Web developer (Internship) - <AUTHOR>

We are a fast-growing startup in the Silicon Valley area, focused on building an intelligent trip planning application that promises to transform the travel industry. We have an immediate position open for a self-motivated and highly organized individual with a passion for delivering high quality software. This is an exciting opportunity to work on different server-side and client-side technologies and leverage a RESTful web services platform. This is an internship position that may lead to a full-time position.
Responsibilities
 Work within an Agile development process.
 Carry out server-side (and accompanying client-side) development tasks.
 Adhere to strict coding conventions and standards.
 Assist with wire-frame designs, documentation and project scoping.
 Perform unit and functional testing against developed code.
 Work with team members located across geographies and timezones.
Requirements
 Minimum 2+ years web development experience.
 Thorough understanding of object-oriented development, and ability to apply OO concepts to everything they do.
 Proficiency with server-side languages such as PHP5, JSP, etc.
 Hands-on experience with a PHP-based framework/CMS, such as Yii, CakePHP, etc.
 MySQL database administration and development expertise.
 Demonstrated expertise in creating cross-browser user interfaces from wire-frames and specifications using object-oriented JavaScript, AJAX, clean and elegant HTML5 and CSS3, DOM Scripting, and JSON.
 Familiarity with JavaScript libraries/frameworks such as jQuery (and ability to write basic JavaScript by hand when necessary).
 Experience consuming RESTful web services. <comment><USER2> You should strongly consider lowering your requirements if you want to consider the position to be an "internship." As they stand, they are quite frankly absurd. Most people with two legitimate years of experience could be earning close to six figures in a full-time role (if not more, depending upon location) with expertise in the technologies you mention.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yup. Anyone with these skills will find it pretty to skip the internship and find a full time position.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please send resume to email@example.com. Thanks!</comment>


The rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html <comment><USER2> I think the article lacks a lot of meat. It talks about what the author used Lisp for, but it doesn't really dicsuss why he thinks Lisp should be used, or why others thought it should not be used.

For example,

"Someone (I don't know who) interrupted him [the software integration engineer] and asked if he could change only one thing to make things better what would it be. His answer was: get rid of Lisp. That one event was pretty much the end of Lisp at JPL."

Why did the integration engineer say that? This should be the cornerstone of the article. Same thing goes for the Google discussion he quotes.

Also, the author doesn't seem to take market forces into effect, eg. given that C++/Java became the dominant languages, I'm almost certain there were (are) not enough Lisp programmers on the market for Lisp to be a feasible technology at a large organization.

<comment><USER3> You're right, it should be the cornerstone of the article. Unfortunately it's relegated to note [3] and the postscript, where we learn that buggy C code was the cause of the integration engineer's Lisp headaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the paper that summarizes the results of the Remote Agent flight experiment ("RAX"), which is the project Erann was working on at the time:

www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/papers/rax-results-isairas99.ps

The stuff about integrating a Lisp executive/planner and the rest of the C flight software is in section 4.1.

It's for sure none of this flight software is in Lisp any more. Additionally, I would be highly surprised if any shred of the ground software that supports it is in Lisp. Both flight and ground s/w is almost certainly in C/C++ and Java.

One of the successors to RAX is:

<http://ase.jpl.nasa.gov/>

in which an Earth-orbiting spacecraft can recognize events like volcano eruptions) and autonomously (without ground control) take extra data from it.

 __*

It's hard to appreciate just how unwilling a flight mission is to take on any unnecessary technical risk. Risk, along with cost, schedule, and mass, is one of the fundamental things mission designers must cope with. Lisp looks like risk, and risk will be eliminated ruthlessly (as in the meeting Erann describes in the OP).

Additionally, there are the software lifecycle considerations. That is, flight s/w, if it works, tends to be passed forward from mission to mission, and quirky choices tend to be weeded out.

<comment><USER5> _It's hard to appreciate just how unwilling a flight mission is to take on any unnecessary technical risk. Risk, along with cost, schedule, and mass, is one of the fundamental things mission designers must cope with. Lisp looks like risk, and risk will be eliminated ruthlessly_

I've spoken with programmers at NASA. There have been times when management thought _source control_ was a risk. Discovering a bug in the _mathematics_ of an algorithm and fixing it is a risk. (Seriously, management was like: the software worked last time with the math bug, so it should work this time with the math bug.)

 _...flight s/w, if it works, tends to be passed forward from mission to mission, and quirky choices tend to be weeded out._

Like most organizations, I'd bet most of these decisions are more "gut feeling" than based on anything approaching empirical. (Arguably, the continued existence of old-school companies using "Steak and Strippers, Baby!" sales tactics _is_ a bet that such irrational decision mechanisms persist.)

<comment><USER4> Regarding risks, I think you're understating the sophistication and importance of risks on flight projects. (I work at JPL, but not on flight projects; once upon a time, the OP's office was right down the hall from mine.) A modest sized flight project will have a risk list which is itemized down to great detail, covering many pages, and this list will be one of the main things the mission managers work on reducing.

In general, there are two parameters, likelihood of the risk materializing, and cost if it does. Sometimes the cost is easier to bear (dollars and schedule), sometimes it's harder (lose the mission). For units like dollars and schedule, it does make sense to do a weighted average (sum over risks of probability * cost); for others it does not. People go farther and use various Monte Carlo methods to deal with risks that interact, so that the sum above does not work.

Here's someone at JPL who's in that area:

<http://www.usc.edu/dept/ise/directory/jairus_hihn.htm>

<comment><USER5> Sounds like JPL is a lot more sophisticated than NASA in this regard. This is weird, since NASA flys a lot more _manned_ missions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "we're confusing best practice with standard practice"

This nails my dislike of the phrase 'best practice'. It never means 'the best way to do it' and always means 'the way everyone else does it' or worse 'the way the person writing the phrase has just thought of doing it'.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes, when the difference between "best way" and "standard way of doing things" is not so great -- it is better to go with standard practice. Reduces time to learn for others, and avoids surprises when interacting with other systems (POLA).

<comment><USER8> "Sometimes, when the difference between "best way" and "standard way of doing things" is not so great -- it is better to go with standard practice. "

...and thus XML is born.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up."

From Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design: <http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> From the article: "The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. < . . . > To my mind, the hallmark of the interchangeable component model of software engineers is Java."

I hate that attitude in management. I've been surprised to find that at higher levels (think C-level) of management leaders who completely _don't_ think of engineers as plug-and-play. I wonder if it is an attitude or viewpoint more common in lower level management in large organizations.

Regardless, I kind of gave up on Java simply because I felt it seemed to get me into environments where people were treated as cogs.

<comment><USER11> Management by metaphor, I'd say that's a red flag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem."

I would love to see a transcript of this debugging session.

<comment><USER13> And I'd love to see them try the same thing with Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who's never used Lisp before, what's the difference between Lisp and Haskell? I keep hearing old stories about the virtues of Lisp, but it doesn't seem like anyone uses it anymore. Has it just been replaced by newer functional languages?

<comment><USER15> The main difference between Lisp and other languages (including Haskell) is that Lisp is homoiconic. That is, a Lisp program is represented as a list, a data structure that can itself be manipulated by a Lisp program. This means that a Lisp program can contain macros that can generate Lisp code at compile time (or even at runtime). This might sound dangerous, especially if you have seen C macros or C++ templates being abused, and it is. It also turns out to be rather powerful; you can use macros to implement at lot of things that in other languages can only be implemented by the compiler writer. One popular example is looping constructs: if your Lisp doesn't have a for-loop then you can implement it as a macro. This is how for is implemented in Clojure, my personal favourite Lisp.

What about functional languages? Well, Lisp has been around for so long that it pioneered a lot of programming concepts. One of these is functional programming. Later, many purer functional languages took functional programming a lot further, Haskell being a great example. There are many flavours of Lisp today and some, such as Clojure and Scheme, aim to be fairly pure functional languages (and Haskell is the purest functional language that I can think of), whereas others, such as Common Lisp, are less so. Functional programming is only one thing that Lisp has going for it, of course.

As I mentioned, Lisp pioneered a lot of concepts which we take for granted today. This essay by pg gives a summary of what made Lisp different and is well worth reading, along with other pg essays on the subject of Lisp:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html>

<comment><USER16> _That is, a Lisp program is represented as a list, a data structure that can itself be manipulated by a Lisp program. This means that a Lisp program can contain macros that can generate Lisp code at compile time (or even at runtime)._

The latter (about Lisp macros) is actually orthogonal to it be homoiconic. What it does mean is that parsing, manipulating, and generating Lisp code is just like generating any other Lisp data structure. But there is nothing stopping non homoiconic languages from adding first-class macros (macros that are written in the language itself).

<comment><USER17> _But there is nothing stopping non homoiconic languages from adding first- class macros (macros that are written in the language itself)._

That is true in theory. However, I struggled with camlp5 [1] for hours to achieve something that could be done trivially with a lisp macro. I'm certain its because the I was having to do much more than rewrite a datastructure. Interestingly, it was this very experience that moved me back to lisp.

[1] <http://martin.jambon.free.fr/extend-ocaml-syntax.html>

<comment><USER16> Zak mentioned Nemerle, which appears to have a very simple macro syntax. It actually reminds me of Lisp, although I'm sure Lispers will happily explain how its completely different. :-)

Have you taken a look at Nemerle? What there is broken compared to Lisp?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice article, but I really didn't like the ending. It seemed a lot like Republican "everything the government does is wrong and costs taxpayer dollars" propaganda.

<comment><USER19> Nice comment, but I really didn't like the presumption. It seemed a lot like the internet commentator "let's discard the actual content of the article and niggle around about our misinterpretation of an irrelevant tidbit" archetype.

<comment><USER18> I would have ignored it if it was an irrelevant tidbit, but it wasn't. It seemed to be quite a major point in the article.</comment></comment></comment>


North Carolina citizenry defeat pernicious Big Solar plan to suck up the Sun - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/north-carolina-citizenry-defeat-pernicious-big-solar-plan-to-suck-up-the-sun/ <comment><USER2> Aside from this being a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728646) ...

Oh, brother. UK's Independent had a similar spin. What neither article mentioned, which is right in the quoted source articles, is that "Three other solar farms had previously been accepted by the town council, with one of the now putting solar panels up." The solar company wanted additional parcels rezoned to allow their expansion into a residential area; that is what was opposed at this meeting. Both articles took objections stated by a grand total of one couple and generalized them into a farce that depicted a town full of Luddites... ... a town that has already approved three solar farms for this company alone. Now, I gotta wonder what else on Ars Technica is bogus.

Anyway, as detaro mentions here, the Vox piece gives some actual non-clickbait balance to the story.

</comment><comment><USER3> read this instead of the piece of c* * * from ars : [http://www.vox.com/2015/12/18/10519644/north-carolina- solar-...](http://www.vox.com/2015/12/18/10519644/north-carolina-solar-town)</comment>


Startup.com a movie about the last startup bubble - <AUTHOR> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/

<comment><AUTHOR> Every time I sit in a coffee shop and listen to some guy at the next table pitch his silly social networking startup, this movie flashes before my eyes, and I start laughing maniacally.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a great movie! There is another good one that did local delivery. I think the blew threw 200 million in 6 months.</comment>


Vim Splits: A Guide to Doing What You Want (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://technotales.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/vim-splits-a-guide-to-doing-exactly-what-you-want/ <comment><USER2> If you use vim + tmux this plugin[0] is super handy. It allows ctrl-h|j|k|l to switch between tmux or vim splits so you don't have to know whether it's a different terminal window or a vim split—just that you want to go right (for example).

[0] [https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux- navigator](https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator)

<comment><USER3> As a new~ish vim/tmux user, thank you. I stopped using vim splits because tmux.

<comment><USER4> You can easily copy stuff between vim splits, though. The window movements can also be part of vim macros. I have a couple macros that will assume I'm on the left window, make a change to the right window, save the file, and return me to the left side. I also have one to delete the second line from two side-by- side files for playlist management. At one point I used several vim instances in tmux panes, but only because I hadn't learned of vim's own advanced features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like there are a lot of different ways to get tiling windows. You can do it in window managers by using different instances of applications. You can do it in terminal sessions using tmux and screen. You can do it in VIM, you can do it in IDEs. You can use suckless tabbed.

I use a tiling window manager, which means I have a unified interface for tiling with all of my windows. I don't ever use tiling window management features of specific programs, outside of tabs in my browser. But I do sometimes miss out on things like sharing VIM registers, or TMUX session management.

Does anybody use tiling features at multiple points in their system?

<comment><USER4> I pretty much use them at every point. The only special window management I've never liked is tabs or splits at the level of the terminal emulator (like in terminator). It really does just feel like worse/clunkier tmux. I use Sway, tmux, and splits in vim/emacs. I like to have all my terminal stuff glued together and in a certain arrangement. I like that this whole layout of panes I'm used to can then neatly take up half my screen thanks to the wm. Vim has registers and macros that benefit from a single session. Emacs has commands to scroll the "other window", also it often opens a temporary window when you use something like M-x describe-mode or M-x describe-char. You could maybe remove some of this overlap if everything had some sort of ipc and your wm just sent commands to it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Vim never ceases to amaze me. Opening remote files over scp, splits, file explorer, and the built in cli w/ 8\. Such a beautiful program.

</comment><comment><USER7> I chose using vim + tmux instead of using the vim-specific tiling. The main benefit for me is that all tiles are using same mechanism, as opposed to tmux for shells and vim for code

<comment><USER8> you can also use vim's built in terminal multiplexer if you have vim 8 or newer. The benefit with using the vim variant is that you can apply most of the vim features to terminal use. i.e. you can use vim to sift through terminal output, you can make vim macros that leverage the terminal as well, and you can yank and paste using vim registers.

Still not as polished as tmux in some ways but I've found it to be a very nice improvement over tmux with vim. Mind you when doing this I still use vim inside tmux so that I can detach and so that I get a bit more consistent terminal output between devices.

<comment><USER9> ctrl-z will suspend vim. then just type fg from command prompt to get it back.

<comment><USER8> This doesn't work over ssh unfortunately. The tmux method works locally and remotely. Vim has server mode which is similar but significantly less ergonomic than just using tmux and requires vim to be compiled with non default flags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I _promise_ I'm not trying to start a flame war, but as an Emacs user this seems… commonplace. Are splits not a commonly used feature? I've used the equivalent for as long as I can remember in Emacs, so it doesn't feel particularly esoteric. Or is it that this is just a commonly not fully- understood/utilized feature of Vim? If that's the case, that is totally understandable. That's basically my life with Emacs. :)

I'm curious: what features of Vim do you feel are essential to become a power user?

<comment><USER11> Vim is great but ancient. It was designed on/for systems that just don't exist any more. E.g. looking at the popular keyboard of the time hints at why "escape" was such a critical key : [https://i.imgur.com/Hn174TJ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Hn174TJ.jpg)

In order to get the most from Vim, you have to take a huge step back and look at your screen configuration and usage patterns.

* The escape key is too difficult to reach on modern keyboards, use ctrl-c

* Code file sizes are becoming really large. Use search rather than directional navigation/paging to save some time

* The search key is too difficult to hit, remap to space

* Most people are on a wide screen. So, try to make vertical splits as easy as possible to do.

* Folder based search is now very fast and efficient. Use a modified search command (<leader>space) and map it to Rg/Ack

There's some good work recently done for vim with language servers. I'm counting on redoing the key mapping once more. IMHO the poor defaults of vim isn't a bug of vim, it's a feature.</comment></comment>


Rolling.fm: Yeah, We Copied Turntable.fm, But We're Taking It to the Next Level - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/08/08/rolling-fm-yeah-we-copied-turntable-fm-but-were-taking-it-to-the-next-level/

<comment><USER2> They admit to copying _some_ parts of it, not to _totally_ copy it. Why are you putting words in his mouth? And copying is so overrated these days. By that I mean people forget that's how companies compete _in the same space_. They copy features from other and improve on them, or take the product in a different direction, and that's exactly what the founder of rolling.fm said he's doing.

If each and every company had to do something 100% original, there wouldn't be a Pepsi to Coca-Cola. They didn't copy the exact formula of Coca-Cola, but I'm sure the author of Rolling.fm didn't copy the source code of turntable.fm either. He just made it similar enough to compete in the same space, but also different enough to be compelling over turntable.fm. And _that's_ how companies compete with _each other_ in every industry or market. And that's how progress happens and technologies evolve.

People seem to be making such a big deal out of copying these days, because of all the patent lawsuits, which don't really allow you to do that. And that's another reason why the patent system is so broken. It doesn't take into account how business works in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Missing part of the title: "...But We're Taking It to the Next Level"

And there's no "totally" in the original title.

This editorializing seems to imply that there's something wrong with competing with an existing business and trying to beat them at their own game, which there is not.

<comment><USER4> I love the tasty irony of this editorializing taking place on a Reddit clone.

<comment><USER5> Wasn't Reddit a Digg "clone" in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like an explanation for why startups are requiring facebook in order to sign up for a service? I'd love to try turntable.fm (as well as rolling.fm, and mixapp.com), but I'm not on facebook nor do I ever plan to be.

Is there some advantage to doing this that I'm not seeing? I understand the appeal of a limited beta and exclusivity, but I would think it would be to their advantage to offer multiple ways to sign up.

<comment><USER7> Many people don't want to give out another e-mail or another password to yet another site. Given the Gawker and other leaked account debacles, many people use the same login/authentication across web services. By using my Facebook login, I put more trust in Facebook securing my credentials vs. a startup I barely know anything about. Plus, it saves me tons of time.

<comment><USER8> The login problem is solved better by OpenId than by Facebook Connect.

<comment><USER7> Isn't OpenID effetively dead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't used Rolling.fm yet but a few design elements stuck out immediately:

\- The look and feel is really like Apple vs. Android with the avatars and overall aesthetic bearing resemblence to MSN Messenger. \- On Rolling.fm, the avatars face left and right whereas on Turntable, you see the back of the heads emulating the feel/atmosphere of going to a live show. This little detail made a big difference to me and gave me the impression that the Turntable folks have more of a focus on the music experience.

I think the Rolling.fm site looks more like an avatar chat site with neat music features. If someone took the same concept and instead streamed videos on Netflix, that would be super interesting too since it would be like entering a "matinee" type of show and people can room chat like on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

<comment><USER7> I'm going to continue on this since the ideas are coming non-stop:

\- On Turntable.fm, they should make the Avatars and volume level respond to your rating of the songs. So let's say you think a song is awesome, your Avatar should move closer to the stage vs. if you don't like a song, you should move to the back of the room + the volume should get lower until the next song.

\- Another pivot could be using music as a theme for an avatar based dating site. Music + Dating has always been a great pair together (think Say Anything or High Fidelity).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To be fair, this isn't exactly uncommon in the history of business.

If I remember correctly, in Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship, this exact phenomenon is discussed as a counterpoint to the first-mover advantage. It is often easier to let someone else do the hard work of verifying that the market for a particular class of product exists. Once you've seen what went well for them and what didn't, you can learn from their successes and mistakes and use that data to one-up them.

From the perspective of Turntable.fm, it isn't necessarily bad news either. If your product is successful enough to inspire someone to compete with you, it might just be a positive indicator of the viability of the market you are trying to serve.

<comment><USER10> Being a fast-follower is often an excellent strategy.

I've long thought that somebody will make a fortune by setting up a company that clones successful America-centric startups into Europe, Asia and/or Brazil; using a fast-follower strategy to test core ideas, but then implementing them in untapped markets.

<comment><USER11> The Samwer brothers in Berlin (European Founders Fund) do exactly that: <http://www.economist.com/node/21525394>

The have cloned AirBNB (Wimdu), for example. I seem to recall that they had several large exits by cloning sites like eBay and then selling to the company they cloned, but I can't find the article right now. In a sense, if an American company doesn't know how to penetrate a particular international market, then these clones actually do add value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish either of these services would let users mix via line in or mic in so DJs could free form their tracks and mixing style. This, coupled with a 5-10 minute per room restriction on mix length, could really take the performance possibilities on these sites to the next level. Right now all you can do is use the site as a shared iTunes which is kind of disappointing for those fond of regular DJ performances.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is interesting in the context of all of the patent discussions that have been happening lately. Is Turntable.fm a patentable invention? Should it be?

I haven't used it myself and I don't have a fixed opinion on the matter. On the surface it appears to be both non-obvious and novel (no prior art).

<comment><USER14> I'm having difficulty formulating what is patentable about a website that allows users to create music playlists. What exactly is the invention?

<comment><USER13> It's not creating a playlist. It's creating playlists in the context of social interactions with other (representations of) people, some of whom are also creating playlists, some of whom are giving you feedback on the playlist.

If the bar is set by Amazon's "buy stuff in one click because we remember how to sell stuff to you from the last time we sold stuff to you" patent, then this is in the same ballpark.

<comment><USER14> Well I don't really consider "buy stuff in one click because we remember how to sell stuff to you from the last time we sold stuff to you" to be deserving of a patent either but hey...

<comment><USER15> To be fair, I think the sum of Turntable.fm, between the voting, the avatars in a virtual club with headbobbing, 5 DJs, DJ points, etc is a lot more complex than the fairly obvious "remember what you entered last time so you don't have to enter it again" one click buy button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sad to see it making the same mistakes as turntable.fm, such as the facebook logins only thing.

</comment><comment><USER17> Business is business, and competition's inevitable -- but that said, I can't see myself talking openly around this team in the future. Given their track record, who's to say they won't try to do the same with something of mine?

</comment><comment><USER18> Competition in itself is definitely not news worthy.

<comment><USER19> Absolutely. I don't quite understand this seemingly common held belief on HN that first-in somehow means you own an idea?

<comment><USER15> I don't know if you've experienced this, but it is one of the most irritating things in the world to see something you've put hours of thought into on every facet of the design copied almost verbatim, doubtless with very little more thought put into it.

One of the few things that keeps this kind of thing in check is the risk of being publicly shamed and the associated reputation hit. So that's why this is here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was hoping for something that dropped the whole stupid "dancing avatar" concept. I don't want to watch cookie-cutter people bob their heads, I want a human-generated playlist that takes up as few cycles as possible.

<comment><USER21> in that case, you might like outloud.fm. the design is barebones and utilitarian, both twitter and facebook logins are supported, and you can also play tracks from soundcloud. full disclosure: i built it.

<comment><USER20> Looks pretty spiffy. Is there any list of public rooms somewhere? One of the things I liked about turntable was that I could pick through a wide selection and gate crash the ones that sounded interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Write the "Perfect" Article - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-to-write-the-perfect-article-a02a9c449d2a <comment><AUTHOR> Is there a subject you have long wanted to write — a topic you've thought of and produced or came up with some clever or hitting words? Do you want to write for a particular publication?</comment>


That Office AC System Is Great – At Recirculating Viruses - <AUTHOR> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/that-office-ac-system-is-great-at-recirculating-viruses.html <comment><USER2> Step 1: open The office windows, as was done in TB sanitariums. Seems more pleasant than most offices I've worked in:

"A century ago, treatment of tuberculosis gave modern architects a collection of design principles that aligned the aesthetic and the sanitary. Sunlight flowed through big windows, picking out whatever dust and streaks might lurk on white, high-gloss surfaces. Invigorating breezes blew across balconies and porches, dispelling germs, shadows, and Victorian clutter."</comment>


Qatar: Abolish Exit Visas for Migrant Workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/05/30/qatar-abolish-exit-visas-migrant-workers <comment><USER2> Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which is even named after the royal family (who does that anyway?) are countries that offer us a glimpse of neo feudalism ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo- feudalism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism)).

This is a potential problem for every country. While western governments are considered much different than both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the trajectory is leaning towards the paradigm those two countries occupy. This is of course, inequality, which is the measure that slavery falls onto one side at the end.

We can look at this policy as a policy, or we can have an intellectual argument on the merit of this type of governance. GOVERNMENT is literally what society as a whole, consents to being legitimate use of force. Military, Law, and Order.

No obviously we can assert that the power of the Sauds and the Thani is illegitimate today in the western world, because we ourselves have in our past moved away from the concentrated and hereditary control of power, into the hands of the super rich (the other end of the inequal spectrum).

So while I applaud hrw.org for pointing attention to this horrible policy, and more intellectually honest headline could read, "Qatar's People: Overthrow your illegitimate rulers.".

Any westerners who are reading this article and are upset or angry, need to fight against neo-feudalism in the US and European countries. The only way we can _truly_ help the people of Qatar and Saudi Arabia is by stronghand political means. Not seeing anything from the US regarding these matters speaks volumes of their slide into neo-feudalism in my opinion. This is something seen both by anti-authoritarian leftists AND rightists(is this a word?).

<comment><USER3> > _named after the royal family (who does that anyway?)_

Depends on the scope of "that", but...

Kingdom of Hanover (defunct), Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Liechtenstein, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Carolina (both), Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Victoria.

And of course Pennsylvania was named for founder William Penn.

Should we start in on cities?

<comment><USER4> I love this game. Ottoman Empire, Bolivia [1], China [2], Philippines, Mozambique.

1: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvarl](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvarl) 2: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Chin](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Chin)

<comment><USER5> May be worth noting that the Chinese didn't name their country China, they named it Zhong guo.

<comment><USER6> Which is almost more arrogant, since it translates to "The country in the center". It's a little easier to understand why there's a strain of "we are the center of the world, outside our borders are barbarians" when you look at pre-modern borders: China is bordered by oceans, the russian steppes, the xinjian desert, and the tibetan plateau.

<comment><USER5> Well _according to Wikipedia_ (yeah I know, but I don't feel like searching elsewhere) it may or may not be taken with the meaning "center of the world." And even if it is, it's more of an observation than a boast, since from their perspective they were in the middle of a bunch of other countries like you said. And hey, they call America "beautiful country" so they're not being stingy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is related to a broader international anti-slavery campaign, as the exit visa system is essentially the instrument for enforcing wage slavery in Qatar. cf. recent Guardian articles related to the world cup construction:

[http://www.theguardian.com/global- development/video/2013/sep...](http://www.theguardian.com/global- development/video/2013/sep/25/qatar-migrant-workers-world-cup-host-video)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed- qatars...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world- cup-slaves)

<comment><USER8> Yes, given the story of a football slave, how ironic that they are holding the football World Cup in Qatar.

I hope every true football fan boycotts Qatar 2022 and puts pressure on top players and FIFA to move the World Cup to more deserving countries.

<comment><USER9> I also really hope footballs fan wont go there. Maybe they'll fill the stadiums with the surviving workers.

<comment><USER10> Those who go might never come back, so either ways...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Qatar and Saudi Arabia are the only Gulf Cooperative Council states with an exit visa system"

They're in a good company. Only other countries to have exit visa are North Korea and Uzbekistan. (In the latter, you can still travel to most former USSR neighbors without exit visa)

<comment><USER12> Also Eritrea. It is why there are shoot to kill orders for Eritrean border guards if they see any of the thousands of Eritreans fleeing Eritrea every month.

<comment><USER11> I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't even heard of that African country and their people's ordeal until you mentioned it. Thanks for the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a migrant worker, it won't be surprising if the passport is deposited with the Employer at the time of joining work. I don't speak from personal experience, but from anecdotes I heard from friends and extended family. So even if there isn't an exit visa required, they don't have the passport, which means they can only travel with permission of their employer. A modern form of slavery.

<comment><USER14> I've always wondered why the employees can't just report their passports as lost or stolen in these kinds of situations and get a new one.

<comment><USER15> Who says they can't? There is absolutely no mention of talking to the French embassy or consulate in this article. That's the first place I'd go.

<comment><USER16> In this story, it doesn't say he's missing a passport, it days he does not have permission to leave the country. I'd be surprised if his embassy could do anything about it legally.

<comment><USER15> Plenty they can do. Here's an example: "Give this guy an exit visa, or the next time your Snowden equivalent flees to France, we're going to make sure that his name is spelled wrong on the paperwork, if you know what we mean."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >The onus is on the expatriate either to find another exit sponsor, who must be a Qatari national, or to provide a certificate that there are no outstanding legal claims against the person trying to leave 15 days after publishing a notice in two daily newspapers.

This seems to be doable workaround. This could be possibly even automated, perhaps start-up idea?

I do not think this could be changed politically, US and those states are best buddies and any serious political pressure would be vetoed.

<comment><USER18> > _This seems to be doable workaround. This could be possibly even automated, > perhaps start-up idea?_

I am guessing you haven't actually worked in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, the two Middle Eastern countries that retain exit visas. I have (Saudi Arabia), and I think it's really naive to think this is do-able, and even a little bit insulting to think a start-up could somehow solve what's going on here.

Let's consider the two alternatives: first of all, they are both no-goes for the type of workers who are trapped by exit visas. Placing a notice in two daily newspapers? Even if you manage to get that, you've then got to get the certificate. Getting any kind of official documentation out of the bureaucracy is next to impossible for someone who a) isn't a citizen of Qatar / Saudi, and b) has no wasta (which roughly translates into 'clout', or 'who you know').

Which brings us onto the other option: finding a Qatari national. The case cited in the article, of a French professional footballer, is rather unique. The vast majority of people unable to obtain exit visas are immigrant workers doing low-paid jobs no Qatari or Saudi wants to do. They are, for all intents and purposes, effectively slaves. I saw it with my own eyes when I was working there: indeed, I remember reading several stories of migrant workers trying to stow themselves away in planes out of Saudi.

So as an exploited worker let's say you manage to find a Qatari willing to sponsor your exit. Except you won't, for two reasons: firstly, no national would risk creating trouble with the state (especially in Saudi, which has a religious police force (the Muttaween), and even if you _did_ find a national willing to help you (which again, would be virtually impossible) the chances are they'd have no wasta and would almost certainly end up in a dead end of paperwork and bureaucracy.

I met many good people in Qatar and Saudi: people who think the current system of 'government' (if you can call it that) is wrong, and that the large numbers of workers coming in from India, Indonesia, and the like are being exploited. But they are simply not able to do what you're suggesting - subvert the system - without serious and profound consequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yet two other countries on my personal No Fly List.

...

[x] UK (can force people to hand over passwords)

[x] US (probability that they reject people at the border/airport for ridiculous reasons)

[x] Qatar (exit visa required)

[x] Saudi Arabia (exit visa required)

...

Even if I'm not sure if those exit visas also apply to short term visitors. Better safe than sorry.

<comment><USER18> I don't think Saudi will miss your custom - unless you're a Muslim (visiting for Hajj) or coming in on business you're going to find it near impossible to get into Saudi anyway. The only country it is harder to get tourist visas for is probably North Korea.

> _UK (can force people to hand over passwords)_

You are aware that most, if not _all_ countries can force you to hand over your passport? If you are arrested and bailed the government don't really want you trying to flee the country. Even if you're not arrested many courts can compel you to surrender your passport (for example, in a child custody case). Some countries will also make you surrender your passport if you're entering certain disputed territories (Chinese citizens, for example, must give up their passport when entering Taiwan).

<comment><USER20> He said passwords, not passport. The latter is just one tiny document (but, ID theft is scary). The former is explicitly so they can unlock all your secrets.</comment></comment></comment>


Launch Your with Launch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2009/04/launch-your-with-launch.html

<comment><USER2> Can someone parse that for me please? I'm having trouble making sense of it, and I suspect my English simply isn't up to it.

Thanks.</comment>


The Next Privacy Battle in Europe Is Over the Proposed ePrivacy Regulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/technology/europe-eprivacy-regulation-battle.html <comment><USER2> [https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/Draft-ePriv- Reg-M...](https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/Draft-ePriv-Reg- May-2018.pdf)

Here is the most recent draft if anyone wants to read it.

Just to start a bit of a discussion, I read prior drafts and this one is _MUCH_ better than previous drafts. Before very simple things like placing cookies for basic analytics, fraud detection, DDoS prevention, etc. were in a grey area. Now they are explicitly allowed by this draft.

If prior versions would've passed as-is, I would be legitimately worried for the future of tech in Europe, but this seems quite similar to GDPR now.

</comment><comment><USER3> After seeing that "App-ocalypse" video, I realised: the intersection between "people that like the new privacy law" and "people who can make a cool video" is probably much smaller than the intersection with people who don't like the new privacy law. EA (say) can probably make a much more effective campaign than (say) Stallman.

This worries me in this case in particular, but it's a worry in general: how to reach audiences outside the science/tech sphere. Not many programmers want to be Youtubers, but that seems to be the only reasonable choice.

</comment><comment><USER4> _" And requiring companies to provide equal communications services to people who opt out of data mining, they say, could cause sites or apps that rely on data-driven advertising to start charging fees or close down."_

This statement starts with the assumption that the data mining was okay in the first place. My metaphor is a bit hyperbolic, but it's like members of organized crime complaining about the passage of RICO in the U. S. "Well, _now_ how are supposed to make a living?" Mmm, you weren't supposed to be making a living through organized crime in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Let's not get hyperbolic and compare data mining to murder.

If you think it's not OK that's your opinion, but do a survey among regular folk of "is it OK to have web sites mine your data to provide you with targeted ads and free services like search, maps, email or you wish to pay $5 a month" and see the results. Make sure to include there people from all walks of life and age and all over the world.

Personally I like having choices. Data mining should be just another mechanism to pay for the services provided. I know for a fact that if these companies didn't have "data mining" as a mechanism to provide otherwise free services I would have never used those free services for the past 15 years or so, growing up in a country where electronic payments were available much later and the per capita yearly income was super low.

<comment><USER6> The problem here is that we don't have choices. Usually it's "accept our data mining or don't use our service". And since a lot of tech companies operate walled garden monopolies these days, that is not, in actuality, a choice.

If someone was pushing a law that required all companies implementing data mining/tracking to have a paid version that could not exceed the value they gain from that tracking, I'd be fine with that. I assume it'd be pennies in most cases considering your Facebook account is really only worth like $12 a year to Facebook.

<comment><USER7> > I assume it'd be pennies in most cases considering your Facebook account is > really only worth like $12 a year to Facebook.

Facebook quarterly ARPU was USD$26.76 for US/Canada and USD$8.86 in Europe in Q4 2017. I'm also guessing that people willing to pay for Facebook are more likely to be a high value demographic, and would conversely need to pay more than the average user for that region.

<comment><USER6> It would presumably need to be illegal to price people based on their willingness to pay for the service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The bill also requires companies to offer people the same communications services whether or not they agree to have their data collected."

This is the most insane part of this clueless and destructive law.

It's like europe has resigned to the notion that they don't have a significant internet company so they are determined to destroy the whole industry. They don't seem to be as petty or as prolific in churning out regulations and limitations on other industries.

<comment><USER9> Or maybe people have realised this business model is dangerous and damaging and we are better off going to alternatives?

Companies can simply start charging for services rather than selling data in the EU, if it's really that bad.

Personally, as a British person, I fear companies doing bad things far more than I fear the government overstepping with regulation. People have been making these same claims about regulation destroying industries for some time, and it never actually happens.

Instead, most of the time they actually end up being good.

<comment><USER8> They don't 'sell data' they show you ads based on relevant data, it's a deliberate mistake that defeats the argument.

The major issue here is that user consent won't be sufficient anymore, I don't mind the business model in question and I'm not alone so let us have it, and those who won't consent they're free to take their business elsewhere. This degree of micro managing the industry is unprecedented in a supposed free market system, and ad targeting is far from only benefit to the data, it's just potential killing legislation.

<comment><USER10> > They don't 'sell data' they show you ads based on relevant data

What they do to show these ads is to sell your data, wholesale.

<comment><USER11> Which isn't even close to being the same thing.

<comment><USER10> They literally send your data to an exchange where the highest bidder wins the right to display an ad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now that GDPR hysteria has passed, the Internet has survived, and we're all still here, it's time to start ePrivacy hysteria.

The sheer number of lobbying groups each of these tech companies is involved in is amazing. Google doesn't seem to publish an EU counterpart to this that I know of, but here's how many organizations Google is backing: [https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html](https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> hysteria? Google, Facebook, et al had billions of dollars worth of complaints filed against them the first day it took effect. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154175)

And those same groups filed against LinkedIn, Apple, and Amazon too: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/gdpr-attacks-first-google- face...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/gdpr-attacks-first-google-facebook-now- activists-go-after-apple-amazon-linkedin/)

It sounds to me like the critics of the law were right. Instapaper pulling out before it took affect was a good move if they weren't ready. The cases were filed minutes after the law took affect.

<comment><USER6> As Google and Facebook's entire business models are built on invading your privacy, which both the UN and the EU classify as a violation of fundamental human rights, is it wrong that they are receiving complaints as soon as it is legal to file them?

UN, Article 12: [http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)

EU, Article 8: [http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:120...](http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12012P/TXT)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it maybe finally time to get a real business model?

As with any regulation, there are issues which need to be sorted out. But one thing is crystal clear to me: this helps making people aware of what is happening to their data and their lifes. There is no excuse for not being able to come up with a viable business model without productizing users and making them subject to social and political manipulation.

I wonder why no one writes about how products could use GDPR and other regulations to their advantage instead of whining about the demise of the ad industry.

<comment><USER13> > There is no excuse for not being able to come up with a viable business > model without productizing users and making them subject to social and > political manipulation.

How so? TV and media have been doing it since forever - not as efficient but still. It's a valid model if you want open, pluralistic services.

<comment><USER12> If old media advertising is so great, then why is it necessary to collect more and more data about individuals, up to the point where you can target them personally? Would you call TV advertising a productization of the consumer?

Why do e.g. FB not offer a level of service that is viable without personally identifiable information being used for targeting?

There seems to be a BIG difference in the effectiveness and mechanisms of statistical target groups vs. individual targeting. If you've followed the Cambridge Analytica scandal, you know to what degree this information can be abused.

<comment><USER13> I agree that there have to be limits , but it's not an 0/1 question. Facebook should even be treated as a special case because it's a monopoly, but again it's not 0/1\. I doubt they can offer the same service without targetting - facebook makes $100+ from each user in US or western europe. If they made 10% of that they couldn't offer to e.g. store all your photos and vids for free.

And lets not kid ourselves, very few people would pay $100+ for facebook, even though it would be interesting to see them offer that option.

<comment><USER12> But people already pay that money (on average), just not directly to FB.

If I need to lure users into using my platform by pretending to be "free" so I can get a monopoly going, then that just underlines my point of a non-viable business model.

<comment><USER13> > If I need to lure users into using my platform by pretending to be "free" so > I can get a monopoly going

You just described every startup in SV, but in any case facebook did not have ads platform in its growth phase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The bill also requires companies to offer people the same communications > services whether or not they agree to have their data collected

Again with this madness. Please convince me how this does not violate the right of people to come into contracts with each other? The internet is not a private space as the EU's lawmakers seem to want it to be, but a public space like the real world. If you want privacy, you buy a house, and similarly you get a subscription service online. I appreciate that everyone is sensitive with their privacy these months, but please try to be rational. FWIW, as an EU citizen i am sometimes offended by the stupidity of our lawmakers.

<comment><USER14> This is not madness. Many (if not all) EU countries have a law that regulates contracts. One principle is that the one in the weaker position in the contract should have some protections.

This can be seen as an extension to such a law.

It appears that consumers are in the weaker position in the contract here because major ISP can in (silent) agreement to refuse to provide a fair contracts. For example they are in such position because majority of consumers do not care.

<comment><USER13> In europe ISPs dont have monopolies. Thats legitimate - the government should interfere to make sure there are options. This doesnt make the law right though because then

> they are in such position because majority of consumers do not care

is like stating that users are idiots that need a nanny state.

<comment><USER14> > _In europe ISPs dont have monopolies._

Usually no, but regardless it does not mean that they could not cooperate to create unfriendly environment without any real options.

Let me give you a simple example. Let say company X and Y are providing service Z.

For this service alone profit for company X is $1 per customer and $2 for company Y.

If they sold the information about their customers then their profit would be $11 and $12 accordingly.

Now would either of companies get any competitive advantage from not selling customer data?

> _is like stating that users are idiots that need a nanny state._

No. These kind of laws do not care about the idiots. They care about the rest of us.

We should be not forced into position where the options are the following:

1) €20, 100 Mbs, full tracking, 2) €20, 20 Mbs, no tracking.

This law states that the consumers should be not forced into a position where they have to compare products by tracking.

If it still did not click for you then here is an analogy. Customers should be not forced to choose between products

1) €12, totally safe, 2) €10, kills you maybe.

It is not ethical.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


President Obama Details Plan to Win the Future through Expanded Wireless Access  - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/10/president-obama-details-plan-win-future-through-expanded-wireless-access <comment><USER2> Is this really a pressing problem compared to all the other shit that's going wrong in America? As long as the government feels the need to do this sort of stuff, why not invest in something that's going to be more useful to society than 4G cellular service?</comment>


Ask HN: What can AlphaStar tell us about imitation learning for autonomous cars? - <AUTHOR> I find it intriguing that DeepMind's AlphaStar used supervised imitation learning on a dataset of 500,000+ human-played games. With supervised imitation learning alone, it was able to beat the StarCraft Elite AI bot 95% of the time, and get an estimated MMR that would put it in the Gold league — where the middle third of ranked human players are. So just with imitation learning, AlphaStar was able to get to roughly median human performance (or at least we think so; I don't know if it beat any Gold-ranked human players).<p>The Information reported (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/what-makes-teslas-autopilot-different) that Tesla is using supervised imitation learning to "directly predict the correct steering, braking and acceleration" based on the state/action pairs observed in human driving. Should we feel optimistic that what (apparently) worked for StarCraft will work for autonomous cars? <comment><USER2> The big point of AlphaStar wasn't the "learning" part (that is: strategies, build order), it was the micro part (control of individual units).

Even with the same APM (action per minute) as a human, it has a huge advantage. It can control units in different areas in the same time, and do so perfectly. It doesn't have tiny imperfections. That adds up quickly in star craft 2, and gives it a great advantage.

Does that translate into real world applications? Computers are already much better at reaction time and, once they calculated everything and a decision has been reached, executing it perfectly. That'll probably help in piloting as well - thinking of it as a human that steps on the brake a little bit earlier, doesn't oversteer etc. Tiny advantages can make the difference between a crash and a close call. It's not the great breakthrough though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just watched the live-streamed match where MaNa beat AlphaStar and the professional commentators seemed to think that AlphaStar had good strategy. MaNa had even copied something AlphaStar did in a previous match.

[https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs](https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs)

I have not played much StarCraft, so I can't judge for myself.

<comment><USER2> Sure, it does some stuff that's fine, but that's not what makes it win (yet). It's basically playing in Archon mode (but alone) where it can see and act all over the map at the same time - humans can't do that. I'm sure it will at some point become better at strategies, too, but so far it's hard to compare because the API it has is much more powerful.

When they did change that aspect of the match, the 10:0 turned into 10:1. Would Mana have won the next 10 games? Nobody knows, but at least it would've been a lot closer. SC2 rewards micro a lot, and a computer will always be better at micro than a human (unless you make it harder for the machine). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PLplRDSgpo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PLplRDSgpo) This is a couple of years old, and at that level, it would certainly beat any pro, even without a superior strategy because micro is a leverage for unit strength.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gold's currently 30th-50th percentile, so more like "slightly below average" than "middle third": [https://www.rankedftw.com/stats/leagues/1v1/#v=2&r=-2&sx=a](https://www.rankedftw.com/stats/leagues/1v1/#v=2&r=-2&sx=a)

The problem with autonomous cars will be the "error bars" \-- playing at a diamond level but occasionally losing a game due to a bronze level mistake is impressive for a Starcraft bot and deadly for an autonomous driving bot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh. Is the info on this wiki outdated? [https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/League_(StarCraft_II)#Leag...](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/League_\(StarCraft_II\)#League_Types)

<comment><USER3> Very. The page says "As of Heart of the Swarm". This was released in 2013, and obsoleted by Legacy of the Void in 2015.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha! Thanks. I have only played a bit of StarCraft II so I'm not super familiar.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are you working for github yet? - <AUTHOR> http://amiworkingforgithubnow.com/

<comment><USER2> I got to listen to Tom, one of the cofounders of GitHub, do a presentation tonight in Boulder for the local Linux users group. He did a great job. One of the nice things about it is that it wasn't a high level pitch about the business model or about what GitHub was. Instead, it was basically an introduction to the core architecture of git. How it works. How it's different than say CVS, or just keeping manual backup copies of files around. He actually went into Terminal, wrote code, and essentially hand-crafted git storage files in a Ruby interpreter, in order to illustrate how git works internally, and how simple it is. It was great on two levels. One one level, it was very substantive for a crowd of Linux geeks, we eat that stuff up. And on another level the fact that he clearly understood this stuff and enjoyed it and gets his fingers dirty actually building things. If I wasn't already firmly in the no-Ruby-for-me camp (prefer Python, and don't want to waste time switching time investments over to an approximately similar language), I'd probably love to work with them. Small companies rock. People that know their shit, and are passionate about it, rock.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I navigate to <http://amiworkingforgithubnow.com/yes> does that mean I'm instantly hired?

<comment><USER3> I thought maybe it was shenanigans like [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4198883/exposing-any- ruby...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4198883/exposing-any-ruby-object- over-the-web)

where you were suppose to add your handle to GITHUB_HANDLES list, but alas didn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note for web developers: Browsers on Windows suck at rendering most custom fonts. If you feel that you definitely want to embed your font, at least please check it on Windows first, play with font sizes and positioning and make sure they don't look silly.

<comment><USER5> Why should everyone have to purchase another OS, at a high price, just to work around another OS's problems? Shouldn't you be contacting your OS provider about this instead?

<comment><USER6> When that "other OS" is highly ubiquitous (~90% or higher market share), it is reasonable to expect developers to purchase the OS before developing for an audience that uses it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> wh-uws Could someone please explain this?

<comment><USER7> Github has been announcing a ton of new hires in the past couple of their days (5 since the beginning of February).

See:

\- <https://github.com/blog/>

\- <https://github.com/blog/792-aman-gupta-tmm1-is-a-githubber>

\- <https://github.com/blog/790-simon-sr-rozet-is-a-githubber>

\- [https://github.com/blog/788-mislav-marohni%C4%87-is-a- github...](https://github.com/blog/788-mislav-marohni%C4%87-is-a-githubber)

\- <https://github.com/blog/786-tim-clem-is-a-githubber>

\- <https://github.com/blog/779-corey-johnson-is-a-githubber>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately, it appears they are not looking for interns :-(

<comment><USER9> No? They said differently at the Stanford career fair a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps they are only looking for Stanford interns.

<comment><USER11> This is something that is frustrating to me. Startups will go to MIT and Standford begging for interns and grads but people who are qualified and show enough initiative to do the challenges/job postings don't even get an email back. Just because my school is small and not well known outside of the Midwest doesn't make it inferior.

/rant I suppose I just have to start my own thing if I want to work around smart and cool people.

<comment><USER12> It's a lot of work arranging travel and accommodations.

<comment><USER13> Additionally, outliers aside, talent density outside of the top five or ten schools is pretty dismal. It's kind of a rough deal for the handful of talented people at smaller schools, but you can't expect a company with limited resources to bother going after them.

<comment><USER14> I accidentally upvoted you. Sorry, but I absolutely disagree. Talent "density" outside of a few media friendly schools is actually very good. Better still, that talent is cheaper.

You can get excellent developers for $50K/year coming out of a "second tier" school which certainly beats having to hire a $200K/year princess out of stanford.

Fact mit, harvard and stanford aren't holy ground for the only places to find smart people. In fact I think the brand name works against them a little. My experience (MIT only) has been that the stars tend to be better but the average tends to be about the same as anywhere else. You get students forgetting data structures, using the wrong algorithms and other such tragedies. I'd bet money that Harvard and Stanford have the same issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Part of the hires they did was for some new projects (I think iphone related). I'm very happy for the new hires, it must be great to work there.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmmm... Strange, it's broken for me.

<comment><USER17> Well, it crashes Safari on my iPod Touch 2G. I was curious so I looked at the code.

IMHO there are only two possibilities:

(a) It's the css-font-definition-stuff they're doing (b) google analytics script is causing the problem

Actually, I do think it's google.

Too bad, people should check their websites on mobile devices, too, before release. I believe I am not the only one who enjoys his/her daily dose of hacker news from a mobile device reclining on a couch. :-)

<comment><USER16> No, I mean broken as in I keep getting the wrong answer. :/

I'm scared now... Maybe I'm getting fired or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is the lack of a link to a list of available jobs and locations or even a mailto:jobs@ email address supposed to be part of an indie appeal?

<comment><USER19> I suppose hunting down the job listing is part of the test ;)

<comment><USER20> That is some Alice in Wonderland $#!7 right there. Can you truly ever complete the hunt for nothing?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your other favorite communities other than Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> Curious what other sites you use to get your news and daily geek fix from.
More interested in communities where everyone can participate. Forums, etc.
Not necessarily news sites.
For me I get most of the value from HN from what you guys have to say. <comment><USER2> I spend a lot of time on Reddit, though I know HN likes to hate on it. There are lots of subreddits that I enjoy participating in there and I can curate what I want to be part of. I have a multireddit specifically for memes and jokes, some for the different video games I play, and one big multireddit for guns and related stuff.

The website is moderately usable but an independent app called Apollo really makes it a pleasant experience on my iOS devices. Hoping for a macOS port sometime.

Edit to add some specific communities:

/r/GunDeals is one of my favorites, but is incredibly dangerous to my wallet.

/r/CCW is a great resource for concealed carriers.

I know it's childish, but the various meme subreddits can be hilarious at times. I like /r/historymemes /r/grimdank (warhammer memes) and /r/lotrmemes among others.

I also keep subscribed to /r/Clojure and others but I get most of my professional news from HN.

/r/DestinyTheGame and /r/DestinyLore are fun but the former can get a little salty when things in game are changed.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'The Well' \- [https://www.well.com/](https://www.well.com/)

'Hackaday' \- [https://hackaday.com/](https://hackaday.com/)

'Slashdot' \- [https://slashdot.org/](https://slashdot.org/)

'Stackoverflow' \- [https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/)

Also, haven't used it for a while, but IRC is still going. #math on freenode is apparently still fairly good, according to a few people I know.

<comment><USER4> Is the well worth paying for? What's the community like?

<comment><USER3> I tend to drop in to read some of the public discussions, especially 'The State of the World' every January, ever since that started. I haven't ever paid to join, but if I ever get around to fleshing out some of my writing, I intend to make the effort. It seems to be of most use as an authors group.

edit - here's a link to 'The State of the World, 2019' \- [https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State- of...](https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-of-the- World-2019-page01.html) \- it should give you a bit of an idea of the kind of community they have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As of a few years ago, I've taken up espresso as a (unfortunately expensive, but fun) side hobby. One of the communities I visit is home-barista, it's a wonderful community full of people who love coffee, enjoy making it and sharing their recipes and get the hands deep in the more technical aspects of coffee-making. Other good forums are: coffeesnobs (australian, not as snobby as it sounds) and coffee-geek (European).

The beauty behind all this is that third wave coffee has really taken off and with it has followed a really cool, friendly, very global crowd.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://relevant.community/relevant/top](https://relevant.community/relevant/top) has a good mix of technology and culture/society content similar to HN.

The voting is based on a pagerank reputation system. Users earn reputation from getting thier comments upvoted and, in turn, increase the rank of the posts they upvote. This makes rankings sybil-resistant making manipulation harder and moderation easier. So far its been a great way to keep communities focused and resistant to mob mentality.

Each community manages their own reputation system (admins are in the personalization vector).

There is also a prediction-market mechanism overlayed on top of the rankings — you can bet on post's relevance within a given community (this is abstracted from the UX at the moment).

Disclosure, I'm the founder.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Could you explain the prediction market/betting system in more detail? Can users wager Coins, upvotes, or repuptation that they get back multiplied by some factor that depends on the success of the post they bet on, or do I misunderstand?

Also, TIL of the concept of a Sybil attack, AKA sock-puppeting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack)

 _> an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks [...] named after the subject of the [1973] book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research_

<comment><USER6> Users can wager Relevant Coins (not reputation) on the quality of posts. This is done via a 'bonding curve market maker' ([https://blog.relevant.community/how-to-make-bonding- curves-f...](https://blog.relevant.community/how-to-make-bonding-curves-for- continuous-token-models-3784653f8b17)). The market maker mints 'shares' in exchange for staking Relevant Coins. The more shares are outstanding the more expensive they are, thereby rewarding early participants.

Not that the actual ranking of the post is determined via the pagerank algorithm which is independent of the coins and betting.

If the post has a higher ranking than average it gets a portion of the newly minted tokens — kind of like block rewards. These rewards get distributed to all the users that staked on the post proportional to the amount of shares they own. Everyone also gets their original tokens back. So in reality this it's prediction market 'light'. All users pay a 'tax' on their token balance via the inflation rate and but get a chance to win a portion of the pot by participating in curation.

The betting mechanism is similar to and inspired by Steemit. Except they don't use reputation ranking to resolve the market. Steemit posts are ranked by how many tokens were staked on them, so a whale can basically force the market and get all the rewards — self-fulfilling prophecy. In our case its is more akin to an actual prediction market where the prediction is separate from outcome. At scale the prediction market can actually be a useful way to surface recommendations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> RSS.

Mercilessly tightly curated email, mastodon, diaspora, and reddit.

But really: books. Mostly books.

<comment><USER9> This. I feel like the secret to being meaningfully informed is maintaining a balanced signal:noise ratio.

Over time, I've come to realize that this is fundamentally impossible without "mercilessly tight" moderation, and tools/services that give you that power (RSS, email), because the state of the world is 1 part signal to 99 parts noise.

Books, and by extension libraries, are a viscerally physical representation of this principle. Much of what's in a library is noise, but the signals are sustained, dense, and often unlike anything you can find on the web. However, like the web, signal tends to cluster around certain authors and publishers. There's still a moderation problem (picking the right book), but over time your verification algorithm (is this book signal or noise?) gets faster and "mercilessly tight".

I don't have much of a conclusion, but I'll end with questions this raises for me. I wonder how this idea interacts with "echo chambers"? Aren't we constructing personal ones with these tools and resources? Is that necessarily a bad thing?

<comment><USER8> There are a lot of books. Many are bullshit. Most are not worth (and never can be) read.[1] Going to primary sources helps, they're almost aways preferred to commentaries, though guides and maps may help. I span new material via bibliographies and citations frequently. This helps, somewhat, to burst bubbles.

I'm currently curating from a listing of 25k+ law articles on a topic of interest. Availability of those (free, online) has a huge influence. Thanks to the Library of Alexandra (Sci-Hub) and LibGen.

Adler's _How to Read a Book_ is quite useful -- the synoptic approach especially.[2]

Making rapid assessments of suitability is crucial. Being prepared to revisit those assessments, either way, later, also. Developing indicators of crap or possible gold help immensely. Again, see Adler.

I spend considerabe time with older sources. They're often known to be wrong or inaccurate, but:

* The path they reveal in development of understanding is often hugely useful. To understand the bug, it helps to know how it came to be.

* The rhetorical and ideological battles to which they may have been part is _usually_ now known, often spent. Literature -- science, technology, fiction, philosophy -- is all tremendously ideological, and being removed from the frame under which it was constructed, or being aware of it, helps immensely.

* One often finds one's own crazy notions expresed there, sometimes partially, sometimes far more clearly. I've generally found that the questions I've been most concerned with are in fact long-standing ones.

* Much current discussion retreads older thinking, though aparently unconsciousy and/or in complete ignorance.

The Copyright Abyss -- many materials published since 1924 -- is aboth a hinderance and a blessing. It's not complete (LibGen, Sci-Hub, ZLibrary, Open Library via Archive.org), but it _is_ sufficiently effective that it tends to force consideration of earlier works.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. The US Library of Congress houses 24 million catalogued books and over 168 million items in total.[3] Its annual reports show about 300,000 new book additions annually, a remarkably stable rate, since the 1950s.[4] Bowker issues about 300k ISBNs annually to traditional publishers, and another million to 'untraditional" (self-published) authors.[6] Google have estimated 129 million books were published, ever.[7] And there's the question of how many books _can_ matter, culturally. About 3/4 of Americans read at least a bok a year,[8] which suggests a floor somewhere around 60 books over a lifetime. Given that there are other informational channels, how much information _must_ be transmitted intergenerationally to preserve culture -- technically, socially, values, etc? "Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book)

3\. [https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a- glance](https://loc.gov/about/general-information/#year-at-a-glance)

4\. [https://loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual- reports/](https://loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual-reports/) [http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049](http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049) [4]

5\. One of the exceedingly rare cases in which Hathi Trust is actually useful.

6\. [http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker- Data.html](http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html)

7\. [http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world- stand-...](http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and- be-counted.html)

8\. [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fe...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-fewer- americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can't believe nobody has mentioned [https://www.techmeme.com/river](https://www.techmeme.com/river) yet.

</comment><comment><USER11> Metafilter [https://metafilter.com](https://metafilter.com) still has interesting comments and occasionally unique content, besides the links which bubble up everywhere. It's pretty heavily politically left, which, along with heavy moderation has driven away a lot users over the years, but sometimes still has some nuggets you don't see on other aggregators. It is much more of a community than most of the other sites, with lots of rules and sub-sites, but I've only read the comments.

Twitter has been surprisingly useful since I started using last year. If you only follow accounts in a specific area of interest it really allows you to discover new things. The hard part is dealing with power poster/users since they can quickly dominate your feed, but they also can bring in new areas of interest. It's too bad they don't have better tagging curation tools.

Serializer [https://serializer.io/](https://serializer.io/) is a meta- aggregator which grabs stuff from HN, Ars, some Reddit forms and others, not sure if this counts or not.

</comment><comment><USER12> Refugees from the UK's Guardian newspaper talk board ended up here: [https://justthetalk.com/](https://justthetalk.com/)

Big enough to be interesting, small enough to become familiar with individual posters.

</comment><comment><USER13> Skyscraperpage for local development news. Cyburbia for urban planning in general.

</comment><comment><USER14> News and community are two very different things to me. I get a lot of news from Ars Technica but their forum community is extremely toxic and mob-driven, not helped by the active side-taking of their staff.

Platforms I love like Imgur can be very useful but I think the use of point ratings on comments discourages honesty and turns discussion into point- hoarding pageantry.

</comment><comment><USER15> MechanicalKeyboards on reddit hands down :)

<comment><USER16> FountainPens and Programmer_humor

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> bogleheads.org for investments and personal finance advice.

</comment><comment><USER18> Metafilter

</comment><comment><USER19> Lobsters:

[https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

It's a slower-moving site with lots of CompSci and programmer-focused stuff. People also regularly share what projects they work on, what's going on in their life, or maybe what they're reading. Still has a small community feel despite over 10,000 views a day.

Lobsters and Hacker News are my must reads each day. They're both great. :)

<comment><USER20> It doesn't look like lobsters have enough content for everyday reading..

<comment><USER19> Some days, the front page won't change much if at all from previous day. There will be stuff in Recent and Comments coming in that might be highly interesting. Some of these people will drop a whopper of a comment days after it's posted. I usually have stuff to read every day.

Checking now, fro added a paper on fuzzing for side channels in CPU's 30 min ago. Might have missed it if I just looked at morning feed but not later in day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure how it holds up today, but a few years ago Yospos on Something Awful was a dumpster filled with nuggets of gold.

</comment><comment><USER22> devRant

Aside for stupid memes, every now and then there is a story that temporarily cures my impostor syndrome / helps my everyday struggle seem like a fun day at the beach compared to crap some (fellow 3rd world) developers have to go through to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER23> Mostly indiehackers, which I check out daily along with HN. With HN and IH I already spend a lot of time everyday, not sure if I could handle another community. Although from time to time I checkout r/startups.

</comment><comment><USER24> Reddit : /r/programming

Twitter : to follow some personalities in the field I'm currently interested in

Telegram : I like the devs network, mainly the Linux group chat of this network

<comment><USER24> I forgot the irc channel of emacs on freenode network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://www.snapzu.com](https://www.snapzu.com)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.

</comment><comment><USER26> Bogleheads.org

Because knowing how to handle money is a multiplier. Among the ways to spend your time, it's got a high payback.

</comment><comment><USER27> Twitter is a double edged tool. It can be terrorific as it can be fantastic depending on who you follow

</comment><comment><USER28> twitter

I have curated it to the point where I almost never see anything political and there is a lot of really good content. It's all computer vision, computer graphics, demoscene, black/grey hat and startupy type stuff.

<comment><USER29> How do you curate Twitter? I have my account inactive since forever because I wasn't able to deal with the flood of messages.

<comment><USER28> Make sure you are super careful who you follow, Mute a lot of people and use the "I don't like this tweet" judiciously.

<comment><USER30> I signed up to Twitter and followed exactly one account: Material-UI (a React component framework). I don't login to Twitter very much, I redirect the email notifications to my RSS feed. Every third email has no content related to Material-UI, it's just random ads-as-tweets about TV shows, movies and US politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> mrmoneymustache forum

personal finance and so much more.

[https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/](https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Neopets.com :)

</comment><comment><USER33> freepo.st

</comment><comment><USER34> lobste.rs is basically HN without the politics.

<comment><USER35> tildes.net is similar in that it's good but it does have politics

<comment><USER36> Sadly its invite only and I know nobody with an invite. If anyone fancies throwing one my way it'd be appreciated.

<comment><USER37> The hand them out on their subreddit. Took me three minutes from posting to getting an invite from one of the owners of tildes

<comment><USER36> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Technical writers don't have any strong online forums, I've been working on cultivating reddit.com/r/technicalwriting as our main watering hole.

I've recently started browsing reddit.com/r/webdev and am finding it to be a pretty lively source of web development discussion.

Twitter gets a lot of flak but I find it helpful for getting a pulse on different communities.

Aside:

> I get most of the value from HN from what you guys have to say.

If you'd like to cultivate HN as a place where women and non-binary people also contribute, consider using "you all" instead of "you guys".

Edit: Looks like I'm getting downvoted for the "you guys" comment, which I expected. I know that it's usually just an old habit but I also know that being thoughtful and correcting that old habit means a lot to some people. Considering that we're talking about online communities it seemed relevant to bring attention to here.

<comment><USER39> I thought "guys" was accepted as gender-neutral now, like "dude".

That said, in trying to force congruence in my idiolect, I once referred to a woman as "this guy", and it felt so wrong. It still feels wrong. My mind reels in disgust as I'm typing these words right now. It doesn't work. So maybe we need to go the other way. But why does "dude" work?

Also, everyone becoming agender when? It's the best way to cut the knot and have egalitarianism. Seriously I mean come on already.

Unless the concept of gender is a psychological technology that gives people with gender dysphoria a target to aim at while they reconcile their inscrutable brain-body disagreements and so abolishing gender would harm their therapy. Unless² those disagreements stem from our still having genders. Let's hope that what it is because damn. Unless³ gender is also a biologically- salient component of people to the point where we can't ignore it without it resurfacing and re-creating the problems we tried to get rid of it to begin with for. I hate everything.[0]

0: [http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-beyond- forty/2017/05/40-ge...](http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-beyond- forty/2017/05/40-gender-neutral-alternatives-to-saying-you-guys/)

<comment><USER40> > I once referred to a woman as "this guy", and it felt so wrong

"Guys" might be considered gender-neutral, but "guy" is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am going to get banned for this, but 4chan's /g/ is unironically a nice place

<comment><USER39> No, it's not. It's a terrible place full of extremely dumb and sad (but technologically curious) kids.

But it can be hilarious. Yesterday, there was an HN post and a /g/ thread about Intel's new CPU, and the discussion was so parallel -- the same noises of neuroticism and pessimism, but in HN delivered in pedantic paragraphs and on /g/ distilled in crude, biting brevity.

For that reason, I linked the thread and got downboated. I don't regret it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have some tildes invites. Shoot me an email at yesreply (at) hoomane (dot) org with just a link to another profile of yours to make sure we keep the community full of nice humans. I'll send you back one to the email you used.

<comment><USER43> [https://hoomane.org/](https://hoomane.org/) and [https://www.hoomane.org/](https://www.hoomane.org/) seem to be down at the moment. HN's "hug of death", or simply some downtime?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I get better at building stuff? - <AUTHOR> I'm 38 years old and have been doing software since I was 13.  I've got a PhD in systems engineering and was in academia until a year ago, but I've only just realised I have always worked at the level where I got a codebase and improved it.  I suck immensely at building stuff, I make it too complicated, I overthink, underengineer it.  I know little about market fit, shipping product, etc and I feel like I've wasted 15 years not doing it.  What's your recommendation on the shortest path to fixing this? <comment><USER2> To improve codebase is harder than building from scratch, as you have to get familiar with it first and understand what other developers have done with it. Now you have experience you have a feeling of how to make things ~right. But as other mentioned the way to get better is actually to build stuff. Take a project/idea you'd like to see alive and chunk it into small/workable pieces that on the first place make a set of "deliverables" that keeps you engaged in your progress (you probably didn't have to do this with previous codebase). Then start the action! I'd suggest to focus first on the list of "easy" deliverables so you can get started and get confident as you connect pieces together. In the process you'll see how the list of deliverables grows but also you have to know where to stop (as most people from Academia do not know), for this ask yourself what is the minimal set of features that your project need in order to work? once you have gone through this minimal set you build from there and you can even return to see what can be improved (just as you did with improving codebase).

To get a projects/ideas look at your own needs and think what you would like to be improved to make your life easier or make some tasks less annoying or ask other people, there are a lot of people with ideas around there but very few people willing to invest time to implement them

</comment><comment><USER3> Some interesting notes here from Matthias of HtDP/Little Schemer author fame, how to do software engineering [http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/4500-f18/lectures.html](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/4500-f18/lectures.html) and it's basically what I do, top down design, then build bottom up, which at some point during this I'll trash the spec and re-do it as now I have a better idea from building what I actually need. Repeat until somewhat satisfied with what been built as you'll never be satisfied.

I also use most of the advice here from the talk 'Effective ML', like creating an interface for everything, making failure obvious, ect [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l16sYRpfL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l16sYRpfL8)

</comment><comment><USER4> The best way to get better at building things is to build more things from scratch. You're last sentence though suggests that maybe you aren't that interested in getting better at building things and instead you want to get better at shipping product, finding market fit and doing the stuff usually associated with starting a business. If that's the case then building more things probably won't help you. Those skills aren't really engineering related. If you want to be better at shipping product for example, then the best way to do that is to get better at planning and to practice regularly deploying your product. Finding market fit requires a lot of talking to people in your target audience and shipping a product that meets those needs.

Essentially, if you want to get better at building things, then simply build more things. if you want to get better at everything else, then step away for your computer, talk to people, make connections, and put your work out there for others to see early and often.

</comment><comment><USER5> 15 years?... Don't just build more things; build harder-to-build things give yourself a real challenge or three.

</comment><comment><USER6> Over engineering is a problem I face too. I feel the best course of action is to simply write the MVP then fix problems like scaling, responsive design, flexibility, integration...etc. As they are required.

Build, don't prematurely optimise

</comment><comment><USER7> Build more things :)</comment>


The New Information Age - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/the-new-information-age/

<comment><USER4> On a different note, the second Techcrunch commenter says

"Reads like a high school essay. Too long. Didn't finish. Boring. Lift your game."

Now this may be true or not. But this is definitely mean and doesn't add any real value to the conversation.

I thought FB comments are supposed to keep out mean people under the assumption that mean attacks (true or not) come from people who hide behind an anonymous name. And they wouldn't do it with real identity.

So the question is what if people will still be mean even with their real identity attached? Does it hurt more if the attack comes from a real person?

<comment><USER5> At least to me, the attack doesn't hurt any more coming from a facebook account than from anonymous. Either way I feel like a real person wrote it. In my experience, true online trolls are also true real life trolls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> where is part 2 of the video?

</comment><comment><USER7> This post is relevant - but I am inspired to write one based on this article the meta-data-sets that get created and the services which we build on them are going to be very interesting. Specifically working out the taste graph with predictive algorithms based on the data-sets of millions where you can infer interests just based on the fact that you read this article, that page and searched for that term...

\---

It started innocently enough. Everyone is on it. Everyone. In the more than 20 years since it was founded - and now - daily life just could not be managed without it. Sure, it started innocently enough. Connect with your friends, post your pics, keep up with the fam. Yeah, that was then.

It wasn't too long before they started adding features. Adding value they called it. Extending your circle. Enabling you they'd say. Yeah, in the same way a spiders web is beautiful. The pattern and symmetry, glistening like shiny gossamer art. Its beauty pulls you in - you don't realize at first as you touch it, that it sticks. No, more than sticks - you become imbued with it. The more you move it wraps around you, encasing you... entombing you. For the data-mining black widow to come and suck the marketable value right out of you, your connections... every aspect of your life is now a product.

Classified, organized, tagged, sorted, tracked, pegged, followed, poked, monetized, labeled... owned is what you are. A commodity. A small spec among 3.5 billion in the user base of the book.

That's what it was these days... just simply 'the book'.

Everyone knows - everyone is aware. They are all in the book. Not even a page, or a word either... more like a letter. A single letter. An iconographic digital hologram of the total sum of your parts - all wrapped up real nice in a uniform singular profitable little package called your user profile. Displayed and viewed and consumed and tracked billions of times over. With more than thirty trillion page views per month, the cancerous blue and white digital encapsulation of the human soul was now blazoned across innumerable screens as nearly half the worlds population interacted on the book - <USER2> than 20% of the worlds population on the book at any given moment.

A study, one of the countless to be sure, said that now more than 90% of real human interactions occurred through the book. What does that even mean anymore... real? Real human interactions? Through the book? how is that even possible.

It was no wonder that in the last few years the backlash has switched to resisting this unexpected strangle-hold on the human condition. Most never saw it coming... happily going along with every new feature update, privacy change, "enhancement". MZ was repeating himself a lot these days... except his frame of reference had gotten bigger... along with his security detail.... Where years ago, the book was likened to that which only came along to change humans interactions every 100 years... now his statements were 10 fold. MZ thinks of himself as the embodiment of the singularity... whatever that means. Some fucking fantasy of a long dead cybervisionary that couldn't recognize the makings of our current prison I'm sure. Fuck him.

Looking around looks a lot more like binary slavery than any form of singularity. None of our old problems have been solved - in fact the book has only made things worse. After it became a "platform for governance and outreach" we, people like - those who really see, knew. We knew what this meant. Game fucking over.

This era of hyper connectivity and ultra social awareness was supposed to usher in some sort of Utopian orgasm -- one in which MZ would be carried on the shoulders of the masses to stand next to fantastical human saviors like Jesus. Fictional allusions to stellar bodies be damned!

The only problem is that most of the world is too busy. Feeding their attention into the black hole of the book to notice... or care I guess.

With ubiquitous access thanks to the assimilation of the largest global fiber network a few years ago, the book was now able to offer complete and total "free" access via the acquired goog-net.

Years ago, when Athena rolled out - it was a huge success. Welcomed into every neighborhood - direct, very high speed fiber access in every home was quickly made into a "right". The model was seen as our manifest destiny, held in a 62-micron translucent hair that fed us with more 1' and 0's to each person in a single day than the entire digital output of the globe in 1999.

Such an umbilical cannot be bad right!

The only problem is we misjudged the direction of the flow!

Now, with goog-net reaching everywhere, but the book being the only lens into the tubes -- our minds are warped. We are a most technically advanced - <USER3> wholly dependent child-like civilization.

A mutant.

If its not on the platform. Not "in the book" they say -- how can it be trusted - how could it succeed? How can you expect to be relevant?

HOW CAN IT NOT BE RELEVANT!

Slaves! All of them!

This is why we act! This is what is needed. Who are we? Who the fuck were we? Not this! Surely not this. It is time....

We take action now. Rewrite this so called book.

We will not forgive. We will not forget!

<comment><USER8> Previously posted by the same user 12 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2381780>

<comment><USER7> Yep, thats why I said the post was relevant, implying I was reposting something.</comment></comment></comment>