Introducing the New Profile - <AUTHOR> http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=462201327130 <comment><USER2> One thing that's fascinating me is how they're letting this update deploy virally, by itself.

You sign up for the new profile and your friends are going to see you did. If several of your friends do it, you're going to see that a number of them did. This is bound to be at least somewhat convincing, given that you trust your friends more than the faceless evil of Facebook Corp, and therefore it might be worth doing, and your curiosity will be piqued.

Given Facebook's history with negative feedback around new features, this seems to me like the most brilliant part of the entire new profile - and it's very subtle, too.

<comment><USER3> > _One thing that's fascinating me is how they're letting this update deploy > virally, by itself._

Are you saying it's opt-in only for everyone? My friend got the new profile automatically, though I did not. I see that I can choose to get it manually, but the FAQ also says you cannot revert.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your comment. I would be really impressed if the feature had total viral deployment (i.e. opt-in only for everyone), and if it allowed you to change back to the old profile at will.

<comment><USER2> I imagine they'd seed a few million profiles to start with, so probably a few people ("a few million" equates to "a few" in the Facebook ecosystem!) got converted over to hotstart things. Not surprising, really.

Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very feasible move, I'd imagine. You want to move your userbase over to the new code as soon as possible so you can start iterating on that for everyone, without worrying about maintaining two versions.

<comment><USER3> > _Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very > feasible move, I'd imagine._

I agree. It would be a real headache. That's why I would have been really impressed if they did it. Or rather, I would have been really impressed if they found a way to do it that wasn't a headache. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm impressed by how small the teams remain at Facebook. His profile shows that he worked on this profile revamp with only 6 other people, as well as Chat with 5 others, and the iPhoto exporter himself at a Hackathon. While there have been reports of Google's teams burgeoning in size, it seems that at least for now Facebook is keeping them small. Obviously, these products have had perhaps less depth than Wave for example (which had a 30 person team [http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-cant-build- instagr...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-cant-build- instagram-2010-11)). But, still, it says something about Facebook that they are attempting to keep team size small.

<comment><USER5> This also implies that Facebook grills their engineers to the point where engineers would get exhausted so easily. Executing huge features with small teams is very great for the company, but does that necessarily mean it's a great place to work? For instance, recently graduated people would be very suitable for Facebook because they are young and single (as in not married). However, people with families would less likely to work for Facebook.

<comment><USER6> Does it? Not necessarily. At my previous employer I was one of several team leads and we almost always broke into 4-8 man teams.

One of my biggest takeaways from doing that for a couple years is how dramatically productivity can swing based on factors like the texture of the project, the clarity of the goal, the freedom of the TL to make judgment calls without needing to get approval from a BA, morale, the quality of the spec (note that quality != length), etc.

No reason a small dedicated team cannot build large products with reasonable deadlines and a balanced lifestyle. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, in my opinion 50 hours a week is fully balanced and a team can run at 50 hours pretty consistently without ill effects if they WANT to and are HAPPY with their mission and job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps the most convenient change is that all 4 display ads are now above the scroll line, even on my netbook. Thanks Facebook!

<comment><USER8> Basically, the new profile has become more ad-friendly than what it used to be, user friendly. No, I don't like the way my communications (Wall Posts) have been sidelined and ads have become the most prominent feature in my profile page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sign up here: <http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/>

<comment><USER10> And Facebook told me that you (my Facebook friend) already had signed up as soon as I visited that page from the link submitted here on HN.

<comment><USER11> annoyingly, it published a story about this to my friends; one that I can't delete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder why Facebook moved away from easy Twitter-style status posting. It used to be (about two versions ago) that the "what's on your mind" textbox was open by default and it was easy to post a status. For sometime now, you have to click "Status" first to do it, which almost seems like they'd like to discourage users from doing it?

<comment><USER13> Based on the analytics at a startup I used to work at, photos are a much better driver of user engagement than status updates. I'm guessing the same is true for facebook, and anecdotally, most of the facebook comments I receive are on photos and shared links, not status updates.

<comment><USER14> Wow.. my feed (primarily non-technical) couldn't be more different. I'd estimate it abouts 80% status updates and comments on the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks like the update is mostly with photos, but I would really prefer an update to the tagging system. Easier control of who is allowed to tag you, what they can tag, and who is allowed to see it.

<comment><USER16> I think there should be a couple use cases facebook _always_ protects from, and proves that they aren't going to hurt the person. Here is one:

"Mary is an abused spouse, beaten inches from death once upon a time by her abusive husband. She has since left him and moved to another city entirely, in hiding."

Nothing in the system should allow any information about Mary to leak out. Not pictures of her, not her updates, not her level of participation in the site even. Your tagging is broken if you allow her to be tagged or captions to point her out.

<comment><USER17> It would be nice if facebook pursued the design goal you've outlined, but it would be irresponsible to interact with the facebook system as if that goal had been achieved and cemented for all time.

I think the guiding principle for Mary, or any user, should be that she doesn't type anything into a web browser that she doesn't want publically known and tied to her real-life identity.

<comment><USER18> > I think the guiding principle for Mary...should be that she doesn't type > anything into a web browser that she doesn't want publicly known

That was Eric Schmidt's answer a while back too, but I'm not sure it's adequate anymore.

As PG has remarked, more and more of the tools we use to interact with the world are becoming software (and as all software is increasingly web-enabled & socialized, that's often indistinguishable from "typing it into a browser" for purposes of this discussion.)

We're essentially telling people who have very legitimate reasons for wanting to protect their privacy that their other option is to become a Luddite hermit. Is that really the best we can do?

It's a tough question to answer as an entrepreneur, because it probably is a much smaller opportunity, and by definition doesn't enjoy the same viral loops - - but I wish it's one that we as an industry would spend more time on.

<comment><USER19> "We're essentially telling people who have very legitimate reasons for wanting to protect their privacy that their other option is to become a Luddite hermit. Is that really the best we can do?"

Not exactly. We're telling people that they're not going to have privacy, period. We're assuming that privacy is dead. You might think it's still something that can be salvaged, but lots of people assume that the world is moving to less privacy whatever we do. Which is why we should be education people from the start that, whether we like it or not, anything they type into a computer is basically public.

I especially like Scoble's thoughts on this. He says, rightly I believe, that anything that is a copy-paste away from becoming public, isn't really private at all. He also had the fun adventure of having many private emails being made public as part of lawsuits against Microsoft.

Also, you might want to read about The Transparent Society: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc4/hs737.snc4/65739...](http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc4/hs737.snc4/65739_10150113084606729_20531316728_7289445_369369_n.jpg)

I love how that looks. They put all the useful information into a nice bit- sized block, yum... all that's missing now is the guy's SSN.

<comment><USER21> don't make that information public, and don't friend people you don't know and you will be fine.

<comment> mike-cardwell You forgot: Make sure you stay logged in constantly, checking for changes, just in case Facebook change their privacy settings again and make stuff public that previously wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The comments on that page are actually very interesting to read. I try to do my part to filter by voting down what I do not like and voting up what should be addressed. That is just how it is when you allow 500M users to say their view regardless of age group and other demographics. You get a multi-layer of " I want this , this and not this " but then a next person says the opposite. Some people want it to stay the same ...others welcome change.

They are not joking around when they meant that they wanted to make the world more social. Because of this change my dad realized where the Poke Button was located. Go dad.... If you remembered the boxes' (Top Friends ,Gift Boxes etc) removal a while back you would see that (at least to me) the current change made sense. Now the focus really is in the interaction with the user (info,photos and wall are packed in the top middle) and their interests not the "glitz and glamour"

Now the real item that needs /that I hope it is not really a need.. I cannot tell Facebook what they can and cannot do/ to be addressed is the 10% of friends option ( this has been discussed in other formats 10 friends,8 friends ..etc). The everyday user does not interact with all of their "Friends". If you can force me to choose only 10 or so of my real friends to interact with ..those that I mail,sms,send messages, actually see outside ... that would be great.

If you could even couple notifications with Facebook Chat on your phone ... FBM (FaceBook Messenger) /BBM/ . Just an alternate reality thought.

</comment><comment><USER23> I just realized that Facebook uses data more structured than their crushed competition. The relational database pundit in me rejoices.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm upset that they won't let you put programming languages into the "Languages You Speak" box.

There's gotta be at least one Facebook engineer lurking on this post. If so, how about a fix? :)

</comment><comment><USER25> ...and just like that, Facebook revamps profile to add Twitter-like sharing, MySpace-like focus on pictures and media, and LinkedIn-like employment, education, and projects details.

This is brilliant. It's good ole Facebook with Twitter + LinkedIn + MySpace. Executed brilliantly!

<comment><USER26> I'm a little curious as to what you mean by "Twitter-like sharing". Wasn't the old way more like Twitter?

<comment><USER25> I'm largely talking about where I see Facebook going, rather than just this specific update.

Overall, I think the Twitter-like feature updates have been numerous and obvious.

<comment><USER27> Well then you're missing something that some of us haven't seen. Could you answer his question instead of vaguely sidestepping it, please?

<comment><USER28> The specific features happened when status updates changed from being a minor (in the right sidebar) to major part of the website, with the large 'What's on your mind' box at the top. It was a while ago, rather than being specific to this update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another change that must be fairly recent:

If you admin a fan page, you can now see instant info on each post, including number of impressions and percent of feedback..

"174 Impressions Raw number of times this story has been seen on your Wall and in the News Feed of your Fans · 0.57% Feedback"

<comment><USER29> [http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/01/20/facebooks-page- admi...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/01/20/facebooks-page- administration-tools-getting-upgrades/)

<comment><USER7> Weird. I definitely did not have that on pages this September, when I was actively managing a page for an event. I'd have been very happy if I had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> From my perspective this is more structuring of data. If you look at the profile in the example its a very clear organization step.Advertisers will now have a better and easy targeting mechanism than the usual demographics info.This I think is more of user training where people enter the data on how facebook wants to see it; why would a friend of mine who has known me long enough need information in this structure?

Facebook is now going to be able to sell super targeting techniques to marketers. Google relied on machines to do this, Facebook just asked its users to do the same;needless to say its a master stroke :).

</comment><comment><USER31> Why do people care so much about minute differences in terms of functionality and layout on facebook?

<comment><USER32> You'd care if Hacker News changed in functionality and layout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In the guided tour and blog post, it says that the photos displayed at the top of your "new profile" are "recently tagged photos". Most of the ones that keep showing up for me are very old. Is everybody else experiencing that?

It also seems like the order of the photos is somewhat randomized when I go to view all of my photos (as opposed to being reverse chronological order). Weird.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, same here. It seems a bit buggy; a couple more examples: it's impossible to say you live in Paris, France (only random cities elsewhere in the world named Paris), I can't turn on chat while looking at any of the profile pages (but can turn it on on any other page), etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Share: Question" doesn't do anything (ajax 404).

<comment><USER36> Hehe, yup, I checked too. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Its interesting to see how Facebook keeps on coming up with changes in its UI every now and then. Take one look at Orkut in its current state and you have enough reasons to assume that either they don't have any designer working on it, or even if they do, they simply aren't putting enough resources.

</comment><comment><USER38> I simply love the idea of letting you tag people in the employment history box, and list the projects you've worked on. See [http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc4/hs1223.snc4/1555...](http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc4/hs1223.snc4/155591_10150113086206729_20531316728_7289482_5419270_n.jpg)

Give it 3 months before LinkedIn follow suit. fb Keeps morphing ideas into new realities. I have never seen short cycle iterations at this level ever before. They make it extremely difficult for a new player in this space to ever keep up with the level of innovation and change facebook has baked into their culture.

The facebook of last month is too dull and less-relevant than the facebook of next month. Well done, and I salute Zuck for not selling out in the tech world as so many others have.

</comment><comment><USER39> My comment on the page, pretending FB is going to read it:

> I like the additional structured data. Even if I had time to figure out how > to structure my Facebook data the way you've done it with this release, it > doesn't help much because my friends would have to pick apart the structure. > It's a framework where you can expect certain things to be in certain > places, like Ruby on Rails.

I was annoyed when they made everyone convert interests to links to pages, but it adds more edges to the graph, and graphs between entities (starting with people) has always been a big part of Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER40> Looks like Facebook is going for the social resume play w/ the jobs/projects page -- unlike LinkedIn, you add _WHO_ you worked with, which makes all the difference. Just missing whose contribution you "liked" to get a professional endorsement graph.

<comment><USER41> I definitely won't be making use of that. I go out of my way to keep my professional contacts and info far away from my Facebook profile. I use LinkedIn for professional contacts, and I keep that decoupling quite intentionally. My privacy settings on Facebook are cranked up about as high as I can get them, while my LinkedIn info is largely public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Interesting that FB notified a 'pending' friend (someone who's friend request I have not yet accepted) that I have switched to the new profile. Seems strange...

</comment><comment><USER36> I like it, but the Education info seems buggy. I added half a dozen classes to my college, and now have half a dozen college entries each with one class. :-(

</comment><comment><USER43> > _Featured Friends_

> _You can now highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your > family, best friends or teammates._

Cue increased drama in 3...2...1...

</comment><comment><USER44> Is it just me or are the advertisements when viewing a profile larger and more in focus?

</comment><comment><USER45> New profile, but Last.fm still loads blank in Chrome after several months.

<comment><USER46> developer build? mine screws up a few pages

<comment><USER45> I thought it was going to be just the dev build, but in Chrome stable it doesn't load either. So, not sure why saying so provokes downvoting...

<comment><USER47> <http://last.fm>? Loads fine for me in Chrome.

<comment><USER45> No, Last.fm Profile (in Facebook).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> any one know how i can switch it back to the "old" one?

<comment><USER49> Seconded. I tested it out, and I don't prefer it... but I can't find a way to switch back. Anyone know how to switch back or is it even possible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> not sure how much to read into this, but the comments on the Facebook discussion are overwhelmingly negative

<comment> brown9-2 Every Facebook UI change is the worst change ever since the last Facebook UI change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The comments on that page hurt my brain.

</comment><comment><USER52> "As you can see, Mr. Anderson, we've been keeping our eye on you for... some time now" < _slides FB profile dossier across table_ >

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder how long their software deployment process takes. I do not see this change, nor do I see an option to switch to this change.</comment>


"Hire the best" → A critical perspective on standardised hiring processes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tobiasuhlig/hire-the-best-a-critical-perspective-on-standardised-hiring-processes-d6060b100308 <comment><USER2> Google famously passed on the guy who invented Homebrew, so at least you're in good company. As others have said, the interview process selects for (wait for it) ... people who are good at the interview process. It's kind of like the SAT and college. If you want to get in, you get good at the SAT, regardless of its relevance.

Instead, maybe seek out the companies that go bonkers for your OS project and can't wait to turn you loose inside their company. They're out there and I suspect it would be more enjoyable to work for them. Good luck and don't despair!

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually hope that some of the ideas get picked up. Might be naive.

Getting visibility / traction for a new OS project is intense these days, especially in case it is "disruptive". Might be too far ahead.

"They're out there and I suspect it would be more enjoyable to work for them". Probably, but hard to find. Most job requests are like "Would you like to help us with Angular, React or Vue?".

<comment><USER2> My apologies for not realizing that point you were making. I agree that it might be difficult to find a company that wants you to build their product using your OS project. I meant that there are probably companies out there that would evaluate your abilities on the strength of your OS project and then hire you to build whatever it was they needed.

If you want to make your side project your day job, that's a different story, but maybe it would be possible to build a startup on it. Easy to say, I know. The internet is full of well-meaning but effectively useless advice like mine. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "We want to hire the best talent" \- Some company making insurance software that pays below market.

Understanding that you aren't the best (company), and you don't need the best (talent), but instead you need people that can put up with the mundanity of your working environment and product, is probably a better task than "trying to fix interviewing". The interviewing will fix itself if the reflection and honesty from the companies show up.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sharing an idea here, because I haven't had the gumption to start my own blog.

\--

Job interviews should be recorded, available for review.

Feedback loops are important. Accountability and transparency are important. Constructive feedback is important.

Once recorded interviews become a thing, it'll spawn of cottage industry of interview prep.

Inspiration:

Part A

I ran for office. Endorsement interviews are part of the gauntlet (ritualized humiliation). My recorded and publicly released interviews were terrific. The closed door interviews were trainwrecks.

I've had maybe a dozen interviews (as applicant) that were complete trainwrecks. And there's no way to appeal, contest, or even understand wtf just happened.

I've also interviewed 100s. Per Luke Hohmann's advice, I tried very hard to explain yays and nays to candidates, be avail for followups. FWIW, I've never received the same courtesy.

Part B

Part of the candidate prep is practice, just like working on your golf swing. Start camera. Do your thing. Debate, stump speech, meeting people. Review the tape. Try to get better. Rinse, lather, repeat.

One org I serve does dozens endorsement interviews every year. All public. It's so much work. And incredibly valuable. To us, the candidates, news medias, voters. And whenever there's a mini drama, we just say "review the tape". Prevents so much bullshit.

Part C

Training. Most people suck at interviewing. Both hosts and guests. Why? Because it's fucking hard.

Back when I was recruiting and hiring (served as manager for a group of products), HR stuff was easily 1/2 my job. I was fortunate that my boss took this responsibility very seriously, providing training and resources.

</comment><comment><USER5> Author says that he is humble but he is not humble enough, he still thinks that his achievements should mean something. They actually do but not all the time, at some point the fate can and will be decided by a 1 yoe junior dev who thinks they are a hotshot based on the TC comparison thread on Blind, all leadership principles be damned.

Big corp interviewing is an exercise in Zen and should be approached as such.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Author says that he is humble but he is not humble enough"

I have been thinking about this part while writing it :)

It actually did not feel comfortable to write this much about myself. Thought it was important though to put the article into perspective.

I normally would not even apply for big company roles, because most of the time you get stuck in roles where it is close to impossible to make an impact.

Agree on the Zen part.</comment></comment>


Zombie Factories Stalk the Sputtering Chinese Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/business/international/zombie-factories-stalk-the-sputtering-chinese-economy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> One significant way where a free market economy has an advantage in efficient resource allocation over a planned economy is not the priority allocation of resources to successful enterprises/groups/economic niches (both styles can do that), but a rapid, ruthless deallocation of resources from unsuccessful enterprises, so they can then be used elsewhere. Planned economies _could_ do that in theory, but this has always been their weak point in practice.

Bankruptcies are an important instrument for the overall health of the economy. Yes, there is a short term hurt during the reallocation. But if many companies are in trouble keeping afloat, then a few of them sinking will free up resources (workers, capital, materials, land/buildings) so those resources are cheaper for the remaining, slightly more successful companies, allowing them to come back above water.

<comment><USER3> How do you think is planned economy unable to direct this effect? Maybe random faults even out arbitrary bias that would be introduced by regulation. How is a government spending tons on military not partially a planned economy?

<comment><USER2> Planned economy _might_ direct this effect, but they don't - if the system gives leaders an option to prolong the agony, then they invariably use it, and the system suffers from it.

For examples in planned economies, USSR had a lot of examples, and this article is another. For examples in otherwise-freemarket-but-not-in-this-case economies, see "too big to fail" situation with bank bailouts, and your own example on USA military industrial complex - where failed projects get propped up instead of allowing them to die as they should, thus in the end harming the long-run perspective in the whole sector.

<comment><USER4> I kind of lived through this effect with the decline of the British coal industry which was nationalised at the time. It became uncompetitive mostly because British coal was hard to get at compared to say open pit mining in Australia, so money was lost on each ton dug up. But the argument against closing it was the miners needed jobs, it was hard for them to switch to other work, sacking them would kill the economy in mining towns and so on. It was easier for the government to pay the losses from taxes on the general population who didn't complain very much, than to fire a bunch of miners who would complain very loudly. And who did of course when Thatcher eventually fired them.

With hindsight it would have been better for the industry to decline gradually than laying off everyone at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading it reminded me of the articles in the same tone that were written against Argentina, also asking for more misery for the people here. They were wrong. Argentina recovered from e 2001 crisis by kicking the IMF out of the country. The IMF uses this kind of discourse to oppress countries. I hope China's government will be wise enough to not let the IMF bankrupt them.

<comment><USER6> Argentina didn't recover by kicking the IMF out. Their growth over that time is almost identical to Chile and Brazil. It began at the exact same time all economies began expanding, including Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador as well. The expansion was a macro effect, not something Argentina did.

Worse, Argentina's GDP has hardly moved in 20 years on an inflation adjusted basis. Their debt is soaring faster than during the 2001-02 crisis. [1] Last year their economy had 40% to 60% inflation [2], and is in dire condition. I'd say Argentina is doing a fine job of bankrupting itself. I'm just wondering who they're going to blame this time. [3]

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/argentina-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/argentina- is-racking-up-debt-even-faster-than-during-its-2001-2002-crisis)

[2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-07/argentina-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-07/argentina- economy-can-t-take-40-percent-inflation-massa)

[3] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-17/-no-why- ar...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-17/-no-why-argentina- refuses-to-pay-its-debts)

<comment><USER7> This article from The Economist a while back [1] gives what seems to be a pretty good rundown of Argentina's rather sad economic and political history.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21596582-one- hundred-...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21596582-one-hundred- years-ago-argentina-was-future-what-went-wrong-century-decline)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, yet _another_ anti-China article from NYT. I can't get over the volume and frequency. Things look pretty good on the ground here!

<comment><USER9> Yes, if you get all your news from xinhua then it definitely looks much more negative. But NYT is great if you want to know more than what the government wants you to know; the government doesn't block NYT because they are wrong!

<comment><USER10> The fact that the person above wrote in English and is on this site means they are likely an expat/ABC. Thus your accusation that they get all their news from xinhua is a laughable ad hominid.

<comment><USER9> It's evening in China right now, I assume everyone in the USA is still asleep. Why would parent not be in china, there are plenty of Chinese in China who speak English well enough, I work with them. Of course, the poster could be in Europe, but what does it matter?

Compare say china daily (an English version of xinhua mostly) to NYT, and you'll see a vast difference on bias and reporting standards, where NYT is vastly more professional than the shill Chinese press. So taken like that, why would parent think NYT was lying unless they had something else to compare it to; i.e. the CPC's word that the economy is fine and nothing is wrong?

There are plenty of problems in the Chinese economy...why not report them?

<comment><USER10> Here's a quick (terse) summary of what happened up-thread:

"I'm physically in China and I find that the NYT reports on China often don't match the reality that I see." "Shut up xinhua shill"

Comparing the quality of xinhua and NYT is completely tangential to the point I was trying to make. I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't have a serious discussion about China. I am saying that such a conversation is not happening here. I expect better than this HN.

<comment><USER11> How does the contigenics 'see' the lack of zombie factories? Are they flying in a helicopter to fact-check the NYT? I think not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like the US oil industry. Many wells that should be shut down as uneconomical at current oil prices are still producing. This is to service an estimated $150 billion in loans from banks and hedge funds.

<comment><USER13> Just because it's uneconomical to drill a well at a given price doesn't mean it's not profitable at the margin to keep pumping from it, given that the drilling is a sunk cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So basically they need to invest in the economy they cannot plan for consumer..

the only similar case Germany during WWII 250% or more debt over GDP but GDP was not expanding due sole effort on military building</comment>


Ask HN: Do you rank local applicants higher? - <AUTHOR> I live in South America and I keep getting nice emails from companies that I applied to saying I have a great set of skills and experience but unfortunately they won't be able to invite me for interview. Even when they prominently display "visa sponsor" in their job ads.<p>I'm thinking about accepting ANY job that will allow immigrate to Canada/Europe just so I can even be considered for interviewing at the places I want to work at. <comment><USER2> The question reflects one of the risks a business might associate with visa sponsorship...the candidate accepts the job primarily for the visa and has less inclination to continue employment following relocation.

Combined with the risk that the employee decides that life as an _ex patriot_ is not what they want, relocating a candidate can have a different risk-reward profile from the company's perspective.

For what it is worth, if immigration is is the goal, then it can often be done without lining up employment first.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great insights.

To be honest, accepting any job is a thought that comes to my mind out of frustration, not plan A.

I'm coming to the conclusion that overseas candidates must have way more skills than local ones to offset the risks you mentioned.

I want to be part of the candidate pool that gets taken seriously but it seems I'll need to be physically close for that.

<comment><USER2> There is another factor at play. It is easy for people to apply for jobs anywhere in the world. Your "plan from frustration" is based on this. For specialized roles or unique skills or high level positions, the trouble of wading through foreign candidates is worth it. For a production Rails/Java/C#/Javascript position, it probably is not because someone wanting to relocate for that type of position is primarily applying because they "think they might possibly" want to relocate.

If you really want to live/work in Canada or Europe, pick one and take the steps to live there on your own and worry about the job further down the line. Having a visa already probably gives you a leg up.</comment></comment></comment>


New tech by Nissan: Tactile feedback in gas pedal to help you save gas - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/nissan-eco-pedal-system-fuel-efficiency-save-gas.php

<comment><USER3> As someone who drives a stick, I would love to see this feature under the right foot of drivers of auto cars. I drive a 300hp sports car and on my stoplight commutes if I'm not accelerating pretty aggressively, people will be on my tail behind me.

I think many people just don't realize how much they slam on the gas once the light turns green. With auto cars getting smoother and quieter (especially with the CVT transmissions), many people don't even get the auditory feedback anymore that they're hauling ass. Combine that with your average driver who doesn't understand what the RPM gauge is for, and you get the stoplight quarter-mile drag race on repeat until you get to work.

<comment><USER4> I'm trying to square your concern for the gas mileage of your fellow drivers with your choice of vehicle. Those cylinders and their parasite losses (more air to compress, more manifold vacuum to suck, more surface area to rub against) don't come for free...

You'd have to be a true leadfoot to pull a typical automatic sedan down to the mileage range of a 300hp monster (c.f. the Mustang GT, which gets 15/23mpg on the EPA test). My '99 Saturn, a pure commute vehicle which drives 5 miles at a time in stop and go traffic on a cold engine (basically pessimal fuel efficiency conditions) never gets below 22.

<comment><USER3> The point of my comment is that I'm driving a sports car yet have to accelerate pretty aggressively to keep up with the automatic drivers. I have a Mazdaspeed6 with K&N intake and turboback exhaust (~300hp and 250 to the wheels). The few mods aside, Mazda's 2.3L I4-DISI engine is highly efficient and there's a reason it has been on Wards 10-Best Engines for the past 3 years.

I get 22-24mpg around town and 26-29 highway depending on how aggressively I drive. I've gotten it as low as 17 when I initially owned the car and was racing everywhere, but that's the absolute worst I've seen. My best efficiency run on a drive from TX->PA saw ~455 miles before I had to fill up again.

Here's some more information for you on why my 300hp "monster" gets equivalent gas mileage to your Saturn: <http://wardsautoworld.com/ar/auto_story_behind_wards_2/>

<comment><USER5> I have an 205hp Acura TSX (07) and I have gotten anywhere between 32 - <USER2> highway on a tank of gas which is almost 25% better than your Mazda and IMO the TSX has great highway acceleration even if it's a little slow from a dead start. Granted it takes an extra second on the 0-60 vs. Mazdaspeed6 but you don't accelerate that hard anyway so what's the point.

I like power but there is a direct relationship between HP and efficiency but going over ~200 in a car seems to be a waste IMO.

<comment><USER3> That's the tradeoff. I smoke you through the turns, and you get better gas mileage. I don't drive hard on commutes, but I don't work on the weekends =) Also, the MS6 is a mid-size sedan, the TSX is a compact entry-level sedan that weighs ~400 lbs less. The Acura TL vs. MS6 would be a better comparison.

Finally, gas mileage is much more related to the weight of the car mated to the engine, rather than the horsepower output of the engine itself. A simple example -- when people drop in an LS1 engine (when tuned it's upwards of 400hp+) to a Mazda RX-7 body - which weighs about 2400lbs - they get around 25-30mpg.

<comment><USER6> I think you're on the right track here when you mention vehicle weight.

Some kind of feedback for drivers on the ridiculously weights new cars are carrying these days would be more useful than gas pedal feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think a dashboard meter displaying $/hour of fuel consumed would be more effective - and probably cheaper to implement.

<comment><USER8> Why bother? Sure, you might save a few dollars a week, but in exchange you'd spend your whole driving time depressed. Not worthwhile.

<comment><USER7> Some people find it entertaining: [http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/king_of_the_...](http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/king_of_the_hypermilers.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that there is no such thing as excess acceleration.

<comment><USER10> is there some physics in-joke I'm missing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In regards to the first paragraph: my mom has a sweet gadget I'm envious of. It is a sensor you attach to your electric metre (its a camera which reads how fast it spins) with a wireless monitor. The main feature of the monitor is how many $/hour you are spending on electricity (you can have it in real time or averaged over any length of time). I enjoy walking through the house turning on various lights and appliances to see how much they cost to run.</comment>


Water Revolution in Israel Overcomes Any Threat of Drought - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/world/middleeast/water-revolution-in-israel-overcomes-any-threat-of-drought.html <comment><USER3> What's interesting about this is the desalination costs... The Sorek plant mentioned (largest of it's kind, 40 billion gallons/year) cost just $500 million to build. [1] They sell it back to Israel for $0.58/m^3 or $0.0022/gallon profitably.

That's way cheaper than, for example, Glendale, California, whose residential rates run anywhere between $0.0030 and $0.0052/gallon depending on consumption levels. [2]

What will it take to bring this kind of technology to Southern California?

[1] [http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megasca...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale- desalination/)

[2] [http://www.glendaleca.gov/water-rates](http://www.glendaleca.gov/water- rates)

<comment><USER4> >What will it take to bring this kind of technology to Southern California?

San Diego county is already getting a desalination plant in Carlsbad, although it's projected to cost more, for much less water: $530 million for ~18 billion gallons a year. No idea why it's so expensive.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsbad_desalination_plant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsbad_desalination_plant)

<comment><USER3> Great benchmark for California... Actually, it looks like the project is closer to _$780 million_ for the plant (not sure why the Wikipedia summary is off). [1] Central question is, can the Sorek method/scale be implemented in SoCal to get better results? Can it be run on integrated solar or other renewables?

[1] [http://carlsbaddesal.com/carlsbad-final-schedule-taking- shap...](http://carlsbaddesal.com/carlsbad-final-schedule-taking-shape)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Israeli 'watergate' scandal: The facts about Palestinian water [http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle- east/1.574554](http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.574554)

Not enough water in the West Bank? (Press the + in the top-right corner) [http://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/west-bank- water?v=la...](http://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/west-bank- water?v=large)

Water supply and sanitation in the Palestinian territories [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_the_Palestinian_territories)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, the Palestinians elected for their government, Hamas, which has as part of its charter the destruction of Israel when they could have elected the Palestinian Authority to lead them which does recognize Israel. Hamas has spent much of its money on missiles that it shoots at Israeli civilian population centers. Consider, would the US be obligated to give water to Mexico or Canada if these countries had as part of their charter the destruction of the US and shot missiles at US civilian population centers?

I can assure you, that the Palestinian standard of living, esp. in Gaza, will markedly improve once they elect a government which signs a peace agreement with Israel.

<comment><USER6> So the Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing is actually the Palestinians fault? For electing the wrong political party? How long until Israel implements the final solution for this evil minority?

<comment><USER7> > Israeli apartheid

Let's assume for the sake of argument that there is apartheid (it's clear there isn't, but let's assume it anyway). They are in Gaza! Gaza is not Israel, the entire concept of apartheid doesn't even make any sense in that concept.

> ethnic cleansing

Oh definitely. Most effective ethnic cleansing in history.

> implements the final solution for this evil minority?

Your antisemitism is showing.

You do know your github and other public data is linked from your profile? Most people at least try to be anonymous before being antisemitic.

<comment><USER6> > the entire concept of apartheid doesn't even make any sense in that concept

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analogy)

> Your antisemitism is showing.

In my criticism of Israel?

> You do know your github and other public data is linked from your profile?

Fear is the mind-killer.

<comment><USER7> You try to criticize Israel and you don't actually know anything about the area, do you?

Gaza. Does the word mean nothing to you? Apartheid is about two types of citizens, Gaza is not in Israel, the concept make no sense there at all. (And did you actually read the article you linked? I suspect you didn't.)

> In my criticism of Israel?

You didn't criticize Israel, you suggested they solve their problems by massacring millions of people.

> Fear is the mind-killer.

And mindlessly hating other people is the civilization killer.

<comment><USER8> > Apartheid is about two types of citizens, Gaza is not in Israel, the concept > make no sense there at all.

Ah, the Guantanamo defense. I know that maneuver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, let's state my affiliation first: I lived in Tel Aviv for a year, I still work for a company that was founded in Israel. I have friends there and would love to go back.

Now .. water? That's insane. You'll see lots of places that offer a 'lawn'. Which doesn't work without a lot of water. People seem to be rather wasteful. We (my wife and me) had discussions with Israelis about how to do the dishes (the 'German way', if that is really special, is filling your sink with water and washing your dishes. The 'Israeli way' \- anecdotally, among friends - <USER2> running tap water) and about reusing glass bottles ("What? You have people that prefer to buy Coke in a glass bottle, because that bottle will be washed and reused? Isn't that totally baaah?").

We tried to discuss that topic a couple of times, but nobody local (in our circles) cared One. Little. Bit.

(Ironically we were in a hotel before we found our final apartment for our time in Israel and the management stole the bathtub plug from each and every room, citing water shortage as a reason. That was before we had all the conversations that are summarized above)

I'm glad that desalination works and helps. But the attitude might need adjustment as well, based on my non-scientific observations.

<comment><USER7> Keep in mind that because they recycle so much wastewater, "wasting" water by running the tap is not as bad as it sounds.

Washing and reusing glass bottles is really stupid in a desert. You have unlimited amounts of sand to make glass, but water is less plentiful. Plus kosher issues make washing bottles problematic (doable, but more complicated).

<comment><USER9> Hmm.

Now, water in Europe is recycled as well. Maybe I'm missing the context, but .. so far I'm unconvinced. And even IFF that would be true, not using a running tap would save more water.

Reusing bottles is stupid? Really? You want to create those from scratch, because .. you have sand? What happens to the old/used bottles? I cannot even begin to understand this point, tbh.

Kosher: I'm no expert on kosher regulations, but a bottle of coke (in a specific form) will stay a bottle of coke. Washing it, refilling it should (??) be irrelevant for people that want kosher stuff. If you consider Coke kosher (which - ignoring Coke - is arguably something that you have to decide for yourself. People often seemed to eat seafood but reject pork for example) then this bottle is just going to be cleaned and .. refilled with the same stuff. I don't see how kosher comes into play here?

<comment><USER10> I think the issue is more you can't guarantee someone didn't do something with said rewashed bottles that doesn't violate kashrut.

<comment><USER9> Okay - I don't want to say "that's insane". If you have a religious reason for not recycling glass bottles, there's no way to argue about that. None.

But that didn't apply in my social circles. My selection of citizens (say .. more than one, less than two dozen people) were not observant. Some were gay. Some recently immigrated and had more or less about as much idea about Jewish laws as I did.

So while you might present a point for refusing recycling (?), people around me were really mostly complaining about the 'Ewww' part of using a bottle that someone else used. Maybe downed, and used as an ashtray afterwards. Etc. etc..

<comment><USER7> > were really mostly complaining about the 'Ewww' part of using a bottle that > someone else used.

Do they not eat at a restaurant that washes dishes?

I doubt they actually thought about what they were saying.

<comment><USER9> We had that discussion (when talking about doing the dishes) and they were at least convinced that restaurants do their dishes the same way - open the tap, rinse the dishes...

There was no way to proceed. Obviously these guys did it that way at home. Stating that this is wasteful (and even worse for a restaurant!) didn't help. The 'sink full of water in which you dip all the dishes of the night and whatever you need to clean' was considered 'ewww'.

I'm still baffled today (we returned about 2.5 years ago). I still have exchanges about water usage (i.e. "It is our right to use as much water as we want to grow our garden") with my coworkers to this day.

<comment><USER7> > and they were at least convinced that restaurants do their dishes the same > way - open the tap, rinse the dishes...

They are both right and wrong. Restaurants use the tap to wash food off of plates (no soap). Then they sanitize (not wash) the dishes with bleach, and minimal water.

> I'm still baffled ... with my coworkers to this day.

I hope you do not consider them representative of Israel. Israel has lots of people, with lots of opinions and ways of doing things. I get that they were who you knew there, but I hope you'll categorize them as "that's how they do it", not "that's how Israel does it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The impact of this can not be overstated. Wars over water in the Middle East are more common there than anywhere else.

By removing this casus belli peace with Israel is much more likely.

Look at Jordan for example: Once they had a good treaty for water everything else fell into place.

<comment><USER11> Peace with Israel?! Never ever. Too much money for Big Weapons relies on Israel pretending to be threatened by its surrounding countries.

No country leader right in his mind, not even Kim Yong (all NK is after is more Western aid money and a bit of luxury goods for the elite, and potential nukes are a perfect way of extorting), would _ever_ sign off a military attack against Israel, given its nuclear abilities and the support of NATO. Still, Israeli government successfully manipulates the entire world to believe they're threatened.

The only threat for Israel is its corrupt, right-wing-extremist government. Israel government complains all the time about raising anti-semitic behaviour worldwide yet completely ignores that it is the fault of Israeli government.

<comment><USER12> "Pretending"... Just because you live in a place where the existence of your country isn't threatened, doesn't make it not true for other places. Israel is in a place where you have 10s of thousands of rockets aimed at your population centers, UN member countries publicly threaten to wipe you off the map while creating a nuclear program. History of your surrounding countries trying to actually wipe you off the map, many many times...

The threat is real.

<comment><USER11> I don't believe that Iran would do as much as send a dummy conventional rocket towards Israel. Israel and the US would likely send enough nukes flying towards Teheran to vaporize the country for centuries before the Iranian missile crosses the border, and Iran leadership knows that.

It's just exaggerated v-penis comparisons, imho.

<comment><USER12> Because they can't just give a dirty bomb and smuggle into into Israel?

You can say but.. they will hurt the Muslim population.. but hmmmm what did Hezbollah did when they shot thousand of missiles at the norther part of Israel and hit many Arab villages or Hamas shooting and hitting Bedouin settlements in the south of Israel.. It's fine to kill "your own" as long as you take the infidels with them..

That same "I don't believe that they will do that" was said about Nazi Germany.. fool me once shame on me... fool me twice... oh nvm I'm dead...

The US promised to protect Israel in the first golf war, they shoot missiles that hit Tel-Aviv. Israel wanted to respond but the US asked Israel to hold back and they did.

US will not do Israels job for them.

<comment><USER13> > You can say but.. they will hurt the Muslim population..

Well, I'd actually say that Iran would have no benefit from that.

Really, the main threat to Israel from Iran -- or any of Israel's other regional foes -- getting nukes is that Israel's own nuclear arsenal would no longer provide it as free a hand in its own policies towards it neighbors as it has heretofore had, since it wouldn't be holding an unequaled trump in any runaway escalation provoked by Israel's policy choices.

<comment><USER14> I don't even understand what types of escalation you're talking about. Israel has peace aggreements with all its neighbourhood countries, and Israel being a nuclear power hasn't changed a thing for terrorist organisation which have attacked israel for the last 30 years.

All the trouble in the region comes from non-national entities, or state- sponsored terrorist organisations ( with daesh being a weird hybrid of the two). Letting iran have the nuclear bomb will only push conflicts toward even more terrorism, especially between shiite and sunnites.

<comment><USER13> Israel has peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt, but not its other neighbors, and fairly regularly engage in cross-border military operations, recently particularly in Syria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Imagine if the US used the $3 billion/year it sends Israel to instead build desalinization plants in the south west.

<comment><USER16> I like how you're downvoted for pointing out something very obvious, but not 100% pro-israel.

<comment><USER7> He edited it. His original message was blatantly antisemetic.

<comment><USER15> It was anti-Israel which is not the same thing as antisemetic, no matter how much zionists keep saying it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Basically pointing out, once again, that it really is a question of price, not of availability. Cheaper energy would make this more doable. And water has been proposed as a transfer medium for value from photovoltaic arrays (they desalinate water by cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen, which then gets recombined to produce local energy and exportable potable water. Only makes sense if you are willing to pay more for the water.

That said, the ability of graphene to desalinate water is something I think should get more investigation than it does. See ([http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/03/methane-rescue-new- energ...](http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/03/methane-rescue-new-energy- efficient-graphene-desalination-membrane-99/)) for example.

</comment><comment><USER18> From the article:

 _Mr. Shezaf, who also grows olives, prefers older agricultural methods and says desalination is essentially a privatization of Israel 's water supply that benefits a few tycoons. _

</comment><comment><USER19> I have trouble getting behind desalination for California. Surely we have not exhausted all our options in collection and storage?

<comment><USER16> You exhausted those a decade ago. Now other states are shipping water to Cali, and those states are starting to have their own issues.

<comment><USER20> Reasonable options haven't been exhausted until California stops producing crops like rice.[1]

       Our ideal climate, ample water supply and
       innovative farming techniques result in some
       of the highest rice yields in the world,
       while at the same time providing rice of the
       highest quality.

That was written a few years ago. Growing rice in a desert is hardly an "ideal climate", and the recent drought has certainly changed the perception of an "ample water supply".

Same thing with other water intensive crops like almonds. TV was recently reiterating the trope that a single almond takes 1 gallon of water. That seems way high, but I haven't searched further.

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20060210141916/http://calrice.org...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060210141916/http://calrice.org/e7b_cas_rice_growing_region.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's the state of the art of water desalination? I remember some interesting research on graphene filters a year or two back. Is this doable on a micro level for off grid living on coastlines?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd love to have a conversation with the author of the piece and ask them what sort of mental conception of the universe leads to calling desalinated water "artificially produced."

<comment><USER23> "artificially produced water" just seems like a shortening of "artificially produced freshwater", and that seems like a correct statement. It's just semantics, man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Flagged because of the fucking awful comments in this thread.

And those comments were very predictable.</comment>


My Personal Trade Deficit - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2040/ <comment><USER2> Whoa! I got to the end of this article and was surprised to see that the offer is an econ professor. I've never written a comment this long, but just had to this time. Comparing an international trade deficit to buying books at a Barnes & Noble in a different town? I understand the schema, but it is nowhere near complete or accurate in its intention.

Buying books vs. running a trade deficit with Mexico. sure on a micro level the author can run a deficit with the city of Pittstown and still be OK, just as the US could run a deficit with Mexico and still be Ok. I'm assuming that the author is running a surplus in the city where he earns his living. That is the reason the deficit in Pittstown is manageable. The US is running a large deficit overall and therefore the situation is much less manageable.

This is a better analogy. The author has a job which makes $50k a year, yet he spends $75k a year = earnings < spending.

How does he spend more than he earns? With credit card debt of course. The US issues and sells bonds as debt.

The author argues that a deficit is better than a surplus because credit will eventually be cut, but someone can save forever not living to their full utility (economics term for enjoyment). If these scenarios play out, here are the outcomes.

The person running a deficit is in debt without the earning power to get out. In this situation they have to cut their spending significantly and hope they can afford to feed themselves. Remember they cannot borrow any more and eventually their assets may be repossessed.

The person running a surplus can maintain his current standard of living forever. Depending on the size of his savings, he may be able to quit his job and live off the interest of the savings. He has no debt, only savings, and can most likely increase his utility/standard of living without any further effort or consequences.

Both scenarios are equally good?

<comment><USER3> _This is a better analogy. The author has a job which makes $50k a year, yet he spends $75k a year = earnings < spending._

That's not a good analogy for a trade deficit. _One_ way of increasing the trade deficit is to borrow money and spend it. If you mortgage your house to buy books, that certainly increases the "trade deficit" with Barnes & Noble. But someone with, say, a $500K/yr. job could easily afford to spend $75K a year on books, and would run a massive "trade deficit" with B&N without going into debt.

It's a potential problem if US individuals or the US government go into massive debt, of course, but whether they use that debt to buy foreign or domestic goods is immaterial. If some of that debt happens to finance the purchase of foreign goods, it drives up the trade deficit, but the problem is the debt, not the deficit.

This looks like a linguistic problem as much as anything---people get so hung up on the word "deficit". Given its pervasiveness, though, I suspect that causation actually goes the other way: mercantilism is so intuitively appealing that the imprecise terminology seems almost inevitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an entirely sensible piece. I'm not sure if it is relevant to hacking or to startups, but it is entirely sensible.

If A sells to B sells to C sells to A, then they have just created three trade deficits. This is why "the trade deficit with China" is an utterly meaningless concept. Maybe China sells things to the US, which sells things to Mexico, which sells things to China, or any other transitive combination, and voila, a trade deficit.

The only trade deficit that is somewhat meaningful is the trade deficit of a country with the rest of the world, all of it. Now even that trade deficit needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If the US has a trade deficit with the rest of the world, you have to wonder for a minute why on earth the citizens of all those other countries would be so happy to send goods America-bound and not to receive equal value in return. Whence their charity? How come the free lunch?

When a good economist smells a free lunch, s/he smells murky accounting. And indeed, there's murky accounting in the trade deficit. Oftentimes, services are not included. Even if they are, then investment isn't. It just so happens that the US is a good place to invest, relative to other countries, because it has a very well developed economic and financial system that can take advantage of capital well and bring high returns in capital-intensive industries. China, on the other hand, lacks the institutions required to make capital-intensive industries quite as lucrative, but it has cheap labor. Thus both countries specialize, but the Chinese investments flowing into the US bought with the money that Americans paid the Chinese to buy their goods-- those investments simply do not count.

Hey! A deficit!

Is it a big deal?

Mwah... no.

<comment><USER5> Generally the U.S. has run perennial trade deficits with the rest of the world because people around the world have been essentially collecting dollars instead of spending them. They were for a long time considered the main "hard currency" other than volatile and politically-sensitive gold.

In other words, we would send dollars to country X and receive goods in return. Instead of sending back those dollars to us and receiving goods from us, they would stuff them under a mattress, or in their government reserve vaults, because their own local currency was not considered as trustworthy.

In recent years, foreign governments have begun viewing the euro as a strong, stable currency, and have been diversifying their reserves by getting rid of dollars and stocking up on euros. Two of the recent effects of that phenomenon have been a declining dollar (as with anything, its price goes down when there is a sudden flood of sellers), and high U.S. asset prices (because now the dollars are coming out of the mattresses and vaults, and being used to buy stocks and property).

<comment><USER6> _Instead of sending back those dollars to us and receiving goods from us, they would stuff them under a mattress_

Usually they take the cash and invest it in US Government Bonds or private stocks and bonds. This high demand for bonds means our government can offer them at really low rates, and there are still takers. (China has something like $300 billion of US Bonds.) This is an added bonus for us. In this way, our currency's primary status is kind of self-perpetuating. Our currency is backed in faith in the solvency of the US Government, and our Government can borrow money really really cheaply to deal with any crisis it needs to, keeping it solvent where other governments would fail.

(For anyone out there that is scared what will happen if the rest of the world started dumping it's dollar-back assets, remember that less than half of the 'National Debt' is owed to foreigners, and many of these countries use dollars to stabilize their own currencies, so this would amount to financial suicide for them.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Actually, you should care what your neighbors are doing. Your taxes will (eventually) increase when the economy is unhealthy.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is the trade deficit between a cow and the rancher?</comment>


Ask HN: Is this the real reason of the crusade against Facebook and Zuckerberg? - <AUTHOR> I think there is a hidden reason behind that the media has been raging against Facebook and Zuckerberg for the last couple of years. I guess the Russia collusion and data collection scandals are pure pretexts for the real reason which is that Facebook changed its feed algorithm 3 or 4 years ago so that Facebook pages became simply dead. Views and interactions have became very low even for pages with millions of likes and followers. An ordinary Facebook post that could simply get 10,000 likes in 2014 can't even get 100 likes now. Even with lots of money paid to Facebook to promote posts, you still can't get half the exposure you got 3 or 4 years ago for free. Facebook made many changes so that users stay in Facebook as long as possible including making it harder to view YouTube videos inside Facebook and blatantly allowing stealing videos from YouTube. And unlike most other social media outlets, Facebook doesn't reward influencers and popular pages for doing a good job. It's like everybody knew that Zuckerberg got greedy and wanted every cent for himself only. And now publishers and media outlets are seeing the opportunity to punish Zuckerberg for his greed. I also think Facebook's feed algorithm change is the real reason why Reddit became even more popular in the last 3 years for example. <comment><USER2> While I can't speak to the popularity of Reddit, I am certain this theory is not correct.

People are legitimately pissed about the constant exposure of their personal data. Exposure not just by Facebook, but by many collectors be it Amazon, Target or Equifax. Exposures that had essentially no consequences for the collectors.

People are pissed and and they let their representatives know. At governmental inquiries all over the world Facebook appears to have bold faced lied about how they operate. Now politicians are pissed.

When the people and their representatives are collectively pissed at something, two things are sure to happen. Firstly, the media will cover it and potentially rile up the various players. Secondly, there will be (at least calls for) fines and special taxes.

IMHO, this collective ire at Facebook has nothing to do with changes to feed algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is not just a crusade against facebook, it is a crusade against tech. FB is just an easy target.

I believe there are powerful people funding much of this crusade. They are threatened by the growing power of SV.

Soros, old money, maybe state actors... Soros admitted to it: [https://www.fastcompany.com/40533252/george-soros-is- taking-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40533252/george-soros-is-taking-on- big-tech-next)

I remember seeing that Soros article before the crusade started and thinking "hmm... I wonder what he can do"

<comment><USER4> Hmmmm... I wonder you have some super powers of knowing things before :P</comment></comment>


The pitch deck that the Samwer brothers raised $1B in 26 weeks with - <AUTHOR> http://www.manager-magazin.de/fotostrecke/geheimpapiere-wie-die-samwers-um-investoren-werben-fotostrecke-95732-2.html

<comment><USER2> They raised $1bn because they had 30+ exits with large returns, $2.5 billion annual revenue, and over 1000 employees to help realize this. The pitch deck is irrelevant and won't help you make your pitch.

<comment><USER3> This; they could have showed a picture of a cat with that sentence you wrote and been able to raise the same amount.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I built an Android game after work with a friend in 6 months - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thirtymatches.apuraditos <comment><USER2> Take my $0.99 and give me an ad free version!

Take additional $0.99s and give me boosters, like clock extenders, wild letters, and hints.

Leaderboards. OMG. Leaderboards...

Let me grow your user base by inviting my FB friends in exchange for said boosters.

Relevant leaderboards (because people i know are on them)

Spend half of those $0.99s and hire a designer to create a design that caters to the middle aged women crowd. Spend the other half of the $0.99s on advertising. Web / Fb of course, but late night TV seems to do exceptionally well for that demo.

Recoup those $0.99s by running your own ads for said ad free version and boosters with a larger audience.

<comment><USER3> Careful, it sounds like you're proposing a pay to win model. Maybe that's good financially, but it ruins the game. If "boosters" (sounds like cheats) are allowed, somehow compensate in game. Maybe by offering pure matches, or by giving the boost to both players (kinda defeats the point).

OTOH, perhaps I'm a strange minority, and these annoying, unbalancing devices are loved by many.

I'd certainly pay for ad free, even a buck or so s month (Google Play has subscriptions).

<comment><USER2> you are the minority, and so am I. I hate that stuff in most games, and rarely fork over my cold hard cash.

But the middle aged women demo does not think like your typical HN reader. And that demo is orders of magntude larger than the HN community.

At best, OP should pray to monetize 2% of their audience. Of that, only maybe 15% end up being repeat customers.

and remember, 37% of all stats quoted on the internet are made up. but you get my point ;)

<comment><USER4> The vast majority of gamers don't spend anything.

The thing about free to play games with in app purchase is that there are a few "whales" who spend so much money they dominated all revenue statistics. Here's a video from Kongregate talking about this phenomenon on their platform (which has since broadened to include android games):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekz466sDprg&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekz466sDprg&feature=youtu.be&t=10m44s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally, someone who has the guts to admit that their app wasn't built in a weekend!

<comment><USER6> Honestly and the claims seem to be getting shorter and shorter all the time. First it was "we built this in a month," then a week, and on to just a weekend.

Recently people have been saying they built the entire app in a single "hackathon" (basically one day).

If you really look at almost all of these claims they're false. Often times people would have built three similar apps and for their "new" one they just combine elements of the three and call it done.

<comment><USER7> Well, I did write my app when I was waiting for the food to cool down after I put it out of the microwave.

<comment><USER8> So you wrote yours in a singe snackathon? Congrats!

<comment><USER9> Depends on the food, there're things I've heated in the microwave that have been cooling down for the past two weeks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congrats on finishing and publishing a side project. I know how hard that is!

Some quick feedback.

First the Play Store listing. I installed Tiny Words on a Nexus 7, and it shows the first 3 screenshots for a 7 inch tablet. Then it shows the same screenshots but on a phone. It is only by scrolling to see the other screenshots that you finally see the 4th and following screenshots "The best score after 3 rounds wins!", etc.

After installing I chose the FB option, but it opened a FB login web page which would require typing in username+login. I have the FB app installed and logged in, so this shouldn't happen. You'll lose a lot of users at this stage unless you fix this.

<comment><USER11> I used the FB option as well, and was not required to login to FB.

<comment><USER12> Ditto, but inviting friends doesn't seem to work - I see a "facebook" window pop up, then it disappears, and I don't see a list of friends to challenge. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You should consider adding an option to at least try the game without giving your information away (facebook or email). Maybe an offline mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not a bad idea, maybe in the signup screen have that option. I know a lot of people really hate downloading and app and having to signup before using it. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER14> Definitely worth doing. I've noticed in some of my apps where i haven't had this as an option that people really drop off after downloading, but if people have the option to play without signing up they usually at least give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi, I'm New to hacker news, but I also built an android app on the side and have 20ish downloads. I built it all myself and it cost only a couple hundred dollars. However I can't get users to stay. Most of the 20ish users installed it and then didn't play. So my question is what is your plan to get users to download and keep them interested? My app took about 4 months and I build it using Xamarin.Android. I don't want to break any forum rules by adding a link to my app, but I would be interested in getting some direction for marketing and feedback.

<comment><USER16> It might be better to submit this as a standalone "Ask HN", with more specific information about your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice! It's funny, but I was just reading about a similar game being built, but this guy took 16 months and spent $58K building the app. Here's the post [http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income- reports/1635...](http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income- reports/16351-expense-report-wordsearch-hero.html) where he talks about it. His game isn't exactly the same, and definitely has a lot more going on, but there are some similarities for sure.

<comment><USER18> 35k? That seems like a big, risky investment considering he doesn't even have any developers or designers in-house and this is his 3rd app.

Although maybe he prefers doing one-offs? I'm not super-familiar with the game scene.

<comment><USER17> It seems like this is sort of a "hail mary" for him. He's hoping to make $600K over the next 3 years and he's planning on spending a ton of money on ads.

<comment><USER19> The thread is from march 2012, and his app has between 1k and 5k downloads. I doubt he made a good return on his investment... [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rhs.wordse...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rhs.wordsearchhero)

<comment><USER17> The user joined in March 2012, but the thread is from 10-17-2014.

<comment><USER19> Oops, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's awesome. I spent 12 full weeks last year and built a game for iOS without using a game engine as well. It really gives you an appreciation for understanding the OS, Memory constraints and trying to model concurrent actions.

Another thing that I really like about game development is that it really challenges all of the sensors on a device. It pushes the limits of animation and sound which a lot of utility apps don't really embrace.

<comment><USER21> any resources/tutorials for a beginner? I know Objective C and have built basic apps, but not games

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't seem to login via email.

It asks for my email, then it says "Do you want to create an account with this email ?", I press "Yes" then it asks for my password and whatever I type it's wrong. If I click recover password it says my account is not yet created.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, if it asks for your password than it's because that email is already registered. If password recovery is not working in this case, the it's definitely a bug. I'll look into it, but meanwhile can you maybe use another email address to signup?

<comment><USER23> I'm also unable to register with my email (then it says "welcome back" and asks for a password) or recover my password (says that my email address is not registered). When trying to use FB login I get "Whoops! We could not log you in using Facebook. Please try signing up using your email".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do you currently market the game? How do you plan to?

Do you have any planned (or potential) revenue streams other than ads?

I'm in the midst of building a single-player word game, so anything you have to say on this would at least give me something to think about.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually just released the app yesterday. We don't really have a formal plan, just this sort of stuff, like posting to HN, game and android related subreddits, twitter, etc. Right now we only offer ads (and very few actually) since the goal is to attract users. In terms of revenue, our plan is to get some metrics and user feedback, figure out how users use the app, what they like, don't like, etc, and use that to add some relevant in-app purchasable items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks like Snap Attack, which I've played on my Windows Phone and is good fun!

Did you write up anything about your experiences making it? Would be interested to hear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't really setup a dev blog yet, but I will soon. In the development side there isn't anything overly complex actually. The app doesn't use any graphics/gaming library, it's developed in native Android targeting versions 4.0+, mainly to avoid spending a lot of time testing and adding patches for older devices. The backend is done in ruby but it will probably be rewritten in erlang/elixir in the near future if the game gains traction. The main reason being that my friend which developed the backend works full time as an erlang developer and is eager to try out elixir on a real project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Hurry up! You only have 1:30 minutes"?

<comment><USER27> Yeah that irked me as well.

"1.5 minutes" "One and a half minutes" "one minute and thirty seconds"

The use of the colon to separate hours/minutes and minutes/seconds means that you need to supply units to tell which it is, but "1:30 minutes" seems wrong.

<comment><USER28> "90 seconds" may be the best sounding alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just wanted you to know that I can't try out your game since it doesn't seem to support Android 2.3.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it requires Android 4.0 or newer to run. It was a decision we made at the beginning since we don't own Android devices running those versions and didn't want to spend all of our time making the app compatible with all android versions (or at least starting at froyo).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great game, just a few silly nitpicks, the UI looks a lot like Etermax games, I hope you do ad free versions, I didn't liked so much the Spanish name (Apuraditos), also I don't know if that word is used in all the Spanish speaking word. Saludos desde México.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks good. Can you give more details to us? Like what was biggest issue for you, did you do it full time or part time. How many hours average a week you would spend on it and how many downloads did you got thanks to HN?

I thinks those details would be very good to have!

Good luck with your success!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. The app actually went through several iterations. The first thing I developed was the main board of the game and it was definitely the hardest part (at least at the development side) since it needs to detect valid words. If you play around with it, you'll notice that you can form combinations of words that are linked together, so you basically have paths of words that might be connected to one of the fixed words through this path, and are thus valid combinations (hard to explain, but I think it makes more sense when you see the gameplay). Getting this logic right involved a couple of weeks of trial and error. On the bright side, it increase my vocabulary skills :).

Most of the gameplay was developed locally, without any backend. By the game I was sure I could get the gameplay right, I asked my friend to join me and work on the backend. So for the past 3 months more or less, we've been working on getting all of the endpoints right, and testing, testing, testing and more testing to make sure we could catch as many bugs as possible.

In terms of hours, we probably put in about 2 hours per day on weekdays and about an average of 5-10 hours during the weekends. In hindsight it looks like a LOT of time, but if you've ever done Android development, you probably know that the amount of time and effort that goes into testing the app on several devices, probably surpasses the actual development time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Awesome! Congrats on getting it out there. I just started getting into mobile development as a hobby this year (after 6+ years of mostly systems programming/scientific computing). I'm hoping to have something released within the next few weeks as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> I just played a few rounds, it is really fun. I did not understand what to do the first two times though. I kept looking for a way to submit a word similar to what you would do in a scrabble game.

Very nice design and animation. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it means a lot for a developer to hear the the design looks part of the app looks good :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Congrats! I wish you guys success with your app!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Small typo: addicti _ve_. "Addicting" is a transitive verb. I'm addicting you to heroin.

<comment><USER36> Addicting can be used as a participle adjective. You'd be hard-pressed to find a style guide that says otherwise.

<comment><USER35> Descriptivist pig!

<comment><USER36> I couldn't possibly argue with that.

<comment><USER35> In seriousness, though, "addicting" sounds worse to me. "Addictive" is more standard, wider-spread and more sonorous.

<comment><USER37> As a non-expert English speaker with 41 years or so of experience, I feel that "addicting" is just fine in this context.

But that's just my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's a typo on the help page, the first word: "Objetive" ... missing the "c"

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wow this is awesome! Motivates me to get moving on my own side projects.

</comment><comment><USER40> Did you used any engine ?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, we just used the Android SDK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What an excellent game. Please charge me for an ad free version!

</comment><comment><USER41> Make a promo video and put it on the play store page.

</comment><comment><USER42> Which country are you guys?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> on a news site i would rather be linked to an article about the process than a download page for the game. booooooooOOooOoOo (jk just sayin)

<comment><USER44> If you have questions about the process, why not ask them? OP appears to be happy to answer questions in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nice work! :)

</comment><comment><USER46> looks awesome and fun</comment>


Elon Musk, Neuralink and the Brain-Machine Interface [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/07/18/703801.full.pdf <comment><USER2> Elon Musk has made himself first author and deleted the names of all the scientists who actually did the work. The ethics and legality of this are very dubious.</comment>


Atlas Informatics to shut down - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2017/atlas-informatics-shut-pulling-plug-encrypted-personal-search-engine/ <comment><USER2> Really curious what happened here. They only had 23 employees, and just had a $20 million round a little under a year ago.</comment>


Secured conn to SimpleDB enabling entirely JS web apps (JS challenge for beta) - <AUTHOR> http://ServerCyde.com

<comment><USER2> It's also possible to do this using YQL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know anyone remembered YQL! We take a very different approach, you create the queries on our site then call them from your site and pass parameters like a stored proc. We store your credentials so that you don't have to expose them in client side code.

We also offer a bunch of other features to liberate you from needing a server, like session handling (with encrypted cookies), email templates, facebook connect.

<comment><USER2> Haven't taken a close look at your product but what I would find useful is an API for generating those queries that I can use within my own tools while developing simpleDB apps although this use case might be just for a particular project I have in mind.</comment></comment></comment>


An Amazon Scam: The Mofut Key Lock Box [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz6NxH3wy94 <comment><USER2> An aside: The Lockpocking Lawyer is a thoughtfully humorous and (somewhat) informative channel. Really recommend watching some other videos of his.

<comment><USER3> "Humorous" and "somewhat" informative? Dude is barely funny at all and you can tell the security of a lock by the length of the video. He has mad, mad lock- picking skills.

Recently, the YT algos decided to show me a video where he cuts open a consumer safe using a nothing-special circular saw in 2 minutes. It was basically thin sheet metal, foam, and plastic.

To give credit where credit is due: I'd consider LPL and BosnianBill _extremely_ informative.

<comment><USER4> You obviously haven't played around with his wife's beaver

<comment><USER5> Before you downvote, this is from one of his actual videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRozAbaKs9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRozAbaKs9M)

<comment><USER6> Oh my! I literally snorted out my coffee over this. This is hilarious. I have followed LPL for a while, but never seen this before. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like Amazon has directly removed the product after this video went viral.

<comment><USER8> A simple google search would reveal otherwise

[https://www.amazon.com/MOFUT-4-Digit-Combination- Weatherproo...](https://www.amazon.com/MOFUT-4-Digit-Combination-Weatherproof- Resettable/dp/B07V6DTQG5)

[https://www.amazon.com/Combination-Weatherproof- Resettable-B...](https://www.amazon.com/Combination-Weatherproof-Resettable- Businesses-Waterproof/dp/B07S7NJFQS)

Or was it a specific merchant/product ?

<comment><USER9> I love how two other items use the identical photo... One at $20 and the other at $100.

<comment><USER3> Merchants will create new items on the site and assign them randomly-increased prices to test pricing strategies. The reason is there are plenty of suckers who will buy things at any price who don't know what things cost. Often, I'll find items on Amazon at 100%-300% of prices elsewhere. Heck, I just found an old, out-of-print book for an obsolete technology going for $800.

<comment><USER10> It's called "price discovery". Consider it a form of pricing A/B testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a common tactic on Amazon. But if Amazon finds out it's over. They are pretty strict with any seller to customer communication even without the scam part. Just asking customer to visit your website is a violation.

</comment><comment><USER12> As a side note, there are all the "as seen on TV" things.

Typically they are US $3-8 worth (price) i.e. US$ 1.5-4 worth (value/cost), advertised on TV as the "ultimate whatever" with a "shop price" of 50 $ but - only for tonight - 29.99 and sometimes (big offer) we will send you two of them for only 39.99.

Then a few months later you can find them on e-bay (or similar) for anything between 3 and 8 $.

For some strange reasons I am fascinated by some of this crap and tend to buy it (when I can find it at the lowered 3-8 $ price), and - surprisingly - it is actually IMHO good for the 3 or 8 $ you pay.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just got $300 something in refunds from Amazon because the three automatic dropout handgun safes (with fingerprint sensor) I bought had a bullshit cylinder lock even a child could defeat.

<comment><USER14> @ryanmarsh - any chance of a link for this? in the market and I can't tell the wheat from the chaff on Amazon.

<comment><USER15> If it's on Amazon, it's chaff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This practice is not new. I had a online furniture site call me and say they will send a free gift, if I give a good review to a recent I bought on their site.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes, this is a violation and they'll get canned.

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't be so confident on getting canned... I've found this to be an extremely common practice with new consumer electronics from no-name brands on Amazon. I would say more than 50% of such items I buy on Amazon come with an offer for a partial refund if you leave a 5 star review. This is actually the _lame_ deal, typically if you establish a relationship with one of these companies (e.g. by leaving a 5* review for one of those offers) they'll start emailing you offering a 100% refund on certain items they're trying to get the score up on. I know someone who does this kind of thing on a pretty large- scale basis for multiple items per day and then resells them... she seems to make okay returns on it considering the low effort. I imagine you could even resell them right back on Amazon although I don't think she's tried that.

It's definitely against Amazon's policies, but clearly enforcement is not exactly bulletproof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I misread this "An Amazing Scam." A youtube channel talking about old timey and modern scams. The ol' "Mofut Key Lock Box."</comment>


Starving artists need to get over themselves - mkr-hn http://www.mkronline.com/5583/starving-artists-need-to-get-over-themselves/

<comment><AUTHOR> Most staving artists are already "selling out" -- the reality is that if your audience is small that selling t-shirts on cafepress may give you some coffee money if you are lucky but not enough to earn a living. In fact most artists already support themselves with other jobs to make their art, so there isn't much time after that left to promote it. And then lastly art is art -- even if it's great, it just might not be the right thing at the right time and the right place.</comment>


With Software, Small is the new Big - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wordnik.com/with-software-small-is-the-new-big

<comment><USER2> So you re-architected your application and ran it on different hardware, and it performed better. I wonder whether that's due to the re-architecting or due to the hardware, since generally AWS hardware is extremely expensive for what you get. It would be interesting to see how well the new architecture performs on beefy dedicated boxes for the same money as the AWS hardware, especially since you can get a beefy dedicated server for cheaper than a standard EC2 instance.

<comment><USER3> There is no question that physical machines are faster than VMs. The main issues are fixed cost, burst capacity, multi-datacenter deployments and linear scaling. That was the main point of the migration. There is nearly zero unused capacity now--that is a very tough thing to achieve with physical machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That sounds more like "with servers, small is the new big" to me. From the looks of it, it doesn't sound like the (custom) software itself got any smaller.

</comment><comment><USER5> Though I like the idea of modularity, wouldn't having so many different services running at once in completely independent compartments make it much harder to monitor and manage the software as a whole? I feel like that's a whole lot of quirks to interact in the course of a given transaction.

<comment><USER3> Yes! For communication this is part of the motivation for developing Swagger. For configuration & monitoring, our Caprica configuration tool keeps all the servers talking to the right services. It's not terribly complicated but not something to overlook. I'll blog about it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You got 1/10th of the I/O performance, so you traded disk seeks for network latency?

<comment><USER7> You can parallelize I/O with more servers. They split their one big data set into multiple small data sets in many more cheap boxes. These boxes may be 1/10th of the I/O performance of the beefy one but there are less contention, more fault tolerant, and more scalable while having the same overall performance. And it seemed they found it cheaper as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, usually you see people move away from EC2 over time with growth

<comment><USER3> Netflix is an example to the opposite.

But it is worth noting that a great model is a hybrid physical/cloud, once you have established predictable, steady load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Modularization rediscovered.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, building apps to be service oriented instead of object oriented.... because the web is service oriented.

I've noticed a few times that some of the problems we run into with web apps are due to OO not architecting itself in an SOA friendly manner.

Why not have a bunch of little heroku apps? For most web apps that start out small this isn't as big of a deal and you can grow the sub apps that do?

</comment><comment><USER11> _If you wrote software to take advantage of monster physical servers, it will almost certainly fail to run efficiently in the cloud._

I find this statement kind of incredible when the solution for the terrible I/O of EC2 is to spin up ranks and ranks of virtual machines, trying to make up the difference in aggregate. That is efficiency?

When I have a problem with I/O, I improve I/O: A gorgeous cluster of Nimble SANs with some supporting local Fusion IO cards. When I have a problem with memory or caching servers, I add memory or caching servers (just got a relatively low cost _dev_ server with 192GB...just incredible). When I need more processing power, I add more processing power. Just added some Xeon E5s to the mix, and boy do they set new thresholds of power.

That's the world of controlling my own hardware.

This story is really one about restrictions forcing a more efficient platform. Yet you don't _need_ restrictions to have an efficient platform, and the two are only loosely correlated. This is the story of the alcoholic cheering on prohibition without which they couldn't contain themselves.

<comment><USER3> And when you need another data center, you shell out major coin. That's what we needed to avoid.

At some point, even your finest physical server has limits. If you can split the work up into smaller pieces that execute in "parallel" fashion, you have a more scalable architecture. This holds true in VMs as well as physical servers. Think map reduce, twitter blender, or nearly any parallel system.

Rope is strong because it has many threads.

<comment><USER11> _Rope is strong because it has many threads._

Rope made out of wet tissue paper is not strong. Rope made out of threaded rebar is very strong.

You are presenting a somewhat absurd dichotomy -- that having good servers precludes parallel operations or scalability. I thought we had discarded that sort of silly foundation a few years ago.</comment></comment></comment>


"-1" being used to break site search? - <AUTHOR>

A website I work on has been throwing errors from someone repeatedly entering "-1" into the site search. Is this malicious and what would it accomplish? Thanks in advance I've been unable to find any information Googling. <comment><USER2> A -1 is often used to see if someone isn't sanitizing input correctly, as under certain circumstances it generates a numerical underflow. I see people looking for vulnerabilities feeding -1 to the HTML content-length header all the time. If it's generating errors in your app, perhaps you need to look at you're handling that field.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks you two.

I'll dig into serverfault.com. Since I'm not a network guy Hacker News seemed like the correct place to ask this question.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted on server fault and nobody seems to think that it's a hacking or scraping attempt. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wrong place for this question. Try [http://serverfault.com/](http://serverfault.com/)

<comment><USER4> Don't bite the noobs.

@OP: I believe it's just a script kiddy trying to see if your site search is vulnerable to any boundary check/conversion issue.

<comment><USER3> ... most people just ignore posts like this. I was trying to helpfully redirect the OP to somewhere they could get a real answer, and you come down on me for this?

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I misread your intent as flaming. Just had a couple of idiots in an IRC channel flaming upon noobs, I overreacted :/

<comment><USER3> No problem. I admit I was being very terse, so I understand how that could be seen as mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who Won Science Fiction's Hugo Awards, and Why It Matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/?mbid=social_fb

<comment><USER2> _" But in recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, the Hugos have changed, too."_

I welcome the increased diversity, but surely this should read "[...] expanded to include [ _more_ ] storytellers who are women, [...]". While there are probably notable examples of the other categories listed, Ursula K. Le Guin immediately springs to mind as belonging amongst those "Gods" discussed in the previous breath - and she won a Hugo in 1969 and another in 1974.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article seems to be very shoddily researched. A couple examples.

1.

       Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history,
       largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns
       fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous
       governments who don't want them to mine asteroids
       in space?

That was the science focus in the '20s and early '30s. By the late '30s the "ray guns vs. hideous aliens" stories were largely relegated to third tier, low circulation magazines, and generally only appeared in mainstream science fiction as a deliberate joke.

2\. The author identifies the SP leaders a "three white males". I'm sure it is going to come as a surprise to Sarah Hoyt to learn that she is male. Larry Correia is Hispanic, which is a closer call--there is much confusion over whether or not Hispanic is an attribute that can be added to white/black, or if it is a separate category.

<comment><USER4> Is he Hispanic or is he Latino? I'm partly/significantly Hispanic. Hispanic just means your family has roots in some place where Spanish was spoken, including Spain. It's not a racial distinction.

If he's Latino, he's not a "white male". If he's Hispanic, he might be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminder to all posters that Eric Raymond was nominated on a Puppy slate and lost to "No Award."</comment>