Uncanny Valley (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/ <comment><USER2> Very well written but I'm afraid this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn't truly _love_ tech gets into the tech industry. Sure, office culture is banal in the extreme but if you have a lifelong passion to be the best developer possible, getting paid to code is not such an existentially crushing experience.

I think we should question if blindly pushing people into tech actually works/is a good idea or if it's just a recipe for disaster for all involved.

<comment><USER3> _" this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn't truly love tech gets into the tech industry"_

I had loved tech long before I started working in the industry, and when I first started everything was fresh and new. I saw wide, interesting vistas ahead of me. Learning whatever I had to learn was a joy, and I did it well. Even offices themselves were new and different to me. I was impressed by their opulence, access to cool tech that I couldn't afford on my own, by the professionalism and competence of the people I worked with. I felt I could learn a lot from them, and I did.

That lasted maybe a few years. Then I burnt out from overwork and from feeling undervalued and treated like crap by people who didn't understand what I did and thought themselves superior to me. People were lied to and manipulated for profit, treated like replaceable widgets, and thrown out on a whim. Corporate cheerleading speeches and "morale boosting" or "team building" activities were nauseating, two-faced affairs where management pretended to believe in the bullshit they were dishing out and their underlings pretended to love swallowing it. No one was fooled, but the charade continued.

The grand technological vistas I had seen ahead of me had dwindled as I learned and mastered the truly novel, interesting things I had to learn. What was left to do became repetitive and boring, and I really couldn't care less about being the cog in the machine that was designed to make the owners of the company and other bigshots rich. Instead of being interesting and challenging, over time I started viewing learning new tech as just an endless, tedious chore of learning irrelevant minutia, and every time I've gone back in to the industry after that first burn out, I've burnt out more and more.

Honestly, I don't know how some people keep up their enthusiasm for technology over the decades, in the face of so much stress, corporate bullshit, and endless repetition. I just get way too bored and fed up with all that before long.

<comment><USER4> I think this is inevitable as long as what you're using your tech knowledge for does not relate to a goal you value. There can be intrinsic interestingness in ideas, but there has to be a connection back to what they might be used for.

For instance, when I first started learning to code I was interested in making video games. Along the way there were all kinds of concepts in real-time rendering which had intrinsic interest and which I enjoyed learning on their own (e.g. even ones I never put into use). However, if it weren't for the intensifying factor of what I _might_ use those ideas for, and without having the potential applications in mind to get me through the boring parts—I don't think I would've enjoyed learning the material all that much.

If you end up spending your time coding to develop things which you find pointless, for people whom you don't respect, it may be even worse than mere lack of motivation.

The only solution I've found is to earn money in other ways, while working on tech things in my free time if/when I feel like it—or to find a position at a small company that you believe in. I've found the first to much more doable so far, but I do keep an eye out.

<comment><USER5> That's one big reason I'm trying to pivot away from software industry.

I _love_ programming. I just hate the bullshit that usually comes with _getting paid for programming_ in this industry.

Ironically, I program _both_ at work and after it - at work because it's (still) a very cost-effective way of making money, and after to actually do something that I care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad this resurfaced. The only thing I have in common with the author was that we both work in tech, but that doesn't have much to do with their story. It was so well written I couldn't put it down. I hope they're feeling better now, a few years later.

<comment><USER7> In particular this resonates painfully, "This is a cozy home for believers in bootstrapping and meritocracy, proponents of shallow libertarianism."

And then...

 _VENTURE CAPITALISTS HAVE SPEARHEADED massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation's very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won't Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn't Love You Back. Sometimes it feels like everyone is speaking a different language — or the same language, with radically different rules. At our all-hands meeting, we are subjected to a pep talk. Our director looks like he hasn't slept in days, but he straightens up and moves his gaze from face to face, making direct and metered eye contact with everyone around the table. "We are making products," he begins, "that can push the fold of mankind."_

I wonder if most people in that world understand how bizarre and grotesque it is to everyone else looking in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is intriguing and aesthetic and I've read it until the end because of that, but I didn't understand it. Is this the story of the author, who quit a startup? Why did she quit? She writes that she believed in her company's work, and was good at her own work, and liked it. However in the end she says she actually means the opposite. Why?

I'm quite confused :\

<comment><USER9> The author is reflecting on opportunity costs and the dysphoria generated by an anxiety-inducing rewards system which pays out randomly huge amounts to people who don't seem to deserve it, while inflicting a lack of control and ownership on others. The title reference to the "uncanny valley" points out that working for a Silicon Valley startup is marketed as a fulfilled lifestyle, providing a sense of accomplishment in solving real problems and just about everything you could imagine if you work hard enough. But it turns out to be an illusion, eerily close to the real thing yet ultimately unsatisfying and false.

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

To make things worse, the startup life is so seductive and demanding that it excludes a lot of other potentially rewarding life choices which the author's peers enjoy. The author feels that startup workers are victims of operant conditioning and lack real independent agency in their lives.

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

It's been pointed out that unpredictable rewards really screw up brains, causing them to obsess over the payout despite the overall returns being low. The author feels that startups and gambling have a lot in common.

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

In the author's case, the conditioning is so strong that, when she thinks back on her experience with the startup, she's still seeing herself as part of it even three years later and she still feels the same compulsion.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I see how that can follow, for example, from the bit about her friend who won the hackathon lottery. Also from the "What is it like to be fun? What is it like to feel like you've earned this?", though she writes that when she's talking with a developer who isn't actually in silicon valley.

It still seems like a bit of a stretch to infer that from the text, this feeling upset because of her own brain being manipulated by random rewards making the payoff seem higher. But it's a self-consistent interpretation and better than any that I have so I'll take it.

Thank you for taking the time to write it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691)

</comment><comment><USER11> This reads like an updated version of American Psycho. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice

</comment><comment><USER13> To author: It appears the realization is setting in now that most of the VC landscape is a fugazi, a playground for the mindless rich pissing away millions on trends they can't see the hearts of, on overdeveloping asinine apps and gadgets blind by their pointlessness and lack of need amongst the growing sea of world problems, and on lavish offices and 100 engineers to over-engineer and over-complicate every code base as long as the new hires only come from ${MIT, Stanford, CalTech} after having been privileged with the means to attend. To you and your melancholy, wading through the quagmire of self absorbed executives seeking to get rich, those false prophets whose only aim is as much money as their ravenous actions can exploit, to you I say welcome to the reality the rest of us have been living our entire lives, welcome to your disillusionment.

<comment><USER14> Would you please not rant like this here? It isn't that you're wrong; it's that even if right, this is not in the spirit of intellectual curiosity which motivates HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). Ginning up rage is a different thing, and the two are not compatible.

Take out the rage and it becomes plain that what you've written here is too generic to have much substance. Curiosity requires a gentler touch and a more specific one.

For example, if you have personal experience with things related to the article, sharing something about those, the way you would to peers in a good discussion, would make for an entirely better comment.

<comment><USER15> disagree- it reads in an interesting way, cultivating a mood that wouldn't exist if you just stated the "facts". its also, i would say, in thematic agreement with the linked article.

<comment><USER14> Quite right, but it's a tradeoff. We have years of experience with the effects posts like that have on HN, and they're dreadful.

I puzzled over this dynamic for years but it seems clear to me now: the issue is genre/medium fit. In the case of the GP comment, the genre is the diatribe. A scathing diatribe in a small literary salon or journal, like n+1, is one thing; on a large, public, internet forum it's another. In the first case it's interesting and leads to interesting responses. In the second it's a fast track to the bottom of the barrel, a snake in Snakes and Ladders.

Imagine if anyone who felt like it could reply to any n+1 piece and n+1 had to publish all of them as new pieces without editing. What would happen to quality? It would tank. Personal projection, simple misunderstanding, dimwittedness, windbaggery, reversion to the mean: every known factor would work against you. Extrapolate further and this would kill n+1.

In both cases—a small literary forum and a large internet one—the goal is more complex, more interesting formations, but the way to get them could not be more different. The more I learn about this, the more I appreciate McLuhan. Most of the issues on HN derive from the medium, not what people post to it.

<comment><USER15> i give you a lot of credit for writing this out. very thoughtful, thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to write a bug report that actually gets resolved – and why everyone should - <AUTHOR> https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/2016/10/18/how-to-write-an-effective-bug-report-that-actually-gets-resolved-and-why-everyone-should/ <comment><USER2> After years of vague bug reports at various places we've worked, my 2 cofounders and I built a tool that records video of a bug, alongside network traffic and JavaScript logs.

That way even with a vague description, and no steps to reproduce, we can get a much better idea of what a customer is trying to report to us.

Would love for anyone interested to check it out: [https://www.bugreplay.com](https://www.bugreplay.com)

<comment><USER2> Just dawned on me that a demo might be better than just linking to the marketing site :)

Here is a BugReplay recording demonstrating an ebay security vulnerability that we recorded awhile back:

[https://app.bugreplay.com/shared/report/3efa632d-5b51-45f1-a...](https://app.bugreplay.com/shared/report/3efa632d-5b51-45f1-aa0f-8f5503d9c663)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reporting the bug is important but highlighting what are the implications of the bug is equally important.

With one simple string , I was able to find 45 bugs in different software and every time I reported the bugs I decided to tell them what were the implications of the bugs.

With no professional background in security, I was able to claim 18K in bug bounty rewards by being professional, clear and providing clear implications of the bug.

It is quite possible that people fixing the bugs may not be well versed in some components of the bug and are likely to not understand the implication of the bugs until you tell them so.

<comment><USER4> Good old SQL injection?

<comment><USER3> Good old >'>"><img src=x onerror=alert(1)>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's absolutely stunning how many testers I've worked with didn't understand the "Preconditions/Actions/Expected/Actual" as a bare minimum for a bug report.

> Avoid using ambiguous words like "broken" or "not working."

Holy crap yes, this. So many infuriating waste of time bugs. And adding screenshots is good to call out. "X looks wrong", is useless, "X looks wrong <screenshot attached>" might still be useless, but at least you're trying.

<comment><USER6> _It 's absolutely stunning how many testers I've worked with didn't understand the "Preconditions/Actions/Expected/Actual" as a bare minimum for a bug report._

What I've never understood is how testers with multiple years of experience continue to get away with this. To me it's like checking in code that doesn't compile: you can't even do the bare minimum required by your job.

On the rare occasions I've had folks like that on my team, I've emphasized the importance of easy-to-replicate bug reports by pointing out that dev has to repro it in order to fix it, PM might have to repro in order to triage, another tester might have to repro in order to close the bug when you're on vacation, etc. Now, because of your shitty bug report, how much time has been wasted because your steps-to-repro are poor or non-existent? Me, I'm personally embarrassed when a bug comes back "no repro" because I half-assed the bug report.

Let alone getting into things like, copy-and-paste the damned call stack that's staring you in the face. And if you're a professional tester to whom we pay good money, and your "observed" includes "broken" or "doesn't work" with no further description, your future with this company might be in jeopardy.

<comment> T-hawk I had a previous job where the testers would always do that, just report "broken" or "doesn't work" for just about everything.

I eventually figured out that they didn't actually _want_ bugs fixed. They wanted to have lots of bug reports open and the application looking broken all over the place. Why? To justify the jobs and headcount and existence of the QA department. The QA managers would even resist movements towards automated testing, to protect their own turf and the employment of the far-too-many manual testers. I eventually got quite used to the disappointment in a tester's face when he had to close a bug report because it had been fixed.

Classic case of "if you're being paid for a problem, the last thing you want to do is solve it."

<comment><USER6> _I eventually figured out that they didn 't actually want bugs fixed_

Which is bulletpoint #2 in my presentation of "What Your Job as a Professional Software Tester Is". If you answered "file bugs?", my $29 PowerPoint deck will present you with ways to be a professional software tester instead of some hack who muddles his way through the day filing bullshit bugs because you'd never hack it as a dev.

Because the correct answer is: "get bugs fixed". Which means filing better bug reports, and thus it comes full circle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For example, an essential user action requires 3 cryptically named menu items, deeply hidden in 5 layers of menus, each of with takes ages to open.

Does that count as a bug? Users will simply fail at their job. But for many (open-source) developers, only a segfault counts.

I have stopped reporting such things.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://anarc.at/blog/2016-10-14-bug- reporting/](https://anarc.at/blog/2016-10-14-bug-reporting/)

</comment><comment><USER9> According to the flow chart, one doesn't need to "Look for an existing bug report before reporting the bug" if one doesn't like the software.

<comment><USER10> Seems like a pretty passive-aggressive way to punish the developers for a piece of software you don't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel for you and the state of the QA industry. If you need someone efficient please contact me servicewareqa,gmail).

</comment><comment><USER12> Great post. I'm surprised that this topic doesn't get visited more given how much time we [developers] spend on bug fixing.

Shameless self-promotion: we are working on LogRocket [1] specifically so that you _don 't_ have to ask users for steps to reproduce.

[1] [https://logrocket.com](https://logrocket.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://getmarker.io/](https://getmarker.io/)

These guys are doing bug capture well.

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks pretty fantastic. Definitely worth checking out.</comment></comment>


Brazil Nuts Are Brought to You by Rodents - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/brazil-nuts <comment><USER2> >crescent-shaped, creamy seeds

Are they really creamy? Just eaten one. It's relatively hard and fractures into shards when chewed, as you continue chewing the shards get smaller and smaller and finally approaches texture of a chewed walnut, maybe bit stiffer.

They must have mistaken it for cashews.

<comment><USER3> Dried nuts ship and store better. You can soak or steam most dried nuts and legumes for a fresher consistency or shorter cooking times.

Where I'm from, fresh Pecans are sweet, pliant, and heavy- pretty typical mammoth halves. The products from the store are not very similar, but that's the cost of keeping them from going rancid on the shelves.

I also soak almonds before pulverizing for a number of un-cooked/toasted Indian dishes. Dried, they're mealy and not very aromatic. Soaked, they're a lot smoother.

<comment><USER4> How long do they need to soak?

<comment><USER5> I usually soak them overnight. I will soak then around 10-11 PM and by morning they are soft and tastes a lot better.

<comment><USER4> Do you toss the water out or does it have any benefit?

<comment><USER3> The water doesn't have much if any nutritional benefit, but if you like the flavor, you can add it to other things.

Depending, it may be good in smoothies or to steep tea in, to add to rice, oats, or quinoa, or as part of the stock liquid when cooking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > They only bear fruit in nearly pristine, undisturbed forest

.. and various backyards or just along the road even in larger cities. Some consider them a nuisance[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut#Hazards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut#Hazards)

<comment><USER7> From the section just below in that wiki article

"Brazil nut trees produce fruit almost exclusively in pristine forests, as disturbed forests lack the large-bodied bees of the genera..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What do Brazilians call Brazil Nuts?

<comment><USER9> Something that locally we call "Castanha do Pará"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut#/media/File:Brazil_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_nut#/media/File:Brazil_nuts.jpg)

<comment><USER10> Interesting. That seems to explain why we call these 'paranoot' in Dutch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > They only bear fruit in nearly pristine, undisturbed forest

Does this mean we can use the Brazil Nut (and its availability/price) as a "canary" for forest condition?

</comment><comment><USER11> Fruit bats fertilise some plants in Oceania. I wonder if we have a lot more '...brought to you by mammals' fruits to come? (I think they fertilise non- farmed species. they eat the heart out of the fruit industry and are endangered in part because they're seen as a pest)

<comment><USER12> "Discover the insects that do most farming in the world, n°5 (bees) will surprise you!"

<comment><USER11> If bees are mammalian, I will be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I worked for a while in the Peruvian rainforest and was told that the biggest single cause of death was a brazil nut falling on your bonce.

</comment><comment><USER14> Curse them.

<comment><USER15> Yeah they can keep them. Worst nut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As seen in _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,_ I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like real organic peanut butter.

Who's Hazel anyway</comment>


Idiomatic Python [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.neckbeardrepublic.com/screencasts/idiomatic-python

<comment><USER2> I wish C++ had a isMember method for its containers or a keyword like Python's "in". The most succinct way to do this currently (with vector for instance)

vector<string> naughtyList {"Bob", "Tom", "Rod", "God"}; string member = "Jerry"; for (string & each : naughtyList) if (member == each) // do stuff

/rant

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why "find" or "contains" isn't a member function of STL container types, but there is the std::find() function:

       bool xIsMember = std::find(v.begin(), v.end(), x) != v.end();

Edit: I admit this is terrible API design. When you want the v.begin()/v.end() combination 90% of the time, why not at least have a std::find() overload that does that for you? Or simply add "std::contains(v, x) -> bool"? You can write your own version of that, of course, but... my take-home point: API design is very important.

<comment><USER4> Providing container operations as functions in <algorithm> operating on iterators means that someone implementing a new container with iterators immediately has a wealth of functionality available with no extra effort.

Also, containers that are most well suited to membership searches (std::set and std::multiset) do include find(Key const& key) as a member.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was just wondering, shouldn't it be python3 and not python2 when talking about idiomatic python now adays?

<comment><USER6> That'll make sense just as soon as it's idiomatic to write python 3 :)

<comment><USER7> Python 3 is not new, and it's not Perl 6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if you resized your editor window to be as small as possible and cropped the video to that size. As it is the area of the video I actually care about is very small with lots of empty space around it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Side note: the video player is really annoying, hitting the 'full screen' button uses the terrible full screen functionality of OS X rendering my second monitor useless.

<comment><USER10> atleast it seams to load on your screen

<comment><USER11> If you provide me with some information, I can definitely fix the issue for you.

What browser are you using? what version? What operating system are you using?

<comment><USER12> Same problems here, get audio only:

Windows 7 Professional x64 SP1. No video on the following 3 browsers: Firefox 19.0.2, Chrome 22.214.171.1244.172, and Cyberfox 19.0.2 (a 64-bit build of Firefox). I get video, but the audio is choppy on IE 9.

It seems to work on my iPhone with Safari (iOS 6.1.2) but the bandwidth required is too great for my 4G connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related: [http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2012/10/04/writing- idiomatic-p...](http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2012/10/04/writing-idiomatic- python/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I liked your website and was going to sign up. However, your catalog of screen casts is too short to sign up for at the moment. On the other hand, does anyone know other python screen cast websites like this with more topics/videos?

<comment><USER11> I am creating new content every week. I am also going to be creating content at a rate faster than one per week, to combat this exact complaint.

So see ya in 4 months?

<comment><USER14> I'm in!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Off Topic: Looks like he's using tmux in the terminal, but does anyone know how he made the bottom panels look so awesome?

<comment><USER16> Looks like: <https://github.com/erikw/tmux-powerline>

See also:

<https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-powerline> and *-powerline for shells, etc.</comment></comment>


The Experience Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15brooks.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1299081705-gh1OkXKP5ibS2FfZ9kz2Eg <comment><USER2> Technological progress has always been inherently deflationary.

Remember, the vast majority of the world's people used to work directly in food production as a matter of necessity. Technology has allowed most of us to get off the farm, and pursue other activities.

Whereas a day's work once bought a day's food and not much more, a human worker (using the machines that serve him) is now able to produce a huge surplus of wealth. This means that there's time for leisure, and that our leisure can be much more enjoyable than our grandparents'.

The tragedy of this seems to be that we're running out of stuff for people to do. A dystopian version of the future this could lead to is recounted in 'Manna,' by Marshall Brain: <http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

For my part, I'm hopeful. I believe that our current plight is the same sort of growing pains we've experienced in the past. The invention of the automobile made it tough to find work shoeing horses, for instance, or manufacturing buggy whips. Just because we don't need to spend our time making stuff any more doesn't mean we won't be able to find other ways to occupy our time.

<comment><USER3> >The tragedy of this seems to be that we're running out of stuff for people to do.

There is a lot to do for humans. Just look at the problems in any area of science. Not all people are qualified to work there though. This is why instead of whining about disappearing of menial labor jobs, we should be working toward [what would be at least a start] making K16 a basic level of education instead of K12. A thousand year ago reading and writing would made one a basically educated person (for the rest of his/her 30 year long life). In 19th century K8 was enough (and the average lifespan ~45), in 20th for the most of the part - K12 (and the average lifespan is ~70 at the end of the century). The body of knowledge is growing, we live longer, so it is natural to learn more and apply the more advanced knowledge and skills for longer period of the active adult productive life.

<comment><USER4> I'd fix K-12 before we make K-16 the default. You could easily learn fit the amount of material in a K-16 education into 12 years if those 12 years weren't just a matter of putting in time without any real focus on learning the material. Let's improve quality of education before increasing quantity.

<comment><USER3> >You could easily learn fit the amount of material in a K-16 education into 12 years

>Let's improve quality of education before increasing quantity.

nice sound bites. Complete rubbish. The whole amount of K-12 material is comparable in size with amount of material consumed in just one, max 2, years of college. But it doesn't work in the opposite way. I graduated from a top math and physics high school where students were selected from half of the country. The amount of additional material what we were able to consume during the high school pales in comparison with amount of material we consumed later at the University. The brains is still not there at this age. Hormones already are :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like this should be titled "I don't understand the new economics". The economics of a material world are different than the economics of an information world.

Rob Gingell used to point out to me that people living during the revolutionary war didn't have a good feel for what the final rules were going to be either.

So I buy the insight that it takes fewer people to create Facebook today then it did to produce Chevy Malibu's in the 70's, however Facebook is creating opportunities for people like Zynga so you really have to ask yourself what is the set of all the people working on Facebook, or applications for Facebook, or applications that let you visit Facebook, or derive demographic data from the information pool of Facebook?

This is what will distinguish the information economy from the material economy. In the material economy the product (our example is the Chevy Malibu) is a dead end, it gets created, used, and discarded. In the information economy people build products which turn out to be pre-cursor materials to other products, or combined into still other products. Information products, even those that are nominally not 'tools', by their nature can be composited into new products, just like a DJ might create a techno trance mix of three or four of her favorite tunes.

Google, employs 24,000 people (approximately), and how many people have careers that exist only because Google (or I guess more properly search engines) exist?

So I read articles like this one and I feel like the author (in this case the meta author because the NYT is talking about Cowen's book) are struggling to understand something their brain wasn't prepared to understand, which is that information, like a Chevy, can have intrinsic value. Further its value persists as its "re-manufactured" into new information by people skilled in the art of doing so. So without the tools to understand the economics of information they see money like Google's billions but can't see the mechanism that creates it.

<comment><USER6> I think you've missed a core point of the comparison: Chevy Malibu's weren't built in isolation, either. They were built from parts, in factories built by people who specialized in building factories (we call it, in very generic terms, the construction industry). They were serviced by gas stations and mechanics. There is an entire industry focused on producing rubber, primarily for automobile tires. There's another industry which builds tires, and another that refines oil, one that focuses on fixing scratches, another on cleaning the devices.

The argument that the information world is the first to stack industries on other industries is fallacious, and misses the point entirely: Information doesn't take labor for every instance of product.

<comment><USER5> This is the core difference between information manufacture and real good manufacturing.

Real goods, such as the Chevy Malibu, have a pyramid of raw materials starting with ore mining, through smelting, through plastics creation, through tooling, to piecework to sub-assemblies, to assemblies to product.

Information goods on the other hand start with generally lower value information which gets collected and distributed and refined into higher value information. An inverted pyramid if you will.

And unlike ore, which once its in a Chevy Malibu is locked up 'forever', the information that is created can be re-used in an infinte number of additional products.

Consider a contructed example of company A which makes their money selling the current stock ticker from the NYSE, to company B, which takes that data and does analysis on it to create trading strategies for resale, which are purchased by company C which uses the trading strategies combined with capital acquisition from clients to make their money.

A completely different company, Q, might take the same stock ticker information from company A and make a large LED sign which can display it and sell those.

So the same 'information ore' is used in two separate product streams. There can be dozens of such streams. So evaluating the value of Facebook's information by the number of people Facebook employs really misstates the economic impact of a company like Facebook.

"The argument that the information world is the first to stack industries on other industries is fallacious, and misses the point entirely: Information doesn't take labor for every instance of product."

I don't believe I made either of these claims.

To be clear, the claims I make are; 1) Evaluating the information economy using the 'rules' of the real goods economy fails. 2) The information that Facebook and Google create is more analagous to the ore someone might mine out of a mountain than the end product of vehicle brakes. (the real goods example used in the article).

I will grant you an example of someone making money off creating after market products for the Chevy Malibu as a valid post production economic activity, I know of no examples where people have collected Chevy Malibus and then turned them into a product that itself had mass market appeal.

It is the distinctive characteristic that information can be combined into new information which has its own intrinsic value, without losing or consuming the source information (ie removing its ability to take part in additional economic activity) that, for me, differentiates the two economic models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A key concern is whether there will be enough _good_ jobs for people with insufficient intelligence or training in post-material world.

It is common for anyone who has lived in a developing country to see a big divide between plenty of people who hold unskilled service jobs and a much smaller minority whose jobs require some sort of intellectual abilities or high-level salesmanship. Wage of the latter group is 7-20 times larger than the former. The middle group, whose jobs revolve around routine skills like clerical or secretarial tasks, see their jobs disappear one by one. For example, Google translation and IBM's Watson systems, once a bit more mature, will be better than lower-skilled translators and researchers.

If middle-tier jobs are reduced to an insignificant amount, the world of jobs will be divided into two major classes:

1) Jobs that require high-level of intelligence to make decisions/automate tasks/invent new technology or those that require purposeful human relations building and salesmanship.

2) Jobs to service those holding jobs in class 1)

The problem, as implied by the article, is that the number of people needed to do jobs in class 1) is much smaller than world population. The excess of labor pool for jobs in class 2) leads to much reduced wages and clear division in standard of living. With increasing wealth in society and distribution program, people holding class-2 jobs can still live fairly comfortably, but the ideal of egalitarian society will be even further from reality than today. (Egalitarian societies did not exist for most of history; they are in fact quite an anomaly to appear in quite a few countries in the world today--even in imperfect form.) Will the class-1 job holders protest ever louder about increasing wealth redistribution to the mass? Will the class-2 job holders be unsatisfied with status quo and seek to confiscate more wealth from the other group?

Is there a good way to preserve the egalitarian ideal or at least achieve a harmonious society without violent changes? I invite you to discuss.

</comment><comment><USER8> David Brooks almost wrote an interesting article there.

The beginning is promising, he writes about the different growth rates in developing vs developed countries. This is a well established economic fact. There's an opportunity to infer something from this... Brooks just never quite gets to it.

Another interesting idea he does not clarify but does mention is the productivity improvement we have experienced over the course of this (and last!) century. Technology has greatly reduced the need for labor. Again great potential for a discussion which Brooks is never able to take anywhere meaningful.

Instead the article slowly degenerates into some kind of drivel about hypothetical individuals states of mind... I don't even, what?

It's kind of sad when someone clearly has the education to start a discussion but just completely lack the personal ambition to write to a much higher standard.

Write about hard facts, falsifiable theories based on them. Write something more akin to a readable scientific paper.

Instead we get something which resembles a bright high-school student's essay on the human condition in a consumerist world.

But that's what the work of an op-ed columnist must be like.

If you told me I was doomed to be a ditch digger, I would be quite upset, but I'd get over it.

If you told me I was doomed to sit in a cubicle, well I'd be rather upset that I'll never fulfill my dream of working for myself but I would get over it.

If you told me I was doomed to create nothing other then op-ed articles like this one, I would shoot myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> Worth a read: _The Experience Economy_

[http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Economy-Theater-Every- Busin...](http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Economy-Theater-Every- Business/dp/0875848192)

Read online: [http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5hs- tyRrS...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5hs- tyRrSXMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=the+experience+economy&ots=IIr6ZCfMih&sig=xdAGfFjBGCGcRP6_sD3mjv2_igM#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Skip the last few chapters. The author's personal (religious) beliefs start to show, and his line of thought weakens (experience economy leads to "transformation" economy, in which people seek to be "transformed.") The majority of the book is an excellent read, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> _and slower rates of technological change._

Slower? The typical office of 2011 might as well be an alien planet to someone looking from 1981, in comparison to 1951-1981. Computers, fax machines, the Internet, cellphones, social networks, viral marketing, hiring people you've never met in foreign countries and who directly report to you.. several areas of worklife (heck, life in general) have been totally redefined in the past 30 years at a speed never seen before.

</comment><comment><USER11> Intensely interesting. This is the most poignant section in the article:

"For example, imagine a man we'll call Sam, who was born in 1900 and died in 1974. Sam entered a world of iceboxes, horse-drawn buggies and, commonly, outhouses. He died in a world of air-conditioning, Chevy Camaros and Moon landings. His life was defined by dramatic material changes, and Sam worked feverishly hard to build a company that sold brake systems. Sam wasn't the most refined person, but he understood that if he wanted to create a secure life for his family he had to create wealth."

I would add to this that between 1950, when Sam was an adult member of the working class, though nearing retirement, the world's population was 2 billion, and today, the world's population is 8 billion. That in itself is going to manifest incredible levels of change.

I think the trend we're going to see over the NEXT century is going to be a return to production, away from SOLELY consumption of goods, simply because, as the article stated, there are fewer low hanging fruits. Couple that with many more mouths to feed, and you have a recipe for a very different world in 100 years.

I believe just for the human race to survive, people will need to start growing food, en masse, at a local level. Even people in cities. Energy consumption continues to rise, but the means to produce it become more and more expensive. We will need to produce alternative methods of energy gathering - which are renewable. So what does the future hold, in my opinion?

1\. Rapid population decline after continued population growth because of lack of ability to support growth (ie Malthusian theory) 2\. A "return to the farm" - a resurgence in small farms. Energy costs WILL bring down big agrabusiness - just wait. 3\. People using more LOCALIZED means to generate energy. In the Philippines, for example (I was there in July 2009), there were a lot of geothermal plants being built near volcanos. Hawaii has been investing a lot in harnessing wave power (and generating a lot of controversy from the surfer community). I attended a "Blue Planet" presentation in Honoulu in May 2009 and talked to many of the leaders of this initiative. Germany is the world's LEADER in solar energy now. People will take what they can get, where they can get it, to meet their power needs. Even in rural Kentucky, people are starting to put solar panels on their houses. 4\. Thank god, less of an obsession with money and stuff. Basic survival will once again trump all other needs until we can again reach a level of production where people can go through another lazy cycle.

<comment><USER6> Aside from the fact that our global growth rate has been dropping for the last twenty years, I'd like to point out that actually feeding the population isn't a problem. Feeding it beef may well be, but the primary issues with world starvation is that the market is held above their heads by unnatural means (fallow field subsidies in the US, solar subsidies in Europe, and lack of agricultural subsidy in Africa, just for example). Big agrabusiness, BTW, exists only because it is more cost-efficient than small farms, and as such could better weather rising energy prices. Energy prices will not ever be high enough to crush big agrabusiness; A large agrabusiness would build private nuclear plants first.

Beyond that point, Localized fuel is a funtion of rising fuel prices. Energy exists in the world, in the form of deep sea oil, shale oil, natural gas, and coal on a scale that makes a mockery of any renewable movement.

Its about cost-effectiveness of extraction, which, as energy prices rise, will make so many sources of energy available to us long before it makes renewables an efficient plan.

<comment><USER11> All good points (very good points). I think we will see the cost of extraction result in a net energy loss by the end of the decade, and maybe sooner. I could be wrong, though. As for growth rates, where do you see that global growth is declining? I think that's only in advanced industrialized societies (like Germany and Japan) where birth rates are lower than death rates. Even in the US, population continues to grow, and big increases are expected.

<comment><USER6> It's been a while since I researched it, but my impression was that the growth rate had been decelerating since the seventies. Not that it isn't still a growth rate, just a lower one.

About energy, I expect that higher prices make many more sources of energy available to the market than is available now, and I don't expect the demand to drop without a very fundamental change....we've still got lots of room for energy prices to go up in our market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Actually in a more relevant parallel to Brooks's comparison, Larry Page's grandfather worked on a Michigan auto assembly line. I don't think the grandson's economic contributions are that much less tangible or clearly valuable than the grandfather's.

</comment><comment><USER13> I watch a lot of moves from the early 80s, Back To The Future I is my favorite.

What we (Americans) had then and now has not really changed much. Items are either faster, larger or cleaner looking, but they essentially do the same thing they did in 1981.

The materialistic items sold today, don't add any marginal value to our lives. The iPad doesn't improve your life by much or at all. I think its good that people are realizing this and focusing in on enjoying life spiritually.

</comment><comment><USER14> Think about the economy of China since 1974.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think asking "how many jobs does X create" isn't as useful an analytical framework as its inverse, "how productively does X allow its workers to create new things of value".

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd argue that everything we buy is an experience, some are just longer term than others.

</comment><comment><USER16> I vote we stop linking to articles behind paywalls/loginwalls, like this one.

</comment><comment><USER17> So US growth started stagnating in 1974 (allegedly). There's something familiar about that number. Something to do with the gold standard? Coincidence?

<comment><USER18> Unless you can back up that statement with anything else but speculation, yes.

1974 is also the year I got my first chemistry kit. That's about as relevant to the discussion.

<comment><USER17> It wasn't a statement, it was a question. So now questions about monetary policies in threads about economic stagnation are being down voted on HN, good to know.</comment></comment></comment>


CSEdWeek - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/11/csedweek.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 <comment><AUTHOR> We should all support this at: <http://www.csedweek.org/forms/sign/pledge- step1-2012>

The most interesting thing to me now in Education reform is that it seems to be less of a technology issue and more of a bureaucratic issue. I have yet to see any of the amazing edutech platforms implemented at anything other than a novelty level.</comment>


OK Boomer, Who's Going to Buy Your 21M Homes? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-boomer-whos-going-to-buy-your-21-million-homes-11574485201?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Can we PLEASE stop using this agist phrase?

<comment><USER3> Boomer is our word, you may say 'booma' /s

In all seriousness, while I agree with you, I am fine with an easy way to tell when an argument is being made in bad faith. Lets not censor 'red flags', it helps the rest of us avoid drama. Sometimes it seems like all banning/deplatforming bigoted/problematic speech did was teach those who said it to couch their laungage in more subtle metaphor, deepening the hook, and making the issues harder to identify and address.

For those reading along, 'boomer' now just means older, more conservative person, and not (only) the literal 'baby boomer' generation. Its just another variation on "don't trust anyone over 30" which was the manta 30 years ago. Not exactly the ageist battle-cry the media seems to be pushing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to DigitalOcean? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I got a DigitalOcean droplet the other day. Someone on here recommended them as a solid VPS that was pretty inexpensive, so I thought "Great! I'll sign up right away". The product is great, but I don't know if I like the management...
I had just finished setting up jekyll blog on my droplet, and was trying to transfer no more than 4 or 5 ordinary-size PNGs to my droplet (in retrospect I wouldn't be having this headache if I used something like scp, oh well..), so I just uploaded them to imgur as one-time images and used wget to download them onto my droplet.
I log into my DigitalOcean account today and find out that my account had been locked and my droplet shut down, and they ask me to verify my account. I give them the info they need and then I get a response asking me why I was running an out-bound DoS attack from their platform.
I wish it didn't sound as if I were trying to hide anything, but that's literally the extent of what I did... I guess its possible that something happened with my droplet after I last logged into it, but I highly doubt that...
I don't wanna deal with a service that acts like this... Anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? Preferably as cheap with the same features (I was using the smallest droplet) i.e. SSD filesystems and a simple, out-of-your-way feature-set with a static IP for $5/month.
Thanks for reading! <comment><USER2> DigitalOcean has a solid platform _for the price_ , and we've personally had great experiences with them, with only intermittent downtime when their SFO location first launched.

In terms of the suspension you're referring to, they're an automated detection as far as I'm aware, so it really sounds like there might of been something happening that you were unaware of.

Regarding alternatives in this price point, you aren't going to find many options. If you're willing to step up your budget slightly, CloudVPS[1] and TransIP[2] in the Netherlands have both been great for us, and are still quite affordable considering what they provide.

If you're really stuck within your current budget, you might want to look at EDIS[3], whom we run several Slave DNS/MX servers with. They're about on-par with DigitalOcean pricing and offerings, with a much larger choice of locations, including the US.

[1] [http://www.cloudvps.com/](http://www.cloudvps.com/)

[2] [https://www.transip.eu/](https://www.transip.eu/)

[3] [http://www.edis.at/en/home/](http://www.edis.at/en/home/)

</comment><comment> workhere-io [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/)

[http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/)

[https://www.linode.com/](https://www.linode.com/)

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/](http://www.hetzner.de/en/)

You mentioned that you wanted something reliable and with SSD for $5. I honestly think DigitalOcean is the only host with a decent reputation in that price range (and yet you frequently hear people complain about them). You might want to consider paying slightly more. $10 to $20 a month should do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've been dealing with Linode for well over 3 years now without any issues. Their support is great and their pricing is imho just about right.

We also tried Webbynode in their very early days, I just checked their website now and things seem to have greatly changed for them so that's another option.

I'm not so sure about your pricing requirements though, quite frankly I was a bit surprised when I first checked out DO, having such a low pricing point. So I don't believe you'd find another vps of the same quality with such pricing but you could always check at [http://lowendbox.com/](http://lowendbox.com/)

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can check these benchmark results with other options:

[https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench/wiki/VPS- Hosts](https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench/wiki/VPS-Hosts)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using DO for about 6 months now, mainly as a OpenVPN server, and the odd bit of work from a tablet via a terminal. Since I usually use a tmux terminal, I can't say that I've seen downtime in that time.

If you're looking for possible alternatives though, these guys were posted here a while ago: [http://cloudatcost.com/](http://cloudatcost.com/)

I got one of the $35 VPSs (which are still available, it seems), and have done minimal playing with it, but seems to be ok.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was unpleasantly surprised this week by two rather lengthy outages. Now considering Linode as an alternative.

I'm wondering what other DigitalOcean users have to say?

<comment><USER7> In the past few months, I've seen a few. Here are some with a quick search:

[http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital- ocean-...](http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean- threatened-to-shut-down-my-blog-if-i-didnt-remove-or-edit-a-blog-post/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6898224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6898224)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6549106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6549106)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447152)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438761)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Go with aws , they have a free tier service. You can easily get a cloud machine there in a mini instance. Plus you get to play with their web console or use their command line and interact with your instance from your linux machine or mac.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had the same experience, but their customer experience was pretty great. I have yet to start up the Droplet again, since they threatened to shut down my service.

</comment><comment><USER10> EU-only and a bit more expensive, but I really like Bytemark's BigV: [http://www.bigv.io](http://www.bigv.io)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is their way of not taking any responsibility and blaming the customer. This also happened to many others including me. You can check these HN threads.

HN Thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447152) Blog Post: [http://serdardogruyol.com/?p=137](http://serdardogruyol.com/?p=137)

<comment><USER12> How _is_ it their responsibility if your droplet is running a DOS attack?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use Dropbox for sync. You can use btsync too.

Digitalocean is working great for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious, did you request any more information on the detected attack pattern?

</comment><comment><USER15> You can check RamNode.

(they have also permanent -40% promo codes, check google)

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I've had good fortune with webfaction (affiliate link)

[http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=danschnau](http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=danschnau)</comment>


Ask HN: Why do some founders create a new user profile for Launch HN? - <AUTHOR> Of late, I've noticed a trend where the founders doing Launch HN posts have almost no prior news.yc presence [0][1][2][3][4]. It rather seems very strange because it can't be that the founders never had a news.yc account ever before? In fact, to apply to YC one must have created a news.yc account in the first place.
What could be some reasons to create a new account for Launch HN? Is it a recommendation now because a Launch HN in the past has gone awry because of a founder's contributions on news.yc?
I, personally, like to trace a founder's journey on news.yc to get an insight in to their thought process by going through the discussions they might have engaged in.
To clarify, I don't find this disingenuous but intriguing, as I've seen this happen frequent only from a year or so back.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20578850
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20699923
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265377
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347443
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20215483 <comment><USER2> I haven't launched anything here, so cannot really speak for those who have, but:

If I were to create and launch something here, I would likely create a new account as well. The reason would be because I would not want personal and business lines to blur, and the things that I have posted in a personal capacity to potentially affect my business.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's simply that these are founder accounts that were created to apply to YC and didn't happen to post to HN before. Perhaps they were busy working on their startups instead.</comment>


Did the "Time Square Bomber" comment on a Peter Schiff YouTube video? - <AUTHOR> http://stream.btucker.org/post/574454397/did-faisal-shahzad-leave-a-youtube-comment-on-a-peter

<comment><AUTHOR> The more I find out about the guy, the less it's sounding like religious extremism...</comment>


Fully driverless cars could be months away - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/report-waymo-aiming-to-launch-commercial-driverless-service-this-year/ <comment><USER2> I've always been a big proponent of self-driving cars, but only because I imagined them as fully autonomous. A fleet of self-driving cars that rely on being backed by, essentially, a call center, sounds like a nightmare.

"When Waymo tested in Phoenix earlier this year, drivers sometimes had to take over the wheel to prevent the cars from holding up traffic because it took too long for humans in the command center to answer the cars' requests for help."

<comment><USER3> I guess the ability for a single person able to essentially 'drive' an entire fleet of cars is an improvement but it's not exactly the utopia I imagined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fully driverless cars are here today, for that matter. But if you want want tamperproof driverless cars that perform well under adverse conditions and are thoroughly tested, then you're going to have to wait a lot longer than "months".

I think this snippet is pretty telling: "Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and _the relative lack of pedestrians_." (Emphasis mine.) Probably wise, but I'm sure they've already carefully calculated the risk/return vs pedestrian fatalities and are coming out ahead.

<comment><USER5> How could a driverless car ever truly be tamperproof, though? At some point we'll just have to accept it as a potential risk.

<comment><USER4> Good question. Tamperproof to me means they can't physically be spooked into doing things, as well as being secure from hacking. In theory, they just have to be as safe as human drivers, who manage to kill thousands of people each year. But as a practical matter, people will probably demand that they be much safer than humans. And it will take awhile to prove that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> …if 'fully' means 'remotely operated, when the going gets tough', such as, I guess, in bad weather (rare in Phoenix), or when there is a lot of traffic in one place, times when demand for taxis is highest.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical that it works correctly:

"Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive self-driving technology into a shipping product."

Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and safety protections:

"Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles."

So the TL;DR is that someone has been pressured to rush a product to release in an area with few safety regulations that could cause a lot of harm if it malfunctions.

<comment><USER8> On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US alone:

[http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month- estimates.pdf](http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf)

<comment><USER9> So we should push out half-baked solutions?

<comment><USER8> Depends on how half-baked.

From a PR perspective it's a definite "no". Even a single self-driving fatality would lead to global news headlines and a lawyer feeding frenzy.

But from a protecting people perspective? If making it "live" quicker would speed development and adoption... then maybe.

E.g. the first 5 year increase fatalities net by 1.1x. After that tech is actually dialed in and fatalities drop to 0.5x. Holding off gives you 400K fatalities whereas pushing earlier adoption gives you 320K. That would be 80K lives saved. (Under the assumptions of this shoot-from-the-hip model).

<comment><USER3> > Even a single self-driving fatality

It's more specific than that. It will be the first self-driving crash that would be glaringly obvious to a human driver. Like the Tesla crash where the sensors mistook a white semi for clouds and merrily plowed though it.

If the tech is adopted too soon it might face a death knell when computer assisted driving proves to be much safer than fully autonomous. It's much easier to fill a human's blind spots than replace the driver entirely.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bats use private and social information as they hunt - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-09-private-social.html <comment><USER2> While this is almost lost knowledge these days, humans and other animals have always paid attention to each other to find out what is going in on around them.

The nature (or absence of) bird or animal calls or activity can tell you that there is a large predator in the area.¹

Some animal calls are even specific to the type of threat as well.

It has even been proposed by some linguists that prairie dog calls satisfy enough of the requirements to be considered language.²

1: [https://birdlanguage.com/products/what-the-robin- knows/](https://birdlanguage.com/products/what-the-robin-knows/)

2: [https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research- news/prair...](https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research-news/prairie- dog-chatter-the-science-behind-a-new-language-9144ace4114f)

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhat off topic, semi-related, I have a bat that thinks I control the weather. If it gets too hot or cold, it will go just outside my window and squeak at me. There are patterns to it's communication, though I have no idea what exactly it is saying. I can talk to it and it talks back. Obviously we don't understand each other. I can tell it "get back to work" (taking out mosquito's) and it will leave. I think it understands tone of human voice.

</comment><comment><USER4> When we were doing bat surveys most nights, after we caught the first few bats, we would watch later ones actively avoiding the mist nets we'd set up as the ones we caught called both from the nets and from the bags we had them in. It was also known at the time we were doing our work bats communicate feeding areas to each other and are extremely vocal in their hibernacula and roosting sites.

</comment><comment><USER5> The bats should carry around a big banner with a warning: Are we allowed to collect information about you? :D</comment>


Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of his deductions are flawed: In the Nike example, he confuses implication with equivalence. Also, uncertainty can be modeled with probabilistic logics ("people in France speak French with probability .95"). But most if it seems still true. Ten years later I don't see any popular applications, RDF is not a very popular exchange format, and most of the available data is published by projects with the explicit goal of creating data for the semantic web (DBpedia).</comment>


Developers and Depression - <AUTHOR> http://agilescout.com/developers-and-depression-killing-our-knowledge-workers/

<comment><USER2> Thank you for this.</comment>


Mel Gorman - Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager. - <AUTHOR> http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/0131453483/downloads/gorman_book.pdf

<comment><USER2> Anyone know of any condensed versions explaining the VMM? 748 pages would be nice to read through if I had the time

</comment><comment><USER3> this is old stuff. Why post it now. Gorman's text has been available and known for ages.

<comment><USER4> HN has a culture of digging up old but still interesting stuff.

<comment><USER3> there's nothing to dig up here. Its a well known text (though now its slightly dated)

<comment><USER4> Modify your definition of "dig up" until it allows for things that are well known but old. We do that here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scrapy on the Road to Python 3 Support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scrapinghub.com/2015/08/19/scrapy-on-the-road-to-python-3-support/

<comment><USER2> Any expected ETA for Python 3 support?</comment>


Aaron Swartz' Prosecutor's Husband defends his wife - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tom-dolan-defends-carmen-ortiz-2013-1

<comment><USER2> Six months offer? There were no conditions? No "no computer" three year supervised release? Sentencing cap? Stipulation as to the guidelines? Then why the insistence on a plea to 13 counts? Why hasn't the US Attorney released their last plea offer letter? The case is over, there is no pending investigation. Someone needs to clear up the confusion.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And it looks like he deleted his twitter account already: <https://twitter.com/tomjdolan></comment>


The Product-Minded Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engineer/ <comment><USER2> As a product-guy-turned-engineer, I really enjoyed this read! Thanks for linking some great resources.</comment>


Show HN: Recursive Matrix Inversion Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/grondilu/5916c9dbc3ec85da8372c8aa6315c951 <comment><AUTHOR> The inverse of a 2x2 matrix (a b;c d) has a fairly simple explicit solution (d -b;-c a)/(ab-bc).

I was wondering if it's possible to have a similar formula for a matrix of dimension 2^n decomposed into a 2x2 block-wise matrix of four 2^(n-1) matrices.

I thought recursion could be desirable if one wants to make matrix inversion parallelizable.

I wrote a short javascript gist and apparently it works (a matrix A.mul(A.inverse) is very close to identity, up to numerical approximation).

Not sure what this is worth, but I thought it was interesting so I wanted to share.</comment>


The Python scientific stack, compiled to WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide <comment><USER2> Part of an effort to make a Jupytr notebook-like environment without relying on server side code.

[https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide](https://github.com/iodide- project/iodide)

<comment><USER3> > "Part of an effort to make a Jupytr notebook-like environment without > relying on server side code."

So there won't be any server side code, you'd just be downloading the entire Python stack and dependencies every time you want to use this through your browser. This time it will be WASM though, instead of x86/x64/pyc.

That we can, doesn't mean that we should.

<comment><USER4> I guess we need an in-browser package management like npm?

<comment><USER5> Just compile Debian to WASM and use apt.

<comment><USER6> Just run a browser in your WASM Debian to hit the same page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I benchmarked this recently. It comes in at 4-10x slower than cpython for random typical use cases on my machine, which is not too shabby at all. The author also states that numpy is slower than it should be due to lack of support for BLAS at this time.

The real impressive feat to me isn't hosting jupyter in the browser. It's access to a reasonably fast implementation of numpy in the browser which smokes native JS code for homogeneous array operations. I would love to see a minimalistic WASM implementation of numpy that can seamlessly interop with normal JS. Such a library would open up all sorts of possibilities that aren't currently feasible due to perf reasons.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, how do you derive at "4-10x slower"?

Running the exported notebook here takes

time py3 python.py real 0m0.145s

chrome: load html: 2sec run html: 13sec!

That's not 10 times slower, but a 100 times slower!

Still good start.

<comment><USER8> I have used Weblas "GPU Powered BLAS for Browsers" for matrix multiply and it smokes! [https://github.com/waylonflinn/weblas](https://github.com/waylonflinn/weblas)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great. Many times I wanted to showcase to colleagues who don't use Python how things would work in Python, but they don't have either Python or Jupyter installed. So I had to run Jupyter server in my own environment and give them access to it. This is quite an inconvenience as well as a security risk. Having a completely server-less Python/Jupyter environment should make this kind of showcasing much easier.

<comment><USER10> You could also use a Jupyter notebook uploaded to colab.research.google.com

<comment><USER11> I'll chime in to mention notebooks.azure.com as well.

(Typical disclaimer, I'm a dev on the azure notebooks team; we just try to solve exactly the scenario GP was asking so I would be remiss to not throw our hat in the ring)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Coming soon [...] Plotting using D3 from Python_

Wouldn't Bokeh make more sense? I'd be very interested in a serverless Bokeh that didn't force me to ditch Python, for example.

<comment><USER13> Bokeh could probably be done, but most of Bokeh's client/server complexity becomes unnecessary in this execution model.

More recently, pyodide has grown full matplotlib support. See, for example, [https://iodide.io/pyodide-demo/matplotlib- sideload.html?side...](https://iodide.io/pyodide-demo/matplotlib- sideload.html?sideload=https://matplotlib.org/examples/animation/rain.py)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happens to all of the C code in Numpy, and the calls to external libraries like BLAS?

<comment><USER15> In particular, does this mean Javascript has access to Numpy? Sounds unbelievable, but would be extremely cool.

<comment><USER13> Yep. You can "import" python objects over to the Javascript side and start using them from there. It's not as pleasant as working with Numpy in Python, of course, due to lack of operator overloading, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do a lot of work with Skulpt, which included adding (somewhat superficial) support for MatPlotLib. You can make line plots, scatter plots, and histograms. It's a pretty cool system, though I will say developing in it isn't always very fun :)

</comment><comment><USER17> The goal of [http://www.graalvm.org/docs/why-graal/#for-ruby-r-or- python](http://www.graalvm.org/docs/why-graal/#for-ruby-r-or-python) is to run scipy.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there a performance hit compared to "native" Python?

<comment><USER19> There's a chart and some discussion here: [http://droettboom.com/blog/2018/04/04/python-in-the- browser/](http://droettboom.com/blog/2018/04/04/python-in-the-browser/) (and some followup at [http://droettboom.com/blog/2018/04/11/profiling- webassembly/](http://droettboom.com/blog/2018/04/11/profiling-webassembly/) )

TL;DR: pyodide in Firefox was slower than cpython.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. Note that the author of that post said:

> UPDATE 2018-04-11: My hunch was wrong, and I was able to get to the bottom > of the root cause and significantly speed up these benchmarks.

And there's an updated graph here:

[http://droettboom.com/blog/2018/04/11/profiling- webassembly/](http://droettboom.com/blog/2018/04/11/profiling-webassembly/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Huh I am getting

``` TypeError: window[s] is undefined ```

with firefox.

<comment><USER13> File a bug over at [https://github.com/iodide- project/pyodide/](https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide/)

I'd love to get to the bottom of that.</comment></comment>


Amazon's own 'Machine Learning University' now available to all developers - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazons-own-machine-learning-university-now-available-to-all-developers/ <comment><USER2> All that machine learning and they still send me reviews for products I haven't received.

<comment><USER3> All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

<comment><USER4> It's worth pointing out that this recommendation behavior is only unintelligent if it has a downside, i.e. reduces Amazon's profits. Companies (and their AIs) only care about your business transactions, not whether you're annoyed.

I'm sure Amazon engineering is well aware of the jokes about their recommendation engines. But their recommendation engines are not calibrated to reduce jokes, they are calibrated to increase sales.

If you only know ONE thing about a person, pinging them about that one thing might still be better than ignoring them, or offering completely random recommendations. A memorably annoying ad can work better than a boring and inoffensive one, sometimes.

<comment><USER5> That's not true, putting a product I've already ordered on my recommended list instead of something i actually want to buy is costing them money in lost sales.

<comment><USER6> Amazon also doesn't know if this is a single use or consumable item. Some things have significant marginal utility beyond 1, and others can be consumed and need to be reordered. (Charging cables, Amazon echo for multiple rooms, paper goods, etc.)

<comment><USER7> How often do I buy a HP Color LaserJet printer, versus toner cartridges for it? Or ink for another printer of which it has no evidence that I own)?

Yet I bought a color laser printer and my first two pages of recommendations are for other variations on the same ("Hey, you bought the wired MFP! Perhaps you want the wireless too! And I know it's a HP printer, but maybe I can suggest some Brother toner for you!").

<comment><USER6> You're correct that Amazon should be smarter about some recommendations. I'd say give them the benefit of the doubt in that they may have found an algorithm that works most of the time (or at least when it comes to their bottom line), but edge-cases stand out to us.

Still though, there could be a method to the madness. You bought a printer - are you setting up a home office? Perhaps you want a second printer for upstairs?

Also, you just bought an HP brand printer. Were you replacing a printer that just ran out of ink? Maybe THAT printer was a Brother printer. Perhaps this Brother ink cartridge can extend the life of the hypothetical printer you may be replacing...

My point is that I can contrive cases where the recommendations might make sense - not to you, specifically, but to a large enough cross-section of consumers.

<comment><USER8> I don't doubt there are entire divisions in Amazon that draw statistical correlations and do A/B testing to figure out what annoying emails work. Just like any other marketing agency. So you can be sure that any annoying email you get is the probably the result of years of metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I loved AMZN's cloud certifications. Not a Data Scientist / ML Developer, nor am I trying to be, but I love sitting for these exams as I believe the amount of study gives you enough credibility to have thoughtful conversations with specialists.

Looking forward to reading sentiment to see if the curriculum is industry relevant and worthwhile!

<comment><USER10> We can agree to disagree on that. The certs are useful if your business requires them for whatever reason but my standard take is any cert that doesn't require hands on learning, such as RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE, tend to be a pointless exercise in reading comprehension. I say this as someone with several AWS certs.

<comment><USER11> What are some certs that you believe are worth investing in (i.e. ones that do require hands-on learning)?

<comment><USER10> Mentioned in initial comment (probably could have been more clear that those are the certs that require hands on learning):

RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE are the first ones that come to mind.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your response.

Do you believe that those certifications are solid investments for any IT professional (from developer and up) or only for those that are looking to become a SysAdmin/Network Engineer? (forgive me if my terminology isn't spot- on)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The digital courses are now available at no charge at aws.training/machinelearning and you only pay for the services you use in labs and exams during your training."

Any one has an idea how much it might cost going through the training?

<comment><USER13> I bet on the order of tens of dollars. I know that when I do my demo of amazon machine learning (another ML service they offer) it costs about $0.50/demo, which processes about 25k records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I haven't had a lot of time to look at the offering, but can anybody tell me if these courses have any theory, or are they just for promoting specific AWS ML services without going into the underlying complexity?

<comment><USER15> I haven't looked in detail but the description strongly suggests an applied ML focus (which would be very typical of IT certifications in general). In AI/ML, there's some overlap between applied AI and research AI--e.g. you're going to want to know something about statistics in any case--but I'm not sure the distinction is always appreciated.

<comment><USER14> Is there a cert to go along with the courses?

<comment><USER15> Some online courses or groups of online courses have certs associated with them. Some don't. Whether those certs are worth anything from a job hunting perspective is going to depend on the cert and who is looking at them. Very situationally dependent.

<comment><USER14> I was specifically speaking with regard to this offering. AWS has a pretty mature certification program (though I think was recently outsourced), so I figured they would have some sort of certification track to motivate people to consume their educational resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ugh, no choice to speed up the videos to 1.5x.

<comment><USER17> Try this: [https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1047257214052794368](https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1047257214052794368)

<comment><USER18> Bookmarklet for fixed multiplier:

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=1.7}();

Bookmarklet for variable multiplier:

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback%20rate%22))}();

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the hardest to use online learning platforms ever. I thought it was going to be a structured course from beginner to expert.

Of course Amazon doesn't make it that easy.

And the Free Digital Training 'enroll now' button does absolutely nothing. You'll spend most of your time choosing which of the 90 Machine Learning courses to do.

<comment><USER20> You have to enroll, and then add it to your "transcript" to actually start using the course materials. A bit confusing.

As for the content, most of it seems to be geared towards IT professionals (ie focusing towards implementation) instead of underlying theory.

<comment><USER19> Yeah I kinda worked this out eventually. But quite unintuitive. Can hardly call it a "Machine Learning University" imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm excited for this - I have stitched together my own courseplan to study machine learning, but this will be great to workback from, complement, or supplant in certain cases.

<comment><USER22> Is this something you could share?

<comment><USER21> Hi, sorry I missed this message. You probably won't see this, but my plan is to do the following (you can Google the course names):

1\. Learn math (I majored in history and sociology)

Classes \</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>- Linear Algebra: Foundation to Frontiers (UT Austin) Linear Algebra, MIT OpenCourseware Single-Variable Calculus, MIT OpenCourseware Multi-Variable Calculus, MIT OpenCourseware Probability Theory, Stanford CS109

2\. Learn machine learning Machine Learning, Stanford CS229 (taught by Andrew Ng) Classes @ deeplearning.ai (also taught by Andrew Ng)

3\. Start my own project

</comment><comment><USER23> I enrolled in the class: "ML Building Blocks". It served me a page with links to two videos. The page seems broken though. The links are dead.

</comment><comment><USER24> What's the cost?

<comment><USER21> Free outside of compute resources I think

</comment></comment><comment> johnx123-up Any YouTube playlist link to share, please?</comment>


Does Google Container Engine (GKE) Still Lead to Lock-In? - <AUTHOR> The GKE documentation says: "There's no vendor lock-in, you're free to take your workloads out of Container Engine and run them anywhere Kubernetes is supported, including on your own on-premise servers."<p>Still, GKE is a managed environment for Kubernetes and I was wondering how difficult it would be to take your  workloads out of GKE after 2-3 years and run them on your own hardware. <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud on GKE/Kubernetes.

My personal opinion is that, how closely you're integrating with storage systems (e.g. databases and blob stores) and APIs (e.g. machine learning, pub/sub, load balancing) of the cloud platform you are running on.

Kubernetes already does a great job abstracting the compute infrastructure and networking topology you have on the cloud provider away. There's a lot of work going on in the Kubernetes Service Catalog[1] to make it even more platform- agnostic. With Service Catalog, you will be able to say "I want a Redis instance" and your underlying infrastructure will be able to provide you a Redis instance, you will no longer worry about integrating to GCP, Azure, AWS separately. Service Catalog sounds a lot promising as a step towards eliminating vendor lock-in. That said, it is still a work-in-progress.

Note that none of this offer a migration path for your existing databases etc. But I am seeing that many businesses are able to migrate their compute workloads between platforms and on-prem to the cloud a lot easier compared to the pre-Kubernetes era.

[1] [https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/service- catalog](https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/service-catalog)

<comment><AUTHOR> @alpb Thank you for your helpful reply! The Kubernetes Service Catalog looks like an amazing project, I hope it will be released soon.</comment></comment>


Jury Convicts Man of Palin E-mail Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1986267,00.html <comment><USER2> Unreal... To me, guessing a password is not the same as hacking.</comment>


Test with Ruby not Cucumber - <AUTHOR> http://afewgoodlines.com/post/1077316188/integration-testing-retrospective-part-i

<comment><USER2> I think you're missing the point of Cucumber (at least as I see it). While it's great if customers write cucumber scenarios and send them to you (we have one that does), that's not the main reason for it. Cucumber facilitates communication between product design and product development/engineering. Cucumber allows the people with much more domain knowledge than you look at your specs and tell you if something is awry. I think this is the biggest win with Cucumber.

One of our clients was dead set on having "functional specs" for every feature we implemented. With Cucumber, they can read our "functional specs" or write their own and send them to us. Then, we can use those functional specs for actual testing, rather than them just gathering dust somewhere on a wiki.

Finally, I do agree that some people overuse Cucumber. Cucumber should really only be used when adding new features, or when something needs the addition of communication with stakeholders. Otherwise, you should fall back to unit testing, or just normal integration testing with RSpec stories or Steak. For example, I think it's overkill to write a Cucumber test in the case of a bug. At most, you should have a Steak/RSpec story that reproduces the issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's great to start (design) high-level tests in human language - in a chart, in a spreadsheet, in lines or paragraphs. Of course, in Cucumber you use structured English in a slightly inflexible way.

But the code should be something that you can walk through when you are running tests. This is what Cucumber is not great at. You want tests that tell a story, but the code is all in a phrasebook.

After some initial experience with Cucumber, I think I will switch to an old- school low-tech approach that I've used many times -- design in conversational English steps, convert those lines to comments, and write code in-between (in this case, using Steak). The flexibility seems like a much bigger advantage than the automation Cucumber provides.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can also use Steak:

[http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/steak-because-cucumber- is-f...](http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/steak-because-cucumber-is-for- vegetarians/)

<comment><USER5> That has got to be one of the least usable blog layouts I've _ever_ seen. It's all flash over substance, which is rather fitting because you can say the same thing about a lot of these testing libraries.

Factories are better than fixtures, I'll admit. All this other cruft that's grown up around Rails testing can be trivially replaced with Test::Unit with no real loss in readability and great improvements in overall simplicity. If Test::Unit is good enough to keep Rails itself on track it's certainly good enough to keep your app under control.

<comment><USER4> Cue religious debate about testing frameworks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI. I have updated the post with an image describing my customer's feature development process.</comment>


YC Companies Responding to Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.ycombinator.com/covid <comment><USER2> Really happy to see this. Really happy to see the extra "Who is Hiring" post the other day. In passing, I also noticed a title about YC going all remote for their upcoming batch. All good stuff. I'm impressed by the proactive response.

If they haven't already, I would love to see something like this focused on any YC companies involved in providing remote work options. I think they have at least one company called Moonlight that does, or did, that kind of thing for programmers. If that company is alive and well, I'm sure there are people here who would love to know more.

<comment><USER3> > Really happy to see the extra "Who is Hiring" post the other day.

For any one interested, here's that thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398)

<comment><USER2> Terrific idea. See also the "Who wants to be hired" post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665396)

Edit:

A couple more resources:

List of Remote Jobs or Gigs Platforms (google doc -- not mine, just something I know about)

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15GJtJ5qpk7H9Cl3xTBwv2FR8/htmlview)

r/GigWorks (I'm the mod)

<comment><USER4> I saw that Google Doc the other day, and have already forwarded the link to several people looking for work. Good resource!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know it's the nature of startups that most of these efforts will fail for technical reasons, fail for financial reasons, arrive to late, get preempted, etc. Maybe this is doubly true for hard problems in biology like drug discovery.

Nonetheless, I am filled with pride and optimism that so many talented people are working on these ambitious projects. Humanity the species will get through this yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Especially the logistics oriented companies are incredibly important. Flexport, Medina's, Osh.

If wonder why, the German government (procurement was handled by the military procurement agency and a department of German customs) "lost" a suppliers shipment of 6 million FFP2 masks (or 3 million, numbers are not really reliable so far) in Kenia. For everyone wondering why they have been shipped througj Africa, welcome to the club. I have no idea. But it seems logistics was handled by the supplier.

Having control over your supply chain, from sourcing through distribution, is critical right now.

Good to see YC has some of such companies in their portfolio.

<comment><USER7> That Kenya facemask story looks highly dubious and likely to be fake. The main source seems to be rt.com. Do you have a credible source?

The stories I've seen claim to be quoting der spiegel but I don't see the story on der speigel itself. For example, nothing is showing up on [https://www.spiegel.de/suche/?suchbegriff=mask+kenya&seite=1](https://www.spiegel.de/suche/?suchbegriff=mask+kenya&seite=1)

<comment><USER6> Confirmed by the German defence ministry, first reported by Speigel who seems to have a copy from the internal report on it (they are citing passages from it in their German article).

But I agree, it is highly dubious. Not having been involved, my only theory right now is that the supplier sold them to someone els. if he ran delivery himself, it is easy to route it through Kenia. Then the shipment get's lost. If he was smart, he has proper insurance for it.

"The authorities are trying to find out what happened," a German defence ministry spokeswoman said, confirming a report first published by Spiegel Online."

Surce: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- german...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany- masks/germany-says-six-million-coronavirus-face-masks-missing-in-kenya- idUSKBN21B1T0)

<comment><USER8> Yes, but the Kenyans say there was no such thing.[1]

Basically the only reason we trust the Germans over the Kenyans is because of reputation, keep in mind that there is no proof for that statement, we basically take their word for it. But in Germany even recently a stash of 100000 masks was stolen from a local hospital and everyone pretends there is no supply shortage.

So I don't know whether the Kenyans are lying, but I do know that the Germans are, because of information updates I get from local health department connections. Might just be the German government trying to talk themselves out of a bad situation. But right now, we don't know either way.

"We, therefore, wish to inform the public that we are treating this report of alleged disappearance of six million type FFP2 protective masks as fake news & that our cargo section continues with normal operations."

[1] [https://twitter.com/KenyaAirports/status/1242455090952384512](https://twitter.com/KenyaAirports/status/1242455090952384512)

<comment><USER6> Talking about mixed signaling, so. Local practices are asking households and carpenters for masks and protective suites. At the same time German authorities are basically refusing external help. "We have our own processes" was the most usefull answer I heard this week from officials.

Luckily, I found a doctor who's heading a regional association today. and at least he was very happy to hear that someone was willing, and able, to help. I almost gave up today, would have been a quite a waste of available air freight and distribution capacities to get these thing from China.

As a side note, based on my experience with the german government in term of procurement and such things, this whole Kenia story is at least in realm of being possibly true. Still, a very strange story... I'm curious to see how it ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are anti-body tests available to purchase on the commercial market yet?

I'd like to know if I already had it so I can get on with my life.

<comment><USER10> Can you still carry it / spread it after you've had it and recovered?

<comment><USER11> When you recover from a virus, antibodies are in your body. These can be detected, Once you're recovered, you can no longer spread the disease. Problem is, people with mild symptoms believe they don't have it, or have recovered.

I'm one of the many, many people who has been ill for a while during the past weeks, and would like to know if I had it. If I can know for sure that I had it, and no longer have it, then I can "move on with my life" indeed. As in, I no longer have to worry about getting this disease, spreading this disease, or getting organ damage from this disease. Most important, I'll know that when I visit my mother (nearly 70, and risk group) that I won't spread the disease to her. Same for my mother in law.

<comment><USER12> > Once you're recovered, you can no longer spread the disease.

This is a super dangerous statement and absent proof you should probably retract it. There are plenty of viruses that you still shed even after recovery, there is some evidence already that COVID-19 is still contagious after recovery with an unknown for the duration, it could be hours, days or even weeks, without a very good test regime it is very hard to put a safe boundary on this.

<comment><USER11> WHO recommends 14 days, RIVM 1 day. With no symptoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do folks generally keep with the regular secrecy in this situation?

(regarding ANA's "More than 50 years ago, the FDA approved a drug. Today, we're evaluating that drug as a treatment for COVID-19")

<comment><USER14> I also found that extraordinary. With such limited information it is not possible to know if the contacts I have are relevant, and how serious and progressed the company are.

After all if I suggest something I'm putting my reputation (in part) on the line, which I'm not prepared to do without at least understanding this is a serious proposal, and the science being at least superficially credible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are life sciences and healthcare familiar verticals for YC?

Good to see money and talent going to such good use.

(Edit) Here's the YC Companies list; which doesn't yet list these new investments:

Biomedical vertical: [https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?vertical=Biomedical](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?vertical=Biomedical)

Healthcare vertical: [https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?vertical=Healthcare](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?vertical=Healthcare)

"The Y Combinator Database" [https://www.ycdb.co/](https://www.ycdb.co/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd like to see this for _all_ YC companies. The 'how you can help' was an especially useful artifact of information. For those of us who are bored and in need of intellectual stimulation, I would like to know what other (non medical) startups are working on, with a specific description of 'how I can help'. Im talking _specifically_ about short term projects (e.g., a week to 2 months) as opposed to the 'who's hiring' thread.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is amazing that talent is going well beyond building cute cat apps.

</comment><comment><USER18> How do I update our YC application? We are pivoting to help with COVID-19.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER19> The page seems to have vanished in the last few hours. (Whups, now it's back).

<comment><USER20> archive view here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200325200045/https://www.ycomb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200325200045/https://www.ycombinator.com/covid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Archive view: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200325200045/https://www.ycomb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200325200045/https://www.ycombinator.com/covid)

</comment><comment><USER21> Inb4 the anti-capitalist/anti-SV crowd comes to preach about how much more the YC ecosystem should be doing to help with covid..

<comment><USER22> Community reaction seems pretty favorable so far.

It's true that cynical comments often show up early in a thread, but that's partly because thoughtful comments simply take longer to write.</comment></comment>