I would. Because (being as it seems to keep happening, over and over again, in big companies and in small companies) clearly it's _not_ the mistake of a single individual. The fault lies with the mindset of those who create the hiring culture in the company at large.

And the shabby treatment frequently dealt out to candidates may not be entirely consciously intended, but still, it is no "mistake." It is a perfectly predictable outcome of the hiring culture in these companies.

See also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040656)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sounds about right. My experience with Amazon's hiring process was that it was extremely flaky, which surprised me because it was nothing like my great experiences with Amazon as a customer.

Did well on the phone interview, got an email the next day saying they'd like to schedule an in-person interview. Emailed them right back with my schedule, radio silence for two weeks. No response to further emails or phone calls from me.

By the time they got back to me two weeks later with an interview date, I had two offers from other companies that I interviewed with in the interim. Ended up having to cancel the Amazon interview.

There are some companies that have this process WIRED. Hiring managers respond immediately to any email and actively work to find the right place for good candidates, an offer gets made a day or two after the interview, or they tell you they're not interested. It's very difficult to not want to work there when you see that.

Friendly advice to entrepreneurs: don't be the Amazon in this story. There are some really good people I know that are turned off to working there from similar experiences.

</comment><comment><USER37> I had a phone interview with Amazon. It too, was with someone with a heavy accent I had trouble understanding. To make things worse, I could tell that the guy was giving the interview from home because there were children yelling in the background.

To make things _even_ worse, the interviewer had trouble understanding my english. How do I know? Because when he told me the answer to one of the questions I had gotten wrong, he repeated back the answer I had just given him.

It was really frustrating.

<comment><USER38> Actually, sometimes it's better to repeat what the other person said back to them to prove you did in fact understand them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I interviewed at Amazon for a product management role in 2010. I also got the whole travel / hotel accommodation thing.

A thing that stuck out at me was ego. There was a lot of ego on the other side of the tables I sat at.

I had one guy interviewing me say he had been recruited by the CIA but chose Amazon. It seemed important to him that he tell me how good he was at his job.

My lunch interview was totally fine and not awkward.

At the end I spoke with a department head who's job was apparently to make sure I wanted to work for the company. I kind of needed work then, so it was a pretty boring end to the day.

My understanding was that Amazon was using an interview model style similar to Microsoft's, where you can be 'let go' from the process at any point during the day. If you make it to the 'closer' type person toward the end of the day, then you've done well. I don't know if this is true.

Ultimately, I wasn't offered the job, but I did get good closure and apart from some of the personalities I encountered, I was pleased overall with the experience.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seven interviews sounds like a broken process. What did they learn in interview number 6 that they didn't/couldn't know at the end of interview number 5 ?

Also, spending a whole day interviewing in Seattle and not meeting any of the team you would be working with ? WTF ?

Edit: I forgot some other points:

The interview process is supposed to be about building trust and getting a feel for whether you would be a good fit for the company and vice-versa.

This process sounds very asymmetrical: they only cared about whether he satisfied their criteria. This is further proven by finding an NDA to be signed on the morning of the interview. Couldn't they have sent it in advance so he would have time to read it ? What super secret details might have accidentally been revealed by their carefully planned interview process ?

</comment><comment><USER41> I had a shit experience like that with Google about four or five years ago. They interviewed me on the phone. Then called me in for in-person interview on campus. Then like thirty days went by before I got the reply "No, sorry." It was kind of hell waiting that long to get a no reply.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had a phone interview with Amazon in 2009, when I was between jobs. The interviewer asked me to write out a binary sort function in my preferred language.

Now, I can describe a binary sort in pseudo-code pretty well, but it's been a long time since school (a lot longer for me than for the interviewer, I suspect) and I suggested I just describe what a binary sort was and we could move on, but he stubbornly insisted that I do the scripted exercise.

I then asked, is this type of coding a requirement of the job, because that's not really my strength, and he seemed to become rather irritated. I terminated the interview, and sent a complaint about this kid to the Amazon recruiter who set up the interview (never heard back, obviously).

I'm terrible at writing code in interviews or answering quiz type questions. I'm much more comfortable with top-down types of scenarios--how would you approach this problem, what tools would you use, what languages, sketch out a solution for us, how would you test, what's your documentation style, what version control system do you like to use, etc. I like telling war stories from previous jobs--weird problems I've had to solve, interesting challenges, and so forth. I enjoy talking to people, and usually in these sorts of open ended interviews, I do pretty well.

The OP seemed uncertain about going to this interview in the first place; he had a pretty good situation, he doesn't really like the interview process and is not that comfortable with that type of social situation. He didn't like breaking his routine, either. Therefore, it's not too surprising if his lack of enthusiasm came across.

What's inexcusable is for him to have invested all that time, and for them to have invested all that time, and not to give him the courtesy of a one liner email followup, especially after a verbal offer was made. Annoying, but not at all uncommon. It's happened to me, too; I remember in particular an all day interview at GTE, a verbal offer, then nothing. The only thing you can do is just shrug it off and move on.

(If it's any consolation, I've cut back on Amazon orders since they started charging state sales tax where I live. I philosophically disagree with the "use tax" concept (a whole debate for another time) so I just switch to buydig or ebay or newegg or whoever else is still tax-free. As it turns out, though, AMZN still has the lower price in many cases, so I might still order from them, though sometimes I can get it from an Amazon Marketplace Seller for less.)

<comment><USER42> For what it's worth, I think it's totally reasonable to ask a software engineer candidate to implement a binary sort, even if the candidate has to derive the particulars of the algorithm from first principles. If the candidate can't implement something as well-understood as a binary sort, how are they going to perform when given a totally novel problem that no one has ever solved before?

If anything, the problem with that as an interview question is that it is too obvious and common, and will not do a good job distinguishing between a strong candidate and someone who crammed for the interview and happened to practice that particular problem.

<comment><USER43> Did you and the parent comment mean binary search? I've never heard of binary sort. And if you do mean a sort, how does it work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> My theory: The recruiter may have a few spots to fill and several candidates. So say, there are 5 eligible candidates and 2 spots to fill. Knowing that not every one offered a position will accept it, the recruiter tells all of them they'll be given an offer. That way those candidates are less likely to accept an offer elsewhere and 'stay in the pool'. Recruiter offers the position to two and waits to see if they accept. If either doesn't accept, they make an offer to the next candidate. In this case, the spots filled before getting to all of them. Since they had been told they would receive an offer but no spots were left, the recruiter decides to end all contact.

If they were more honest, they would have to give offers to only two. The others candidates are likely to move on while the recruiter waits for a response. If the two formally offered jobs don't accept, the recruiter finds the other eligible candidates have moved on and has to go interviewing more people.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I think this is pretty standard all across the board, in every industry. Don't throw the grade "B" fish back just yet. Smart candidates do the same thing--"You're my top choice" etc., even while busily interviewing elsewhere. It's all just a game everyone plays, really nothing new here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having the interviews in Seattle isn't really that strange. If the Vancouver office is new or small, there simply won't be enough qualified, experienced interviewers there to interview you.

Also, since you believe your verbal communication skills are lacking, you should work on improving them.

</comment><comment><USER45> I had the same deal, position was in so-cal but wanted to interview in seattle.

My experience wasn't great. I was put in a small window-less cell and quizzed by people who didn't prepare and I ended up answering the same questions about myself and my background for almost every interviewer. I had a real hard time with a manager-type person who kept on asking me the same non-technical question over and over even when I tried to prod for clarification. He didn't explain why my answer wasn't cutting it, he just kept re-asking it. Like he was taunting me as my answers harmlessly bounced off his bureaucratic shield bubble.

I felt I did pretty well given the circumstances but I guess the manager spiked it because I wasn't offered the position.

</comment><comment><USER46> I see tons of "I interviewed 5 times and didn't get the job" comments on this thread. Why is it so hard to get a job in Silicon Valley?

I hear that it's tough to find talent, and I also hear that it's tough to find a gig. Something doesn't add up.

<comment><USER47> No, it adds up. There are a lot more available workers than positions in SV.

The problem is finding good people. Good people that are a fit both technically and socially. Superstars get hired. That's it-- everybody wants a superstar.

<comment><USER46> If I'm a superstar, I don't need Google or Facebook or Amazon because I can start my own thing and/or join an up and coming startup and get a solid equity stake. That's the crux, and why the 'talent crunch' won't go away. It is self- imposed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Similar to my experience interviewing for an SRE position at Google Dublin. 3 phone interviews (one with HR, two with engineers) and 5 on-site interviews, 45min each. Took them quite some time to tell me I wasn't getting an offer.

</comment><comment><USER49> Even if he had gotten a job offer, it's weird he never spoke to anyone he would be working _with_. Or visited the site in Vancouver where he would be working. It seems like more interviewing was still to come.

</comment><comment><USER50> I work for Amazon. I'm going to use the internal system to look up who dropped and ball and get the make this right.

<comment><USER35> And? How's the inquiry going, so far?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is pretty fail on Amazon's part. Does anybody have a contact inside Amazon that can help this guy get his job?

<comment><USER24> I don't see the fact that this guy didn't get "his" job as the fail part. The Amazon employee from Vancouver at the end probably shouldn't have worded things such that everything sounded final, but maybe they simply interviewed someone the next day that they felt was a better fit for the job, or maybe something changed and the decision was made not to hire for the position they were considering previously -- it happens.

Having said that, I do think not getting back to him at all (even if that was with an explicit rejection) is a complete fail.

Based on anecdotal data, it seems to be increasingly common for modern companies (though I usually hear about it on companies that are much smaller than Amazon, which should have its HR shit together) to just go completely incommunicado with someone once the decision has been made to not move forward. Doing this is completely unprofessional (no matter how big or small your company is), especially in the face of explicit queries about the status from the person who was interviewed, and I applaud the guy for naming and shaming Amazon on that aspect of it.

Fix your shit, Amazon HR/hiring managers. Don't be jerks.

<comment><USER52> Not sure whats up with that last person in the interview, but the recruiter has really _zero_ say in the hiring process. At least when it comes to AWS.

> The last interview was with the lead recruiter from Vancouver (apparently he > flew from Vancouver to Seattle to interview me, a candidate that was in > Vancouver and had to fly to Seattle for the interviews…).

The recruiter finds talent, schedules the interview and hassles AWS employees to interview the applicant. The applicant interviews with 6-7 people (like I did), that consists usually of your direct manager, a bar raiser (an article about this was just posted here the other day), and other peers.

 _Only after_ your interview day is over, and everyone has a chance to put your review info into MRT does everyone meet again and discuss if you are a valid candidate or not.

The recruiter has no say in this matter since they have no idea how your answer related to distributed systems lock coordination and Big O(n) notation work. It sounds like this person jumped the gun.

Amazon HR should at least get back to you with a "sorry we've decided on someone else", or "we'd love to work with you" letter either way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> When I interviewed with Amazon a few years ago, almost all of their recruiter emails ended up in Gmail's Spam folder. Clicking on the "Not Spam" didn't seem to fix this, and I ended whitelisting amazon.com.

At the time I found it quite amusing, but this can be a real problem, since probably most people don't check their spam folder regularly.

<comment><USER54> Well, on a hilarious note, I too had this issue with Gmail. In fact my offer letter too went into the spam folder. :|

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> In the future, don't let yourself get distracted with accent etc, especially if you want to work in the tech industry. It may be different in Vancouver, but majority of tech workplaces in the US you are going to find people from all language background with heavy thick accent.

<comment><USER24> Accents can be a huge problem, though, especially over the phone where verbal communication is all you've got to work with.

I've worked with a lot of developers from many different backgrounds: Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Russian, Ukrainian, etc, etc and while even the thickest accent becomes easier to understand with prolonged exposure, I'd still much rather talk to someone without a strong accent when interviewing, especially over the phone.

If you're spending a significant percentage of your linguistic and abstract/symbolic brain processing just trying to figure out what the other person is saying to you (which can happen with particularly strong accents) it puts you at a big disadvantage for dealing with programming-related questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> NDAs for interviews? Is this common in the US? I would feel intimidated and not sure I'd sign that.

<comment><USER18> At one company, we had a list of standard questions we would ask in a phone screen. Then we got a whole slew of candidates giving the same wrong answers to a few of them, enough to make me suspicious. Turned out the external recruiter had been de-briefing their candidates to reverse engineer our process.

<comment><USER56> We had this too with one large hiring agency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Well, I did phone interviews with both Amazon and Google (both in their UK offices), and while I got rejected, I found both companies very professional. Google called on the phone within 2 days and Amazon send an email the very next day. Also I really hate phone interviews ...

</comment><comment><USER58> While I'm yet to read the article, I wanted to note down that companies like Amazon, Google and the like are enormously huge and nobody needs anybody in these places. Thus do I want to be in small companies where I can be an _important_ piece of a team.

</comment><comment><USER59> Could it be that Jay is hopelessly overqualified for this job? Whatever this position would be.

I assume the sweet positions for algorithm tweaking and HTML/CSS development from scratch are already taken by core Amazon engineers. Well protected holy grail. Perhaps they are looking for is a junior expendable wheel in some sub- project, and not a person actually capable of re-creating Amazon from scratch.

Jay's qualifications seem for me quite senior. He appears to be more suitable for IT lead of a startup or a member of a think tank of a more intimate company.

</comment><comment><USER60> Unless interviewers are trained to provide honest (and we hope, compassionate) feedback to candidates as soon as is clear, the natural desire is to run away from a face-to-face rejection. Thus, except for definitive no-hire's, it's forced smiles and positivity (and lots of wasted time all around).

My prep sheet always reminds me, with a few choice options, to subvert my inclination to duck.

</comment><comment><USER61> Very similar to an interview process I went through about a month ago. The "full-day" interview sort of irks me. You mention how you were tired, and I imagine a lot of candidates are, 5-6 hours of straight interviewing seems too heavy.

When I had my "full-day" interview it left a bad taste in my mouth. (I ended up not accepting the offer)

> and asked me to write the HTML/CSS for the whole page.

Yowza.

<comment><USER62> "new release about to be pushed live, and asked me to write the HTML/CSS for the whole page."

I cringed a little at this, but this is not too bad. They probably wouldn't expect you to make it perfect. It is not always the result they want, usually they want to see the process on how to handle working through the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I always thought getting no response in a few days means you're not hired. This is pretty industry standard. Also, in the interviews they will always assume that you get hired. What kind of interviewer would say "well, you're probably not gonna get hired, but...".

<comment><USER24> "This is pretty industry standard."

It shouldn't be, and didn't used to be (I'm 40 so I've been around software dev for a while).

This kind of behavior is unprofessional and an embarrassment for our industry if we just consider it our industry standard.

It doesn't take much effort to draft a form letter rejection (that is generic enough to avoid any potential for lawsuits, if that's their concern) and even less to send it out. With just a minor amount of work they could act like they were adult humans who treated other people like humans... why not do that?

<comment><USER9> In fact I'd go further and say it's pretty much industry standard for recruiters to go missing/contract ending mid-offer. It might sound aggro, but if you think you have an offer coming, it's not awful to email anyone you might know inside a company to get an answer.

Heck, I don't think I even mind telling people it didn't work out, so if you get in this kind of mess with Google, I'm happy to track down errant Google recruiters for you for them to officially turn you down, or happier still, get you that offer that is waiting in some stalled process.

Big companies can be challeging to interview for. So many moving parts that translate into an offer. pre-interview, interview, referrals, manager and exec review, headcount allocation, comp negotiation, etc. etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Would someone please disrupt hiring in the tech industry? It's so incredibly broken and the people who are extracting money out of providing services to "help" are putting in very little effort for a very big gain without actually having much impact on the problem.

<comment><USER65> It is hard to disrupt these practices. These kinds of interviews, while not the best gauge of talent, do have some correlation with a candidate's ability. The fact that this process scales well and that all the big companies that everyone wants to work at do this makes it such that the only way to disrupt the practice is if another large company gains such a competitive advantage as to overtake the big corps like Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft.

A lot of companies do things differently. They're just usually smaller companies.

<comment><USER66> I don't think his comment was the interview practice itself (though that needs an overhaul too), but rather the pacing and relation the company maintains through the recruiter with the candidate. Neither internal nor external recruiters seem to share the same priorities as the hiring managers nor the candidates, and I know a couple of companies (yes, predominantly SV ones) who have left such a bad taste in my mouth just from my interaction with their recruiters that even though I've never interviewed with them I don't ever want to work for them. That is probably unfair, but if I'm of so little value as a potential hire as to respect the basics of human decency, I don't really want to see what happens when I'm actually dependent on them for my salary.

What's interesting, too, is that the only time I've -not- encountered -any- of these issues (with a large SV company no less) was when I had an offer in hand from somewhere else. Being able to say "Sure, I'll interview with you, but you need to be pretty quick about it because I have an offer in hand that is pretty attractive" got me through from initial phone screen, to onsite interview, to verbal offer, without me having to drive the process at all, in less than a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I can't wait to see whether Amazon ends up responding after seeing this...

</comment><comment><USER68> This is not news. I experienced the same thing at Agilent in San Jose.

</comment><comment><USER69> 7 interviews???

I would've given up after 2.

What a broken process.

<comment><USER8> That's typical for Amazon, Google, etc. You don't have to pass all of them, just get enough of them (especially the more senior ones, although you might not be able to tell who that is) to like you.

<comment><USER9> At Google we've capped it so that you'd not see 7 unless there is some need to revise the slate (different job to interview for, or a really badly formed interview) . In fact we found and target 5 nowadays as the statistical change of score for incoming candidates after 5 wasn't dramatic enough to justify the extra trouble.

YMMV/excpetions etc, but still... I remember when we capped it at 8, then 7, now it's largely 5 at most for 95% of the candidates.

<comment><USER69> Why can't you setup one phone screen + one full day interview?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> you sound like a terribly unsocial person if you were that worried about a phone interview. what is wrong with you?

<comment><USER6> You sound like a terribly rude person. What is wrong with you?</comment></comment>


Show HN: My Weekend Project - Sending a blog to your Kindle - <AUTHOR>

Over the weekend I wrote a small web app that takes an RSS feed for a blog, grabs the feed, cleans up the HTML, strips out small irrelevant images and compiles them into an e-book with chapter anchors. It requires a Google login since it uses the Google Reader "API".
As an example, I was going on a long vacation and had recently discovered Paul Buchheit's blog. I used this tool (which was then just a Python script) to create an e-book and I literally read his blog "cover to cover".
It's still rough around the edges, but I figured I'd iron those out if at least one other person thinks they would use this.
For those interested, the hardest part of this project, surprisingly, was getting Google's OpenID+OAuth hybrid login working since I couldn't find any libraries that had it built in.
http://blog2kindle.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://blog2kindle.com/> and screenshot of logged in screen in case you don't want to log in: <http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/6323/b2k.png></comment>


Ask HN: Is there some service that lets me buy beta app testers? - <AUTHOR>

So I'm in the stage where I might want to test my application before I put it on the app store. I have posted on several forums/reddit etc but it is just so damn hard to gather any significant amount of actual testers. So far I've got one.
I would gladly pay X amount to some service for Y number of "feedbacks".
I would like to upload my app in IPA format. Choose the number of feedback-reviews I would want to receive. I would then pay, and wait.
Is there anything like this? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if they have something _exactly_ like this, but [http://erlibird.com/](http://erlibird.com/) has gotten me pretty good feedback on projects before.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could also try [http://betalist.com](http://betalist.com) or even [http://producthunt.co](http://producthunt.co).

</comment><comment><USER4> I use and love Usertesting.com. Great service.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks interesting, I will have a look at it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could try something like Mechanical Turk.

</comment><comment><USER6> Odesk could probably help you with that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hire qa.</comment>


Launch of SimplyDocs - <AUTHOR> SimplyDocs (simplydocs.cloud) allows you to create online forms & templates, generate pre-filled documents or get form submissions on a real-time basis in your business applications. You can integrate them anywhere. The platform has an in-built approval workflow. <comment><AUTHOR> Code 'ycombinator' brings 50$ off for 6 months.</comment>


Startups Vie to Build an Uber for Health Care - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-vie-to-build-an-uber-for-health-care-1439265847

<comment><USER2> Glad to see there is a market out there for this. I applied to the YC Fellows program and pitched my idea as 'uber for nurses'. And here I was thinking that I was coming up with a groundbreaking idea...haha.

I'm interested to see how this shakes out. The delivery method for healthcare is a mess for everyone involved. I think we go back to house calls within 10 years.</comment>


How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978) - <AUTHOR> https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html <comment><USER2> "So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it."

As true today as it was in 1978

</comment><comment><USER3> I posted this content the last time this post made its way through here and it seemed there was some interest so here it is again: [https://wuu.bi/the- religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick/](https://wuu.bi/the-religious- experience-of-philip-k-dick/)

<comment><USER4> Read that and then had to look him up.

So today is the first day I can remember having heard about Philip K. Dick and also the day when I learn he has written the stories that became Blade Runner as well as The Adjustment Bureau.

<comment><USER5> His works are also the basis for Minority Report, Total Recall, and The Man in the High Castle

<comment><USER6> Also "A Scanner Darkly".

<comment><AUTHOR> And arguably influenced _The Matrix_ , _The Terminator_ , and _The Truman Show_ as well. Virtually any modern film that questions reality has probably been directly or indirectly influenced by PKD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The description of the TV watching process is really juicy. And it certainly applies also to modern day video streaming. It's not the delivery method but the video content itself that it's dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author read the bible first (or maybe he was read to as a child), then subconsciously recited stories from it in his writings. That's my explanation. No the Biblical mysticism he proposes.

</comment><comment><USER9> One thing that constantly puzzles me about PKD is how far ahead his societal and philosophical imagination was, but how backwards his technological views remained.

He has androids being run by punctured cards (i.e this story), advanced civilizations relying on advanced typewriters using paper (i.e. The Little Black Box if I remember correctly the name), and mass communication based on telephone boots (i.e. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

<comment><USER10> He writes this paragraph that may explain your observation:

"So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to archive.org this piece has been around since at least 2017. Not sure if it was written before then though.

<comment><USER12> Seeing how author died in 1982 it would be a miracle or some really odd circumstance if original article was from 2017.

<comment><USER13> PKD used the Ubik line of typewriters. They are well suited for writing and publishing content after death.</comment></comment></comment>


Young, Not Small, Businesses Drive Job Growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/young-not-small-businesses-drive-job-growth/62896/

<comment><USER2> If you want to help new businesses succeed fix health care. We once lost a very valuable employee (to a Canadian firm) because we simply didn't have the cash flow to offer a health care benefit. It sucked. He stuck out as long as he could, and I completely understand his decision. The fact is, health care is extremely expensive to offer and only getting worse.

Find a way to help new businesses (who are tremendously cash strapped almost by definition) to compete sanely with the rest of the world. Do it now, politics aside.

<comment><USER3> Isn't purchasing health insurance privately cheaper than orchestrating a move to Canada?

<comment><USER4> Not if he's already a citizen.

Moving from California to BC really isn't all that expensive. It's just the rental truck and gas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author argues that "measures should be put in place to help start-ups learn how to avoid correctable problems."

Does anybody else think that already exists? What is one of the purposes of HN, anyways? :)

<comment><USER2> I think this is best done at the local level. Cities should be bending over backwards to find ways to help new businesses succeed in their city. I know New Orleans is doing a lot in this regard (although I'm not terribly familiar with the specifics). I'd love to see my home-city of Denver really step up to the plate on this.</comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds Responds To Miguel de Icaza's 'Who Killed Linux' Blog  - <AUTHOR> http://www.muktware.com/4271/linus-torvalds-responds-miguel-de-icazas-who-killed-linux-blog

<comment> james-skemp See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4471726> for a much better discussion on this.</comment>


ASCII Shader - <AUTHOR> https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ll3RB <comment><AUTHOR> the same shader used for FPS game [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW- pDkDvcfE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW-pDkDvcfE)</comment>


Is Recycling a Waste of Time? - <AUTHOR> https://greenthatlife.com/is-recycling-a-waste-of-time/ <comment><USER2> The maxim "reduce, reuse, recycle" is well-known in our house-hold but, as the article points out, the reduce part is hard. Many don't realize how little actually ends up recycled but a recent trip to Cuba was informative.

Cuba doesn't provide recycling in even the major cities, but our guides instructed that plastic bottles (e.g.) should be placed next to the trash-cans on the street because someone would reuse them. When she was packaging up gifts we brought to give to school children, she tore shrink-wrap into strips and tied them around small bunches of markers. Later when we visited a family run coffee farm, we were able to buy small amounts of roasted coffee produced on that farm. Those beans were packaged in recovered water bottles that had been washed and dried.

A couple other interesting examples ... we were instructed to bring along water bottles because they'd supply filtered drinking water in bulk, reducing the amount of plastic ever purchased. When we visited a family-run tobacco farm, we could purchase cigars. The were wrapped in the hard lower leaf of the local palm trees which of course is compostable and renewable.

Reuse in Cuba was also very evident - the best example is the person we saw in Havana who "repaired" umbrellas. People would drop broken umbrellas on his street corner and he's produce working umbrellas. Repaired is in quotes because many times, the finished, working umbrellas were made of the parts of multiple donor umbrellas. Another example is the classic cars that you see everywhere (it really is that impressive) - it was a little disconcerting to hear a '57 Chevy fire up with the sound of a European diesel engine. On the outside, these cars are kept in pristine condition but a collector here would be horrified at how they're kept on the road.

<comment><USER3> I grew up in a household that never really got over the Great Depression or the austerity of World War II, so a lot of this "reuse" thinking is in my brain. Especially when it comes to containers and cooking fat.

But my wife had the opposite upbringing, so she thinks I'm old and stupid because I wrap her Christmas presents in old newspaper and string. But you know what? A lot of those pages from the New York Times are more colorful and decorative than any wrapping paper. Plus, they're unique, and once you learn to tie string well, it's an incredibly useful skill.

<comment><USER2> I usually try to find a recipe to cook that uses the rendered bacon grease before it gets too old. We don't generally fry our food so I'd love to know how you store and filter the cooking fat between uses.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I don't do much to it.

I have one pickle jar that I use to store old bacon fat. I just pour it into the jar and put the jar in the refrigerator when it cools. I use that fat for things like eggs, meats, and certain vegetables I want to add bacon flavor to.

The other pickle jar I use to store leftover frying medium for things like potato chips and french fries and such. I fry in lard because that's what I grew up with.

I don't filter or refine or anything. I just pour the liquids in their jars and scoop out what I need when it's time to use it.

I don't know how long it's possible to keep doing this because my wife throws the jars away every few months and I have to start over. But there's a restaurant in Philadelphia (Bookbinders?) that is famous for re-using its cooking fat for decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recycling is the wrong, least efficient, laziest solution to the problem of packaging. Why does every little thing need to come packaged in its own cocoon of plastic or paper? Beats me. Consumers have become lazy: they expect purchasing and consuming to be the extent of their participation in the long supply chain through which our goods travel. This tends to externalize the environmental costs of consumption to all of us. Recycling would be unnecessary if consumers were held accountable for properly obtaining and reusing materials.

Our laziness will kill us all: mark my words.

<comment><USER5> > Why does every little thing need to come packaged in its own cocoon of > plastic or paper?

It started as security. Packaging used to be way simpler. First, packaging got stronger on medicines and food to prevent tampering, mostly after the incident when someone put cyanide in Tylenol. It grew from there - anti-tempering, anti-theft, protection for rough handling during shipping, as shipping speeds increased. The reasons kept growing, and the packaging keeps growing.

I fully agree that we can cut back. But like most aspects of society, you need to first understand the drivers that got us where we are, and then attack the problem by discussing whether our current solutions are truly the right answer to those problems.

<comment><USER4> You're right: there are at least some good reasons for packaging to exist. So, I'm going to rephrase my original question:

Why does every little thing come in packaging _that is not directly reusable without further investment of time /energy_?

For example, I ordered a USB hard drive a couple of weeks ago. It arrived packaged in:

* An unmarked cardboard box. Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse? It should be a Pelican-style container that is used to deliver a shipment, and immediately returned for reuse.

* An thinner marked cardboard box advertising the device's features and specs. Why was this necessary? I already know what I ordered: I don't need to be further convinced that this is in fact the right thing.

* A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?

* A plastic bag inside the box, with the device inside it. Why?!

There are ways to build reusable substitutes for all of the single-use packaging implements we're accustomed to. Of course, these are more expensive. Insert generic rant on capitalism externalizing its costs to everyone.

<comment><USER6> > A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the > relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are > clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the > particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that > can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?

Because those would be harder to make and more expensive and likely work worse, and the benefit would go to some third party, not the company selling it. You could legislate it, but otherwise I don't see companies spending the extra money and time willingly.

<comment><USER7> There are moldable bumpers/foam for this application. The foams can also be made from bio materials such as mycelium (which can actually be grown/entrained to shape) or that puffy corn starch that can replace "packing peanuts."

Combine with cardboard and paper tape and you've got a pretty well compostable shipping container. Landfill neutral.

<comment><USER6> That's answering a different question, which is how to get away from foam to better materials. The question asked was why aren't they shipping reusable bumpers, which is because there's a market disincentive to, since it costs more, works worse, and doesn't help the company that makes/ships with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > we're encouraged to keep buying, buying, buying, and to not worry about > waste disposal: recycling will take care of all that excess waste. …plastics > industry groups['s] goal is to create a false sense of security that > recycling efforts are environmentally effective while justifying our > continued consumption habits.

There is a _lot_ of this "I did my part, now I can go back to indulging" in environmentalism: turning off light switches, turning the thermostat down a degree, paper/metal straws, sorting recycling, etc. As with charity, it makes the person doing it _feel_ better but lets them avoid tackling the structural issue.

Systemic problems need systemic solutions. We can't get there if everyone thinks they already "did their part."

[https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/things-you- are-...](https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/things-you-are-allowed- to-do-now-that-you-use-paper-straws)

</comment><comment><USER9> Moving things around is the most energy intensive thing we do, and that scales with how far people live from each other.

Recycling is so far down the chain from reducing consumption, that I can't say I'm convinced it even makes a dent compared to the environmental damage caused by living in spread out suburbs using as large vehicles as we do. I even wonder if the extra energy spent sending recycling trucks around is made up for the pittance that seems to be gained from recycling, especially assuming how much "recycling" is actually not recyclable.

As far as I can tell, it was a ruse to make people feel better about their consumption and to keep it going. And it worked great.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know, but it seems to be a mostly us problem. Many European countries are quite a bit better when it comes to recycling.

The most important thing is to separate the different materials as early as possible. Aluminum, paper, cardboard, PET and other plastic bottles and glass has to be separated by the consumer.

Waste that can't be recycled can still be burned to gain energy and reduce the impact and space it uses. Landfills are much worse and probably cost more over the long run anyway.

<comment><USER11> _> Waste that can't be recycled can still be burned to gain energy and reduce the impact and space it uses. Landfills are much worse and probably cost more over the long run anyway._

Can you explain / expand on this? From my point of view, landfills are like _making_ oil, whereas burning trash is like _burning_ oil.

<comment><USER12> > From my point of view, landfills are like making oil

No, landfill is like making natural gas and letting it escape into the atmosphere (lots of your oil-based products will degrade and produce methane in the process). Which is really bad, because methane is 20x the greenhouse gas effect of CO2. Burning is the best you can do for waste you can't otherwise use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it all depends on the material at hand, right? For materials like single use plastics it may in the end not be that useful, but for glass and aluminium it is remarkably effective. Those materials are easy to recycle, yet expensive to produce in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Aluminum is common knowledge it makes sense to recycle. But I'd like to see a citation on glass. Saw an article a few days ago that Baltimore hasn't sent the glass they collect to be recycled in 7 years do to cost and an environmental engineer I know says it isn't cost effective to recycle most things - that putting them in a well maintained landfill is far more kind to the environment.

<comment><USER13> So I have no clue on how this works globally, but at least here in the Netherlands we recycle 90% of our glass:

[https://www.milieuservicenederland.nl/afvalstromen/glas/](https://www.milieuservicenederland.nl/afvalstromen/glas/) [https://www.nederlandseglasfabrikanten.nl/duurzaamheid/recyc...](https://www.nederlandseglasfabrikanten.nl/duurzaamheid/recycling- van-glas/) [http://www.duurzaamglas.nl/glas-is- eindeloos](http://www.duurzaamglas.nl/glas-is-eindeloos)

The second link is interesting in particular, as it states the following: "Er is ongeveer 25% minder energie nodig om scherven te smelten dan grondstoffen."

Translation: "Melting shards of glass requires 25% less energy than melting raw materials."

I also read somewhere (though can't find a source for it right now) that having separate bins for different colours (in our case brown, green and transparent) is one of the main reasons why recycling is so effective over here. It means glass doesn't become tainted that quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've started recycling at least 1 extra use out of everything, but I'm concerned this will not be sustainable.

Boxes I stack in my (large) garage. One day I will use these boxes again. Plastic Tupperware from various sources, cleaned and used for holding tools and stuff.

I can't figure out a good use for milk jugs.

Is this an issue of "sellers" not meeting "buyers"? I imagine milk companies could reuse this.

<comment><USER16> Cut the top off milk jugs leaving the handle and you have a decent container for screws or other odds and ends. Also works as a scoop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've long been an advocate over monitoring total energy usage in a end-to-end process to determine if we're moving the needle (for instance, can a wind turbine produce more energy needed than used to cast the steel tower it's sitting on?). I am often lambasted for suggesting that "green" habits are not really that green. With recycling, it comes down the material be recycled and the end-to-end process.

In nearly all cases, plastic is likely a waste of time and just should just be reduced or eliminated.

Aluminium, glass, and steel are easy to sort from trash and recycling is as easy as smelting, but the energy source used for smelting needs to be renewable.

Paper _may not_ be a good thing to recycle, if you think of tree products are carbon sinks. Nearly all of a tree's mass comes from CO2 pulled from the air. So, sustainably harvesting forests (with rotation and growth periods), means that we're "fixating" carbon from the air into solid materials. Once again it comes down to the entirety of the process.

</comment><comment><USER18> Almost white text on a white background. Judging by the colours, you could guess that the body of the article is supposed to be the least important part of the page. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned.

</comment><comment><USER19> If it were merely a waste of time, it wouldn't be so bad. But recycling does active harm in some cases.

When people switch to reusable bags, they generally don't disinfect them between uses, and nasty bacteria can grow (think raw meat).

There was that poor woman who was killed by a reusable metal straw. Fell on it with it in her mouth. With a classic plastic straw, this would have been at most an unpleasant cut.

In our lunchroom at work, a well-meaning cleaning woman fishes through the "regular" trash looking for things to recycle. Great, no? Well, except that the trash is filled with all sorts of bacteria from half-eaten food, used tissues, etc. She then, without washing her hands, continues to move around the room, touching the tables and chairs that people are eating off of. Hello coronavirus.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article, like many on the topic, is largely FUD. There is only one $ in the entire article, and it simply says that plastics no longer fetch $300/ton. There is no mention of what the offering price is for garbage.

Here is more grounded review of the system:

[https://www.thoughtco.com/benefits-of-recycling-outweigh- the...](https://www.thoughtco.com/benefits-of-recycling-outweigh-the- costs-1204141)

The real answer is that it's a complex dynamic system. If landfill disposal prices are high, recycling makes economic sense. If they are low, it doesn't. If you start recycling, then the demand for landfill disposal goes down, so the prices also go down.

In general, most municipalities run recycling programs that either save money today, or save money by reducing the aggregate cost of what it would cost if all waste was sent to a landfill.

Municipalities which do not have a large enough scale to make a separate recycling program cost effective rarely implement them.

</comment><comment><USER21> Lots of large recycling threads, mostly critical: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Recycling%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER22> I buy a lot of bulk foods from the grocery store, and keep them in re-used containers from other food products. It still requires one time use plastic bags to move the food from the bulk bins to my pantry, but it's significantly less plastic.

I'm nearly to a point where I don't need any more containers though, and I'm not sure how to cut back. It would make a huge difference if there was a way to buy more liquid/perishable foods in bulk but I just can't figure out what the logistics would look like.

</comment><comment><USER23> Small steps that I take personally:

\- At work, instead of grabbing drinks from the fridge I keep a refillable water bottle at my desk

\- Whenever I get takeout and have unused plasticware, I collect it and add it to our communal bin in the office kitchen instead of tossing it

Of course these are the easy cases. The real problem is that you literally can't buy most food items without disposable packaging. That's not really something the consumer has the ability to do anything about. What we need is to bring back the milk-bottle model in certain cases.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a hard time believing that straws are as big of a problem as they're made out to be. Or that reusable ones are the answer. I'd guess that reusable straws get used like twice and then get lost, and probably have a 50x carbon footprint to produce.

If straws really are such a problem, isn't "don't use straws" the answer? Reusable straws just sounds like someone taking advantage of our altruism in order to sell us more junk.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's another layer to this: all of those boats shipping material to China have a nontrivial carbon footprint, so at these low levels of effectiveness for the overall system that cost might even outweigh the benefits on a purely environmental basis, depending on how you slice it.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is simple: just recycle metals, don't bother with paper and plastic.

</comment><comment><USER26> So I wasn't aware that wet paper is hard to recycle. That kinda sux...

Apart from this I sometimes wonder how far robot technology has come in being able sort out papers and plastics from incoming garbage.

<comment><USER27> If you have a garden you could try decomposing it.

I have a lot of papers I use to shred, which became a hassle & I started burning them. Then I realized I could just dump them in a compost heap which does some quick work making them worthless to anyone brave enough to dig through it. Less work for me & at least I think it's better for the planet.

<comment><USER28> >I have a lot of papers I use to shred, which became a hassle & I started burning them.

You could try turning it into paper logs/briquettes, which might be useful as a source of energy or a BBQ, at the very least. Other alternatives have also sprung up based on this principle e.g. logs made from coffee grounds etc.

[https://www.turningtogreen.com/post/paper-log- makers](https://www.turningtogreen.com/post/paper-log-makers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We popularized recycling in the public consciousness as a fix to our bad habits. We say, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but forgot that it's prescriptive of the order in which you are supposed to try to be greener.

Recycling is the last resort. It's good that we've bettered recycling technology so vastly in a few decades, but it shouldn't be the first option. It still uses energy, water, and produces more waste.

And, of course, there's always the opportunity cost, the inherent omnipresent friction of economics. We could be doing better things with all that effort, people, time, and money, than doing a poor job of making up on the backend for a lack of effort on the frontend.

<comment><USER30> the spirit of the parent post here is well-intentioned, but insufficient depth and breadth. Economic value is not rooted in physics. There is no universal value for 0.01 kg of copper, through the ages. The incremental opportunism, and market fluctuation that has been so incredibly effective at building the industrial and post-industrial world, is also miserably short-sighted when it comes to overall flows of material and energy.

So, you can't say "Recycling is a last resort" without context, and context gets too complicated, too fast.

<comment><USER29> It's a metaphor. Not literally a physics or math statement.

In the system where most people operate most of the time, there's friction between all moving parts. Likewise, in the person-realm, every choice or action has an opportunity cost. "No such thing as a free lunch."

You can tell it's a metaphor and not a literal mathematical statement because it's not written in TeX /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Contra Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer is yes. The only material that is actually recycled is aluminum. The solution is thus to replace plastic with aluminum wherever possible, at least we know it _will_ get recycled, without government subsidies or cajoling.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well, if one would go by Betteridge's law of headlines, then... ;-)

<comment><USER33> "Betteridge's law of headlines" I think this gentleman was ahead of his time. I think it's called Clickbait today. Both terms apply to this article. (Yes fell for the clickbait)</comment></comment>


Facebook privacy issue: Google search reveals email addresses in Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://corywatilo.com/a-real-facebook-privacy-issue-email-addresses <comment><USER2> Hey all,

I work at Facebook, but this is not an official media statement.

This doesn't appear to be a Facebook bug that leaks anyone's private email address. It appears that all the examples indexed in Google exist in Google because they were already published publicly on other Internet sites. We're committing a fix right now to stop indexing this page in Google, but even that wouldn't prevent email addresses from being published because it appears that users are already republishing their addresses in other non-Facebook venues.

For example, if you see [http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=afc4a7&u=1018862530&...](http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=afc4a7&u=1018862530&mid=21f667bG3cba9bc2G0G8) in isolation, it appears to be divulging private information.

However, the original Facebook email that links to that page and contains the user's email address was republished publicly on a mailing list archive by the owner of the email address: [http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/Living_Greyhawk/mess...](http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/Living_Greyhawk/message/98175)

Does anyone see an example where this is not the case that constitutes a privacy leak?

Blake Ross

<comment><USER2> Furthermore, the author of the blog post in question republished his own Facebook email on [http://corywatilo.com/reminder-cory-invited-you-to-join- face...](http://corywatilo.com/reminder-cory-invited-you-to-join-facebook)

Although his email opt-out link has been edited out of that email (see "please clic to unsubscribe." at the bottom), it appears that the email was originally published to Posterous in its entirety via his iPhone and then edited later, after it was picked up by Google.

(Update: The author of the original blog post acknowledges this below.)

<comment><USER3> This is possible. +1 Blake

Would be nice for FB to exclude that page from getting indexed though.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the acknowledgment Cory. FYI, we collaborated with Google and these pages are no longer indexed as an extra precaution:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afacebook.com%2Fo.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google is indexing Facebook's "Opt out of emails from Facebook" page for email addresses that were submitted using the "Find a friend" feature.

I checked out the Google site and saw a few addresses in the format email@example.com, which indicates these are the SECRET email addresses people use to post to their blogger sites. Pretty bad.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can debunk the misconception that Google somehow crawled "private" or Gmail content to discover these links. How can I prove it? Because Yahoo crawled these pages too. Here's a screenshot I took of Yahoo returning similar pages: <http://www.mattcutts.com/images/yahoo-facebook-leak.png> including a Gmail address. Yahoo clearly didn't discover that content via Gmail--it found it via public links on the public web. That's how Google found these pages too.

</comment><comment><USER5> With Google and Facebook working together as a 1-2 punch, I'm confident we can squash the last vestiges of privacy very soon.

<comment><USER3> Just wait until Obama buys them. Or just decides to takes them over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder why we are seeing more issues about Facebook privacy issues recently. Is it because the coverage of this has made people start questioning their policies and looking into things that have not been researched or is Facebook becoming more lacksidasical about privacy as time passes? Or, have these things been said a lot in the past, and we are just now realizing the plethora of complaints?

<comment><USER7> It's a self-reinforcing problem: I imagine most startups that grow as fast as Facebook don't have a perfectly engineered architecture, simply because they're desperately optimizing their products for time-to-market. When the "Facebook has security and privacy issues, and might be evil" meme gets around, people start looking for more weaknesses and quickly find them. From my limited experience in startups, none would be immune to such scrutiny.

Facebook is at a very challenging point right now: they need strong short-term PR, very fast patching up of issues as they arise, cleaning out the tech debt they acquired in their youth, and most importantly, battling off the fierce competitors of all stripes and colors: from Google to Twitter to foursquare. Will they be able to do it? Based mostly on their ability to capture as large a market as they did and their fast attention to issues as they arise, I think so: as long as they don't piss off their users enough for them to leave en masse (and they haven't - most of their users don't care about the privacy issues we go crazy over), they just need to hold on and keep doing more or less what they've been doing.

<comment><USER8> _I imagine most startups that grow as fast as Facebook don't have a perfectly engineered architecture, simply because they're desperately optimizing their products for time-to-market. When the "Facebook has security and privacy issues, and might be evil" meme gets around, people start looking for more weaknesses and quickly find them._

This sounds like by far the most likely explanation for most of the Facebook problems. The Facebook non-system has become sufficiently internally complicated that no one person understands it anymore, which makes it easy to overlook security weaknesses. The systematic attempts to "share" information on the part of Facebook's leadership have been quite annoying, and have made me MUCH more circumspect in my Facebook behavior, but all the rest of this is just sheer inadvertence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isnt it a bit more concerning that we can modify these peoples settings by clicking the links? (at least it appears we can) I have not checked but there may be a way to modify the url string to view anyones email (sample URL taken from that guys post below)

[http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=16531b&u=100001103986041...](http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=16531b&u=100001103986041&mid=271e1e0G5af35247bd79G8dbe4G46&c) _(warning- clicking this link will log you out of facebook with no prompt)_

Or, perhaps a way to take the authentication hash + mid hash's from above to perform another function on someone elses account. (like changing the email, or changing privacy settings)

<comment><USER10> You are on to something here. A link that auto logs u out. Can we embed this link in a post on facebook, therefore auto logging people out just by visiting their wall? It would be the ultimate annoyance.

<comment><USER11> I just did this and it works.

If a user has an application such as advanced wall or super wall you can use the following to log people out.

<object data="[http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=16531b&u=100001103986041...](http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=16531b&u=100001103986041&mid=271e1e0G5af35247bd79G8dbe4G46&c) width="0" height="0"> <embed src="[http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=16531b&u=100001103986041...](http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=16531b&u=100001103986041&mid=271e1e0G5af35247bd79G8dbe4G46&c) width="0" height="0"> </embed></object>

The worst part is that if you just try to login again at the prompt (instead of going to facebook.com) you get redirected back to the post and logged out again in a loop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, how did Google become aware of the existence of these URLs in the first place? I seriously doubt they're linked from another Facebook page.

Is Google harvesting links from secure pages using their toolbar or something? Are people's personal mails leaking through other means?

I noticed that a few of them are indexed by Google because someone decided to reprint the email - URLs and all - to their blog. But that's a rare exception,and obviously not the case with the author of the article.

<comment><USER13> It's simple: Google has access to the referrer URL when you go onto their website. It's well known that they index these URLs.

If you go from that Facebook page straight to Google, it'll get indexed.

<comment><USER12> In what situation would the HTTP referrer header report Google when clicking away from a Facebook link? Not only is there no Google search field on Facebook, but Facebook also reroutes links through an intermediary page in order to hide the actual referring page.

<comment><USER13> I had assumed that Referer URLs were sent even if it wasn't from a link that was clicked. That's not true. (And yes, "Referer" is misspelt in the standard...)

<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html>

> The Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a > source that does not have its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Scribd! I am seeing my email ID being published as the title for my scribd account page.

<comment><USER14> umm, May I know why I am being down voted. Just Curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> this was the last straw for me. I just requested that FB delete my account

<comment><USER16> And the lovely newbies here at HN downvote you for that. Sheesh - I don't get what's happened here over the past 6-9 months.

<comment><USER17> After you read enough "this is the last straw" comments about Facebook, it gets old.

<comment><USER15> Isn't that true about Facebook privacy stories too?

<comment><USER17> I imagine some people are downvoting this story too (if that is even possible). However, a new instance of privacy violation is a lot more important than an HN reader's personal decision to cancel his Facebook account. The quickness with which people tire of one type of information versus the other should scale accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It gets funnier... This poor sob just got their email revealed when i searched for

"Email Opt-Out | Facebook"

I can also disable facebook emails for them:

[http://www.facebook.com/o.php?u=1187719938&k=5fcf21](http://www.facebook.com/o.php?u=1187719938&k=5fcf21)

<comment><USER18> Oh that's just crazy. I just clicked that link but didn't click Confirm because ?u= is someone else's user ID.

What's sad is that because it's numeric, you can run down a whole list of IDs, opting people out or in.

So what's k stand for, crc32() or something like that on the u parameter?

<comment><USER19> You should never expose internal incremental user ids in URLs like these. Have a combination of guids that links to the user id in your database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If your information is PUBLIC, what the HELL do you expect? There are so many good reasons to be irritated with Facebook's privacy debacle. This is _not_ one of them.</comment>


Amazon's Tablet Is No Threat To Apple, It's A Huge Threat To Google - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/amazon-tablet-android/ <comment><USER2> Wow, what a poorly researched article! They can't see how Amazon could possibly build an Android tablet for less than $299?

\-----

"The only way this sounds like it can compete with the iPad in any way is if it's extremely cheap. Like $299 or less cheap. But can Amazon really make a 9-inch multi-touch screen color tablet for that cheap? Unless it's an absolute piece of crap, that seems unlikely. There's a reason why all other tablet manufacturers are having problems getting their tablets down to even the key $499 price point. "

\----

I guess they haven't heard of the Barnes and Noble Nook. <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nookcolor/?cds2Pid=38496#logo>

I don't have one, but from the reports I've read, it's a pretty decent device. Yeah, it's seven inches rather than nine but it retails for $249 and has been on the market for months.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems to echo this discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283636>. I still find it difficult to understand the business motivation behind Android; in this case, it seems suicidal. All the work that Google has put into making Android an opening for search (specifically, Google search) might go to waste if other companies start tinkering with Android for their own purposes.</comment>


Ask N.YC: What is the best way to research patentable ideas? - <AUTHOR>

I've been thinking about a new idea for a couple of hours today. As is often the case, I got side tracked by another idea, and I think it may be novel and patentable.<p>How have you researched ideas you thought were patentable to determine whether or not you should step it up and talk to an IP lawyer? <comment><USER2> I found this book to be very useful:

Patent Pending In 24 Hrs

[http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Pending-Hours-Richard- Stim/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Pending-Hours-Richard- Stim/dp/1413305113/)

I also bought (but haven't yet read):

[http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Yourself-David- Pressman/dp/1413...](http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Yourself-David- Pressman/dp/1413305164/)

[http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Patent-Drawings- Companion/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Patent-Drawings- Companion/dp/1413306535/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Most IP attorney's will do quite a bit of research themselves. If you, or your university, have access to it, IBM's Delphion is an excellent resource (not free system).

I think your question is too broad and needs to be refined.

If you are looking to patent a software algorithm, the approach to research ideas would be very different from that for particular plants. As a general tip, search by patent class <http://www.uspto.gov/go/classification/>

Alternatively, search the pending applications of a large company in the field you are researching. For example: <http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html>

And in the query field type:

AN/google

It is from the pending applications that you can look at 'prior art.' Prior art is the list of the patents and other materials upon which a patent relies. Here is a software analogy: If a patent is source code, prior art is an <include> directive or a <lib> call. Only by mastering the existing libraries can you produce new code. Look at some source code. Then examine the libraries/include files. And then start tinkering around on producing your own source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> To get a bit more specific, I found an answer to a problem dealing with the implementation of encryption in a particular environment that, as far as I know, hasn't been done yet. I suppose that would fit in to the software algorithm category.

I've been reading up on encryption in general today in order to figure out if the solution is novel or not, and so far, it seems as though it is. Looks like I have a lot more reading to go, though.

Do you have any more tips for researching software patents?

<comment><USER3> If it's encryption software, browse around the Cryptography class: <http://www.uspto.gov/go/classification/uspc380/sched380.htm>

After you find the subclass, click on the red P to get a list of the granted patents. But note that these are only the patents that have been granted, you still have to check out the latest patent applications.

This system can seem a bit confusing, which is why there are so many service providers who specialize in this area. But with a little elbow grease, you can get through it yourself.

The defect with resources such as freepatentsonline is that they do not have the whole database. A good alternative is <http://www.patentlens.net/patentlens/simple.cgi>

If you are handy with regexpr/sexpr/xml search tools, you may want to take a look at the raw patent data from the FTP archives as well as the Patent Grant Red Book. More info at <http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/patdata.html> From the raw data you could roll your own patent search engine.

Please also note that as a general habit you should research the academic periodicals in the Crypto arena to see if anyone else has published any information about the topic in question. If so, you will need to include it in 'prior art.'

If you are very serious about the process, check with a local attorney. If the prices quoted seem out of your ability, contact the nearest (and largest) law school in your area. Speak with the IP faculty who can point you in the right direction for local counsel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's some great info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.google.com/patents>

What you need to do is read ALL of the patents for anything similar to what you are doing. You need to hope that you find patents for things that are similar enough to imply that your idea is also patentable but that no one has actually claimed what you are trying to claim.

This takes an extraordinary amount of time to do which is why lawyers charge so much money. But you can definitely do it yourself, if you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That's kind of along the lines of what I was thinking I would have to do. I figure if I can do a bunch of research and find out that what I'm thinking of is not patentable, it would save me a boatload of money. On the other hand, if I don't come up with anything, it would give me more of a reason to think that it is patentable and to go ahead and meet with a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing you can do is to ask a company to do a patent landscape for you. There a few around (can't remember their name) and they charge a few grand to do it for you. The results usually come in within a week or two.

The instructions for them would be to look at encryption in general with particular focus on the environment you're talking about.

Also, try freepatentsonline.com instead of the USPTO's website. I find it's much easier on the eyes and the search a bit more human-friendly.

Pierre

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing to be careful of here. If you intend to implement the idea (rather than just patent it) doing the search puts you at risk to some degree. If you do the search yourself (possibly not finding the relevant patent) and then do the implementation anyway, you are at risk for "willful infringement". This is all really murky and you probably want to talk with an attorney if you are serious.

Link with some relevant info: <http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=1303>

<comment><USER7> Well, you can't patent ideas in the first place. And doing a google search isn't going to get you sued for willful infringement.

<comment><USER6> Most large tech companies have an explicit prohibition on non-lawyers doing patent searches. At all.

Doing the patent search won't get you sued, but if you _are_ sued and they win, the fact that you did the search means that they can hit you for triple damages.

I've leave the "you can't patent ideas" piece alone here because I think that is semantics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are two steps, looking for similar patents, and reading them to decide if you'd be infringing.

I can't offer any tips for the former, but for the latter you may want to skip ahead to the 'claims' section: this is the part with the legal meat in it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I used Global Prior Art, a boston based IP consulting firm for some quick and dirty patentability searches. They were cheap and very good. Saved us months of work by avoiding some patented approaches.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes. :) Not a very useful answer, sorry.

Seriously, my advice is to search the PTO site. Unfortunately that's not very useful either. Just too much stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> No.

<comment><AUTHOR> What?

<comment><USER11> No, I have not researched those things. 'No' was not a very useful answer, sorry.</comment></comment></comment>