No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/comp_sci_graduates_need_more_skills/

<comment><USER2> All the hate on artsies ruined the article for me.

 _If you haven't trashed your computer while doing something questionable, then you're not a computer scientist – you're just an arts grad who didn't get laid_

 _A CompSci grad is supposed to be able to do difficult things that arts grads simply can't understand._

This is exactly the type of biased, negative, and unproductive criticism that the HN community works hard to prevent and has been recently vocal in admonishing.

I may be a little sensitive - I have both a double major BA and a Bachelors in Computer Science and my CS friends look insanely ignorant when they presume they know anything about the benefits/lacks of an Arts degree. Arts "teaches you to think" in ways that CS/Engineering students are never even exposed to (except for by some token arts requirements) - it teaches you have to think about _people_ and the human condition. I would much rather have a CS grad help me start a company, but equally rather have an Arts grad _run_ it (See Warren Bennis' _On becoming a leader_ for a much better investigation into why Arts students make the best leaders [of human beings]).

I'm not saying that Arts is _better_ in any way - I'm just asking for mutual respect. No poli sci student is going around saying they can prove the amortized runtime of a skip list - if you're in CS please don't pretend you've had their education either. Your education also isn't any "harder" in any objective way - ODEs or building an OS in C is not any more difficult than wrapping your head around Aristotle or existentialist phenomenology, it really isn't. It's actually much easier to get an A in CS than Arts, but that's a bit of an aside.

I realize that this was an article not a comment, and I don't intend to start a debate. I just think we need some mutual respect between the disciplines and there seems to be a latent "bash artsies" in some tech writing that really needs to be squashed - it's not helping anyone.

[more to the point of the article: My subjective anecdotal evidence is that arts grads have a MUCH harder time getting hired post-grad (which makes sense considering they chose to learn fundamentals not practical skills) so they go either a) travelling b) to grad school c) to law school. This is a major skew, none of these people should be consider employed, but they don't contribute to the arts grads unemployment rate either]

<comment><USER3> This "two cultures" [1] attitude is, sadly, incredibly pervasive. The idea that there are two kinds of people, two kinds of education, and thus two kinds of careers—one in the arts, one in the sciences—is a product of irredeemable stupidity and must be resisted.

Consider the following list of people, most of whom we should all be familiar with.

\- Aristotle was concerned with understanding the natural world; with logic and mathematics; and with ethics, how to live a good life, music, the theatre, and more.

\- Leibniz developed the calculus, symbolic reasoning, and ideas about computation. He also wrote about law, ethics, and religious disputes.

\- Bertrand Russell made major contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language and mind, as well as being a prominent public intellectual and peace campaigner.

\- Saul Kripke developed Kripke semantics for modal and intuitionistic logic, as well as making major contributions to the philosophy of language, mind, and epistemology and metaphysics.

I'm sure everyone here can think of many more examples, and no doubt your personal interests will influence your selections (as mine obviously have). My point is that an interest in, and the ability to make a major contribution to the arts or sciences in no way precludes making a contribution to the other. Yes, writing a proof is different to building a web service, which in turn is different from writing a book on Spinoza or studying the family dynamics of drug addicts. But the classes of people who do these things are not disjoint. We live in a world of specialisation, but that doesn't mean we have to live in a world of separation; that we cannot have broad interests and broad capabilities. When I was a child I learned about the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, but I also read the Iliad. There's no contradiction there, so why do so many people subscribe to the idea that people who do the latter can't do the former, or vice versa?

There is nothing contradictory in being able to write well, derive logical proofs, appreciate literature and disassemble a computer (or a car!). The call for mutual respect is appreciated, but surely we should demand more: a denial that this divide should exist in the first place.

One small nitpick, about learning fundamentals rather than practical skills making it harder to get hired. Even assuming it to be true, I don't think it cuts at all cleanly across the Arts/Sciences divide. A good understanding of complexity classes is not something I would call practical, i.e. able to be applied directly to so-called "real world" problems. My guess would be that it might make one hireable, in that employers might value the kind of mind which can comprehend such things, but that the number of places hiring people to use that knowledge directly is probably extremely limited. The problem that arts students might be facing is more that their skills are hard to quantify than that they are more concerned with fundamentals.

[1] The term "two cultures" comes from C.P. Snow's famous 1959 lecture. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures>

<comment><USER4> I think you're mistaken to assume that more than a handful of us are as all- around insightful as Aristole, Leibniz et al.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> God, articles like this make me feel so much better. Reading nothing but textbooks, source code, and blog posts by ridiculously talented people makes me wonder why anybody pays me to do anything. This article made me feel like a total stud.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a recent CS grad, this article stuck a chord with me. I wrote the following reply to the author:

\--

Hey Dominic,

I'm a recent CS grad (2009) from ECS at the University of Southampton. Full disclosure: it goes against my humility to say it, but I would probably consider myself to have been a student who hacked around with a lot of technologies and concepts not touched by my course (and I think I'm considerably better off for it).

Not to blame the course, though — the course at ECS was amazing. We had our fair share of "ethics" and "IT industry" modules, although everyone admitted (lecturers included) that these existed mostly to appease the professional bodies. We were subjected to modules that sought to teach us Java, requirements gathering, HCI and project management, although these only made up a small part of the course as a whole. A sizeable portion of my time at Southampton was spent deep in the mathematics that vitally underpin the "softer" CS subjects, and the course was delightfully broad. We built compilers to parse abstract languages, learned LISP (much to the initial mindfuckery of my peers and I) and we all implemented a FAT12 filesystem in C from scratch. The latter required two 12–hour sessions in the lab, and I'm pretty sure that the vending machine was completely drained of coffee somewhere around 6 hours into the second day. We were taught and examined in gratuitous (but stimulating) detail on computational complexity, data structures, formal methods and the properties of fundamental algorithms, and the officially sanctioned languages used throughout the course spanned Java, C(++), C#, PHP, Scheme, Python, JavaScript, Perl and a handful of UNIX shells.

I don't think the problem is the courses, I think it's the learning style of many students and the sheer number of students that are encouraged to go to university just because it's what they are "supposed" to do to get a job. Group work always frustrated me, as many of my peers simple wanted to learn the course notes verbatim so that they could regurgitate them in an exam.

Although it concerned me that many of my peers would one day be released into the wild firmly clutching their Java IDEs, there were a lot of really bright students on my course.

The thing that stops large companies hiring me is probably the abundance of truly awful recruitment agencies. Myself and many of the ECS–ers that I've kept in touch with are bombarded by 5–10 poorly written, unprofessional LinkedIn messages from recruiters every week. Today I received such a message that opened with "Hi Darcey". Classy. They all seem to want Java/C# developers and none of them seem to care about other technologies, or deem them irrelevant, or think that this sort of "playing around" detracts from your skill in some other proprietary technology on their checklist. It's getting to the point where I'm only "working" (for money) around 40%-50% of the time. The rest of the time, I'm just sitting at home working on side projects to keep myself amused.

Many of my most talented coursemates are either now working on their PhDs, or working 10 hours a day on a soul–destroying graduate program for some faceless city financial institution so that they can retire at the age of 45, burnt out and sick of technology.

Sometimes I feel like I should just move to Mountain View or Palo Alto or somewhere else with a little Silicon Valley sunshine, but I don't want to move away from my family, and my girlfriend is very happy here working for a physics startup. It bothers me how grey and soul–less the prospects appear to be for passionate British software geeks.

Perhaps I'm missing something crucial (or maybe I haven't been hanging out with enough of the cool–kids at Silicon Roundabout) but where can I find great tech jobs in this country?

Ben

<comment><USER7> What sort of tech job are you looking for ?

<comment><USER6> I'm a web developer. Much of my recent work has utilised Python/Django and JavaScript, although I have experience with a wide range of (mostly open–source) technologies.

I just checked out CoderStack. I'm looking forward to your launch :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very ranty article, but has a point.

I taught in a Computer Science department for 4 years whilst studying for a PhD. I can honestly say that each year, the quality of the students coming in reduced (lower qualifications, less students with any Maths background for example) and in order to maintain pass rates, the university responded by taking hard subjects out of the syllabus.

The UK higher education system is a mess. Its designed to only work financially with a ridiculous amount of students flowing through it. You can't maintain that volume and also maintain the quality out the other end.

My PhD was the same. I honestly believe that the minimum quality of what I had to produce what much lower than it would have been a decade ago. PhDs are the new masters and masters are the new degrees.

Knowing people that teach in the most prestigious universities in the UK, I also know that this issue affects all universities in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER9> What I can say, from personal experience, is that the last time I interviewed college students for a programming job (this was five years ago), we had quite a few applicants, but only one that had done anything on their own with their personal computer other than play games.

It was startling. Only one had taken any initiative to write a single program that was not assigned homework. But, they could tell me quite a bit of details about the games they had played. Sad.

</comment><comment><USER10> Personally I don't think a student who knows only C++ because he was force to use it in school is going to be much (or any) better than a student who knows only Java for that reason. The problem isn't that the language is Java, the problem is that it's a student who never cared enough to learn something else than what was expected she learn and use for classes. I am, however, quite shocked that operating systems classes are being taught in Java. At my university few classes actually required C++ (usually you could use it or Java) and the OS class was certainly one of them.

His concern that students don't have to take hard classes is pretty valid though. If the curriculum changes he described are really that bad I think that is tragic.

<comment><USER11> The thing about Java is that it's a managed language with little insight into lower-level concepts. This isn't a problem in itself, but when students indicate that they only ever learned Java and that they like it because it's easy, it's usually an indicator that they have no idea what's going on behind the curtain. In my experience, these kinds of students are very reliant on tools that provide a garden path to walk down, become very confused the second that something appears to stop working right, and they tend to approach problems with a very "code-first" mindset - given a problem, they will sit in front of a screen and think that if they can just find the right code to type in, the problem will be solved.

A student in a C++ class at least has a chance at being exposed to something lower level.

<comment><USER12> "A student in a C++ class at least has a chance at being exposed to something lower level."

True, but the risk of using C++ in other CS classes is that they'll spend most of their time fighting C++, and not focus on whatever the class is supposed to be teaching. And the instructor/professor may be wasting a lot of time doing C++ tech support, rather than teaching compiler concepts, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> People complaining about the quality of college graduates is nothing new. Most of the people in my computer science classes didn't care about programming at all. Only the people who were naturally very good at it seemed to care much. I recall complaining a lot about the quality of applicants from pretty much day one of my professional programming career.

When I was younger I got a lot out of reading: <http://www.ericsink.com/Career_Calculus.html>. As someone who isn't naturally the best programmer this helped me put a lot of things to perspective. I'd imagine anyone starting out would be well served by following his advice.

These days I try to spend at least some time every night trying to improve my skills in some tangible way (e.g. reading a book, writing code for a side project, etc.). If you're having trouble finding a job you like just spend as much time as possible learning and you'll do just fine.

</comment><comment><USER14> The author is a headhunter and wrote a great guide to getting a quant job (www.ieor.columbia.edu/pdf-files/Paul_Dominic.pdf [PDF]). I guess that skews his perspective a bit in what he's looking for (numerical algorithms and C++). I'm guessing the situation isn't that bad for companies looking for plain old Java programmers. Finding graduates experienced with C++ and numerical algorithms is substantially harder!

<comment><USER7> Agreed, Dominic is held in high-respect in the city and rightly so, but his core expertise isn't in graduate recruitment and it's shows here.

If you want to hire for low level understanding go to universities like Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, Imperial, York. Look at Aero Engineers and Physicists as well as CS students.

Kings College has maybe a third or forth tier CS department, it's not surprising he's not finding great candidates from there. It also seems like he's relying on the mainstream recruitment boards, most talented graduate developers don't even look there. Most are recruited either through university events or dedicated graduate recruitment boards.

Also there's a reason it's hard to find talented graduate developers willing to do VBA, because money isn't everything. Sure you might make an extra thousand pounds a year doing it, but that doesn't make worthwhile to do a job you hate. Most talented developers would rather get a job that pays less and is enjoyable.

<comment><USER15> I went to Warwick (graduated with a CS MEng in 2006) and I would really hesitate to give preference to someone just because they have a degree from there.

Admittedly I didn't really take advantage of what was available, but my interest is basically in building cool things during my day job. I don't really code for fun and I'm not particularly interesting in computer science theory except where I need it to make my work better.

I've managed to do pretty well because I can balance above average programming skills with a fairly good sense of user interface and design. But ask me about compiler design or operating systems and you'll just get a blank look.

I suppose my point is that I'm okay, but nothing exceptional and I don't have any real interest in the low levels of computer science. So to hold me in high regard just because I have a Masters from a top university is a massive mistake in my opinion. Heck, if I'd done more than just the coursework and a day's worth of revision per subject (I was also skipping about 3/4 of all lectures), my high 2.1 would have been a 1st fairly easily.

Apologies for the rant, and my experiences at Warwick may be out of date now and may be untrue of the other institutes you've mentioned.

<comment><USER16> I don't think University works as a blanket indicator, but it definitely can help. At least at Bristol (my alma mater), the students are highly exposed to low level technical detail, with assignments including processor design, building an assembler, and in the final year, writing a kernel for a multi- processing OS (the hardest thing I've ever tried). They have courses on algorithms, computational complexity and a good mathematics unit too. Plus they teach C, Haskell and Java in the first year to give a good spread of different paradigms, and then expect students to go out and learn any other languages as appropriate for whatever they're working on at the time.

I have my own issues with my time there, but for giving a good, detailed, low- level understanding of computing, I can't fault them.

<comment><USER15> That stuff all sounds more difficult than anything I was taught at Warwick, sounds like a good course (though not necessarily one I would have chosen :)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      If CS grads were smarter, they'd see this as an
      opportunity, because MS is still a vast percentage
      of all corporate IT. Yes, VBA is the worst language
      in the history of the world, but you can get good money
      doing it, and a good programmer knows that it is how
      you think, not the language you code in, that determines
      your ability.

I honestly couldn't read any further. Money definitely is not the only factor to consider when searching for a job. I won't elaborate, but the important things in life should be obvious to a so called "hacker".

Maybe it's the most important factor when searching for a first job. But as soon as your rent is covered: Search for a job that does not kill your spirits and cripples you from inside out.

Quantity has never been the best argument for anything I can think of right now.

<comment><USER18> i would rather get half the money and work fulltime then doing VBA as a Job (i'm not just saying that, i have a VB job atm (for a other year))

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a second year CS student and probably not a typical example, but I've found University education fairly comprehensive and useful. I have been programming and fooling around with robotics and such through high school, so I guess I knew a lot more stuff than most of my classmates. This is probably reflected by the 20%-30% or so (my approximation) drop rate after first year.

Anyway, in my first year we've studied different layers of a computing system:

* Computer Engineering - and implemented [MU0](<http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pjj/cs1001/arch/node1.html>) on an FPGA

* Architecture - general principles and ARM ASM

* OO programming - theory and a lot of Java

* Computation - finite state automata, regexp, a bit about complexity

* Math

Plus some more specialized course units:

* AI

* Distributed Systems

* Team project - which was mostly about team work, but some web apps stuff too

In the second year there are a lot more specialized units:

* Algorithms (implemented in C)

* Operating systems (just pen and paper for the first 2 labs, boring for now)

* Databases (SQL)

* Machine learning (labs with Matlab)

* Networks (Wireshark FTW)

* Microcontrollers (with real dev boards - ARM + FPGA)

* Architecture (again)

* CGI

* Distributed systems (again)

* Mobile systems (seems to be mostly about radio comm and codecs)

I mean, really, you have to be an idiot to blag your way through all of these and not learn anything useful for potential employers. It is true that it probably helps a lot if you have some previous knowledge and/or do independent work as the learning curve is steep. But if you can't do it, maybe you should be studying something else.

The geek culture is visible both among students and staff, but to be honest it's clearly a minority.

BTW, this is CS @ Manchester Uni.

And a WTF moment, because not everything's this good: We've had a "careers workshop" and then we had to submit a CV and cover letter to get marked on and receive feedback. I've submitted the ones that landed me an internship this summer and I've been failed (this probably means I need to resubmit a corporate-looking one).

<comment><USER20> THIS! Don't ever forget you are there to learn the computing topic and not the technology used to teach it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The largest problem I noticed in college was students' attitude toward learning the material. In high school, I think the vast majority of people attack the curriculum from a "memorize and regurgitate" standpoint. In a lot of ways I can't blame them, but once a student hits college and begins training in their field, this has got to stop. Especially in the sciences.

I confess, it took me a little while to figure this out myself. But if I could go back and tell myself one (academics related) thing before starting college, it would be "No really. _Knowledge is power_. Stop passively accepting it and start ferociously acquiring it".

The students who understand this from day one will be the successful ones. The trick is finding a way to get it across to the rest of them.

<comment><USER22> I'd go back and tell myself "Apply apply apply!" Seriously, if something doesn't make sense, find a way to put it in a context that you understand! My biggest challenge in school was just figuring out how to apply the things I was learning to myself and my own problems. Once I actually started using some of the stuff I was learning to further my personal projects it was like stepping on an express train, I made so much more progress, and did so much faster than when I was simply trying to memorize what I was being told.

Also, I'd tell myself not to miss that date with that cute blond. "Dude, you're going to marry her someday and she'll never let you forget that you stood her up on your second date."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "A CompSci grad is supposed to be able to do difficult things that arts grads simply can't understand."

/rant/

The majority of CS education that I've had so far has been theoretical. There has been a lot of math and pseudo code, and logic. Programming rarely comes into it, and when it does, it is (generally) trivial (and it is OK if you get it partially wrong).

Compare this to my undergraduate in philosophy, where I was generally writing at minimum 30 pages per class per semester in term papers, regular writing assignments, and thousands of pages of reading.

There is no question to me that the undergraduate philosophy degree was more challenging. (this is solely based on my experience, I do not mean to indicate it reflects all experiences with all MS CS/ BA PHIL experiences.)

In the philosophy degree, I learned theory and wrote (and I wrote a lot). And sometimes my papers came back with lots of red ink. I took my lumps and rewrote them.

In the CS degree I regurgitate facts, and write the occasional Java program. (Normally from a 'starter' program).

There is no question to me that an ideal CS degree would be as programming intensive as an arts degree is writing intensive. Programming assignments for each class, and producing a substantial piece of work by the end of the class. You know, demonstrating knowledge.

<comment><USER24> > The majority of CS education that I've had so far has been theoretical. > There has been a lot of math and pseudo code, and logic. Programming rarely > comes into it, and when it does, it is (generally) trivial (and it is OK if > you get it partially wrong).

Here's my beef with this. It's programming. It involves a computer and perhaps an internet connection. Anyone, for essentially no money at all, can sit in the comfort of their own room and start writing programs. There's simply no excuse for students to not be doing this.

It's not like a photography student who needs access to a dark room, or a chemistry student that needs an expensive lab, or whatever other types of careers out there that involve lots of expensive equipment. We're talking $1000 that just about every single college student has already spent.

When I was in college I read SICP for the heck of it and in my discrete math class where the professor declared we could do our assignments in any language we wanted, I did them in Scheme. I also wrote a Sega Master System emulator, a game engine, a paint program and countless other things. I'm not trying to brag because when it comes down to it I consider myself a pretty average programmer. But it's not at all hard for a student to do this.

When I am interviewing college grads I can smell the ones who just scraped by on their classes and didn't explore the field on their own at all a mile away. They always have and always will get a firm "no" from me, there's just no excuse in this field to not take the initiative to learn on your own.

<comment><USER23> Sure, I totally agree.

I was mostly self taught in programming before starting the advanced degree.

There isn't any teaching instruction with regard to the actual 'doing' of programming. The article states that CS majors should be able to 'do' things that arts majors can't do. Mostly, they can think about things that arts majors haven't learned about.

But imagine if you are an English major. You want to be a great writer. Sure, you will be writing outside of class. But also, you will be writing a inside of class. Maybe an art major painting would be a better example, but the analogy stands; you should have rigorous practice in addition to the stuff that you do for the major, which should be fairly intensive in and of itself.

I don't see programming being treated seriously as a craft in CS. It seems like something that Professors get research assistants to do for them. (In fact, I'm pretty sure a lot of professors wouldn't know a good program if it smacked them in the face).

It is in this way much different from other college level disciplines, where the graduates are supposed to have gained some sort of skill. (liberal arts majors should know how to write, painters should paint, physicists and chemists, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > bog standard languages like SQL, VB, Perl, et al

Sorry grandpa, but the smart kids these days aren't learning those (with the possible exception of SQL). Look for people with experience with Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc...not freaking VB.

<comment><USER25> _No-one_ wants to hire someone who won't work in a language they see as "beneath" them. The author even goes onto mention F#[1] and CUDA in the next sentence as examples of what he considers cutting edge.

[1] A major project of Simon Peyton-Jones, who in his spare time is a leading light in the Haskell community

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying that VB is beneath me, I'm just saying it's ridiculous to expect fresh grads to have experience with it.

<comment><USER25> I'm not so sure. I mean, I picked up Tcl/Tk at college not because it was ever taught in any course, but because I needed to make GUIs for my own code on AIX (rather than generating a .ps graph on the command line, printing it and looking at it on hardcopy!). It's entirely feasible that an undergrad at a Windows institution would pick up VB on the side.

<comment><USER4> There's a difference between "it's reasonable to expect fresh grads to know X" and "there might be a few fresh grads who happen to know X".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I did my CS degree a long time ago in the UK. I did a 'sandwich degree', 2 years at college, a year working for an employer and a year back at college. Everything, and I mean _everything_ , of lasting value I learned in that time was learnt during the industrial training year. Things like seeing projects through to the end, being accountable, getting it right whatever it took, knowing how to figure things out for yourself, doing what was asked for and not what I felt like doing.

Employers want people who get things done with the least supervision. Java is becoming this generation's BASIC, it bestows the illusion of knowing stuff without having undergone the sheer hard grind of becoming usefully experienced and battle hardened. Knowing Java is merely the beginning and, as is becoming clear, not even a terribly useful beginning at that.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think "ethics" is a trash course. At Texas A&M CS is in the College of Engineering. Engineering Ethics is a required course to graduate. One of the major points was using the Challenger disaster as an example case, hammering home the importance of doing whats right, not want management pressures you to do.

Furthermore, anyone with a CS Degree should be able to teach themselves new languages without any problems. When I see people complaining saying that "their school is not teaching them language X" I cringe. Universities are not vocational training, you are supposed to be able to handle independent study.

<comment><USER28> Also taught at RIT for all engineers, comp sci, and software engineer students, including content on Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Three Mile Island, and Tenerife.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I definitely agree with some teachers being totally clueless. _Some_ of them seem to have absolutely no experience nor interest in the industry. To illustrate, I am currently enrolled in a User Interface class and one of our main reference is this website from the 90s: [http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/skaalid/theory/theo...](http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/skaalid/theory/theory.htm). Ok, some principles never change but come on, how do you expect us to take this seriously when most of us could design better websites at 12 years old.

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember on an initial phone interview about 7-8 years ago at a job, first the owner apologized for asking such a stupid question, then asked "what is a pointer?" After hearing an acceptable answer, he said that you wouldn't believe how many supposed CS graduates couldn't even answer.

<comment><USER31> My boss at my current co-op was interviewing people for next semester. He said one of the students, who had supposedly taken Operating Systems, couldn't tell him the difference between a thread and a process.

/facepalm

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Based on a recent salary guide/study, in the US, those graduating with a focus on it security may have a better chance of gaining employment upon graduation do to demand for networking/security talent. [http://www.securityweek.com/it- salary-guide-shows-increase-s...](http://www.securityweek.com/it-salary-guide- shows-increase-salaries-it-security-professionals)

</comment><comment><USER33> I know if I were a BigCo I'd launch a program to sponsor programming contests / projects in universities.

Toy robotics challenges, programming puzzle teams, AI contests, whatever. This would a) give me mindshare and contact with the students who actually get stuff done outside of coursework b) help give these students useful experience. c) be relatively cheap.

<comment><USER7> They do, often through places like TopCoder, but it's a very expensive way to recruit (not because of prizes but in terms of the amount of employee time taken to run these things and the risk of it not paying off).

The average BigCo already spends in the region of 10-20k per candidate hired, running a graduate recruitment campaigns is an expensive business, so return on investment is an important factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> He mentions a lack of engineers well-versed in MS products. Is there good money to be made in doing consulting using MS tech?

<comment><USER35> I refer to them as Sharepoint salesmen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A CompSci degree is not the _only_ thing you need for career in I.T. It's not a vocational degree like medicine is.

</comment><comment><USER37> I am surprised there is a problem with CS grads not finding jobs. Granted, I am in VT, but we can't fill programmer positions for anything here; though, I wouldn't hire a Java-only recent CS grad unless s/he could find a way to really show they were fantastic problem solvers. (as we don't do Java or much OO in general)

<comment><USER38> Maybe it's different in the UK, but a huge percentage of my graduating classmates couldn't write code to save their life. There are people who are bad at their job in most fields, but maybe CS is just easier to bullshit through.

<comment><USER39> It's the same here in Belgium. I'm a dropout but some of my friends are currently getting their CS degree and the majority of them couldn't write code, even if their life depended on it. They see it more as a job then something they like doing.

When I was still attending school I also noticed that the majority of the people really didn't care; it was just a small percentage of the group that loved CS & programming. But I guess that is something you see everywhere in life.

<comment><USER38> > They see it more as a job then something they like doing.

I still don't see why this is a bad thing. A plumber who didn't grow up dreaming of pipe repair can still fix things. You don't have to love a job to at least be _minimally competent_ at it.

Just because they don't love their jobs is no excuse to be unable to do it. But I guess they're unemployed, so the problem fixes itself :)

<comment><USER37> No, I think it's different. Programming is _so much harder_ than plumbing from an intellectual standpoint that there is a strong correlation between people who enjoy programming (and thus do it in their free time, and strive to excel at it) and people who are competent programmers.

You could probably spend two weeks with a good plumber, having never picked up a wrench in your life, and with the right tools be able to do 98% of the work a plumber ever needs to do.

Take someone who has never used a computer and put them next to the greatest programmer and teacher ever, and that person will probably be able to do ~2% of the work a typical programmer will ever need to do.

Since the _intellectual barrier to entry_ is so high, hobbyists are likely the only ones to do it well, as it just takes so much of the brain power of someone to be able to be a good programmer. So someone who isn't using all of that brain power, or a significant portion of it, thinking about coding is simply just not going to be able to compete with someone who is.

Compare that to a plumber and I think your analogy falls a part.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Activists hack ISIS mailing list hours after it was claimed to be unhackable - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-hacked-propaganda-amaq-mailing-list-emails-subscribers-published-islamic-state-online-caliphate-a8049771.html <comment><USER2> >[x] claims [thing] is unhackable

>internet hacks [thing]

What an unfortunate and absolutely unpredictable series of events.

</comment><comment><USER3> Real title is « Muslim activists hack Isis mailing list hours after terrorists claimed it was unhackable ». Why change it?

<comment><USER4> When I try copying the full title into the title box of the submit form it says that the original title is 8 characters to long so my guess is the OP removed the extraneous words so he/she could post it.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep too long. i don't get why it's capped at 80, this comes up all the time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seeing as this is "Hacker News" and The Independent is utter garbage it would be nice with some technical depth on how the actual hack was performed. Does anyone know if it's available anywhere? Even if it's "just" some old, known vulnerability that was exploited in a non-updated piece of mailing list software, it's still interesting.

<comment><USER6> The post wall still interesting showing the information war between sides and where they gather. The fact that UK citizens are do active is alarming to say the least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We should probably spare a thought for those ISIS system admins then if anything we've read about how ISIS operates is anything to go by

<comment><USER8> For me, the thought I spare is "good riddance". Yes, heartless, but when daesh kills its dedicated own, I'm not shedding much tears. What I care about is stopping it from killing and enslaving others.

<comment><USER9> They may be "others". Unsurprisingly, ISIS is known to force people to work for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, rather than let intel agencies / law enforcement hack it and watch what is going on, they hacked it and then let them know?

Really not sure being a vigilante in such a "hot" space for law enforcement is useful.</comment>


Watch 10,000 League of Legends Games in 30 Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/10/technology/league-of-legends-graphic.html

<comment><USER2> It is fascinating that the individual motivations of players fits into such predictable mass movements.

I think this is at heart, the power of statistics. The simple numbers for a group of values shows a predictive strength based on certain highly predictable measures.</comment>


The Million Dollar Logo - <AUTHOR> http://leslor.posterous.com/the-million-dollar-logo <comment><USER2> Not to be a downer, but those are fairly mediocre logos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. I appreciate your opinion. Why don't you like them and how would you change them?

firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


Amazon Micro-Chips for Alexa Devices - <AUTHOR> https://voicebot.ai/2019/08/27/amazon-certifies-syntiant-chips-for-alexa-devices/ <comment><USER2> This is really cool. I look forward to the day we can have a Google Assistant/Alexa like application that doesn't rely on servers to do the main functionality.</comment>


Is Cancer helping humanity? Bulgarian researchers think so - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/depressing-new-paper-suggests-cancer-evolved-to-autocorrect-our-gene-pool <comment><USER2> I came to the same conclusion, that cancer is a side-effect of mutation, and is inseparable from evolution. The billions who died of cancer had an essential contribution to our evolution. Species, such as crocodiles, that don't have cancer are also stagnating, and if the environment changes, they will disappear instead of adapting.</comment>


"Botwall" that stops DDoS attacks  - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/168264/this-start-up-turned-hackers-greatest-trick-around-on-the-to-make-botnets-obsolete/

<comment><USER2> That's an interesting product, but have they not heard of Xpath specific crawling (for the case they seem to describe)?</comment>


Critics call foul as Google takes aim at JavaScript with Dart - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/09/critics-call-foul-as-google-takes-aim-at-javascript-with-dart.ars <comment><USER2> Two problems with this article. First, the primary critic they quote, and the only individual named, is the creator of JavaScript. Naturally, with his emotional and intellectual investment in JavaScript he is going to oppose anything that may replace it.

Second is their criticism of Google designing the initial version of Dart "behind closed doors" as a betrayal of open source. Generally, all open source programs start privately then are opened when they reach an adequate level of functionality that people can start hacking on them. Mozilla almost died when it was open-sourced because it wasn't ready for most hackers to work on.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you learn web development in 2014? - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys,
I ask this as I have been having a lot of trouble over the past 6 months trying to learn web development.
Are there any sources you would recommend for learning enough full stack web development to make simple web applications? (i.e. online surveys)
Thanks
jack <comment><USER2> The first thing you'll have to realize is that web development is learning multiple technologies.

HTML / CSS / a programming language / a framework to interface to the web / some basic system launching / databases / Javascript

Luckily you don't need to know 100% of them all just to get started.

I'd eliminate the first step -- deploying your code and build projects that run on heroku or appfog.com. The former allows small projects for free at the cost of some design decisions.

The second thing I'd eliminate is to start by learning Javascript. You necessarily don't have to use Node, but I'm assuming you have no programming background -- learning how basic programming works is important. I define programming as clear, step by step thinking expressed in any syntax. Programming is learning what to communicate to the computer, not just how to do it (the language). Coursera and others have javascript introductions.

From this point, I'd probably look at something like Parse.com as a backend for your web app -- this is an online database that you can access via Javascript.

Why am I recommending this route? You need the dopamine hits to keep going. Once you're building things, trust me, you'll find the language and framework you love and can "think in", be it ruby, python, javascript or anything else.

Get building, anything, and finish and ship it. Don't worry, it'll be ugly. Anything anyone writes today will be ugly in 5 years no matter their programming level. Your job is to build build build. Feel free to get in touch if you like, all the best :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply mate,

I actually have a degree in computer science so I am very familiar with Python and Java hence why I initially went down that path - would this change your recommendations?

I have done some small things (landing pages) using HTML and CSS and written some scripts for software like Q (Market Research) and LimeSurvey in Javascript so I am not a 'complete novice'

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> lynda.com</comment>


Heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201433200

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of an old Willie Nelson song, "I Gotta Get Drunk," with the lines: "There's a lot of doctors that tell me / that I'd better start slowin' it down, / But there's more old drunks, than there are old doctors, / So I guess we'd better have another round."

</comment><comment><USER3> title of paper is: "Late-life alcohol consumption and 20-Year mortality" [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1530-0277.201...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01286.x/asset/j.1530-0277.2010.01286.x.pdf)

in particular, they are looking whether some 55-65 year olds died the next 20 years, women were underrepresented in their sample (just 37%) who tend to be lighter drinkers anyhow [citation needed]. participants were select by having been at a health care facility in the last 3 years. the socioeconomic factors they took into account where those _at the start_ ("at baseline"). i.e., who knows what changed in the past or future, or why they were in a health care center, etc. was there an observation effect? who knows.

the yahoo article doesn't seem to represent this very well. hype hype hype

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesnt this exclude heavy drinkers who died before the age of 55-65? This skews the results towards individuals whose bodies are presumably quite resilient against alcohol related health complications and managed to keep the person alive long enough to be included in this study. The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"

<comment><USER5> The study is about a population aged between 55 and 65 and what happens to them in the following 20 years according to their drinking patterns. So it's not fair to say that the results are skewed. It only excludes 40-year-old drunks in a trivial way: the study is not about them.

Analogy: suppose we have a study about the effect of using or not using sunscreen on a Caucasian population. It wouldn't be fair to say that the results are skewed just because they didn't include non-Caucasians.

> _The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers > outlive late life nondrinkers"_

Indeed, the title of the paper is "Late-life alcohol consumption and 20-Year mortality".

I understand it's normal to be skeptical of whether the results apply to younger people but, as someone else mentioned, I doubt that so many alcoholics die before 55. There's probably also some practical difficulty of doing an analog study for a younger range.

<comment><USER6> He was referring to the title of the article in the last sentence. I think if there is a better article on their research, it may help in explaining better as this article seems shy on explanations.

Also, the article cites that the nondrinkers may be more likely to be poor. This means a) less medical care to have doctors find things early, b) less stress, and c) they are not benefiting from escaping any stress they do have. Really, this article seems more like, "Stress kills, alcohol relieves stress temporarily, those who drink often have less responsibilities." So an alternative to alcohol: relaxation.

It also (as far as the article) does not go into detail about how many were from natural causes, etc. I'd be interested in whether the nondrinkers were more prone to heart attacks and this caused the discrepancy in deaths.

I can see so many holes in the research that I think it is far from conclusive on the matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did they verify non drinkers are non drinkers? My Doctor friend tells me that she is amazed at how many people when asked if they drink, emphatically say "Never".

<comment><USER8> Cognitive dissonance is widespread. An old roommate once informed me she had given up drinking, because she switched from vodka crans to wine. It's similar to vegetarians who sometimes eat chicken and people who "don't watch TV" because all the shows they watch are on Hulu.

<comment><USER9> I'd suspect it's less to do with cognitive dissonance, and more intentional lying to meet social norms or out of fear of future problems.

Anything controversial, highly personal, or with stigmas attached will get biased results from self-reporting. Alcohol, drugs, sexual history, religious views, political views, racial prejudices, etc will almost always be biased towards what the person thinks is the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What the study actually finds is that heavy drinkers who live to age 55 live longer than nondrinkers who live to age 55. This might be because heavy drinking confers some health benefit, or some behavioral benefit (couch surfing vs outdoor activity). But to me, the more likely explanation is that heavy drinking selects for people who are genetically or otherwise predisposed to live longer (by killing the rest before age 55).

Imagine a headline that read "Smoking correlates with increased life expectancy among centenarians." You probably wouldn't conclude based on that that smoking is a good idea.

<comment><USER11> Do enough heavy drinkers really die by 55 to account for the difference?

<comment><USER10> I don't actually know. I'm just saying that it's one possible interpretation, and that it seems to me like a more likely explanation than heavy drinking extending your life.

The point is that harsh selection early in life means that anyone who survives to late life will be hardier. This has been shown in studies of, for example, plants that survive heavy storms as seedlings. Is heavy drinking harsh enough to show this effect? I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry to post this is off-topic, but am I the only one who is incredibly annoyed by the way Time slips in promotions for other content in the middle of their articles? It's quite jarring and makes it difficult to keep one's attention on the content. And the fact that it happens on almost every paragraph just makes me more and more frustrated until I have no desire to read the article anymore. Unfortunately, readability doesn't help here; anyone know of a user script or other way to easily fix this?

<comment><USER13> CTRL+SHIFT+J (JS console) and type:

      Array.prototype.forEach.apply(document.getElementsByClassName('see'), [function(el){el.style.display = 'none'}])

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a restatement of what we've puzzled over for some time now: that those who consume modest amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk of mortality.

It's an epidemiologic association, so this isn't something you can exactly hang your hat on and encourage people to do. But it has been observed that cardiovascular risk is lowest for women who have just under 1 drink per day, and men who have 2 or fewer per day.

This reinforces the older literature, but doesn't really help illuminate the causal chain, if any.

( _Edit - as sp332 points out below, this does present new data about an association between heavy drinking and reduced mortality in this cohort._ )

<comment><USER15> What's new is that, in this study, _heavy_ drinkers outlived abstainers. Very unexpected, even though I knew that moderate drinkers had some health benefits.

<comment><USER14> Yes, good point. I agree that this part is a new finding; thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps it's because the heaviest drinkers spend many evenings safely at home passed out on the couch, while the abstainers are out incurring the normal risks of daily life.

</comment><comment><USER17> _controlling for nearly all imaginable variables - socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on_

It's been a while since statistics 101, and I'm curious - in practice, how do you control for these variables? Do you try for a large sample size and only compare like with like? Or do you try to estimate the impact of the confounding variables and adjust the numbers accordingly?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is so skewed. 1800 participants, all with different health backgrounds, then divided into 3 groups of heavy, moderate and never. That's not really a sample size to get any definite conclusion from. These results might be a reason to do a more trough research at the most.

The variance on this thing is huge. To tie their drinking habits to their mortality, negating all other factors, on this sample size, is ridiculous.

<comment><USER19> A sample size of 1800 / 3 where 40+% of them died is actually a fairly good for this type of research. The only real value for a larger sample size is the ability to measure smaller effects. And if the change is tiny then it's not really significant anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk..., heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk."

Hmm, seems to me that all have precisely the same likelihood of dying.

Sorry to be snarky, but this is just awfully poor editing. Reading pop science reporting is often just painful.

</comment><comment><USER21> My theory:

absolute non drinkers are uptight,

and heavy drinkers are pickled and preserved.

My grandfather just died at the age of 97 and he was never without a 'snort', aka Coke and Canadian Velvet. He was quite normal up to about 95, and never had any serious ailments.

</comment><comment><USER22> Guess I'm going to die early.

<comment><USER23> I'll drink to that.

jk

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Meh. I'm much happier with my non-drinking quality of life as opposed to my former heavy-drinking quality of life. I'd give a few years up to live drama- free for the remainder.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think it'd be better to check out drinking habits of aged Japanese to figure out whats a good level =)

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nothing to see here. Abstinence is a much more stress and discomfort than drinking, especially when you suddenly stop after years of a heavy daily consumption. It is extremely difficult thing to change your habits because you will face a completely different, unfriendly (literally - you will lose most of your connections when you stop - no one need a stressed/depressed and sick neurotic) world, which you need to learn to comprehend and love again. The same type, but more intensive struggle awaits you after a sudden withdraw from a dope addiction - the world will be alien to you. The problem with a booze or dope isn't about chemistry or organic damages, it is all about losing a connection with reality and the shock and discomfort to rediscover it after withdrawal. Abstinence is worse than drinking, every drunkard or doper will tell you. Even after years, if you can stay away from it, each day will be a new challenge, new struggle. And each regression will drop you back below the zero. This is the thing that kills you faster than booze itself.

btw, the only way out which may work more or less is about getting your mind stimulated and busy - traveling to the different part of the world (India and Muslim countries are the best), some hobby or business. There are a lot of life-beaten people who are traveling - running away from their past and from themselves. Especially in India.

<comment><USER28> I would bet the effect is simply due to heart attack deaths. Heart attacks are the #2 killer. Alcohol improves circulation and ameliorates heart disease.

I bet if you controlled for triglycerides or waist to hip ratio the alcohol has no effect.

In short, if you are going to be fat and coat your arteries with crap from a sugary and vegetable oil heavy diet, then make sure to have a couple drinks a day. That category happens to cover most people in the industrialized world.</comment></comment>


Why Mark Cuban is wrong about Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://pagelever.com/fact-check-why-mark-cuban-is-wrong-about-facebook/

<comment><USER2> $3 CPM is far more expensive that generic Facebook adverts (known for being very cheap in terms of CPM), and it's a fairly typical price for digital advertising. Obviously it depends on the industry, the audience, etc. etc. but $3 is fairly common.

The reason it feels like such a terrible deal here is that you aren't paying $3 CPM to reach a new audience, you are paying $3 CPM to reach _your_ audience. Sure, Facebook can argue "it's the most targeted audience possible, they're Mavericks fans!" but the counter to that is "of course they are, it's my brand that put this audience together".

Brands use Facebook because it's far more user-friendly than trying to collect your fans together on your own website, and therefore it's a better solution - easier for your fans means more will do it, so you have more people to market to. However the comparison is that they're people who have chosen to subscribe to you, and therefore the pricing comparison is not to digital advertising, but to writing to fans on a website, or a blog, or through email newsletters. This is why it feels like, and arguably is, a rip off.

As to the argument that it's needed from a user's point of view and that Facebook happens to be able to monetise to help their users (e.g. jeffwidman's comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4785852>) I'm not really sure. It's probably a valid point. I'm not a Facebook user myself (but my marketing work occasionally covers Facebook), my personal feeling is that if I follow a brand it's because I want to see their updates. All of their updates. In my head, it's the same as signing up to a newsletter, or subscribing to an RSS feed, just through a convenient third party. But as I don't do it myself, I'm happy to consider myself wrong, or in the minority, maybe if I was an active user following many brands that I care about I would find that getting 100% of their messages would ruin my Facebook experience.

<comment><USER3> Spot on!

One thing to note, when you said "my personal feeling is that if I follow a brand it's because I want to see their updates", the tricky think about facebook is that you don't "follow" a brand like you do on Twitter, you just "like" them. In my opinion, it's a small but important distinction. Just because you enjoy a certain brand doesn't mean you actually want to know every little thing they're doing.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Exactly. At first I was all "I'll like every FB page of things I like in RL". But then I was getting annoyed at some of the crap that these pages were putting into my feed so I "unliked" pretty much everything. I wish there was a way to "like" something so that it is reflected in your interests and what not, but NOT get their updates. Maybe there is and I haven't seen it.

<comment><USER4> When you click to remove a post from your newsfeed, facebook prompts you with "unsubscribe from this page's updates" — there's also a tab in the top right of these stories (and of people's updates) that allows you to set the frequency you receive news from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fact Check: The fans on the Facebook pages were driven there by the page owner, likely through other marketing channels such as TV. It should be a mutually beneficial relationship, though Facebook is trying to take advantage of that relationship now. Companies and people are mobile on the internet. They can drive people wherever they want. Mark Cuban's action is a huge signal. As I said in another reply somewhere, Facebook is essentially providing a newsletter service with pages (plus some other stuff). Oh, and Facebook also has ads on these pages.. Something better will come that doesn't abuse the relationship.

<comment><USER6> How is the relationship suppose to be beneficial to Facebook? No one signs up for Facebook to keep in touch with their favorite brands, they sign up to keep in touch with friends. Facebook allows brands to communicate to their users but their added benefit hardly helps FB at all. The only way it does help Facebook is if they monetize these relationships, which is what Facebook is attempting to do. I'm not sure there is legit proof that FB has decreased Fan Page outreach organically (the only way you could claim they're "abusing" the relationship - I don't see an issue with FB charging brands to reach more fans non-organically.

Mark Cuban isn't God, I don't think this is a "huge" signal at all. IMO, Cuban's critiques of YouTube have been similar - which I feel have also been proven wrong with time.

<comment><USER5> Also, the term organic vs. non-organic -- the posts that reach a person's feed, organically, is set by the algorithm Facebook determines; It's not so organic.

<comment><USER6> Organic in the sense of how it's used in the industry. Google's search algorithm is set by Google but when talking about the search results people tend to differ between "organic" and paid.

The difference here is that "organic" is considered Google's and Facebook's best attempt to show their user what is most relavent to them. Some speculate that both companies are modifying these results to optimize paid results but there is no smoking gun that is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Businesses run based on numbers. If a Facebook ad converts at a profitable ROI, then many businesses will buy the ads no matter how poorly they have been treated.

Users are different. If they feel slighted, they will disappear. Facebook is right to focus on the user experience at the expense of antagonizing advertisers.

Whether Facebook could have implemented this without pissing off so many people, now that is a different story.

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _Whether Facebook could have implemented this without pissing off so many > people, now that is a different story._

History seems to indicate that Facebook can NOT change a single thing without pissing off a lot of people. Every time they do a major update... the Internets go crazy. I've been guilty of that. I still hate Timeline... but I haven't left Facebook yet. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Actually, as a user I'm annoyed by this as well. When I like a page it's usually because I'm interested in what they have to say.

I _really_ want is control of that myself. Default me to everything and I'll "show less from this page" or unlike if they are spamming me.

Some companies and organizations are using Facebook to communicate with me and Facebook is deciding what I'll see or not see.

 _THAT_ is Cuban's real problem. You can't reach _all_ of your audience without coughing up a fairly large amount of money because Facebook has decided not everybody wants to see your message.

</comment><comment><USER9> We live in an attention economy, and Facebook is simply the arbiter of it. If Facebook let all fan pages reach all their fans, it'd be a sub-optimal user experience.

The fact that they have turned protecting against the tragedy of the commons into a monetization model may not make brands happy, but it makes users happy.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Mark Cuban, you can afford $0.003 per fan to increase Mavs home game attendance. C'mon son!"

Telling people what they can afford is not a very well thought out argument.

</comment><comment><USER11> "As of November 13th, MySpace has approximately 3.8 Monthly Active Users." Sounds about right.

<comment><USER12> We're cracking up at the office realizing this typo. Fixed. >_<

<comment><USER13> Also, this is only the number of people using the Myspace Facebook app, not the site as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I simply don't get why brands view Facebook subscribers as being opted in to 100% of their constant barrage of spam. Facebook pages have never worked like an email subscription list, and that fact should be obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the platform.

Someone might follow your brand on Twitter, but if he doesn't check his feed for a while, he doesn't see your marketing-speak unless he goes looking for it. Unlike Twitter, Facebook actually tries to be intelligent and show you the stories you care about instead of defaulting to chronological order only. Since, shocker of shockers, people generally prefer to engage with their fellow human beings as compared to these quirky entities we call "brands," the stories you care about are more likely to involve an old friend getting married or your buddy's weekend pics than whatever inspirational message your social medial engagement intern shat out this hour.

Basically, Facebook is treating brands a lot like people: not all their friends see all their content in their newsfeeds, but some do, and higher engagement and closer connections make it more likely that someone will see your stuff. Brands, naturally, don't want to play by the same rules as us mere mortals and want all of their "content" displayed prominently in their subscribers' newsfeeds. In other words, it's Citizens United v. FEC all over again, except no one is actually limiting corporate speech here, just asking brands to pay rather small amounts if they want more reach and distribution than the rules allow.

To sum it all up for Mark Cuban: the mere fact that someone has liked the Mavs on Facebook does not mean that she wants to hear whatever your marketing interns come up with every couple of hours. The obnoxious guy who talks about himself all the time doesn't automatically get a free megaphone to beam his messages into the minds of everybody he's engaged with. I realize that you, Mr. Cuban, have made a career out of being precisely that guy, and that people do walk around hanging on your every word, but us normal people and normal brands have to pay for our promotion, and it's unreasonable to think otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER15> "MySpace has approximately 3.8 Monthly Active Users", you might be underestimating this :D

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh goody. I love to rip on the social network.

AOL, Friendster, Myspace, now FB.. They never monetize because the model can't support itself properly or at least it won't make a trillion dollars like one might expect to with a billion users. If they really wanted to monetize they should just go the linkedin route and charge $1/month for it. If you're not willing to pay that much for FB then what's the service really worth to you?

$38 -> $22 - Need I say more? Zuckerberg reminds me of that guy Steve (Edward Norton) in the Italian job. Clever as he might be - he's just got no imagination.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think both positions (Mark's & brendanib) are oversimplifying (and hyping) the issue. End of the day, what matters are the relationships formed between people and brands. And like all advertising, paying to get in front of people is how the game works. If you'd rather pay money to initiate those conversations, then pay for them If you want to be engaging enough to draw people into those conversations, then invest in that.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it incredibly amusing that a statement by an experienced businessman who has decided to share some of his hard-earned earned insight into a product is being treated this way. I'm inclined take the opinion of someone who's got his mind on his money and his money on his mind more seriously than a blog post by a social media marketing firm.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious as to why more brands don't just use 'groups' instead?

I'm in a couple of groups that are basically companies and I get all their status updates as well as the ability to turn on or off notifications for them (one I keep on because I really like the company).

</comment><comment><USER20> When you're used to paying nothing anything more is hardly seen as a bargin. This is the core issue. It will just take time before brands get used to paying for what they once got for free.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just read this: "Understanding Like-gate" <http://daltoncaldwell.com/understanding-likegate>

<comment><USER12> I'm skeptical of App.net, but I thought Dalton did a fantastic job explaining the News Feed in that piece. Really well done.

<comment><USER21> Just as I am skeptical of a post on the pagelever blog from the "Director of Growth" (Biz Dev). Oh which by-the-way offers a Facebook product...

Content marketing -__-

<comment><USER9> On the one hand, you're completely right.

On the other, who better to say "You just don't understand the power of the platform" than someone who sees the numbers on over 10,000 Facebook pages with more than 1Billion Facebook fans?

If Cuban said "I don't understand the platform" that's one thing, but saying "This platform doesn't work" is claiming it's not an education problem, it's a platform power problem

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awww man, I thought this article was going to be about Mark Cuban's comments on the Facebook IPO.

</comment><comment><USER23> What the author of the article fails to understand is nothing lasts forever on the internet.

Facebook can become insignificant 1 year from now just because a new service propose better features at a lower price, or just because people get bored...

People used to have email accounts at yahoo , yet , people now prefer gmail because it is easier to use and is less "spammy".

People used to have myspace accounts , and guess what, moved to facebook...

But it's also true that nothing's free on the internet. Twitter is not free , neither is facebook , and as a business they need to generate revenue.

<comment><USER24> You've missed a couple of points 1\. The possibility that Facebook is 'insignificant' one year from now is astronomical. People use Facebook for so many things in their lives including staying in touch, single sign on, games, etc. Even if it somehow cut in half it's still 500m users vs the 3.5m of Myspace 2\. The 3000 dollar fee is a fee to reach X number of users now, not one year for now. So if he pays the 3000 now, even if Facebook goes under, it wasn't a loss.

<comment><USER23> never underestimate the web. Someone can come up with a game changing concept and attention can shift just like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So an entrepreneur who is building a business based on facebook marketing is defending facebook. No bias there at all.

<comment><USER26> It's in tune with most of the other startup blogs that hit the front page. HN is a great place for entrepreneurs to lobby for their co's.

<comment><USER27> This is a fair point, but I think its also fair for the parent to point the potential for bias out, given that some people may have perused the article quickly without realizing that its posted to the blog of a company with a large stake in the issue at hand.</comment></comment></comment>


iPhone market share grows 6.4% in USA, takes share from Android in most markets - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/11/ios-market-share-kantar/ <comment><USER2> They might have removed the headphone jack, but they've added quite a lot in the new iPhone:

\- New generation haptic feedback

\- Improved camera system and dual cameras for the Plus

\- Stereo speakers

\- A10 Fusion SoC makes the 7 the fastest phone on the market by a wide margin

\- New solid state home button

\- IPX67 water resistance and dust proofing

\- Bigger battery without increasing thickness

\- Wide color gamut display that's up to 25% brighter

\- OIS for the smaller model

<comment><USER3> > \- New solid state home button

I personally consider this a reduction, not an addition. I prefer the old button.

<comment><USER4> Why? I actually still have a 6S and I find the physical button feels mushy in comparison to the new solid state / haptic button. Is there a disadvantage I'm missing?

<comment><USER5> I had a 5S which has the first generation touch ID paired with a physical button, which I considered to be the best home button on any iPhone I'd owned. I've since switched to the 7 plus and now think the haptic/solid state button is superior. Having the whole bottom of the phone simulate a click feels really satisfying, and knowing that no physical hinge is involved gives me confidence that the effect won't deteriorate with time or use.

Just as moving from a physical keyboard to touchscreen reduces moving parts and therefore many points of failure, moving to a solid state home button eliminates a very common and critical point of failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually switched to iOS for the past few months as part of an experiment. I have mixed feelings about it.

I think it's greatest advantage and disadvantage is that it's a sterile environment. No third parties can mess with it. Unfortunately at times those third parties include me, the user.

Overall, I miss my Windows tablet for web browsing which is what I do mostly on my iPad. However, I am waiting for the next round of Windows tablets to see if I can find a 10 inch that is worth my money. I also miss having a (Android) back button on my phone.

<comment><USER7> > I also miss having a (Android) back button on my phone.

I find I much prefer the swipe from the left to go back, it feels a lot more natural.

<comment><USER8> The Android back button is a concept that doesn't really exist on iOS (except as an informal protocol with inconsistent UI cobbled together between a handful of apps, many of which were written by Google...): swiping left is more like clicking "parent folder" than "back"; think what happens in a file system or web browser when you click a symlink/shortcut or hyperlink: that is closer to the Activity/Intent model of Android, and back serves the universal purpose of not just going "up" the folder/breadcrumb trail inside of an application and an actual "back" in Safari, but also allows for global "back" during tasks like returning to the web browser from an app you might have entered, or back to Yelp from the Maps app, or back to YouTube from a web browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone 6s were the three most popular smartphones in the US at the beginning of the holiday period, for a combined 31.3% share. The Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge were the fourth and fifth best- selling phones in the US, with Samsung capturing 28.9% of smartphone sales._

I remember the days when Apple completely dominated the smartphone market, competing favorably with Android, and eclipsing any single Android manufacturer. I was surprised to hear that Apple has now dropped to 31% market share. This means that Android now has almost double the market share of Apple, and Samsung alone is going head-to-head with Apple.

I think we've just witnessed the end of Apple's golden era.

<comment><USER10> When did Apple have dominating market share? Though they have near total profit market share, isn't their non-dominant market share what has kept them clear of any anti-trust scrutiny?

<comment><USER11> When did Apple have dominating market share? - maybe back in the days of the iphone 3g, in usa?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was a diehard android user for a long time and I switched when the 7 came out. Ios has some annoyances and it is clearly not built for a phablet sized phone. However the battery life I get with the 7 plus makes it all worth it.

<comment><USER13> You can find good Androids for every niche. (Xiaomi has some good high-battery options.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How did the SE sell?</comment>


Crowdsourced cloud hosting. Opt-in, paid botnets? - <AUTHOR>

In my room right now are two desktops I don't use any more. A P4/2gb ram box my parents bought years ago, and a recently built i5/8gb ram computer I built for gaming that I have not used for months.
Why isn't there a way for me to let other people use my inactive computing resources and make money?
In the past I've seen research projects that had software you could run in the background to preform intense calculations, but why couldn't this turn a profit? <comment><USER2> Like AirBnb for cloud hosting?</comment>


Traffic Camera Enters Drivers Who Obey Speed Limit Into Lottery - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/2010/12/traffic-camera-enters-speed-limit-abiding-drivers-into-lottery.html <comment><USER2> This is the best idea I've seen in a LONG time. Incentives and Rewards = first step of Game Layer creation.</comment>


Requester: ridiculously powerful, elegant REST client for Sublime Text - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester <comment><USER2> Nice work. It reminds me of restclient-mode [0] for Emacs, a package that I use daily.

As a python developer, that this builds on top of python & requests is very attractive!

[0] [https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el](https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I built Requester so that its syntax would be identical to Requests' syntax, so I wouldn't have to come up with my own syntax for the plugin. Requests' syntax is _extensively_ documented, and improving on it would be quite a tall order.

Are there any features you think would be nice that aren't here?</comment></comment>


uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging - <AUTHOR> http://utox.org/ <comment><USER2> I would use Tox and any of its clients with caution. At one point in time, your friends would be able to execute arbitrary shell commands on your PC if you were running utox and accepted a file download. Even with large security concerns like this, the lead developer believes Tox and uTox is secure because he reads the code he wrote himself (none the less git history is filled with bug fixes he clearly missed in his reading). This isn't exactly reassuring, especially coming from someone who doesn't have provable past experience in security software.

Edit: I just got banned from their IRC for stating this opinion here.

<comment><USER3> That last part is enough to ditch them unless you were fighting with them in IRC. Were you?

Your claims ring true for vast majority of new, COMSEC schemes. Far as Tox, this is what I found on their GitHub page: "Current build status: build failing." I'll add that NSA and malware authors have 0-days on the platforms the tool will likely run on. It will be bypassed like all others on such platforms.

<comment><USER2> I was just idling on their channel when irungentoo got me banned for my post here.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that's quite questionable. They need to be able to handle and defend criticism better if they want to make it in INFOSEC. Especially if they ever get press like Cryptocat or Diaspora did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something to keep in mind:

Of all Tox clients, uTox is written in C, using its own UI framework that directly interfaces with X11 and WinAPI. This makes the code itself a mess. The reasoning behind this is that it's somewhat of a meme on /g/ that anything but pure C code is "bloat". I tried contributing a bit last year, did some work on copy/pasting inline images, and found a remote code execution vuln. Then I got fed up with how terribly confusing the codebase was for something so simple. I'm not a professional programmer or anything, just a student, but it seems like it's the same for everyone else in the project.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where projects start advertising what methods they use to weed out memory management bugs (i.e. static analysis, fuzzing, etc) because an adversary that can execute arbitrary code on my machine is far more intimidating than one that can eavesdrop (imo).

<comment><USER6> Speaking of that, I wonder why uTox & Tox weren't made in memory safe languages in the first place. There could be many possible reasons, so I won't bother speculating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just build it with asan and you will get all the safety, memory usage and slowness of a memory safe language.

<comment><USER6> You'd need UBsan as well, and even that doesn't catch everything. Regarding memory usage/slowness: why not OCaml, D, or Rust?

<comment><USER7> Rust only recently hit 1.0, so it's pretty obvious why somebody would not have built their software using that.

<comment><USER8> Also, current benchmarks show Rust to be about ~3x slower than C, making it more comparable to Go or Java.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Do you know of any good, recent benchmarks of Rust? I haven't seen a whole lot. The Benchmarks Game mostly appears to show Rust being closer than that in general, though the Rust benchmarks seem to be kind of crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're worried about how good the encryption is, you can actually use Tox with Pidgin and then layer OTR on top of it.

That way you get decentralized messaging and don't need to trust their crypto.

[https://wiki.tox.im/Tox_Pidgin_Protocol_Plugin](https://wiki.tox.im/Tox_Pidgin_Protocol_Plugin)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using this for the last 6 months or so. Seems pretty good as a client. Stable on the comms side, although short of an audit, I'm just having faith in the security side of things.

What it really needs is some way of having a roaming profile though. Currently you have to have multiple accounts, one for each device. So my friends list has a lot of duplicates depending on whether they're on their work computer, at home, on their phone, etc...

I'm not actually that fussed about the encryption side of things. I'm far more happy with the lack of reliance on centralised servers. You don't need an account somewhere to get it up and running, you just send a message to a friend and compare secrets to authenticate.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, way to many messengers seem to assume "Well, everyone has just 1 phone anyways, and where else would you want to use a messenger". I get that desktop clients etc are not the first thing on the priority list, but still it is very annoying (and the first one which gets that right I'm pushing everybody to.)

(Threema actually recommends a workaround: "Just create a groupchat for each of your contacts with all your devices in it and always use that")

<comment><USER10> Thanks, that's a good workaround, I'll try it tomorrow. It should still be a default thing if they want mainstream adoption though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      "Future of Instant Messaging"

Not with that UI.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord uTox is one client of several. For a full list, see: [https://wiki.tox.im/Client](https://wiki.tox.im/Client)

</comment><comment><USER13> you know its good cause it offers "ROCKSOLID encryption"

</comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this a project that was developed by users of the /g/ board on 4chan? I've only ever seen it berated on that board (everything is berated on that board) and don't really know how solid the actual software is.

<comment><USER15> As far as I know, the project really only gained any traction once it distanced itself from /g/'s bikeshedding. I think in light of this the uTox team has made an effort to distance themselves from 4chan entirely.

It's been a while since I read anything about them but last I heard, the crypto was fairly solid and the only problems were one of reliability and user experience; that being said, I'm no expert and we won't know until it gets popular enough to deserve an audit from someone important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gee, yet another identity nomenclature - <username>@utox.org! When will this trend end?! Aren't you tired of the ever-growing lists of identities you need to share with people?

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the idea of Tox but there are a couple issues that make it unusable for most users (at least me and a few I've talked to about it):

\- No push notifications of any kind, meaning mobile devices have to keep a connection open (kill their batteries) or poll for updates (and get the message later).

\- No multiple device support, so I can't use my phone _and_ my desktop. I have to pick.

It'll be great when it's been polished up and completed a bit more but it's not there yet.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why aren't the name/Tox ID requirements listed on the site? I tried registering a few times and got an "invalid" error each time.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, Skype must have really cemented its place in public conscience as an instant messaging service.

I would think a new service should support video chat before comparing itself to Skype, but no. (I am actually seeking an open-source alternative to Skype that supports video conferencing: I know of audio clients/services, but not about video)

</comment><comment><USER20> Back in 2001, the ayttm project supported free, secure instant messaging by using gpg to encrypt all messages and by allowing you to split a conversation across multiple networks (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, XMPP).

<comment><USER3> Appreciate the tip. The Snowden leaks appear to support that GPG is so robust that even NSA analysts use it. So, a project using IM over it is playing it extra smart (albeit clunky). Turns out it's still active:

[http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/features.php](http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/features.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why would I use this instead of XMPP and OTR?

<comment><USER10> The main thing for me is the lack of a central account server. Even with XMPP, you still need to have an account and login somewhere to authenticate. With this, you have to authenticate each friend manually, but only the once. After that, there is no account but the profile stored on your hard drive.

<comment><USER3> That's certainly a selling point. The problem: newer and hand-rolled stuff _always_ has serious problems. Many continue to have serious problems over time. I'd be interested in seeing software that solved those problems while leveraging proven protocols, clients, etc. Might just be a plugin to several popular IM clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So how does this improve on existing IM, say: XMPP?

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems really cool, anyone audited this project yet?

</comment><comment><USER24> Would be cool ta have FOSS iOS apps made with this.

<comment><USER25> We basically have this stuff with Signal: [https://whispersystems.org/](https://whispersystems.org/)

<comment><USER26> Signal I trust over anything else, but the iOS application is pretty awful to use to be honest.

<comment><USER25> I've heard these open source projects have ways you can help fix that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i prefer software that do not need runtimes and can run without dependencies on major distros.

</comment><comment><USER27> qTox please consider making static builds</comment>


Sony Goes After Leica With Full-Frame Compact RX1 - <AUTHOR> http://photorumors.com/2012/09/09/breaking-sony-rx1-the-first-full-frame-compact-camera/

<comment><AUTHOR> More specs here: <http://photorumors.com/2012/09/09/sony-rx1-specifications/>

This Camera is targeted after higher-end photography enthusiasts. Those who seek the best image quality and want a pocketable camera to take with them.

24MP full frame CMOS sensor

ISO range: 100-25,600

3 in. LCD screen

5 fps

Zeiss Sonnar 35mm f/2 lens with 49mm filter thread

Price: $2700</comment>