Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to get laid off from a very  nice job, but I have a couple of projects I'd like to focus on.  Does anybody know of ANY job where I can sit at my desk and more or less hack away at what I really want to work on?
Jobs I've been looking at:
house sitting
night shift security
library desk
etc. <comment><USER2> I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day.

Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com

I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.

<comment><USER3> That's awesome. Have you ever been caught working on your side projects? What happened (if applicable)?

<comment><USER2> Actually they are cool with it. Me and one other guy request the slow windows, everyone else hates them. He does consulting for restaurants, working up business plans and processes.

<comment><USER4> Off-topic, but is there a reason they don't use ski-lift-ticket vending machines, at least at the slow windows where the per-ticket labor cost of manual vending must undoubtedly be rather high? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developmen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developments)

 _Eventually, users will be able to track their vertical and lift ride data online and purchase Alta Cards using "ticket vending machines"._

<comment><USER2> We do have them, but a lot of people either don't notice them or would prefer to buy from a person. We also sell lesson packages, redeem special discount vouchers, do will-call, and answer questions.

However, I do wonder sometimes if the offsite windows are economical.

<comment><USER4> Based on what you said in that first paragraph, I predict that in five years the average ski resort will have less than half as many employees as it does today. People may tend to prefer to deal with in-person people, but this competes against the value provided by automation and tele-help (e.g. questions can be routed to centralized, inexpensive call-centers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or, you could pick up a part time job doing what you're good at (hacking), earn as much money as a full time "mostly idle" type job, and use your _actual_ free time for your projects.

The jobs you mention can't pay much more than $1500/month, which is 30 hours at $50/hour (or much less if you bill higher). One freelance project per month will fund your hacker lifestyle, and will probably look much better on your resumé later on in life.

<comment><USER6> Where can you find a freelance gig that isn't a total rip though? I'm sure the parent doesn't want to get paid $14/hr hacking on a Windows clone for someone on ELance or Craigslist.

<comment><USER7> Very nice jobs can be found on elance if you're willing to look a little bit. When I had no reputation, I would bid on the best-value projects (e.g., $500 for an hour's work) with something like:

"Since I have no elance reputation, I am willing to work for free and receive payment after the work is completed and satisfactory."

I never got ripped off, but even if I had, so what? Most elance jobs (the ones I've done) are fixed fee, and the buyer doesn't have to know how many hours (or minutes) I spend. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was in college I worked the night shift at a television station in the tape room, and spent most of my time, four to five hours each eight hour shift, learning UNIX system administration, shell and Perl programming, or writing songs. However, last I heard, stations had started automating away most tape duties and merging the master control and tape operator jobs into one. Master control is not a "lot of downtime" kind of job--there are interruptions every few minutes, though I imagine it's seen some automation improvement since then.

System administration positions often have a lot of downtime, since if you're doing your job well, nothing is urgent and everything just hums along real pretty-like. Night watch in a hosting data center would probably be a great choice. If you're still in school, night shift in a university tech center would probably be a good choice, too (assuming it's open 24 hours...I think most large universities do have at least one center that is open all night).

Finally, have you considered contract work? This is a different model altogether. Instead of taking a job where you can half-ass it, and work on what you really want to most of the time, you take jobs every few weeks where you work your ass off, get paid a metric ass ton (like $100-$150 per hour), and finish the project in a week or two. Then you're free to hack for pleasure for a few weeks before taking on another paying gig. This has mostly been what I've done since leaving college and the television station. I usually billed $1000/day plus all expenses, if travel or whatever was involved, and often made more than my friends who worked full-time at regular jobs...it only takes a few projects for that math to work out.

<comment><USER9> Radio stations have also become increasingly automated over the past few years and mostly have no-one in the building overnight. (In days gone by, they'd sometimes employ a DJ to play music without talking through the night!)

However, there are still positions where you spend a lot of time sitting in the studio with not a lot to do. Many stations run "network" programming which is delivered via satellite or ISDN from a central hub and employ a "tech op", usually a wannabe DJ who's still in school, to oversee it and make sure the network feed and local ads or other inserts go out on air. It's a job with a lot of downtime and you're sitting in a room full of computers. What could be better?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interruptions = Bugs

I wonder if you might be more productive by changing your habits. Get up and hack for two hours before going to a job that does not require creativity, then perhaps hack a bit more in the evening as life permits. The advantage here is that you will have plenty of thinking time between execution periods and it will support the quality of your work.

I know an author that does just this, his problem though is that he is too conscientious and competent and keeps getting promoted to positions that require too much creativity. At that point he has to change jobs.

</comment><comment><USER11> Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software.

<comment><USER12> I'll be you _use_ a lot of RMS-style free software, though! Just because you don't want to contribute, doesn't mean free software isn't a good thing.

<comment><USER11> I certainly do use GPL licensed software. The GPL makes sense in various situations, but that's a complicated and long topic.

By the way, I do contribute to free software, and enjoy doing so a great deal:

<http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/>

(Unfortunately the patches/ and files/ bits aren't working due to issues with mod_rails)

My issue is with the idea that I should under no circumstances work on proprietary software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Trevor has always said that his dream job was to be a projectionist in a movie theater.

<comment><USER14> That actually kind of surprises me. I saw Trevor at CES and he looked like a proud parent over his robot.

Building robots seriously seems like it's incredibly fun and interesting.

<comment><USER15> That's my dream - robot building. I look forward to the day that "robot startups" are as trendy and commonplace as "web startups". :-/

<comment><USER13> I've been encouraging Trevor to make this happen, by making his new QA into an Apple II of robots that people can bolt their own stuff onto. So far it's not happening though: the thing only has one hole in its exterior case, for the charger to plug into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked at the University library and it was a dream. In a given 4 hour period I probably did 20 minutes of work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Front desk at a small hotel.

My wife had this job when we first got married. When she was pregnant, the hotel actually let me cover some shifts for her. It was awesome. I'd bring my laptop and once the check-in rush was over (6pm-ish), it was real quiet and I could hack away.

<comment><USER17> I worked the desk at a mid-sized hotel (50-ish rooms), and it was the worst job I've ever had. The checkin/checkout rushes were bad, but then we had to reconcile the accounts, set wake-up calls, answer the phones, etc. There definitely wasn't any time to relax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In college, I worked 2nd and 3rd shift doing tier 2 tech support at an ISP. I spent most of my time doing my CS homework. The guys working 1st shift didn't have that luxury.

Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.

<comment><USER19> This is a pretty good idea. You could probably even get a night or weekend shift in a NOC for a small to midsize ISP if you have the networking chops. It usually goes something like this: wait for alarm from monitoring, run a few circuit tests, call upstream provider so they can tell you that they are working on it, inform customer, repeat. On an uneventful night, you can end up with quite a bit of free time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a student, I worked as technical support at our libraries to help other students with computer stuff.

For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.

During "work" was when I discovered/experimented with Ruby on Rails, got interested in start ups, read a lot of PG essays, starting hacking on side projects, etc...

Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.

I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video rental places, etc. I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not take (windows stuff) when desparate. My impression is that these types of side jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough about the job to try hard not to get fired.

As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs that were more suited to my needs. Rather than be able to work on my stuff at work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.

The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses considerably.

The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part- time business" ideas. The one which I partly did and made money on was finding old books at garage sales to sell online. (Very little money.) The one which people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral" fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements. I had this pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care). People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.

Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time, and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day a week. If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest the rest of your time in your startup idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nothing food service related! Think your keyboard is dirty now? Wait until your laptop has been on the salad station for a night or two. Seriously though: The forest service has some -lonely- jobs watching for fires in the national forests. Lighthouse keeper? Night watchman? Lots of night shift jobs should be conducive to hacking.

Seriously consider also jobs that won't be conducive to hack but would be for knowledge acquisition. Get a job at MIT that comes with course audit benefits. A job that requires the hands, but allows you to consume audio lectures on your ipod. Long haul trucker that listens to mit courseware?

<comment><USER22> Some of my best times hacking have been on planes. A pal of mine used to fly around the world, selling off upgrades and miles online to cover it. He spent a lot of time reading, the slack...he could have been coding!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Finding a job that pays the bills while allowing you to hack is an interesting way to become 'ramen profitable'. That might be the ultimate way to hack the funding process...

</comment><comment><USER24> why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ...

<comment><USER25> Really? All the sysadmins I've met worked their asses off all the time. Firefighting with too much on the plate & too little time & resources to make it all happen.

The worst is usually the same people get the calls about the primary app server being down as someone's windows box having too many popups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current paycheck for the first 6 months, then you _really_ should start looking for something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on 'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the social obligation of 'having a job'?

<comment><USER9> Here's something else from (this part of) Europe: 'bollocks'. For a start, each country has its own rules on unemployment benefits and I've no idea where they pay 80% of your current pay.

Then, at least in Britain, they send you on pretty patronising courses about how to read job adverts, how to go to interviews and so on along with making you go in once a week and give proof that you've been "jobseeking". The job centre'll put you forward for any work going, regardless of whether it's a good match for your skills. If you refuse, no benefits. And for all this, you get the princely sum of £60 a week. Not enough to feed, heat and house yourself, let alone travel the globe.

It's not a free ride by any means, and if you've been through it through no fault of your own it's a pretty demoralising and humiliating system.

<comment><USER26> UK != socialist Europe, I suggest you relocate first, I can only talk about Belgium and I'm fairly sure you can game the system. Many countries do not require these monthly/weekly/whatever checks. 60% - 80% of current pay is pretty standard, but yes: every country has their own rules & after X months you really need to get a job again.

If you're looking for a moral justification, what about this: the baby-boomers set up a social security system that 'conveniently' collapses after they are long dead. The younger generations will not reap the benefits of this system, they will only carry the burden.

So why don't you take some of your tax money back and get a little retirement _right now_? Or better yet: do something productive outside of the system.

<comment><USER9> "Socialist Europe"? What on earth are you babbling about? It sounds like a fringe newspaper sold by scruffy types on street corners. Whatever your views, Europe is a capitalist society.

The UK's just as much a part of Europe as Belgium or any other European Union state--in fact, we're one of the few net contributors to the EU. I'm happy here and I'm not planning on going and, erm, sponging off the Belgian welfare state, so I'll respectfully ignore your request that I relocate (!)

I was never taught that going on benefits was a particularly socially acceptable thing to do. I'm glad the system is there for people who are genuinely down on their luck and can't find work, but personally I'd rather take a low-ranking supermarket job than go on jobseekers'. Having something to get up for in the morning makes all the difference, even if it's a rubbish job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whatever it is, _make sure_ it doesn't require an IP agreement. The ones you mentioned obviously wouldn't.

</comment><comment><USER28> Night security at some office building sounds like a dream job to me. I would do it for free and maybe I would even pay to do it since I would get more (computer) work done there than working out of my apartment.

<comment><USER29> It sounds neat, but don't underestimate the long-term dangers of sleep- deprivation. You really would need to sleep during the day. Before trying something like this, spend some time at home during work hours to make sure that you haven't been missing out on annoying neighbours and noises while you're away.

I lived in a condo once, next to a construction site. The noise started at 8 am and finished at 4pm. I ran into a woman in the elevator, crying because she couldn't sleep and she worked a night shift.

<comment><USER30> I've done night work and found it easy to sleep during the day. People who have problems almost always make the same mistake: Reverting to a night-sleep schedule on the weekend.

<comment><USER31> In the U.K. we don't have air-con. It can be hard to sleep during the summer days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've sometimes thought about how I could get paid 2x, 3x, or more. As a graduate student RA it wouldn't be that hard to get 2x. Just do my computer research at a nightshift security job. But how about: RA+security+baby sitting+baking in my portable easy bake oven!

</comment><comment><USER33> Take care of paralysed people. They need round the clock watching, so you can sit there nights, drink coffee and code. I used to do that, it made me a good amount of money (from the code I produced during that time).

</comment><comment><USER34> I used to work in a video store. Not many people used to turn up, so had a lot of time to myself. You might want to just jump into the store next door. Would be a good bet.

<comment><USER35> You mean the Quick Stop?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Dog-sitter?

</comment><comment><USER37> I sold tickets on the phone for a small-medium ticket company. Some nights were busy, but usually I had plenty of free time.

</comment><comment><USER38> Behind the desk at an Internet Cafe?

</comment><comment><USER39> Librarian +1

<comment><USER40> Maybe in a small town public library, but you will be dealing with kids all the time. Otherwise, you won't have time. I spent years working in academic libraries and you are always expected to be doing something. If you aren't working a desk job, then it's basically like any other office job. Even if you have some boring desk job you'll be expected to be filing or labeling something or working on some part of a project assigned to you. Plus, you'll be constantly interrupted. Remember, librarians take their jobs excessively seriously and expect all library staff to do the same.

Also, the title "Librarian" requires an MLS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Actually I've had that situation several times in _technology_ jobs. It's not so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large company) and hack away.

One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in. It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground.

<comment><USER42> In this case, though, you need to be careful if you decide that you want to turn around and sell your 'hacking' as a product. Because you used company resources (at-work time and equipment) to produce it, there is a strong legal precedent allowing your employer to claim ownership of your creation.

I'm in the position of working full-time and starting a company part-time, and am very careful to keep my two worlds separate, even though I'm 99.999% sure that my employer has no interest in attempting to take ownership the product I'm building.

<comment><USER5> Too true; be careful. You're probably safe using company time to _learn_ (as mentioned in the parent^2), which the company might not actually mind if you put your skills to use for them as well, but if you use it to create your own product, you're on thin ice.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple: iPhone Copy and Paste Now Working Between Safari and Mail - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5107138/iphone-copy-and-paste-now-working-between-safari-and-mail <comment><USER2> Title makes it sound like this is an official announcement from Apple, but this is just another copy-paste hack, albeit a clever one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like Steve Jobs is so strongly drawn to simplicity and control, it can become a weakness. His strong desires for simplicity and control are also sources of his success, but they can also drive him to make decisions that infuriate customers (one button mouse, no iPhone cut & paste, no MacBook Firewire).

Perhaps this will prove to be Apple's Achilles' Heel.

<comment><USER4> Hardly. The two services you're mentioning aren't ones that huge droves of people care about. MacBooks still sell without FireWire. iPhones still sell without copy & paste.

It's only a weakness if somebody else DOES implement c&p _while retaining the beauty and simplicity of the iPhone._ That's the only case in which Apple has a chance of losing. If that scenario _does_ come up, though, then Apple can take whatever that innovative solution is and use it for its own.

We've seen bulky computers with FireWire, and complex phones with copy and paste. The fact that Apple's gaining ground despite not having those specific things is a sign that Apple's vision is more important than those specifics.

<comment><USER3> The two services I'm talking about? How about the one button mouse? That's the primary example. Going against the grain _that_ far is a bit too much. As people use phones in ever more sophisticated ways, the lack of cut & paste will become an issue just as big as the one button mouse. (Of course, cut & paste is not the right way to do it. What people really want to do is to move certain pieces of information between applications. There must be a better, more elegant way to do that.)

I would agree that the vision if valid. But remember, I'm talking about an Achilles' Heel. Maybe it's a little (but exploitable) flaw in something that's overall great.

<comment><USER5> " As people use phones in ever more sophisticated ways, the lack of cut & paste will become an issue just as big as the one button mouse."

Wow, this is a tired meme. How is the one button mouse a big issue? You buy a new mouse. Hell, you don't even need to do that these days with imacs which come with a mighty mouse.

The lack of two buttons is a giant non-issue just like white space in python.

<comment><USER3> You've just proved my point. A lot of people want the two-button mouse. The Mighty Mouse is effectively a two button mouse. The one-button mouse is so undesirable people buy a different one.

It's not an issue in using a mac. I never said it was. However, it reveals a cognitive blind-spot in Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER5> Actually, you said that the one button mouse was a BIG issue. It isn't, and that was my point.

<comment><USER3> Okay, I did use the words "big issue." But I didn't mean that the way you took it. I'm a mac user since the 128k mac days as a child. It's not an actual big issue in most cases when using the OS and machine. It's _perceived_ as a big issue by those used to something different. It's not a marketing plus -- it's actually the opposite!

The fact that Jobs "stuck to his guns" for so long when it was apparent that the one button mouse was a big loser is the salient point. My point isn't that macs are crap because of the one-button mouse. It's clearly trivial in practice. The fact that Jobs kept up with that for so long, even featuring it as a key marketing point, in the face of overwhelming preferences the other way is a big potential Achilles' heel. (As I said before, it's also his strength. The trick would be to get him going against the grain in a way that actually matters.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How to share Slack channels across multiple teams - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@MVaragnat/how-to-share-slack-channels-between-multiple-teams-b999756fc9aa#.ip351vjxd <comment><AUTHOR> Maker here, happy to answer any question. Smooz.io is used daily by hundreds of teams to collaborate without email. The new feature allows up to 6 teams in the same shared channel, for even more chat fun :-)</comment>


Six programming languages built in Cambridge, MA - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/07/26/6-programming-languages-invented-in-the-hub/

<comment><USER2> C was invented at Bell Labs, which is in New Jersey.

For Scala, the article even says, "although not created in Boston".

And Logo and Scheme are dialects of Lisp.

My takeaway is that Boston is the home of LISP and APL.

<comment><USER3> Also worth noting that New Jersey is the only state to have a programming language named after it. Just saying...

<comment><USER4> And which would that be ? Just curious.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML_of_New_Jersey>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Out of the MIT Media Lab: Processing: <http://processing.org> Scratch: <http://scratch.mit.edu>

Out of Mass General Hospital: MUMPS: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS>

</comment><comment><USER7> How about adding Victor Yngve's COMIT. First string-processing language, developed at MIT in the late 1950's (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMIT>).

</comment><comment><USER8> "APL was originally popular for computer graphics programming."

define "graphics"? I suppose matrix operations and the ability to visualize them could count?

</comment><comment><USER9> Just an aside for anyone who cares about maps and city boundaries, Cambridge is not a part of Boston and never was in any shape or form. I know the Boston Innovation guys are [really] trying to stretch it with this piece, but they got what the asked for when they named themselves after a city where very little innovation takes place.

<comment><USER10> For almost everyone in the world outside of Cambridge, Boston and Cambridge are equivalent.

Even where I live in New Hampshire they're considered the same.

<comment><USER9> Sure, and Portsmouth, Worcester and Providence are all a part of Boston too, when you look at it from a financial perspective. But they're not. They are their own incorporated cities with elected governments, complete with by-laws and regulations, independent agencies, school systems, taxing, licensing and terms for residents and natives alike. Just like Bostonians and Cantabrigians. So no, not even in the remotest of terms, are Boston and Cambridge the same. They're not even in the same county.

And when you're writing a piece that even you know stretches the known boundaries of truth in order to promote your events publication, the least you can do is aim for a little bit of accuracy, even if it's just to save face. Truth isn't trivial.

<comment><USER11> I can take the Red Line from Park Street to Harvard Square. I can't take it to Worcester or Providence.

If Manhattan was its own city, it would still be associated with Brooklyn, because they're one subway stop or bridge walk apart.

<comment><USER9> You can take an MBTA train to both Worcester and Providence from Boston. The MBTA is also the authority that manages the subway system, the bus routes and other services in eastern Massachusetts. Not just Boston.

Anyone ever confuse Newark with NYC? How about Jersey City? And yes, Silicon Valley does not stretch from Sausalito to Berkeley through Oakland and SoMa down to San Jose, either. Especially when you're pushing mindless bragging rights.

<comment><USER12> Close. The MBTA owns the commuter rail but does not operate it. It is outsourced to the Mass Bay Commuter Rail Company.MBTA provides the ticketing but does not operate the trains. <http://www.mbcr.net/>

<comment><USER9> You can also take the Fung Wa from Chinatown to Chinatown for $20 but that will not keep them from being separate entities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title and focus of this post is a good example of the problem I think Boston has: they want to do research and create some languages - they don't like going into the trenches and doing the lower level stuff that builds companies. that's an extreme generalization but I think it applies at least a little.

<comment><USER14> Do you consider being John McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie to be a problem? I doubt that they do.</comment></comment>


Is the 'paperless' office here at last? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/18/paperless.office/index.html?hpt=Sbin

<comment><USER2> Interesting to see the iPad mentioned. That's what interests me about it: is it an adequate substitute for an A4 (paper) notebook?</comment>


Ask HN: Links expiring *really* fast ... - <AUTHOR>

Normally I don't mind about the "link dead or expired" message, but at the moment the links seems to be expiring really fast - sub 10 minutes in one case.
Has something changed? <comment><USER2> I would guess that HN traffic has increased. Time for pg to increase the cache size again.</comment>


A Short History Of The War On Syria - 2006-2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/09/a-short-history-of-the-war-on-syria-2006-2014.html#more

<comment><AUTHOR> Confirmed.

The website sana.sy of the Syrian Arab News Agency has been 'censored' or 'purged' from Google search results. Even after clicking through 10 pages of results, not a single one links to Sana.sy. Contrast with DuckDuckGo and Bing where it's the top result.

Google: [https://www.google.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency](https://www.google.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency)

DuckDuckGo: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=syrian+arab+news+agency](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=syrian+arab+news+agency)

Bing: [http://www.bing.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency](http://www.bing.com/search?q=syrian+arab+news+agency)

<comment><USER2> Confirmed that the site seems to be de-listed on Google, but not why...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> According to the article, Assad is a popular and beloved leader, who listened to protestors and made reforms that addressed their concerns. The Syrian people support the government, and the defections from the military to the rebels have only been a few unimportant people.</comment>


New Bain Study: Amazon as Trustworthy as Banks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/bankings-amazon-moment.aspx <comment><USER2> "Amazon as Trustworthy as Banks"

"Wells Fargo's fake-account scandal leads to credit downgrade"

"HSBC spared further US money laundering sanctions as it battles to clean up its act"

"Rabobank has been fined $369 million by the U.S. government after admitting it handled millions in illicit funds"

Well, okay then.</comment>


Working with Saved Replies on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://help.github.com/articles/working-with-saved-replies/ <comment><AUTHOR> I might well find myself copying and pasting some of the advice from Eric Raymonds "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

Some of the advice in these days of better customer service may be a bit blunt, for example "RTFM" would at best be considered not newbie friendly and at worse hostile and actively not supporting diversity.

GitHub is more public and front facing than pre GitHub software projects, and so I think that many of the advice and examples could be adapted for the GitHub model.

So, instead of "RTFM" as a canned reply, perhaps a better saved reply would be:

"Hello, thank you for taking the time to submit this issue. Many new users to the project can get started helping themselves with reading the documentation here and here or by searching StackOverflow or Bing search here and here. We recommend you have a read of these resources and if the problem persists to write a new Issue. In the meantime, we will close this Issue. Thanks again! And welcome to our amazing project"

<comment><USER2> One of the great things about StackOverflow is that it downvotes RTFM answers. The problem RTFM solves is not a technical one, it's Endless September on the channel, and the same people get tired of answering the same questions and being smug and mean and rude is more fun and fosters the sense of tribe. The William Gibson problem - that the future is not evenly distributed - is better addressed in other ways.

Sending users elsewhere is probably a bad strategy in many situations. Particularly before finding out what the real issue is in situations where having users matters.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What choice you made in your career you regret the most? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Quitting jobs and moving without having the next job lined up. I always figured I was a smart guy, I could land on my feet wherever I ended up. And that was true, but it took some time and effort to get a job that lined up with my career goals, and while that was happening I was pretty stressed out. I also feel like I've lost about a year of growth (and salary!), which is hard to let go of.

I realize that this isn't really a big revelation, but it didn't really hit home for me until I got into a real "career" \-- it wasn't such a big deal when I worked retail jobs.

</comment><comment><USER4> discovering hackernews?

but seriously, probably thinking i had to "pay my dues" before I begun my career. Thinking I wasn't good enough to get a job, and I had to spend time at Uni first. It wasn't until I was mid way through my masters before I realised that a job wasn't going to magically appear the day I graduated. I dropped out and never looked back.

Also, thinking I had to shoehorn myself into the industry by working my way up to it from tech support. That was fruitless.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not buying that Perl book at the college bookstore in 1994 and not really digging in deep when I first encountered RDBMs at about the same time. At the time I was learning grad level social science with a quantitative focus - <USER2> of statistics with SPSS. Around 2012 I started adding in HTML, PHP, Javascript, SQL, R and now working on Python. I was right on the verge of putting together the multi-disciplinary skill set that serves me well today as early as the mid 1990s.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not taking Statistics in high school. Ended up taking it in College, but found I enjoy it quite a bit and would have been able to enjoy it nearly a decade earlier.

<comment><USER7> Statistics should replace algebra II or maybe trigonometry as a high school requirement.

<comment><USER6> I think High Schools focus to much on theory and not enough on practical application to make it interesting.

They do the same for most math. Always learned math better when it was being applied to actual things I cared about personally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not learning web coding earlier. Although it wasn't a conscious choice, just something I wasn't exposed to.

</comment><comment><USER9> Taking such a long time to get my degrees. When I finally had the educational background I wanted, I found it's difficult to get those entry-level positions when you're over 35. And if you can't get those entry-level positions, it's extremely difficult to have a career in the field you want.

</comment><comment><USER10> That time I had to call a lot of SOAP APIs. Not Java SOAP, but .NET SOAP. There's a difference and I regret having had to know what it was.

</comment><comment><USER11> Accepting the first offer that came through, every time I went job-hunting.

Nearly drowned in toxic work culture..

</comment><comment><USER12> work for more than 10 years on the same company and almost with the same technology. bad mistake.</comment>


Tile38 – Realtime geofencing and geospatial index, v1.13.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tidwall/tile38/releases/tag/1.13.0 <comment><USER2> pretty awesome stuff. I really like the network protocols REST and WebSocket access. Cool that there are several clients for different languages!

</comment><comment><USER3> Saw a demo of this last week. Cool Tech!</comment>


Prezi: Create insanely great presentations online - <AUTHOR> http://prezi.com/

<comment><USER2> I saw these from a customer. Looks like a neat idea for awhile. I'm not sure what it's staying power is (sort of like animoto felt like at first)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you do mobile app developement and CI/CD without Apple Hardware - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You don't.</comment>


Mock your HTTP responses to test your REST API - <AUTHOR> http://www.mocky.io

<comment><USER2> Also, python people might be interested in <https://github.com/gabrielfalcao/HTTPretty> or (bias disclaimer) my serializer on top of requests+httpretty <https://github.com/kanzure/python- requestions> for the httpetrified decorator. It loads and mocks an expected response from a json file in your tests/.

There was a service called requests.in or something that acted like httpbin, except it gave you a unique url to query against to view multiple requests over a session. Does anyone know where that went?

<comment><USER3> requestb.in

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a nice idea, but relying on a remote service for testing makes me worry. I tend to mock HTTP responses locally, so that the tests can run when there isn't even an internet connection available.

<comment><USER3> What do you use for your local testing?

<comment><USER5> Telnet when I'm lazy or its quick, curl when I actually want to write a full harness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a post here: [http://artemave.github.io/2012/05/27/stub-like-a- surgeon-spy...](http://artemave.github.io/2012/05/27/stub-like-a-surgeon-spy- like-james-bond-with-rest-assured/) that talks about using a similar service (the BBC's REST-assured <https://github.com/BBC/REST-assured>) to aid in BDD using cucumber.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why not use SinonJS? <http://sinonjs.org/>

Same ability to mock responses and errors, but everything is local. Check your responses into git and every developer is testing the same stuff, no reliance on a 3rd party

Makes for lightning fast automatic background testing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would someone provide an example on how this tool could be used to test a REST API? I think I'm missing something here. I'm not seeing how a fake response endpoint lets me test my REST API (shouldn't my test code invoke the API and validate that the real response was correct?)

<comment><USER9> It seems to me that it isn't for testing a REST API but rather for testing something that _depends_ on one without having to deal with real integration issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you explain better than me ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Been working on something similar for local use by running nodejs to both server static files and mock API responses. <https://github.com/rco8786/apimok>

</comment><comment><USER11> For those looking for a local alternative have a look at <http://wilig.github.io/mockity/>

Full disclosure: I'm the author.

</comment><comment><USER12> I use <http://frisbyjs.com/> FrisbyJS for most of my front end API testing needs.

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.hurl.it/>

I recommend this service for this kind of testing.

<comment><USER14> Hurl is requests. Mocky is responses.

<comment><USER14> In fact, here is Mocky serving a response to Hurl: [http://www.hurl.it/hurls/18e4da3bfc0c2159abd1c8e769915c360a8...](http://www.hurl.it/hurls/18e4da3bfc0c2159abd1c8e769915c360a8de8ce/6dc5f86a8ac115dc0870e88cf260d5b7dcb49c15)

<comment><USER15> If a hurl falls in a forest, and only a mocky is around to hear it, did it happen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice idea. Are these stored as gists under my account? Can I choose to modify an existing response so it's versioned?

</comment><comment><USER17> this isn't any better than using a live server for testing.

Build a good client library for your applications to use, mock the client library and don't worry about tests failing because of availability problems.

<comment><USER3> If the live server has side effects when making the call (send an email, charge a card, etc) and you just want to test against the response headers/body, it can be very useful. A local mocking library is also good for that, but for quicker tests this is nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use mocking framework(Moq for .NET) to mock my service response and various xml responses i will save in test xml files.. Anyways, I will try to use it to test over network rather local mocking

</comment><comment><USER19> I prefer to run my own local test server to return mock responses. I built this little project, that you can install using NPM: <https://npmjs.org/package/apimocker> It's intended for sandbox development as well as automated tests. There's no UI, but you can return whatever data you want. The features are pretty basic right now, but it works well for most tests, and it's easily configured on the fly.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's a neat idea but I can't imagine I'd ever actually use this for real testing. Relying on a third party server for your tests can be a problem. We also have thousands of tests that rely on mocked REST responses, setting them up with Mocky would be a ton of work.

If Mocky could be ran onsite and had a nice API for easily generating mock responses, then I think it would be more useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an open source project, created 2 days ago. All is possible, this website is just a proof of concept. And you can fork the project to run it locally.

<comment><USER20> Yeah I realize that. I hope I didn't come across too harsh. It is a good idea, and I'd like to see it grow some more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just launched something almost exactly the same a fortnight ago - e.ndpoint.com - POST/PUT/DELETE support coming soon.

<comment><USER3> The URL scheme you're using makes it really easy to view everyone else's mocks.

<comment><USER21> Yea i'm not looking to obfuscate, I'm planning on introducing user accounts whereby people by create, save, edit, and alias their mocks. Bypassing that issue. Anonymous mocks will simply be sequential base62.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've heard good things about <http://apiary.io> on this front as well...

<comment><USER23> i'm using it on first project and it's very nice. they let you export your complete api definition to apiary.apib file which can be parsed with their github.com/apiaryio/blueprint-parser into json and used with your custom server localy. it's also nice for synchronizing between devs, when added to vcs ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is very cool. It is kind of a fiddler on the web. It is interesting that I saw something similar but with fiddler in the morning: [http://www.devcurry.com/2013/05/testing-crud-operations- in-a...](http://www.devcurry.com/2013/05/testing-crud-operations-in-aspnet- web_3.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've sent a pull request to add portuguese brazilian translation. I hope it helps! Scala is really cool :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice project! My suggestion would be adding JSON editor or JSON syntax validator for JSON responses saved.

<comment><AUTHOR> You already have a light Json editor. The Syntax validation is a very good idea, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In case anyone was wondering about licensing:

"[1]DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, December 2004

Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar firstname.lastname@example.com"

[1] <https://github.com/studiodev/Mocky>

</comment><comment><USER28> You can't mock HTTP responses, the responses mock you.

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/girliemac/6508102407/in/set-721...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/girliemac/6508102407/in/set-72157628409467125/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @misframer The app is updated in real time. So it can be some sporadic errors

<comment><USER14> Welcome to Hacker News. We don't have @replies here. We do, however, have nice friendly reply buttons. Great app, by the way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How exactly does this work? A short little tutorial would help ^.^

</comment><comment><USER30> Wouldn't it be better if it would just say "mock your HTTP responses to test your HTTP client", or "to test your HTTP client code"?

The service makes a lot of sense otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER31> This failed :(

what

Not
this

one

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice, Emacs have a mode for doing the same too: <https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el>

<comment><AUTHOR> Emacs have a REST Client, but this app is like a REST Server: Mocky serve an HTTP response, whereas RestClient send an HTTP resquest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have wanted a service like this forever! Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm occasionally getting hit with

"HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error"

when that's not what I want.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ironically, I'm seeing 500s. Great for testing my reliability in the face of errors!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes sorry for that, I didn't expect a such traffic from HN. Things will be stable in a few hours :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> E.endpoint.com

A very similar offering released a week ago on github.

</comment><comment><USER37> That's cool !</comment>


Some Users Want Terrible User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/03/25/some_users_want_terrible_user_interfaces/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IgnoreTheCode+%28ignore+the+code%29 <comment><USER2> As a former trader, I can say that Bloomberg's UI is, while not perfect, in general quite good. You can do almost everything straight from the keyboard; once you get used to it, it's quite fast. In about 30 seconds, I can calculate the yield on a mortgage-backed security, see what the Treasury market is doing today, skim a list of top headlines, and show a graph of the stock market since today's open. Try doing that with Yahoo Finance!

In that sense, it's very much in the spirit of any other command line environment. But apart from any UI issues, people continue to use it because of network effects. It's got a great messaging system that everyone uses, and it's got a common set of tools shared across the entire financial system.

Old habits die hard, too. Even though I'm no longer trading, I still have an old Bloomberg keyboard on my desk.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Just another blog post by someone who doesn't understand why. Not everything can be web 2.0'd, bubbly and made into an iPhone app.

<comment><USER4> Replace "can" with "should", and I'll happily agree with you.

I'm a vim fan, personally. The keyboard is _ideal_ for high-speed, high-skill interaction. Most GUI-centric applications fail completely in this area, where a lot of old applications had a lot of focus on it. Both is probably the best, but that's hard work and doesn't always fit with the GUI without it being cluttered for a "clean" interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks like yet another case of designers not "getting" the needs of anyone who wants to _use_ the software for any length of time.

I took a gander at the comparison on [http://www.portfolio.com/interactive- features/2007/06/termin...](http://www.portfolio.com/interactive- features/2007/06/terminals) , and the whole article just annoys me. If they could focus less on "oh dear, this isn't going to win any design award" and more on making the software more efficient to use, I am confident they would not have faced the wholesale rejection that they complain about.

The current design is _easy on the eyes_. A black background with bright text is easier on the eyes than a glaring white flashlight with some thin black text on it. (I wonder if the misconception that dark background is bad stems from print, where it is a legitimate complaint?) Fun test: try using each of black-on-white and white-on-black at 3AM with bloodshot eyes and see which one gives you a pounding headache and which one allows you to focus on your work.

The current design is _compact_ , and uses nice color-contrast techniques to group regions, while the "improved design" wastes a ton of pixels for spacing between the regions instead. Less eye-travel, less scrolling, less next-page- ing makes for more efficient (and therefore more relaxed) use.

</comment><comment><USER6> Emacs or vi won't win any design awards, yet it is the editor of choice for a lot of hackers, and not just because of machismo.

This is because (A) there is more to design and usability than _visual_ design, and (B) some systems design should be optimized for the expert user, not the general user.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if I can agree with the stick shift argument. There are benefits over an automatic transmission, and you can choose the same model of car with either transmission types. I'd equate the differences to having a settings page with defaults and then advanced user options. I like a better design than not, but I think the traders use bloomberg terminal largely for the data that it displays. I don't think that is is going to change much between the current and potentially redesigned versions.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. As far as I'm concerned, a manual transmission and an automatic transmission are completely different animals altogether. In my mind, his whole argument fell thru once the statement was made. It's like comparing a text-based shell with a GUI interface. There are trade-offs to be considered and neither of them are "better" than the other, they just have different strengths and weaknesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Pride in their ability and job security are two reasons why people may prefer such user interfaces. Some complex user interfaces may also give people the perception of having more control._

These statements are incorrect. Command line interfaces (black background, in my case green text instead of the article's yellow) often _give_ more control and are more usable than "simple" GUI ones. Especially for complex systems, it becomes unwieldy when a GUI interface tries to provide graphical settings for _every_ supported feature. There are a bajillion tabs and windows, and while the UI designer though of several brilliant one word descriptions for each settings section/tab, of course they're not completely accurate for the setting which you're looking, and you end up flipping through way to many tabs/windows.

</comment><comment><USER10> How is a black background with orange text a "blatant UI flaw"?

<comment><USER11> The fascinating thing about graphic designers is, if you use Photoshop then what do you get, a tool palette, in stark black and white, full of cryptic symbols. In other words, they tacitly acknowledge that for a busy professional, learning a "difficult" interface is fully worthwhile. Yet they continue to peddle "design" as if this isn't the case...

<comment><AUTHOR> In the case of Photoshop I think it's more that an established system with a large userbase can't significantly change its UI without significant negative feedback (see Office Ribbon).

The pallet interface is also what we're used to. Most people, were they to set out to build a pixel pusher app, would start with a basic pallet UI. Unless of course they were specifically aiming to get away from that.

Also, Photoshop is a perfect example of "The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> BBG's GUI is not pretty, but the real reason people use it, and pay a hefty fee at that, is because it is full of things people need, and that's an understatement.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not just UIs. I was in the closed beta for a computer game (friend was a dev), and one of the goals of the developers was to lower the barriers to entry for new players to get into the genre. Nearly universally, the self- described 'hardcore' players decried the changes as dumbing down the game and removing the skill barriers between new and old players. In fact, some of those changes were UI upgrades, like making the item shop easier to navigate. While that one was more generally accepted, there was still a vocal minority that thought that noobs being able to easily purchase the items they had earned would lower the competitive aspect of the game.

While there's often an initial loud and forceful resistance to change, it dies down as people get used to the new system, except for a few die-hards. In the example above, it took about two months for the community to come around and realize that removing some obvious pain points let the players focus more on strategy and whatnot. Of course, it helps that the new system is clearly superior to the old system. Microsoft Office's Ribbon, on the other hand, is not clearly superior, so people still bitch about it years after it was introduced. I happen to think it's superior in theory, but the implementation was botched a bit (menu names and organization not intuitive), so it's not a clear upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the screenshot here: <http://uxmag.com/design/the-impossible-bloomberg- makeover> I don't see any blatant UI flaw. It looks like a number of unix tools I use on a daily basis.

Is anyone going to suggest replacing "top" with a friendlier UI?

<comment><USER15> > Is anyone going to suggest replacing "top" with a friendlier UI?

`htop` is that better, friendlier UI...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity._

I've noticed relentless attacks on wall street portraying them as dumb people who do simple work but are just ruthless and greedy as hell. Of course they're greedy risk takers, and sometimes that causes problems. However, financial models can get fairly complex and require intelligence to navigate and utilize.

I was listening to NPR post-Haiti earthquake, and they were interviewing this woman who was basically borrowing money, going to the Dominican Republic to buy goods, giving them to stores in Port Au Prince, and then collecting the money two weeks later. She also charged the shopkeepers interest. When the earthquake hit, all of her goods were destroyed in the shops, so there was no way she could repay her debts.

Anyway, the radio hosts kept harping on the fact that she had only a middle school education, and was doing "extremely sophisticated math, the type that people on wall street get paid millions for". Now, I very much respect what that woman (and she was working off her debt post earthquake), but I thought it was incorrect and misleading to bring in wall street.

There are a lot of other examples, these are just two.

</comment><comment><USER16> Shouldn't this entry link to one of the original articles instead of to some random, er, symbiont? Sorry if I'm missing something here; I'm the new kid.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but no reason to fling insults around. Linking to articles you enjoyed and commenting on them is not some kind of despicable act. It's, in fact, quite normal.

<comment><USER16> I didn't mean to be insulting, it's just that I don't see how this particular instance of blurb-cum-comment page adds a lot of value. I'd have thought it would have been more helpful and polite to skip the intro and link to the full article straight away... but then again I'm new here, which is why I asked.

Does HN encourage this kind of redirection so that the blurb linked to may serve as an executive summary or tl;dr or whatever you want to call it? Does HN encourage this kind of redirection to elicit submissions from people with blogs to draw attention to?

<comment><USER17> In general the original source should be linked. Certainly in this case.

No reason, though, to call the author of the submitted article a "symbiont". You could do that if the author of the submitted article is also the submitter (not the case here), but simply submitting the original article would probably be more appropriate.

<comment><USER16> I see. Thanks for answering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm quite annoyed when I get a GUI with no keyboard shortcuts; it just doesn't occur to some developers that being able to use the keyboard is what allows advanced users to become very fast at using the software. Full on command line capability for very advanced users is great, but rare.

I remember a UI I was given to test for controlling a custom video display; the operator needed to be able to update things very quickly, but there were zero keyboard shortcuts defined, so everything had to be done by move-click- type move-click-type. Keyboard shortcuts hadn't even occurred to the developer as being important, despite the speed requirement.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't know anything about Bloomberg, and I'm willing to bet that as a niche product aimed at high trained people, it might not be too bad.

But I agree in principle with this article. You can see it sometimes in the Linux/FLOSS world. People decry anything that means the average user can use it.

"But you should know how to set up networking on the command line!"

People like that, they like jumping through hoops. They think sensible defaults are a bad thing. They think you should have to read a 1,000 page manual before doing something simple.

<comment><USER20> It's actually not about jumping through hoops, it's simple math. Doing a command in a terminal is O(1). Everything is at your fingertips immediately and can be combined efficiently with everything else. Doing something in a GUI is O(n), you have to dig through menus and tabs to get at what you want, and the result is in a form that can't be recombined or filtered or modified at will.

The trade-off is that the command line takes a lot of getting used to in terms of memorizing commands etc. If you don't know any Unix commands, the terminal is almost completely useless unlike a GUI. For beginners, a GUI is a good way to explore and get a feeling for how to do things because GUIs explain themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If human factors efficiency was the only factor driving interface design, we'd all be using Dvorak keyboards.</comment>


The German Tank Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.eadan.net/blog/german-tank-problem/ <comment><USER2> This is only the toy version of the actual problems solved by the Allies, which were more nuanced, and involved reasoning about the tank manufacturing pipeline. The write-up [0] doesn't go into the math but makes an interesting read.

[0] [https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2280189](https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2280189)

<comment><USER3> How accurate did the allies' model turn out to be when compared to the real number?

<comment><USER2> Quite well, see pg. 86 for a plot of all predictions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> More about Frequentist and Bayesian analysis can be found here:

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

Matter of fact...

        According to conventional Allied intelligence estimates, the Germans
        were producing around 1,400 tanks a month between June 1940 and September 1942.

        Applying the formula below to the serial numbers of captured tanks, the number
        was calculated to be 246 a month. After the war, captured German production
        figures from the ministry of Albert Speer showed the actual number to be 245.

<comment><USER5> I was actually surprised that MVUEs and the fellow point estimators are called frequentist (though it makes sense). In school we always referred to them as non-Bayesian, at the same time frequentist always seemed like a dirty word to us students so maybe that's why

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How ironic that the nation that led the world in the frontiers of maths in the 19th century completely missed the boat in the applied math of signals intelligence in WWII. I'm referring to the tank serial numbers and the lack of care in Enigma codes, except by the Kriegsmarine, but even they eventually lost a code book to the allies, which they apparently considered an impossibility.

<comment><USER7> They had a lot of opsec problems. There's a great story about how using "cool" codenames instead of random ones bit them in the ass.

It's nearly impossible for a bomber to navigate long distances in the dark over a blacked-out country, so the Germans came up with a radio navigation system involving beams transmitted from the mainland to intersect over the target, which the British figured out how to jam; the Germans came up with another nav system, and the Brits eventually jammed that one too.

The British knew the Germans would be trying to find yet another way. They'd learned from Enigma decrypts about a new device called _Wotan_. One researcher looked up the word, learned that it was the name of a one-eyed god, and concluded that the new system would use a single transmitter with a rangefinding transponder aboard the bomber, instead of multiple beams like the previous ones. Starting from there, they had a countermeasure online and ready to go before the Germans even _deployed_ Wotan. When the Nazis realized they'd been outmaneuvered from the start, they gave up on radio-guided bombing completely, at least against Britain.

<comment><USER8> We also caught every single German spy and turned them all (iirc it was all) but didn't know we'd got them all till after the wars conclusion.

British intelligence was pretty impressive during WWII.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, some of the German spies were pretty bad at their jobs. Josef Jakobs stands out as a man who was just not a good spy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Jakobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Jakobs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting article, though I think it incorrectly leaves the reader thinking that there is some interesting informating hidden in the average spacing of the numbers. In fact, all you need to know is that maximum observation and the number of observations. Once you simplify the average spacing goes away.

If M is the maximum serial number of N is the total number of observations, using the formula in the post:

        M + (avg. spacing) = M + M / N - 1 = (N + 1) / N * M

To me that gives a more clear picture of what the unbiased estimator is doing: inflate the maximum value by a factor that limits towards one as the sample size grows.

<comment><USER11> If you just assume that the sample mean = the population mean, then you get the right answer, at least for this example. I don't see why the article fools around with the maximum at all - isn't the maximum a much more noisy statistic than the mean?

<comment><USER12> The range matters – had they found 10 serial numbers between 100000 and 101000, would the mean still be a meaningful estimate of the production rate? In this case, the author just tacitly assumes the minimum to be zero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For anyone else interested in WW2 reverse engineering and design etc., [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF- Ufapu8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8) "The secret war" is a huge documentary covering british efforts to counter german electronic warfare and V-weapons.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why didn't they use randomized and scrambled serial numbers? Sort of like what Amazon does to their order numbers. I know it can still be cracked but serially numbering military equipment is not very smart. I was setting up a Shopify store the other day and it doesn't allow for a lookup table to be used for order numbers. I don't want competitors to know that I've sold so many X items. Same thing with Squarespace and Square e-commerce stores. It blows my mind that a multi-billion dollar ecom giant has not implemented despite of forum posts and requests from users.

<comment><USER15> World War II was (at least one of) the first industrialized war. So the whole situation was genuinely novel to most participants.

Additionally, the German army command didn't think that way. Where the US relied on overpowering by materiel dominance, and the Soviets fought and won through unimaginable human sacrifice, the considerable initial success of the German army was based on better, smarter tactics, individual leadership, bravery, ruthlessness, etc. The leadership assumed they'd be able to win the war that way, even when the war had turned into a much more industrial operation.

You can see that in operations such as the Battle of the Bulge, the war in Normandy, and most importantly in the the Russian campaign.

This is of course over-generalizing, but I believe the general mode of thinking was there, and that'd explain the lack of attention on such details.

<comment><USER16> Don't underestimate Soviet industrial capabilities during the war. The Soviets produced over 58K T-34 type tanks compared to Germany producing 37K (PzIII through Pz6).

<comment><USER17> Though a substantial part of the steel used to make those tanks came from USA. As did much of the trucks and other equipment used by Soviets.

I recall seeing actual numbers (proportion of American steel in Soviet production), but couldn't find them, does someone have a source?

Anyway, e.g. this article talks about it:

[https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03/14/lend-lease-how- ameri...](https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03/14/lend-lease-how-american- supplies-aided-the-ussr-in-its-darkest-hour_575559)

<comment><USER18> At the point of German-Soviet conflict, the US had about six times the steel production of the USSR, six times the iron production, eight times the oil production, and three to four times the coal production. It definitely wouldn't be surprising if US steel was a large share of Soviet figures.

The scale of resources delivered to prop up the Soviets was extraordinary, including what the British sent them.

In just 3 1/2 years the British sent them[1]:

3,000+ Hurricanes aircraft, 4,000+ other aircraft, 27 naval vessels, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 1,212 Universal Carriers and Loyd Carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines, 1,474 radar sets, 4,338 radio sets, 600 naval radar and sonar sets

And the US sent them:

427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel,[32] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production

Beyond Russia also notes:

"The USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies"

The notion of sending a country 375,000 trucks and 1,900 locomotives in just three years, is incredible to think of today.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend- Lease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease)

<comment><USER19> The Soviets repaid the debt with unimaginable human losses: 25-30 MILLION war dead.

80 percent of all German military casualties occurred on the Eastern Front.

Just think about those numbers.

<comment><USER9> While the Soviet Union lost a huge number of people, the 25-30 million dead is an inflated estimate because it counts people living in areas that were conquered by the Soviet Union. Polish people by and large do not appreciate being lumped in with the people who had invaded them the year before.

<comment><USER17> And quite many of the dead of course died with a bullet from behind, or in slave labor camps run by Soviets themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The job interview version: If you are being interviewed for a position by engineers who have their employee ids (serially allocated) on their badge find the number of employees from those ids assuming all engineers are equally likely to be on the panel of 8.

<comment><USER21> I have looked at my payroll check numbers from contracting firms to see how they're doing as a business. If the interval between check numbers drops in a month, I have a good idea that there aren't as many people working there anymore.

<comment><USER22> I worked for a big company and we used to put bug numbers in our change releases. We were told to stop doing this, as some customers would see that their bug would appear to have been given a lower priority when they saw lower numbers coming in first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> See also Doomsday Argument.

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

<comment><USER24> Take a silly premise, get a silly argument and a really silly conclusion.

Confounding question: 1000 years ago, would this argument look any different? Answer: mathematically speaking, it would not. In fact, far more humans have been born than you could have predicted using this method. Conclusion: the argument is flawed.

<comment><USER23> The people living a 1000 years ago indeed could have used the same argument to show that they should be 95% certain to be in the last 95% of all humans to be ever born, and history indeed showed that this was not the case; the dice fell on the other 5% possibility for them and the population increased more than 20x.

However, the argument will still give the correct prediction for most humans that try to use it. Just not for the few that were in the special position to be born early in the sequence of all humans. The argument essentially tells you that you have no reason to believe that you are also in that special position.

<comment><USER25> You are trying to _predict_ the length of the sequence of all humans, so you have no way to know whether or not you are 'early in the sequence'. You can't use the number you are trying to predict as an input to your prediction.

The tank problem doesn't tell you how many tanks Germany will go on to build - it just tells you how many they have already built.

'Good news! The war is almost over! The chances are these tank serial numbers all fall among the last 95% of the tanks Germany will ever produce!'

<comment><USER23> The difference is that the german tank sample can only be drawn from the pool of existing tanks so far. But when you consider your own birth, that's a sample out of the pool of all the humans, including future ones. Because future humans can also ponder their own place in the sequence, and where they find themselves is distributed uniformly over the sequence of all humans.

To apply the doomsday argument to tanks, we need to fix the sampling. It won't work for allies grabbing german tank samples. We have to think from the point of view of the tank; say a copy of your consciousness is being uploaded to an army of tanks. If you wake up as tank #734, _could_ there eventually be millions of tanks? Maybe so, but there's only a 5% chance that you are one of the first 5% tanks, so there's a very good chance that there will be less than 734*20 tanks in total.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This all seems to assume the tank serial numbers would be captured at one moment in time ("captured 15 of these tanks uniformly at random.") But in fact the tank shells dribble in over time which biases the gap, the gaps at the highest numbers are going to be greater. Earlier tanks have had many more chances to be destroyed or captured. So using average gap is clearly not going to give the best estimate. If you restrict yourself to tanks from the latest large battle, that will cancel out the dribble effect though.

</comment><comment><USER27> FWIW, this is part of why Amazon's product identifiers (ASINs) are obfuscated the way they are

<comment><AUTHOR> People have used a similar strategy to estimate iPhone production [0].

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2008/oct/08/ipho...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2008/oct/08/iphone.apple)

<comment><USER28> There's a zillion things you can estimate this way. A lot of sites use sequential cookies, user IDs, etc. Until about a decade ago UPS tracking numbers were sequential for each shipper which made it trivial to estimate output for online shops. Apple invoice numbers used to be dense and sequential and you only needed the number to retrieve the invoice. The IMEI is actually just about the worst way to have estimated iPhone sales in 2008; at that time you could literally have crawled Apple's website for every invoice whether sold online or in stores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Since no one else commented on that yet; I just wanted to say that I like the simple layout OP is using.

Not much clutter & straight to the point. Loads fast and it's under 630KB.

Could certainly be improved but it's nice not having to load >25MB just to read an article.

</comment><comment> d-- This is also a good (applied, with simple code) example of the use of probabilistic programming. I can't get myself to read full books, but somehow this simple example gave me some intuition and additional pointers to follow.

</comment><comment><USER30> Related from 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095178)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517882)

2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670065)

</comment><comment><USER31> It depends on how you intend to 'score' the estimate.

Are you looking for the answer that is the 'most likely', or one that has the 'lowest least squared error', or maybe one that is 'unbiased' (mean error)?

[http://datagenetics.com/blog/march22014/index.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog/march22014/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> I recommend Think Bayes by Allen Downey if you want to study more. It's a free book available online. [http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkbayes/thinkbayes.pdf](http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkbayes/thinkbayes.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER33> "the Germans, being Germans, had numbered their parts in the order they rolled off the production line"

Probably in today's world this is racist or nationalist or something. But (as someone of German descent) I have to admit it's funny.

</comment><comment><USER34> I remember studying this problem in the context of anonymity a few years back, defining immeasurability as the property whereby an adversary cannot distinguish between different node counts, for example. The tank problem is related to mark recapture techniques for animal population size estimation. Shameless plug,

[http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr- get.cgi/2...](http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr- get.cgi/2011/MSC/MSC-2011-06.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice write up.

Little bit of a funny though: Note how num_tanks ~ Unif(max(captured),2000) was defined, so you already have p[ parameter | data ]. Isn't this already a posterior?

I get however how if you had the r.v.s num_tanks ~ Unif(M,2000), observed | num_tanks ~ Unif(1,num_tanks), M some constant, that you could find a posterior distribution num_tanks | vector<observed> by first finding the joint via E[ 1[num_tanks < t]P[observed | num_tanks] ]

</comment><comment><USER35> Given the praise for Bayesian methods here, I'm surprised the author didn't discuss the Bayesian solution. See [http://isaacslavitt.com/2015/12/19/german- tank-problem-with-...](http://isaacslavitt.com/2015/12/19/german-tank-problem- with-pymc-and-pystan/) for a similar exposition.

<comment><AUTHOR> I implement the Bayesian solution in pymc3 at the end [0].

[0] [https://www.eadan.net/blog/german-tank- problem/#probabilisti...](https://www.eadan.net/blog/german-tank- problem/#probabilistic-programming)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> More impressive than using modern tools is that people in WW2 figured this out and modeled it on paper using slide rules.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually fairly straightforward to derive the estimators by hand [0]. It's just a bit tedious to do in a blog post.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_uniform_distribution#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_uniform_distribution#Estimation_of_maximum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Very interesting. Especially the three links and in particular

[https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic- Programmin...](https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers)

</comment><comment><USER38> Why call it probabilistic programming? It is bayesian inference with mcmc (or am I missing something).

</comment><comment><USER39> Moral of the story: Don't auto-increment serial numbers :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> Was there only one tank factory?

<comment><USER41> No but each tank also had a manufacturer code, so this technique still worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Seeing that it's a uniform distribution, let's start out with assuming our sample mean (the average serial number we find) has the same distribution as the true mean (the actual number of tanks in existence). If this is true, then:

2 x mean

should be an unbiased estimator of the true mean. But because we are probably under sampling the extremes, we could use the Bessel correction:

1/(n-1) x summation_{i=1}^n(sample_i)

I would guess this comes out to a better estimation than what the article says.

Bessel's correction might be a bit of overkill, since it's intended to work with normal distributions. But I still suspect it comes out to a better estimation that what the blog post says.

<comment><USER11> I thought the same, and tried it. The mean sample mean after 10 million runs is 500.47, which is very close to the true mean, 500.5. Bessel's correction is not correct here - it's effectively multiplying by n/(n-1), so your estimate would be 536. Bessel's correction is made for estimating true _variance_ using a sample, not for estimating true mean.

<comment><USER42> Yes of course, the mean is the first moment and a Bessel correction would be inappropriate. Now I feel stupid. The mean calculated by sum(p_t x_i) or 1/n sum(x_i) is already the best linear unbiased estimate. Maybe we can't get better than twice the mean?</comment></comment></comment>


TechCrunch: Is Spotplex a better Digg? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/28/exclusive-is-spotplex-a-better-digg/ <comment><USER2> It's basically Digg + an ad hoc reputation system. The good news is that it will eliminate most linkspam. The bad news is that it will filter out a lot of insightful content. The systemic design rewards the people who post every single day, rather than those who post the occasional great piece. The reason is that if you only post occasionally then it's very hard to build up a following, unless you write for a techy audience who all use RSS or you make Digg or Slashdot regularly. Instead of encouraging people to speak up when they have something valuable to say, it seems to be encouraging almost the opposite. [insert joke about my comments here].

I do, however, predict that this site will have a lot of stories with really awesome headlines.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spotplex seems to be down currently, so I haven't been able to fully explore the site. However, based on the Techcrunch coverage, it seems like this will ultimately be just another content suggestion site. I like the innovative way of sourcing stories, but at the end of the day, it will just be another wall for news to echo off of. If a story makes it to the front page of Spotplex, there's a good chance we'll see it on Digg. And then Reddit. And so on.

However, Spotplex will ultimately garner a different type of reader base, so it should provide some variety from that standpoint. Not to mention, now we're getting one step closer to our news feeders becoming "self aware."

</comment><comment><USER4> Holy Crap. I can't stand that every div in Spotplex is pulling some other Ajax thing down. I had spinny indicators whirling at me like I was in a land of pinwheels.

And when I went in, the first 3 links to stuff was just some test posts or spam.

Answer: No.</comment>


Are night owls generally more intelligent than other people? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Are-night-owls-generally-more-intelligent-than-other-people

<comment><USER2> Good news. What I thought were lousy sleep habits actually mean that my Fields Medal should be turning up any day now.

<comment><USER3> Paul Erdös quote:

 _A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems._

<comment><USER4> A more modern variant is "A computer programmer is a device for turning coffee into bugs." -- Bram Moolenaar

<comment><USER5> drink coffee. create bugs faster. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was an article posted to HN some time ago that claimed that being a Night Owl or Morning Lark isn't an intrinsic disposition so much as a lifestyle choice. Does this mean I can choose to stay up later and I'll get more intelligent?

Claim: [http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm#Lark- owl%20misco...](http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm#Lark- owl%20misconception)

HN post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207945>

<comment><USER7> Anecdotal evidence: I swap between the two, it just takes a creative sleep pattern, I had a strange schedule last year due to the layout of my courses, so some days I'd stay up till 4 sleep till 2, and other's I'd sleep at 11 and wake at 7:30. I guess my IQ last year was sinusoidal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly, this post, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488225> talked about how morning people rule the worlds.

So the conclusion is - less intelligent people rule the world.

Of course, I always take IQ score with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER9> From what I have seen of history, the most intelligent people (from what we have been able to tell) are _never_ a regular part of the mainstream. They only dabble occasionally.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about that, Jefferson, Einstein and many of the members of the Royal society was quite involved with politics and society.

<comment><USER11> Are you saying Jefferson and Einstein are mainstream? That is clearly not the case. Their popularity is, but their actions were from from it. Hell, just LOOK at Einstein!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I interpreted night owl as an actual owl and hilarity ensued. More seriously though I have thought about this issue from an evolutionary perspective and in social animals it makes sense for a certain part of the population to be nocturnally inclined. If everybody wants to sleep at night who's gonna watch the mouth of the cave?

<comment><USER13> The more intelligent ones?

<comment><USER14> Perhaps it takes a bit more "intelligence" to keep one's attention focused for long periods on the kinds of subtle clues that one would first get of danger out in the dark beyond the cave.

And it could be a mutually reinforcing thing, in one direction, the higher IQ provides the right skills to form thoughts that keep the listening-&-watching game interesting longer and that interest gives one personal motivation to stay up. In the other direction, groups who delegated this job to those with higher IQ did better; as those members are better able to tease the right danger signals out of the noises in the dark. I.e. do you want the smart guy or the idiot to watch for the wolves as you sleep? I want someone at least as smart than all the wolves put together.

Personally speaking, I know my most creative schemes (leave aside the question of paranoid or not) for attacking/robbing a house all came as I sat listening to the sequences of noises from outside the house... trying to determine if I needed to use the flashlight or yard lights to confirm/dispel danger, weighing the benefits against giving my attention/position away to anyone who might be out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not too sure this has a lot of weight:

When I was in college there are far more might owls than early morning risers. Out of a 100 people 80 are probably night owls (some of them might just end up partying the whole time). So there is an inherent bias there, because there are more nightowls than 'early morning risers'. Which leads to the conclusion in a sample of 100 if 10 of them are intelligent: then obviously 8 are night owls. I would personally never judge a person's intelligence on this factor (even though I am a night owl myelf).

<comment><USER16> When we say "night owl", it is fair to assume we mean someone that would stay awake late into the night without any kind of social stimulation. Nobody will be tired if they're going to a party with tons of people and loud music, but most people will eventually get tired if they are alone. Night Owls usually enjoy the deep solitude and quietness of the night.

<comment><USER17> "Nobody will be tired if they're going to a party with tons of people and loud music"

I disagree, introverts (like myself and probably others here in HN) find social situations very tiring.

<comment><USER18> Large parties with a bunch of strangers aren't the only form of social situation. When I was in college, I had a mostly regular group of friends that I'd hang around with and chat politics/philosophy/whatever till late in the might. Regularly to 2 AM, sometimes to 4 AM. These days, I spend most of my evenings alone and naturally go to sleep around 12:30 to 1:00 AM if left to my own devices. I'm definitely more of a night-owl and an introvert, but close proximity to friends, as I had in college, I would stay up real late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is related to the earlier submission

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492124>

to an article from Psychology Today

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200911/intelligence-...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200911/intelligence- the-evolution-night-owls)

which seems to assume this as fact, starting:

        Night owls are smarter than other people,
        and now we may know why.

</comment><comment><USER20> One of the cited sources is Satoshi Kanazawa. I really like Satoshi and he has an excellent blog on Psychology Today.

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific- fundament...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific- fundamentalist)

</comment><comment><USER21> may be they are so bored with the world that they'd rather live apart from it ?

<comment><USER9> I am a night owl because the evening is the best time to pursue things of personal interest, and when I am on to something really interesting, sleep seems boring and useless in comparison.

Unless I know I have to get up by X hour tomorrow for something important, I will then proceed to stay up until I can't perform physically (e.g. I can't solder because my hands are shaking, or I can't read because my eyelids weigh 50lbs each)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been seeing quora show up on HN more and more lately. Seems to be gaining steam.

<comment><USER23> They have probably started to work at night...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Those studies do seem to indicate so. However, they do not take into account multiple other factors that could make an individual wanting to, consciously or not, become a _night owl_. The same is true for all a person's preferences, although we don't have enough theoretical nor practical knowledge on the topic. Also, the way they are phrased, particularly the one by Kanazawa and Perina, seem to indicate a causal link between the two states. Correlation does not imply causation. Furthermore, how many studies indicate the opposite point? I'd be interested in a comparison of results.

</comment><comment><USER25> How unfair to post this so late! (3am EST)

<comment><USER26> Psh, the night is just barely getting started out here on the West Coast!

<comment><USER27> Tell me about it. I've been trying to get to sleep by 1am so I can get up and out in the morning to go running before the Scottsdale heat is overly oppressive. But even when I'm physically tired, I just want to stay up and hack on one ... more ... thing.

Would that I had that same drive at 9am. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can believe owls are more intelligent than most people.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can the stats be like this because generally great engineers _can_ chose their time?

</comment><comment><USER30> If you stayed up as late as I do, you would already know the answer to that question.

</comment><comment><USER31> My question: Does forcing oneself to get up early lead to stupidity?

<comment><USER32> It does for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If staying awake is an effort for them, then yes, they generally are going to be more intelligent because they are dedicating more than the rest of the population, on average.

</comment><comment><USER34> No. Night owls get more time do perfect their skills while others are asleep (no distraction).

<comment><USER14> It provides a good opportunity to self-censor the more screwy ideas too. Just show people the little program you finished around 2am, and no one need ever know about that 3am idea to revolutionize the world of juggling using hairdryers. Just put everything back where you found it before they get up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's works only for amateurs - mature people love to wake up with sunrise and emptiness and clearness of an early morning. ^_^

<comment><USER36> Why would you want to _wake_ into sunrise and early morning, if you could _wait_ for them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yes.</comment>


New iPads come with special, multi-carrier "Apple SIM" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/new-ipads-come-with-special-multi-carrier-apple-sim/?comments=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone has an idea how this works? Did Apple become an MVNO?</comment>


Show HN: CreatorPool, a database of bloggers interested in sponsorship - <AUTHOR> https://creatorpool.net <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

Was hoping to get your thoughts on CreatorPool, a tool i've built to help product makers discover online content creators interested in sponsorship. Right now, I allows creators to sign up manually and I also analyze specific domains to scrape creators that might be interested.

The tool is based around the ability to simply search the content creator database and export creators that you're interested in.

Any thoughts/comments/critiques would be greatly appreciated!</comment>