We were raised by the Valley - <AUTHOR> http://blog.teambox.com/raised-by-the-valley

<comment><USER2> This struck a chord with me. I grew up in rural Scotland, learning to program my MSX and the BBC Micros they had in our school. I picked up a lot of 'tech culture' from Byte magazine, which would sporadically appear in our local newsagent. Although I have been to the US a few times now, I've only been to the valley once, but walking through Palo Alto listening to everyone around talking tech I had the strangest feeling that in some way I felt 'at home'.

<comment><USER3> Please move here, but remember there can be only one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting. I'm just out of college and from central Massachusetts, a place that I can best describe as "incredibly boring" (but with pretty good public schools).

However, Silicon Valley doesn't appeal to me at all. San Francisco? Sure, that's appealing, but it's not really "the Valley" (correct me if I'm wrong here). Even if it is, it's still not as appealing as Boston/Cambridge or New York.

I've been to the (non-SF) Valley. To me, it seems like home, but a little denser and with more money. There's still a lot of sprawl. You have to drive most places (I have very little interest in owning a car currently - I don't have $20000 on hand and I'm not interested in debt). BART seems kind of, well, sad, compared to the MTA or MBTA. I guess there's the advantage of being able to easily bike year round, but I would still need to bike a lot further.

It's a _nice_ place, I certainly won't debate that. And I would appreciate a place where me saying "Cocoa" didn't bring chocolate to most peoples' minds. But I don't think it's for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is a load of valley sensationalism if I've ever read it.

This culture is not exclusive to the valley at all; you're not "coming home" to some exclusive club for a group of people who were shunned by the rest of the world. This culture and the types of people involved exist elsewhere in the world (in very large quantities, much of the time).

You can claim LucasArts as valley, sure, that's fine. However, don't claim IRC, don't claim Linux, and don't claim the Anarchists Cookbook of all things. You got to where you were because you had persistance and some level of dedication that enabled you to build something remotely interesting - this is not the doing of a given area in the world.

I love technology and startups as much as the next guy, but I really do think a more critical view of the valley and the surrounding tech scene is necessary. This kind of blind evangelizing for the valley also does nothing for other location's tech scenes.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is kind of odd for me to read considering I actually grew up in the Valley - San Jose, to be precise - and have been working in high tech companies since I started high school. It's weird to me to think that the place where I grew up might also be the best place for me to start my career - I understand most peoples' lives aren't like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's kind of strange, but when I read ESR's "Portrait of a Hacker", I recognized many traits in myself that I had independently developed, many prior to getting into the software world online.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would got to the Valley for a while if it didn't mean Visa trouble.

<comment><USER9> Getting a turist visa shouldn't be that much of a problem.

But yeah, moving to the Valley is kinda like NASA going to Mars: quite a lot talk is going on and you keep getting your hopes up but in the end it just isn't feasible yet.

Chile on the other hand...</comment></comment>


In Search of the Valley documentary now streaming free - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Iz1pCZNKF0

<comment><AUTHOR> As featured on TechCrunch, RWW etc. back in the day. I'm the director if you have any questions.

<comment><USER2> What would you say has changed the most since then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, at the time I was told by one prospective interviewee that, aside from Google, there wasn't anything interesting going on in the valley. That's because it was still recovering from the dot com boom/bust.

Aside from being not true - sometimes the most interesting things happen when money is scarce - I found the place to be in a very reflective mood, which benefited the documentary and I think I managed to capture quite well on film.

We finished editing in 2006, by which time TechCrunch, whom I now write for, was founded, based on the web's second coming and the beginning of the startup 'renaissance' (if we can call it that) we see today. And, as the film concludes, Silicon Valley is everywhere now.</comment></comment></comment>


5,200 Days in Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/5200-days-in-space/383510/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Interesting to note: whenever the ISS comes up in European or Russian media, it is presented as an international, collaborative scientific enterprise. When it comes up in American media, it is presented solely as an American achievement. The same is true for the coverage of all other international scientific collaborations (the ISS being one of the greatest example there is, alongside ITER).

Most Americans who know about the ISS aren't even aware that the ISS is not a NASA-only, American project. Ask around you, you'll see.

Case in point in this article:

 _" It's a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. But chances are, most ninth-graders don't know the name of a single active astronaut—many don't even know that Americans are up there. We've got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a stunning achievement, and it's completely ignored."_

<comment><USER3> _Most Americans who know about the ISS aren 't even aware that the ISS is not a NASA-only, American project. Ask around you, you'll see._

If you are willing to do a randomized survey to prove or disprove your claim, than I'll believe the survey.

I don't take personal experience or anecdote or impression of what people believe about people as evidence.

<comment><USER4> If anyone really cares, it looks like you could do it for about 10 cents per data point:

[http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing](http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/pricing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> so $150B/5200 = 28MM . So $1.2 million per hour. and for 3 occupants, $400,000 per hour each.

I am sure the experience is awesome, but i wonder if space could have been done better.

<comment><USER6> Space could certainly _be_ done better (I think the key advance would be the ability to upload human minds to solid-state substrate - that would make a lot of the problems of living in space dramatically easier), but it doesn't follow that it could _have been_ done better. It's part of life that we have to try inefficient ways of doing things in order to learn what we need to know before we can figure out the efficient ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dumb question.

The right question is: Why people still want to get out of the planet? Because they are people. And because of other people.</comment>


Android, and How It Will Take Over the World - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5397215/giz-explains-android-and-how-it-will-take-over-the-world <comment><USER2> Android is really great for competition. All these handset makers can compete with each other on pricing, features, performance and design and not worry about the OS or developing their own third party application library. I don't think Android will fully Windows-ize the handset market though because both Apple and RIM are very strong. It could go 20/20/20 with the last 20% being a mix-mash of WebOS, Windows Mobile, etc. I think Nokia will jump on the Android train sooner or later. Maybe Palm as well. The way things are heading I'm not sure Windows Mobile is going to even exist in a few years. I think it's more likely Microsoft will make a first party Zune Phone and WM will be forgotten.</comment>


PHP Strict Typing - <AUTHOR> https://ttmm.io/php/strict-typing/ <comment><USER2> A type violation is a run-time exception, not a compile-time error? Cannot believe this.

<comment><AUTHOR> PHP isn't a compiled language. Exceptions are thrown when the code is loaded into the interpreter and said interpreter notices the error.

<comment><USER2> No, that is not how it works. PHP is not AST interpreted anymore, there is a distinction between compile-time and run-time. And this error is compile-time, otherwise it would make no sense at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and no.

This is a PHP Fatal Error, which will cause execution to stop. But the compiler doesn't compile the entire file in the same way you'd see with other languages. Any code in a PHP file _before_ the type error will still execute just fine, but when the PHP engine hits the error it will fatal and throw a TypeError (along with a stack trace, depending on the verbosity of your configuration).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux on Your Canon DSLR? Why Not? - <AUTHOR> http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=14847

<comment><USER2> Soon I imagine most DSLRs will be running Linux, specifically Android. Android has dramatically improved their image rendering pipeline in the Lollipop release, and it's just a matter of time before the remaining camera manufacturers switch. Vendors can concentrate on their device pipeline drivers and apps, they get the associated benefits of a fully-featured OS.

<comment><USER3> I wonder; i am sceptical.

I am a very satisfied owner of a Nikon D80, and have been since, like, 2007? 2008? In all, it's been super reliable (touch wood), but more than that, it has always worked. Instantly. Never needing reboots. Never crashing, never doing something wonky or glitchy that i didn't intend. I _really, really_ value that, and i hope that the everything-must-be-an-general-purpose-computer craze will pass over my cherished DSLR.

The same people who are proponents of smartphones can pry my "dumb" camera from my cold, dead fingers.

Long live simplicity.

EDIT: Something else it cannot do: update software (well, i can't anyway). I think this type of device would be much better served by writing some good firmware and using modern full-stack proof/guarantee/checking so that the software can be certified to be correct and bug-free, then put on the device, never to be changed again. _That_ is something that would make me truly happy. In 2015, we should have aeroplane-grade stability in software for devices like cameras (and phones, mind you, but that opinion is less popular).

<comment> semi-extrinsic FYI, Magic Lantern has been a thing on Canon DSLRs since 2009. The sister project for Canon compact cameras, CHDK, has been going since 2006. Your Nikon D80 is already an embedded computer, the fact that it's running a weird OS only means the initial barrier to hacking is higher.

But I do echo you sentiment wrt. stability. I also believe Canon and Nikon are very aware of this. Fortunately for us amateurs, the stuff used by professionals like the Canon 5D and Nikon D4 runs the same OS as our prosumer devices, so stability is pretty much guaranteed. Touch wood also here.

<comment><USER3> I'm indeed aware that it's an embedded computer too, but it's an embedded computer that doesn't have a network stack, doesn't need to do very fancy GUI things, doesn't have user-installable applications, et cetera. It's very special-purpose ⇒ minimalistic ⇒ more likely to be stable/safe.

But indeed, i hope that professionals don't start wanting a functionality like "download and install custom applications for your camera" :p (but i would be surprised, i admit). This niche doesn't seem to exist as clearly in the mobile phone market: my very minimalistic Nokia does precisely what i want, but is rather low-quality and crashes occasionally. If only there was a "professional dumb phone".... :p </ severely off-topic >

<comment><USER4> > _But indeed, i hope that professionals don 't start wanting a functionality > like "download and install custom applications for your camera" :p (but i > would be surprised, i admit)._

Why not? It would an absolute godsend if it was allowed to happen.

Speaking as a DSLR film-maker and photographer, there are TONS of applications that this would enable.

From customized timelapses to custom complex follow-focus sequences, to DoP calculation, and tons more besides.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Have a look at Lua scripting for CHDK. Get a Powershot SX50 and a handheld stabilizer. Then make something magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think one of the people involved in the Magic Lantern project is a DC guy that is part of the HacDC collective. I was very inspired when he tangentially mentioned his invovlement with a custom Canon DSLR firmware. It seems they have certainly progressed leaps and bounds.

The humilty and awesomeness of that guy made me want to splurge and buy a Canon DSLR that was compatible just to learn how to hack from this guy, but alas it was and now is again out of my budget range.

<comment><USER6> For those, like myself, wondering what DC and HacDC are: Washington, DC, USA, and a hackerspace in that city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On Gopro (and other cameras using Ambarella) you can also telnet into a linux shell

<comment><USER8> The newest Gopros have a pretty decent API. Sadly, it's on an absolute crap wifi connection. While Canon's USB stack has its issues as well, it's still a heckuva lot more stable than any of the wifi-based cameras I've tested...</comment></comment>


Behind the European Privacy Ruling That's Confounding Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/business/international/behind-the-european-privacy-ruling-thats-confounding-silicon-valley.html <comment><USER2> I think Europe is leading the way here.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "International data transfers are the lifeblood of the digital economy," > said Townsend Feehan, chief executive of IAB Europe, which represents online > advertising companies including Google as well as small start-ups. The > ruling "brings with it significant uncertainty as to the future possibility > for such transfers."

A typical reaction for some, sigh.

They can have all the certainty they want. Just stop transfers and they will be certainly stopped. But somehow I suspect it's actually not uncertainty which worries them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great opportunity for a startup potentially.

<comment><USER5> How would one go about it? A hosted database access layer that follows these rules behind the scenes?

<comment><USER6> Running your environment in the EU and not transferring personal data out of the EU.

<comment><USER7> There's a ton of research into genomic privacy, and some ideas where a third party hosts encrypted genomic data. The parties interested in the data don't see it, they send their query to the third party, the third party runs it and returns the results.

However, it's yet unclear whether the transmission of the results ("your DNA of interest is contained in your person of interest's DNA") already counts as the transmission of personal data. I'd say it is personal data, making the whole enterprise moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Paywalled article, can't read it.

<comment><USER9> Probably about this: [http://www.businessinsider.com/european-court-of- justice-saf...](http://www.businessinsider.com/european-court-of-justice-safe- harbor-ruling-2015-10)

I actually jumped over here to see the reaction as soon as I read BI's article. Definitely more muted than I expected.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Our little html5/js dungeon crawler. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tametick.com/cq/

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, the source is available publicly on bitbucket:

<http://bitbucket.org/ido.yehieli/cardinal-quest/>

If anyone wants to join us just drop me a message (my email is listed in my profile) and I'll give you write access and walk you through the code base (it is quite small and not very complicated, Corey was committing changes within a day or so of joining me).

<comment><USER2> That's an awesome invitation, and I'll likely take you up on it. FYI, the "email" field your profile isn't visible to others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh...Thanks for the head up! I just updated it.

We would love to have you on board!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Neat! I descended down to around the 7th floor I think, and found a bug: there are only five small rooms on the map, no staircases, and no doors to the rest of the map. I can't descend further or ascend back up to wipe up the mobs I left behind.

<http://imgur.com/P7csK.jpg>

<comment><AUTHOR> Known bug, working on it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> There's a hidden class available, just to the left or right of the three visible options: The invulnerable, blind NaN!

<comment><USER4> Ah-hah! Thanks for reporting this.. fixed, and will soon be rolled into the live version of the game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love it! Took me a while to find how to turn the music off.

How about a character review at death? And maybe a local and global leaderboard?

Maybe a different colored icon for the stairs down would be nice, but that depends on how easy you want to make it for the player. ;)

My keyboard doesn't have a numpad — maybe a duplicate of the numpad somewhere on the keyboard would be a solution?

EDIT: After playing more, monster and item variety is low. A way to see dungeon level would be good as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input, working on all of these points except for the numpad, as I'm not sure what you mean: the game only uses the 4 arrow keys.

<comment><USER5> Oh ok, I had assumed it was possible to move diagonally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh man ... it's a little cruel to post something like this on a _Monday_ morning when I can't play it!

(Excellent work, though. I love rogue-likes and this one looks like fun).

<comment><USER7> Yeah, very cool, but I can't get into it. Bookmarked

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a pretty neat roguelike. It might be nice to make it more mouse friendly. I picked up a bracer, and assumed I would be abel to click on it to equip it.

<comment><USER6> I had the same experience at first -- reached for my mouse to handle inventory, etc.

Once I found the "help" button (which was actually useful!) and the keyboard shorts ... I found I preferred the game mouseless.

Primarily because it brings back memories of playing games like this on IBC XT PCs in the early 1980s, or funneling quarters into the arcade equivalent (eg, Gauntlet).

So while usability is important, consider this post a vote to keep the game keyboard only.

<comment><USER9> The list on the right that is visible at all times is hinting that it might be clickable, but it isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be soon!

Patience, grasshopper (or you can join us and help improve the interface ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> see also one of 10k contestants with similar game: <http://10k.aneventapart.com/entry/177> guys created this game said that if not IE9 support requirement for 10k competition they would be created 2.5d version with css skew scale transformations (this is a sample of their renderer <http://habreffect.ru/files/e8d/aa56d8ae1/kitty.jpg> ) google translated article: [http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=ru&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/webdev/102153/)

<comment><USER11> 10k? Bah. Here's my JS 1k entry: <http://js1k.com/demo/285>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really good! Small point, the start there should be a blinking cursor so you know to enter name at that point. Also, I have no clue how I died, but a JS popup told me I did _shrugs_ \- good stuff...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It was our submission to the 4drl challenge[1].

Here is the success post: [http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.developme...](http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.development/browse_thread/thread/caa43c3ba10ff9f6#)

What do you think?

[1] [http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=4...](http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=4DRL_Contest_2010)

</comment><comment><USER13> Well done! Much easier to use than most crawlers. Is there a way to save the game? Should be easy to implement using localstorage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! You can save & load but it doesn't work so well yet, which is why I haven't listed the keys for it in the help screen :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I seem to have gotten stuck on on the fourth level or so (whenever the wall textures first change). I can only explore the upper left quadrant of the map, and there are no doors or stairs in the accessible area.

I've also bumped into all of the exterior walls, in hopes of finding a hidden passage. Help?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a bug, sorry :(

Will be fixed asap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Argh, I just lost 45 minutes with no return, damn you :) And this excellent lofi music!

</comment><comment><USER15> awesome! love the old-skool scene music by 4mat.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it hard to make game run full screen in a browser window?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really: press f11 in windows or linux (I think it's apple+f on mac os x).

<comment><USER9> Maybe i didn't make myself clear. Sorry, I'm not a native speaker.

I asked how hard it is to make a game, specifically html5 one, that occupies the whole area of a browser window.

Secondly, f11 doesn't work for this specific site.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is quite easy, you just need to specify the size in the cs (or set it with js).

<comment><USER9> Why didn't you do it, then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't think it was necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> too cool!</comment>


Ask HN: What book should I read next? - <AUTHOR> Just finished re-reading The Martian, now I fancy some nonfiction. Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> _The Soul of a New Machine_ \- Tracy Kidder. A classic that inspired many people (myself included) to become interested in the computing field.

 _Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier_ \- Katie Haffner & John Markoff - there is some dispute about the factual accuracy of some of the book, but it's wildly entertaining nonetheless.

 _The Cuckoo 's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage_ \- Cliff Stoll

 _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_ \- Steven Levy

 _Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady_ \- Robert W. Bly

 _Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe_ \- Lee Smolin

 _The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next_ \- Lee Smolin

 _The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real_ \- William Irwin

</comment><comment><USER3> * Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich: A great pop-sci book about how animals adapt to extreme winter biomes

* Deep by James Nestor: A look at the extreme sport of freediving, where contestants train to submerge to depths much greater than 400ft without any oxygen and pressure equalizing equipment

* The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by John Gertner: A great book about the history of Bell Labs, the scientists and engineers that brought great innovations to society including phones

* Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer: A biography of Nikola Tesla. Its quite astounding how much one person can achieve in their lifetime

</comment><comment><USER4> I very much enjoyed reading "The Mythical Man-Month" (as well as listening to the Phoenix project, but that doesn't strictly qualify as non-fiction I guess.)

The Mythical Man-Month was interesting to me becauset the situationsiit describes are totally different and yet eerily similar.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have a specific suggestion, but maybe find a good book about Mars? Seems like a logical follow-up to reading The Martian.

</comment><comment><USER6> _The Knowledge_ \- Lewis Dartnell

It changed my perspective on modern civilization and the necessity of global shipping & trading.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're in the space of being an Entrepreneur, you should understand sales, and ultimately negotiation.

Sales comes down to building desire, different people can desire the same product for different reasons. Understand this fact and you will be head and shoulders above 80% of all Entrepreneurs.

Negotiating come down to two things, the first one is Sales related: you do NOT negotiate with someone who does NOT desire what you have. The second is being willing to walk away. Loathe or Love--Trump he owns this. If you are not willing to walk even when it hurts--you are Not negotiating you are capitulating.

Zig Ziglar explains sales well. And "Never Split The Difference" by Voss is the best negotiating book I've ever read, and not to brag; but my name is on plaques in more than one company as the Top Performer where they hold sales meetings. Side note; Voss does advocate for splitting the difference--at times. And so do I, because it is one tool of many that works.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

</comment><comment><USER9> 7 years in Tibet

</comment><comment><USER10> _Permanent Record_ \- Edward Snoden

</comment><comment><USER11> Farming</comment>


BP drops its solar division after 40 years of operations - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/green-investments/bp-drops-solar-division-so-much-beyond-petroleum.html

<comment><USER2> This is so strange. Given recent improvements in efficiency, I thought solar is set to really take off.</comment>


BBC: ISPs Should Assume VPN Users Are Pirates - michel-slm http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/09/08/2348240/bbc-isps-should-assume-vpn-users-are-pirates

<comment> michel-slm Shows that you can be relatively exemplary in one regard (relative independence from the government) and yet fail in another. Unless they have a scheme for allowing BBC licence payers who happen to be traveling overseas to get access to content, I don't see how they can brand all VPN users as pirates.</comment>


Ask HN: What if Facebook Charges $50/Year to Users to Keep the Data 100% Secure? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It might not be a great look to say "the 5% of you who signed up for FB Premium get security, and the rest of you get to roll the dice." I believe, and have been thinking about it for 7+ years, consumers will own, control and license their own data. It will flip ad models everywhere, and loyal brand followers will have their purchases subsidized, get experiences granted to them by brands, etc. Entirely new businesses will form out of this ecosystem where consumers have control– but where that is a good thing. The data will finally be fresh, authentic, deep and dynamic. It still felt early to me to start this about a week ago– but now the world feels like a very different place. If any technical folks would be interested in pairing up on it, I have lots of ideas.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best tools for doing reports on your data? - <AUTHOR>

What are the best tools out there (open source preferably) to produce reports regularly from our app database?
Like many of you, we track a lot of things in our startup, from analytics to the funnel, to internal business processes. However, periodically we'd like to see other more detailed events for sanity or cross checking, in a report-type fashion. This is the kind of thing that Excel would do nicely, after extracting from our DB (MySQL, via csv), but that's a pain to do periodically. We'd like to see things like a graph of events of type X per day, or per day of the week, or per week, for a certain period. At the moment we have a few reports generated on demand in the admin pages, with our app (in RoR) a graphics library using a fixed set of queries.
What tools do you use/recommend for doing this? <comment><USER2> Excel if you have it. It can access most databases directly, and can be automated using OLE. About 1/2 our reports are made using excel. Once a day we run a batch process that opens the excel report, updates parameters as required, refreshes it and emails it out.</comment>


Fired because your skills are too far above your coworkers - <AUTHOR> http://workplace.stackexchange.com/q/79992/979 <comment><USER4> Here is yet another person who doesn't understand that he is first and foremost _hired to solve business problems, not to write software_. It so happens that he writes software to solve these problems.

If it turns out that he actually _creates_ further business problems (and by the content of the post, it certainly looks like it), then no matter how "elegant" or "brilliant" his code is, it's rational to let him go!

<comment><USER5> What further business problems is he creating?

<comment><USER6> If no one in the team can understand or maintain his code it doesn't matter if it's because it's way above or below the coding standards of the company.

A company can't afford to pretty much be dependable on a single person, what happens if they get sick or decide to leave?

Being a star employee is good, but it always comes with the risk, people think that being indispensable is good, it might be good in a small startup but not in a large company.

At the end regardless how good they are they are only a small part of the delivery bandwidth of the company, and regardless of how good they are they can't do the job of 10 people even if they are smarter than 10 people combined.

As a developer their job is to produce reliable and maintainable code, this means that the code can be picked up by anyone in the company and worked with, if they don't they effectively create a bottleneck and a dependency on a human resource which is a huge risk for any business.

It's ok to be good, it's ok to even be better than some, or even the rest as long as you are a notch above the rest primarily due to soft skills, if the product you produce is effectively alien to the rest of your team and the company then what you produce is a liability not a solution.

<comment><USER7> From the way I read it he is a contractor hired for a specific project - <USER2> which case there is an expectation that he will leave at some point.

There's also a couple of serious red flags in describing a contract as "In my contract, I had to work ALONE in order to build a complete software alone, with my own programming principles. I was recruited BECAUSE the team has no skills at all in the demanding fields."

Which means there's no use of code reviews, even as an opportunity to educate someone else. There appears to be no process for knowledge transfer at all, so how is the company going to gain these skills? Separate principles again suggests not writing code in the same way as everyone else.

Plus if you're concerned after 2 previous incidents of this happening to you and you find yourself months into a project being left on your own then some pre-emption might be useful. Write lots of comments in your code, talk colleagues through it, suggest training videos on the languages technology - make yourself useful and available.

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying that this was handled well from either side, but as a contractor you are hired to deliver a product to a company; if that product is effectively useless once you are done with your product you have not delivered what you were contracted to do.

A contractor that would produce some fully functional, and even elegant in it's own way but convoluted piece of code is doing a poor job regardless if it's because the code is so smart that almost no one can understand it or because it's utterly inconsistent internally and is an unreadable mess.

You aren't selling a binary product here, a company isn't buying off the shelf software, they are contracting you to further develop their IP if what you produce is not useable to them you effectively wasted their time and money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" It's the third time I have come across this situation; when you produce really good code, and you get fired without any reason"_

I doubt it has anything to do with his coding skills. You can be good at programming but still be an arrogant asshole (not saying that an author actually is, just one of possibilities). Working with a group of other people, soft skills are no less important than technical ones. _Nobody_ let go good programmers just because they are too good, that just doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER9> It may also be that he actually produces shitty code, but with advanced esoteric techniques, so it looks like smart code to somebody not trained enough in those techniques. I've seen this happen (I produced such things myself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> He's not alone.

My advice would be:

\- find a better workplace (with more sophisticated and demanding co-workers, or possibly, start up your own company, and even compete with your ex- employer!), or

\- be more pedagogical (which is often harder and slower to give results than it may sound).

Indeed, the problem this situation denotes is that we're surrounded by incompetent and unknowledgeable people. It's not necessarily their fault: economic and time constraints prevented them to get a good education, or to learn on the job.

Sometime people don't want to learn and actively refuses to do a better job, but this is not the most common case, at least in IT, programming.

But then teaching and raising the competency level of a team is a whole different job, and you still need to be allocated the resources to do it: while you're teaching and the coworkers are learning, you're not implementing the next user story; what's more, eventually all this teaching would have to be disruptive. Once you teach iteration to a coworker who used copy-and-paste, you now accumulated technical debt since the team will have to rewrite all those occurences of copy-and-pasted code with iterations! Users stories will have to wait. Never mind that using iterations you will increase productivity and be able to implement _later_, ten user stories in the times you implemented only one, the product manager sees that this will occur _later_...

<comment><USER7> "If you're the smartest person in the room, find another room". Especially if you're at all early on in your career when you should be learning all sorts of things from the battle scarred veterans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > It's the third time I have come across this situation; when you produce > really good code, and you get fired without any reason.

I suspect there's more to this than just producing code that is "too good".

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Either he's:

a) not as good as he thinks he is, or

b) he should be working on his soft skills

If your team is far behind, make sure you're giving them training and helpful code reviews. Do a presentation on your latest bit of code to make sure they are on board and understand it. Be proactive to see and deal with these situations.

<comment><USER13> > If your team is far behind, make sure you're giving them training and > helpful code reviews.

Without a strong willingness of the other team members to learn intensively (also in their free time) - a property that few people have - this is futile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As I understand it's already third time he is been fired. This makes me believe that there something else at play. Either he is self-delusional and can't see the actual reason(cowboy programming,arrogance etc) or companies in France don't like talented people.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like the "architecture astronaut" anti-pattern. Either he's choosing the wrong places to work (aim higher!), or he's insufferable to his colleagues and doesn't actually ship the right thing his bosses want.

You can usually get away with _either_ being insufferable but delivering, _or_ faffing around with an air of pleasant cooperative helpfulness. But not both. I strongly suspect he was delivering what he thought people "really" wanted, not what they asked for or needed, and that made it easy to get rid of him when he annoyed people.

(Also, team composition really does follow TVtropes narrative rules. You need a balance of character archetypes and you can't have two divas.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Good code is readable code, but not when the gap is too huge. For instances, > they didn't know what is the difference between inheritance and composition.

Seems a standard problem when people talk about methodologies, they need to work in the real world not with what's expected of programmers.

Probably 4th time to me means OP needs to adapt to how things actually work.

Lots of working code earning $$$ doesn't use inheritance or composition. It gets the job done, is made redundant and new code is written for the next task.

<comment><USER17> Or sometimes you end up in situations where common "antipatterns" are at least locally optimal.

E.g. if you are working on projects with people making low quality changes & bad automated test coverage it can be better to have a bunch of duplicate/near duplicate code if it lets you decouple things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> About a decade ago I was working for a smaller company that provided local IT services for a large SaaS provider which also enforced territorial protection by only allowing a number of certified service companies in the area.

95% of all field personell was only able to arrive at the client, sit down and grab a coffee to be talked through some items the first-level support was aware of, while I could actually fix most of the problems due to my deeper understanding of the underlying concepts of the stack (Windows Networking, DNS, SMB, LDAP, SQL, …) right away.

This was the problem: No other engineer was able to see through those things and of course the clients began to notice that I was able to help them way faster; with hourly billing and reduced downtimes this also meant way cheaper.

I was kindly asked to "take my time" and to "relax, get a coffee first - <USER3> flirt with the female office staff" so my colleagues would not look bad compared to me.

Shortly after I handed in my notice and went for a freelance gig which was the right decision for both the local market and me personally as well (I did not continue with the field service thing but got into custom software development).

</comment><comment><USER19> From my own personal observations over a long period of time, in France relatively more importance is attached to the teamwork than in other countries/cultures I knew, precisely because the teams are frequently very heterogeneous in levels of skills. Privileging assistance to other team members over own's workplan-to-execute has never got anyone into trouble (let alone into personal layoff) and is in fact frequently implicitly or explicitly encouraged.

Sometimes small companies that are starting a new product, can hire an extremely skilled and expensive specialist only to create the first version of it, and then are not keen to keep him/her, as that becomes complicated and expensive for no good reason (maintenance can or even has to cost less). That said, I don't think anyone would lay off a goose laying golden eggs.

I feel the guy's pain, been through some situations myself .. the pain usually brings with it adjustment to reality, only that comes later. What else can I say.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am pretty sick of the comments I read here. It's like everyone that sticks out must be destroyed. What if the guy is really enormously talented and his colleagues are lazy guys that stopped learning the moment they finished their education? I hope he realizes he is on his own, starts his own company and sells his services for 200x price he would get as a salaried person. That's what his managers really deserve.

<comment><USER21> As others have pointed out, if this is the third time then it's pretty highly likely that there's more involved here than programming skill. Remember, we're only getting one side of the story. But let's assume for the sake of argument that it really is about a coding-skills gap.

Most code will be read far more than it's written. Somebody else will have to read and maintain this guy's code after he's gone, especially since he's a contractor. I think we can all agree that there are many ways code can be good or bad, and that it can be good in one way but bad overall. If this guy's code is hard to read and maintain, then in the most important sense it's not good code. Nobody will care that it's "intelligently decoupled" as he (and he alone) claims. Are there comments to make the relationships or interactions between these decoupled components more clear? Or external documentation? Decoupling is great in the abstract, but if it obscures intent or effects then it's bad code. Ditto for any other kind of "greatness" we might attribute to code. If it can't be maintained or enhanced efficiently, its greatness is transitory at best.

This isn't about "sticking out" so much as putting one's own interests ahead of the employer's. If the employer quite legitimately values code that is consumable more than code that is impressive, and you insist on making the opposite tradeoff, you're not providing what was paid for and you're also showing disrespect to everyone else involved. For that you should be fired.

<comment><USER20> Third time might mean that he is just unlucky to find the same ol' company type or that the prevailing culture of French workplace is that of doing nothing and smiling to everyone around, and getting promotions by kissing up. He might be headhunted by Google/FB/Netflix etc. later.

I know a guy who was absolutely being destroyed by his boss and director (by being simply too good and threatening them, while they were pompously presenting his achievements as their own outside), it drove him to mental hospital, he rebounded and now is a top management member of some famous German company directly affecting business with those two guys (i.e. they aren't getting any business from his company anymore). If you decide to unleash mob on somebody because "he simply can't be that good", think about the consequences. In 5 years you might be shown the door as you become the blocker for your own employer's business.

It's delusional to think that everybody can read somebody else's code. Imagine Linus was employed by such employers; he would be fired within a month as nobody would be able to understand what he wrote. But right, it must be that guy who is wrong.

Show me also which new hire is able to maintain production-grade Perl/Scala/C++/JEE code easily? It's a pipe dream of management.

There are so many nonsenses in this discussion it's unbelievable how low our business now sank. It's like employer expects a person to be their company's slave. Exactly the mindset most of us hate with a passion as we got into computing with the goal of changing the world, not propelling everything that was horrible to new heights.

<comment><USER21> > Imagine Linus was employed by such employers;

Your hero-worship is cute, but Linux succeeded precisely because a whole lot of people _could_ read and understand and extend Linus's code. Furthermore, it was based on Minix, which was explicitly written with understandability in mind. _That_ is great programming.

> Show me also which new hire is able to maintain production-grade > Perl/Scala/C++/JEE code easily?

While it's true that not _every_ programmer can read and maintain _every_ other programmer's code, that's a bit of a strawman. The question is whether some _easily hired_ programmer can maintain the code. If it requires someone with buckets more ability and experience than average, then it's too esoteric. I'll bet I can write more advanced code than you in a more difficult problem area, but I know a lot of my code needs to be maintainable by mid-level programmers (or below) so I write it in an appropriate style and try to explain it well. The OP was obviously incapable of doing that. If 11 is his only setting then - again - he's a poor programmer.

It's possible to be passionate about programming without making it one big ego contest. If you want to write "clever" code, stick to TopCoder or HackerRank. If you want to write code that actually stands the test of time and benefits real people in real production, that's a whole different thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The real problem could be lost in translation of "skills were too far above."

I've found that a lot of coders over-engineer simple components in a way that gets in the way. An example would be writing an entire module for wrapping regular expression methods that already have a clean implementation.

<comment><USER23> Needless complexity is one of my least favorite bugaboos. My mantra tends to be "Do the simplest possible thing that will work first, and iterate from there". For some reason it is hard to get that across, and some people seem to delight in producing baroque heaps of code for simple tasks, which then often doesn't work correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Many comments seem to suggest going with the tide, I'd like to disagree.

Its likely that a smart coder became a smart coder because he hated bad code with a passion.

Imagine a code like this

      if
        ...
        else if
             ...
             else if
             ...
                 else if
                     ...
                     else if
                     ...
             else
                ...
       // goes on for another 100 lines

in a JSP with html spewed in-between with improper formatting.

Should developer who uses a template engine and design patterns instead of following the above be kicked out?

<comment><USER25> > Should developer who uses a template engine and design patterns instead of > following the above be kicked out?

If it doesn't solve the problem they were brought into fix, yes. If it causes the project to miss an important deadline, yes. If it costs more to implement than it saves in the long term, yes.

It's not a simple black and white question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This strikes me more of a social/maturity issue. I can relate myself from when I was younger and thought I was the best programmer around. Even if that was the case (it wasn't) it doesn't matter much if you can't communicate and get along with your teammates. I thought "my work should speak for itself" and "quality over everything else"

One of the biggest lessons of corporate life is that how you behave and communicate will have a disproportional effect on your success. Doesn't matter how good you are if no one knows it, likes you, or people find you troublesome. You have to pick your fights, know when you to compromise, and how to put forth suggestions without stepping on anyones toes. Sometimes the decisions and output of other people can be truly baffling but you still need to manage them with strategy and grace. Just being a good human being, friend and colleague will get you far, as long as you can be forceful when needed an appropriate.

If you really is more experienced then becoming a good mentor is a skill in itself. You don't want to be an arrogant ass that is perceived as being "more than everyone else"

Another thing is understanding the trade-offs between clever code/maintainable code. Even good programmers have a tendency for over designing and/or over complicating stuff until they become more mature.

</comment><comment><USER27> There is more context here [http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/79675/im- techni...](http://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/79675/im-technical- referent-but-i-lost-the-lead-for-technical-decisions)

</comment><comment><USER28> I have a feeling this is the kind of guy who tells everyone to rewrite a million lines of production code in Go because its "more scalable." Not trying to be cynical but it does strike me as strange that a company would fire someone for this reason. Something tells me this isn't the whole story and that it might be time for the OP to work on collaboration / people skills.

If you can't handle that then I can only suggest consulting or starting your own company, but all-in-all working at a startup is a team sport.

<comment><USER29> > I have a feeling this is the kind of guy who tells everyone to rewrite a > million lines of production code in Go because its "more scalable.

As louis ck would say, but maybe??? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw)

I have to somewhat disagree with this. Sure, I give the point that you can just throw more hardware at the problem of scaling. However, there are some problems that do not linear scale and rewriting gives much more of a boost.

For example. Just last year I was at a company where they had a backend product system in just under a million lines of code. I'm not going to say what language it was because I know someone will say oh it didnt scale because it's X.

In addition, it was starting to get cumbersome by having multiple developers write in it. So the agreement was to rewrite it in GO.

What was the net effect?

\- Less servers, much less.

\- Faster processing times, significantly more so.

\- Less code cruft.

\- Faster feature push.

\- 1 developer let go of, saved $90k

I think all in all, they saved $150k-200 a year by switching to GO.

I know it's trendy to say, don't rewrite something in production. But seriously, if the developers agree and the business WILL BE better off with it.

Why not?

<comment><USER30> > _Why not?_

The usual reason is that people tend to want to fix/add a bunch of other things _beyond_ just rewriting in language X.

Sure, if it's a straight port for speed (I'm currently doing something similar from TypeScript/Node.js to C++), and you're not adding a bunch of new stuff in the process, that's relatively safe.

But generally, rewrites are expensive and businesses don't like spending a lot of money for something without any new "features" (beyond cost, ironically). If you find yourself with that kind of group, IMO, incremental improvements are a better choice for that business most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Even more context here:

[http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/48551/discussion-on- ques...](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/48551/discussion-on-question-by- mik378-im-technical-referent-but-i-lost-the-lead-for)

"I already made a full documentation and more than 6 hours in meeting to explain them the architecture. On the moment, they enjoy, but in their mind, it's too theoretical for them, besides numerous examples"

</comment><comment><USER31> Perhaps the Node.JS world just isn't waiting for smarty pants patterns but prefers callback pyramids of doom? It's sometimes even hard in C# or Java to figure out what some smart guy did to the code, making it hard to navigate it and find out what comes from where and how it's wired together.

Also a lot of smart ideas rely on reflection and cause runtime instead of compiler exceptions.

</comment><comment><USER32> This sounds ludicrous but the base problem really isn't that odd. If your output is _so_ completely out of the league of the other people in the company, the business has to treat that as a risk. What happens if you get run over tomorrow? Great, now we have an unmaintained product. There is probably liability attached to that too.

But there are better available solutions than just erasing the existence of this super-developer. They could train the other staff. They could hire better developers.

Seriously, there are _so_ many things that don't involve scrapping this developer's existing work producy... It makes me suspicious that their brilliance isn't the only problem. A lone-wolf with a big head can really tough to work with.

But if that's a misapplied stereotype, he should be talking to his managers to dissolve the risk amongst the other developers safely, and/or hire new ones for this product.

</comment><comment><USER33> I know it sucks but sometimes you need to write code that isn't quite as elegant as it could be. I will take the OP on his word that he is a great coder, but if he writes code his team can't work with then it will be a problem. Writing software isn't just about writing the very best code possible but the best code that solves the problem while being workable for everyone else. There is often not much benefit in only having one person understand how everything works. Unless what they are working on requires super advanced solutions to the problem it will just end up slowing everyone else down. The same is true of all things that require complex solutions.

I don't have an answer for OP other than maybe dumb the code down a bit. Companies want a solution to their problem that does not make it depend on a single person being able to understand it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's what I think probably happens in these situations. Especially when all parties involved are genuinely looking out for the best interests of the company.

If you're with a company who depends on lower expectations to survive, they are probably not just doing this with programmers. The managers are probably under-qualified as well.

I get the sneaking suspicion the breakdown is in communication. If a manager can recognize and articulate a problem with precise language, face it head-on, and define a precise set of rules / constraints that a team needs to follow in order to resolve those problems, and retains a tight feedback loop to determine if the plan is working (adjusting if / when necessary), problems like this should not arise and remain an issue. Unless, of course, the programmer is unreceptive to the plan.

</comment><comment> vladimir-y It's usually called overqualified right? In my opinion if you are about to take a new job except money you need to consider a possibility to learn something, which means there should be a more experienced people in your area. Ie it's a bad idea to be hired to work in a team full of newbies.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't think he understands what good code is. Good code fits the job it's doing. Sometimes that fit requires simple boring code. Boring bug free code is often the best fit for business problems. Fancy out of this world code tends only to be the best fit in very small niches and academia.

</comment><comment><USER36> No, it's because they'd gain more profit by firing you. Most (if not all) business are only there for the profit; it was never about making the world a better place. If you disagree, think again.

</comment><comment><USER37> The number of comments fitting the following pattern is interesting:

"I (guess/think/have a feeling) he is (negative adjective). I'm not saying he is, but (reasons that justify presumption)"

<comment><USER9> It's not interesting at all. It's a standard strategy of formulating such comments that seasoned internet debaters develop. You could see exactly the same pattern years ago in discussions on usenet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I view this problem a little differently. His biggest problem is that the team doesn't care to learn. As a lone wolf, he may also not be a suitable teacher. But I've found the absolute best situation comes from being on a team where everyone wants to excel at their craft. When one member learns something, they pull the rest of the group to that knowledge. It also levels out knowledge a bit as you can always learn something your coworkers don't know.

</comment><comment><USER39> If your code is really so much better than that of the other developers that they will be unable to read or maintain it, you should train the other developers on how to read and maintain it. That spreads the expertise around, it will make them better coders, and it removes the single point of failure.

Of course the expert coder who has now gotten the new responsibility of training others, deserves a raise.

<comment><USER13> > If your code is really so much better than that of the other developers that > they will be unable to read or maintain it, you should train the other > developers on how to read and maintain it.

As I wrote in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13015309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13015309):

"Without a strong willingness of the other team members to learn intensively (also in their free time) - a property that few people have - this is futile.".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If it's N-th time happening maybe there are more problems than just 'too good code'?

</comment><comment><USER41> I feel the same pain in my industry where experienced are replaced with noobs for less pay.

</comment><comment><USER42> If he is so good, why is his code so hard to understand?

</comment><comment><USER43> Sounds delusional.

</comment><comment><USER44> Didn't read the article, but the title makes sense. If you write code that your coworkers don't understand, then that's potentially a nasty situation.

<comment><USER9> If one writes code that is "too smart" ("intelligently decoupled", as the original poster in the thread quoted a colleague), it's a sign that his skills are actually low with a large spike on some small area.</comment></comment>


The end of hot metal printing (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/gnmeducationcentre/2015/mar/03/end-of-hot-metal-printing-gnm-archive-teaching-resource <comment><USER2> I've posted this excellent short film about the last night of hot metal printing at the New York Times a few times here, but it never got any traction:

[https://vimeo.com/127605643](https://vimeo.com/127605643)

<comment><USER3> Indeed an excellent film. Thanks for sharing. I have re-posted this URL as a story of its own: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806072).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forty years ago, I worked for a small magazine company that had its type set by Linotype. The machines were fascinating to watch. However, I remember the time that an editor specced an article in "Spartan", then discovered that 10-point Spartan looked smaller than 9-point everything else. There was nothing to do but have the linotypist key the whole thing again. At that point, I started to see what advantages there might be to computerization.

<comment><USER5> > _what advantages there might be to computerization_

It would be a curious exercise to try and find something that would _not_ benefit from computerization in one way or another.

<comment><USER6> Socialising?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When my company laid off a large number of editorial staff, all you could hear was banging as each member left.

I fear this tradition will be lost also. Newspapers are still extremely important and I yearn for the days when you could actually purchase a thick broadsheet newspaper that didn't focus on drivel.

<comment><USER8> > I yearn for the days when you could actually purchase a thick broadsheet > newspaper that did t focus on drivel

This article is about how the newspapers are printed. What gets printed in them doesn't change with how you print them.

<comment><USER9> > What gets printed in them doesn't change with how you print them

This isn't true. More specifically, if you substantially reduce the cost of printing, you also reduce the bar to competition.

Similarly, if you substantially reduce the time it takes to get from thought to publishing, in a competitive market, you'll need to get more thoughts published.

And the death of hot metal printing, followed by the rise of internet publishing, has hugely affected what is published, when and by whom.

However, this whole rosy tinted rubbish about hot metal printing is comical. It was the least efficient, most expensive, nepotistic, ineffectual closed shop industry. It held back journalism (not exactly a hot bed of activity at the time either) for years. It almost destroyed the news industry before there was a reasonable replacement.

Of course "grown men were crying". They could see the end of their short hours, high pay, minimal work jobs that had been passed down father to son.

The only reason it lasted as long as it did was that there was no effective competition. Once that changed, costs had to come down and journalists had to start writing what folk wanted to read not just what they wanted to write. Now it's a little unfortunate that what most people want to read is celebrity tat but such is life.

I'd also question just how much better journalism was versus today (although I'm on shakier ground here). There was a lot less of it, of course, and it is likely that the signal to noise has dropped appreciably. But most journalism was filler then as it is now.

Sure we remember the great scoops and uncoverings but that's because we remember them. I'm sure, in 30 years, we'll recollect Snowden more than Kanye and look back fondly too.

<comment><USER10> > They could see the end of their short hours, high pay, minimal work jobs > that had been passed down father to son.

Why were the papers willing to pay for that?

<comment><USER9> Strikes. The only thing more expensive than expensive printers is no printers.

Printers' unions were very powerful. Maybe not as infamously as teamsters in the US or miners in the UK but definitely up there. Automation broke them in the 1980's but not without one hell of a struggle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved the Grauniad April fools Day editions of the sixties and seventies. Beautifully typeset reports of 'flong riots' in the island of San serrife. My mum had to explain flong was the Papier Mache used to make a stereotype of the lead type page for copying.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't worry, hot metal will live on -- in boutique print shops in Portland, OR and the Allston neighborhood of Boston, staffed by hipsters with beards longer than your arm and earlobes stretched out of shape by embedded hoops, running off pamphlets about why socialist revolution is necessary _now_.

</comment><comment><USER13> I watched this fascinating 5 minute video recently on hot meta printing. It might have been posted to HN, as it's certainly not the kind of thing I would normally watch!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3XbItz55YE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3XbItz55YE)

</comment><comment><USER5> For the printed book lovers among us, the transition from the letter-press to the offset printing technique must have been just as unpleasant as is for many more people switching from physical books to electronic devices.

<comment><USER10> Personally, I'll have nothing other than illuminated manuscript.

<comment><USER5> If you were 500 years old, then sure, I'd believe you.

<comment><USER10> I'm getting older by the minute! You just wait!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I read this as a "hot meal printing". That would be something.

<comment><USER15> We're working on it... [http://infinite-food.com/](http://infinite-food.com/) ;)</comment></comment>


Language Design: Building a Modern C, Round 1 - <AUTHOR> http://owensd.io/2015/09/04/language-design-thinking-round-1.html

<comment><USER2> I'm always looking for ideas to make my own C like language. But when I looked at this article, his improved C is a completely different language. Looks more like basic, python and pascal than C.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for a 1Password-like service for email? - <AUTHOR>

Given the privacy concerns around Buzz and Facebook's purchase of Ocatazen, it is more than likely that you can be tracked across different social networks if you use the same email address.
Would people be willing to pay for a service that does for email what !Password does for passwords? That is you provide a different email per site but it funnels all back to a specific email of your choosing.
Of course, this is not a Tor like service but at a minimum creepy services such as Intelius and Pipl would have a harder time of mapping out your activities in an aggregate manner. <comment><USER2> interesting idea. a few issues come to mind:

\- people concerned enough about privacy to use such a service might have concerns about their emails being passed through your service as well.

\- the domains of that service might get blocked on certain sites due to abuse and people using multiple email addresses to create multiple accounts.

\- spam filters might block the inbound emails because the 'to' address doesn't match up to the user's. though i can't imagine many would place a high probability on this metric since mailing lists and such would act the same way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, given that this would be a hosted service, the revenue model would be the redirect service and not name scraping. I have no interest in scraping names and think that that is completely unethical behavior.

However, to further address your concerns, email addresses could be stored in such a way that the provider does not match or log any email transactions and acts strictly as a forward only model.

Domains getting blocked is a fact of life and is something that will have to be managed. However, I hear you on potential abuse and part of the service would have to be ways to address that. I'm no fan of spammers and my primary interest in this is to manage the rapidly increasing insight that companies such as GOOG and MSFT have into their users by way of providing "free" services. Google Buzz and Latitude honestly creep the heck out of me.

Wrt to spam filters, you can easily add the "to" addresses inside gmail as approved addresses so that should not be too much of an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Gmail lets you do something like that already with the +anything suffixes on the end of the e-mail username.

Also, in a slightly similarly vein but if you want to have stuff on a separate domain with a message limit: <http://www.spamgourmet.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it would be sort of like spamgourmet except these would be ongoing honeypots. Most of these sites use a standard set of signals to try to identify you

i.e. \- cookies \- IP address \- physical address \- telephone number \- ssn \- email address \- name \- dob

This would be just one of the ways in counteracting such intrusive tracking behavior.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cheap or open source BeyondCorp implementations - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to set up some private infrastructure (developer infrastructure like internal wikis, internal webapps, GitLab) and would like to lock every server down behind some sort of SSO with MFA. I'd like it to be restricted for all services: SSH, HTTPS, etc.
I'd like to set up Google's BeyondCorp security model in a cheap or free way for my infrastructure. I'm okay with using either a third party/cloud service or an open source solution.
My first choice was Cloudflare Access [1], which is free for HTTPS. But to put SSH and other services behind it, you need to use Argo Tunnel, and Argo costs $5/per month + 10 cents per GB (with first 1 GB free). The private infrastructure will only be accessed by our small team of employees and should have very little inbound traffic (at least relative to traffic from users) for a long time. But the cost and lock-in could pose issues in the future.
My second choice is the open source Pritunl Zero BeyondCorp server [2]. This looks really good and like it'll meet all my requirements, but of course it requires some manual setup and maintenance. And and the costs of the server I run it on may end up being equivalent to or even more than what I'm paying for Cloudflare Argo for some time.
Google Cloud Platform's Identity-Aware Proxy [3] seems to be Google's original internal BeyondCorp implementation, but for cloud customers. I would need to use GCP for all of my infrastructure. I'm not necessarily against using GCP in the future, but right now I'd like to save as much money as possible in the early stages of my project. I believe I can save significant amounts of money using standard VPS servers over GCP/AWS infrastructure - at least in the early stages.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/ [2] https://zero.pritunl.com [3] https://cloud.google.com/iap/ <comment><USER2> Please check Gravitational's excellent Teleport.

Privileged access management for elastic infrastructure. [https://gravitational.com/teleport](https://gravitational.com/teleport)

[https://github.com/gravitational/teleport](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport)</comment>


Code Reviews are Broken - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ard_adam/code-reviews-are-broken-here-is-how-to-fix-them-c34497f1721b <comment><USER2> I agree with the general point of the article, though the main compare/contrast of different code review scenarios seems to speak more about deadlines for code reviews than code ownership. Where I work we just expect multi-day turnaround times on most PRs so that the reviewer can schedule it however they see fit, and that does more to relieve code review stress than anything else.

Assigning PRs to code "owners" just seems like common sense to me, and is built in to github now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article! I really like the notion of code ownership over checklists.

However I wonder how this would be implemented in reality. Write permissions in git are managed by having different repositories. Splitting up your code base into several repositories has serious drawbacks in terms of maintainability and deployment.

There is definitely something to code ownership and I'm looking forward to follow up articles.

<comment><USER2> It's fine for the write permissions to only be enforced by convention or automated CI checks (eg, status checks on github PRs). No need to split up the monorepo or anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with code ownership is siloing. Because you are the only one who understands the problem domain or "the code" this create dependencies which doesn't scale. I'd say code ownership is a smell and an indication that your code isn't clear enough. Code needs to change all the time and sometimes completely.</comment>


1996 McDonalds hamburger - hasn't decomposed at all - <AUTHOR> http://bestofmotherearth.com/2008/09/24/1996-mcdonalds-hamburger.html

<comment><USER2> Same story, again and again:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/happy+meal?sort=by_date>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307783>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647759>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1656044>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798846>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799236>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1256516> <\- This one, although dead, has the most comments.

<comment><USER3> I think a few of them are different versions of "My Happy Meal doesn't dissolve into green ooze!".

It seems to be the "Coke dissolves this penny, think what it does to your stomach!" of the 21st century…</comment></comment>


Make Your Own Luck - <AUTHOR> http://alexanderle.com/blog/2012/make-your-own-luck.html

<comment><USER2> I agree, doing more than other people in the same situation as you will lead to more success.</comment>


Deliveroo to add 300 UK tech jobs in new London office - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38659329 <comment><USER2> Why not use that money to pay their riders more first?</comment>


Stop The Hate On Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacrideo.us/stop-the-hate-on-window-8/

<comment><USER2> Not until I get my start bar back. Instead of a start button I get a list of unorganized applications.

</comment><comment><USER3> LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE</comment>


Best launch page ever? Sign up early to reserve your username and early access - <AUTHOR> http://www.nearmine.com Reserve your username early on NearMine.com we're currently in stealth! But sign up early and we'll give you alpha access and you can reserve your username before anyone else gets there. ;) <comment><USER2> Nice idea, I like being able to claim my username as opposed to having to wait, but having to refer 3 friends to a service i know practically about? Probably not worth the trouble. Similar to what Hipster started, and now seems like a common technique (LaunchRock, etc).

Far cry from "best ever," but not bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback, I am completely open to suggestions and will look at what majority like, and hipster/forkly were an inspiration :p.</comment></comment>


How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves - <AUTHOR> http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/bagel.html <comment><USER2> Neat, but academic, because as everyone undoubtedly knows slicing bagel into a Mobius strip is _far_ more practical. Not only does it give you a surface for jam-and-buttering, but also keeps the construct in a single piece ensuring an unbeatable simplicity and predictability of the user experience. It's the same technique as in the article, but the knife needs to rotate at the half of its angular speed as it goes along bagel's diameter.

<comment><USER3> _Not only does it give you a surface for jam-and-buttering..._

Yeah, but if you drop it on the floor it is guaranteed to land jam-side-down 100% of the time.

<comment><USER4> It will fall jam side down 100% of the time even if it's not a Mobius strip. It's the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It is much more fun to put cream cheese on these bagels than on an ordinary > bagel. In additional to the intellectual stimulation, you get more cream > cheese, because there is slightly more surface area.

I believe this is winning on all fronts here.

</comment><comment><USER6> trivia: vi hart is child of george hart. i guess awesome runs in that family.

<comment><USER7> And Erik Demaine is the son of the prodigal Martin Demaine. It seems that some mathematicians are good at communicating their passion to their children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This construction shows Villarceau circles[1], which are the nontrivial circle sections of a torus. This can be also seen on the POV raytracer hall of fame[2].

        [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villarceau_circles
        [2]: http://hof.povray.org/Villarceau_Circles-CSG.html

<comment><USER9> Oh man, if ever I lose my wedding ring, I know what I'm going to commission to replace it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> And they say topology is useless!

<comment><USER11> We expanded the utilty from teacups and donuts to now include bagels!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a number of friends who are middle and high school math teachers. I have asked them to demonstrate this for their students and report back on how utterly blown their students' minds are.

Stuff like this makes me wish I had continued on the path of becoming a math teacher myself rather than returning to the world of software.

</comment><comment><USER13> The rest of George Hart's site is interesting as well, especially his encyclopedia of virtual polyhedra [1]. There is also a part 2 of "Mathematically Correct Breakfast" (this time a trefoil knot) [2], and his sculptures are worth looking at as well [3].

[1] <http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html>

[2] <http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/knot.html>

[3] <http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/sculpture.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982249> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1234503> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967930>

This story has allotted a total of 656 karma, interesting.

</comment><comment><USER15> I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of bagels suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

<comment><USER16> > … and were suddenly silenced.

You misspelt 'sliced'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now if they could bake them like this, I could see that fad taking off...

<comment><USER18> I suspect you could bake two interlocked bagel rings with a little help from a baking sheet that had angled U-shaped cutouts. You'd mold the rings while the dough was soft, and the baking sheet would help support the rings, as separate but interlocked, during baking. (To me, this feels like less of a challenge than the cutting trick.)

<comment><USER19> That won't work, as the dough isn't soft enough before it is baked. By that time, the dough has been shaped, risen for 36 hours and boiled. Baking is a pretty minor step in the process.

<http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/bagels.html>

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the reference... seems the proper accessory would need to be something that helps hold the two in the proper position through rising/boiling. Maybe something in high-temperature silicone? (And yes, it'd certainly force a different hole-to-ring proportion...) Needs experiments!

<comment><USER19> Sure, that could work. I think it comes down to the definition of a bagel. Most bagels you can buy in the store don't meet my definition, that's partially why this exercise is so challenging for me. I will definitely try to find a solution, though. The idea appeals to me.

—Ashkenazi Jew, my grandmother taught me how to make bagels. It's quite a process, when done properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Been waiting for somebody to explain how that could be possible.

<comment><USER21> Normally you take a knife slice a bagel down the middle and you end up with 2 half's but part of that action ends up cutting both sides of the hole at the same time.

Instead take a knife cut to the center but not the other side then as you cut around the edge rotate the cut so by the time your around the full bagel the knife is upside down. If you picture it at one point knife handle is on the above the bagel and after a little while it's below the bagel. The only trick is to make you cut line up when your done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great. Now I have the urge to dissect bagels at 2 AM :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I have tried these cuts a dozen times, never with success. What kind of knife/dough do you need to make clean cuts? 10 year olds can do it in two tries, why can't I?

</comment><comment><USER24> Missed the Hacker News on this one ..

I know I'm not heavily karma'd and so my opinion counts for less, but this isn't the sort of thing I'm expecting on HN. This belongs over in Reddit (where I promise I'll still see it .. probably reposted a dozen times)

<comment><USER25> "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Complaining is just noise.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for pointing me to those.

I also missed this one: > If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

I'm only up to 326 days, so I'll go back to my corner and apologize (genuinely) for not being aware of these rules.

Though I still don't think it belongs here ;-D</comment></comment></comment>


Creating Markdown Drafts with TinaCMS + Gatsby - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/tinacms/creating-markdown-drafts-with-gatsby-and-tinacms-bdp <comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people ask about creating new Markdown files and giving them "draft" status in TinaCMS. This article does a good job explaining how to achieve that.</comment>


Want the Biggest iPod in the World? - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/30/smallbusiness/bling_your_ipod.fsb/index.htm?postversion=2009050106

<comment><USER2> I thought they were talking about my Halloween costume a couple years ago: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattmichielsen/285081298/in/set...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattmichielsen/285081298/in/set-72157594354509173/) (yes, it actually worked)

</comment><comment><USER3> I read an assertion in an article a few days ago that within a decade we would have personal music players capable of holding every music recording ever made -- which struck me as unlikely, but I was curious how close it was. After all, as the article points out, we currently have 2.5 inch drives that hold 0.3 terabytes...

One (conservative) estimate of the amount of commercially available music is six million songs (<http://boingboing.net/2008/02/18/worlds-most- complete.html>). At about three minutes each, that's 18 million minutes, or 34 years of songs. Encoded at approximately a megabyte a minute, that's 18 terabytes. If storage space on a hard drive continues to double every two years, we should have 20 terabyte 2.5 inch drives in about 12 years. So "music players with every song within a decade" are at least within the bounds of possibility.

Of course, no electronics company has an incentive to sell music players that big, so you'd need a service like the one in the article to build it. :)

<comment><USER4> Every song put out through a record label, or actually _every song_? I highly doubt there's any drive at anytime in the future that will be able to hold every piece of music (no matter how bad) produced .. ever.

<comment><USER5> > I highly doubt there's any drive at anytime in the future that will be able > to hold every piece of music (no matter how bad) produced .. ever.

And at one time it appeared there would be a world market for five computers. ... On a long enough timeline, statements like yours will be trounced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This company is a great example of why the market is so much more important than your idea. A simple business of fixing and upgrading iPods, marketed online, brings in millions per year. Simple and brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's good to know, when my 160GB eventually dies I don't want to start leaving stuff off my iPod. Only have about 15k tracks on it, but that still uses 130GB.

I use it as a portable HDD sometimes so it's always nice to have more space for that too.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who listen 50,000 songs, that is enough songs to last a lifetime : - ). Seriously it will take a little more than 3 months of listening time. I'm impressed.

<comment><USER9> A lot of times, I'll get an album because I like one song I've heard from it, or because I like other albums from the same artist, and then even if I don't, right now, like most of what I got, there's no reason to actually throw away the ones I don't. Even if I _never_ end up liking those other songs, at least having them will keep me from wasting time getting them again in the future when I notice the hole in my collection or album and wonder if, just maybe, I'd like those other songs...

Disk space is cheap enough, in other words, that it's easier to just keep songs than keep an updated list of songs that you _don't_ want.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a specific case of something that has held for a while, namely that it is never economical to spend more than an extremely minimal amount of time "cleaning up" a disk. It's always cheaper to just buy another bigger one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there such a thing as the best ipod in the world? huummmm.</comment>


Ask HN: Tomorrow is April's fool. How you feel about it? - <AUTHOR> Tech sites will be full of useless info. tomorrow. Personally, I think the joke is over. It's just a waste of time and resources for all involved -including the producers. <comment><USER2> Let's not post this stuff.

If you see it here, flag it.</comment>


Researchers hack Siri from 16 feet away - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/siri-silently-hacked-from-16-feet-away-by-french-researchers-2015-10 <comment><USER2> Interesting inducing audio on the wire of a connected pair of headphones. (lousy shielding, coax wouldn't work but nobody seems to have coax headphone cables at the low end :-)

I've always wondered what would happen if broadcast "Ok Google, call 555-1212, ok" over a loudspeaker in a crowded shopping mall. How many people's phones would simply obey?

<comment><USER3> Wasn't there actually a radio ad which just did that?

edit: found it [http://www.cultofmac.com/328705/toyota-radio-ad-shuts- down-i...](http://www.cultofmac.com/328705/toyota-radio-ad-shuts-down-iphones- because-drivers-wont/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few weeks ago I was in a meeting and Siri blurted out "Sorry I didn't get that". I've never had "hey Siri" activated (I immediately verified) and nothing was plugged into my iPhone 5. Rather disconcerting.

<comment><USER5> It will activate if you hold down the home button, something that can easily happen accidentally when your phone is in your pocket or otherwise squashed against something.

Mine activated the other day in that manner and my three year old looked around wildly, then said "Was that the robot lady?!"

<comment><USER4> It was sitting face-up on a table. Other than the possibility of a flaky home button, I'm chalking this one up to the NSA. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a few things that seem key to this: Leaving "hey siri" and "ok google" on at all times, requires relatively noise free environment. Also, with the always on feature, you need to properly address one's phone. Simply changing Siri to "Stupidhead" would render the always on attack moot.

It's interesting but without direct access, there's only minimal information to be gleaned as commanding Siri to look up the most recent call would only allow the attack to see the most recent call with a direct LOS.

Also, this recap can be skipped by going to the original wired article: [http://www.wired.com/2015/10/this-radio-trick-silently- hacks...](http://www.wired.com/2015/10/this-radio-trick-silently-hacks-siri- from-16-feet-away/)

<comment><USER7> Siri can't be renamed to stupidhead or anything else for that matter, but the always listening feature can be disabled.

<comment><USER6> I stand corrected, I assumed that you could as you can rename what Siri calls you. Learn something new every day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was presented at SSTIC 2015.

paper (in french): [https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2015/SSTIC- actes/injection_...](https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2015/SSTIC- actes/injection_commandes_vocales_ordiphone/SSTIC2015-Article- injection_commandes_vocales_ordiphone-kasmi_lopes-esteves_9giaJ0T.pdf) video (in french): [http://static.sstic.org/videos2015/SSTIC_2015-06-03_P09_AGRE...](http://static.sstic.org/videos2015/SSTIC_2015-06-03_P09_AGREMI.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER9> As presented, people are only vulnerable if they:

\- Allow Siri from the lock screen

\- Have headphones plugged in (presumably Apple's)

\- Are not using their device or have their headphones in (otherwise the attack would be detected immediately) OR:

\- Have audible feedback from Siri disabled

P.S. Link to source article: [http://www.wired.com/2015/10/this-radio-trick- silently-hacks...](http://www.wired.com/2015/10/this-radio-trick-silently- hacks-siri-from-16-feet-away/)

Original research publication: [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=7194754)

<comment><USER10> > \- Allow Siri from the lock screen

Lots of people use 'Hey Siri', myself included.

> \- Have headphones plugged in (presumably Apple's)

Not that unlikely.

> \- Are not using their device or have their headphones in (otherwise the > attack would be detected immediately) OR:

> \- Have audible feedback from Siri disabled

These would be the killers. The moment Siri's activated you'd hear it loudly in your ears.

<comment><USER11> So what? You know your phone visited a website, but if that site had a zero- day, would it matter?

<comment><USER9> Generally the result is not immediate. The speed of your network and Siri's delay you should have a second or two to interrupt the attack.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is the best statistics text for experimental physicists? - <AUTHOR> I am an experimental physicist and don't have much idea about statistics. At some point, I feel the need to learn it. Would like to hold reading group and learn it together with other group members. Could you help me with finding a good statistics text book for experimental physicists? Thank you all... <comment><USER2> The Art Of Probability For Scientists And Engineers by Richard Hamming</comment>