21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/21-things-that-became-obsolete-this-decade-2009-12

<comment><USER2> Mostly true. Dead wrong on maps. GPSes are not nearly advanced enough to make maps obsolete, and I'm not sure they ever will be. Maps allow you to gain an overall understanding of an area. Directions will get you where you're going, but you'll never be able to navigate intuitively unless you know the whole area. I still greatly prefer maps to GPSes and often to directions.

Sure, GPSes can provide maps, but GPS are much smaller than any reasonable map, which defeats the whole purpose of getting a wide view of an area.

Also, until GPSes are nearly perfect, there's still the issue of them being wrong or of a road being closed. Maps are very rarely wrong. If you're heading South, you're probably getting further South on the map, but I've had a GPS tell me to head South when the destination was miles to the North, eventually leading to a dead end no where near the destination.

<comment><USER3> Maps are also cool and have prestige benefits. Whereever my family moves, we get a map of the area and create a map table. We've been doing it for hundreds of years, and if we have to pay a lot for a paper map, we'll still do it.

<comment><USER4> Hundreds of years? Awesome. I don't know anything about my family more than 2 generations back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since when were buttons obsolete? They're cheap and they give some nice haptic feedback if they're well-designed. I'm typing this comment with buttons on a keyboard, and I'm not too keen to trade it in for a touch-screen keyboard anytime soon.

<comment><USER6> Business Insider seemed to notice some time back that two things are great for bumping up page views: manufactured controversy and slideshows.

Shame too. It was a decent-enough rag before they started optimizing for hits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Confuses obsolete with less of a trend.

<comment><USER3> "Obsolete" isn't easily defined, just as "Microsoft is Dead" yet the company is still worth billions.

Then we have that which is obsolete but remains for political reasons, such as private health insurance.

<comment><USER7> Actually it is easy to define: <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/obsolete>

The term is misused in conversations that talk about fashion. I like the 100 year rule mentioned there. My hp200lx still has a way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> 22\. Malls, and all of the stores that populate them.

23\. The bar scene, "single's night" at the grocery store, and other means of finding dates.

24\. The penny. No one cares, at this point, if they pay $20 for an $18.43 grocery bill and get back $1.55.

25\. 1980s-style conservatism.

26\. Stock brokers.

<comment><USER8> How does one find dates in the new decade?

<comment><USER3> Good question. A mix of online dating and activities (cooking classes, hiking groups). Also, lucky breaks with friends of friends.</comment></comment></comment>


Mono for Unreal Engine - <AUTHOR> http://mono-ue.github.io/ <comment><USER2> You realize this is officially abandoned right?

[https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?54595-I-want-...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?54595-I-want- Feedback-from-Epic-about-Mono-for-Unreal-Engine&highlight=xamarin)

&tldr; Epic saw the Unity thing and went 'nope; not unless you make it free forever'.

(Also, don't bother. It doesn't work with the most recent version of the engine either)

<comment><USER3> What's the "Unity thing"?

I'm disappointed that the semi-official Lua integration seems to have gone nowhere for the past six months or so. I think that's a much better intermediate step between C++ and Blueprints.

<comment><USER2> Unity licensed mono, with a very special license, for that specific version of mono. Then there was what, 4 or 5 years of wrangling and no C# version updates because of licensing and royalty disagreements with 'whoever owns mono at the moment'. I can't honestly be bothered digging the threads up, but search the unity forums and you'll get the whole story.

Unity is now officially pursuing the 'compiles C# to C++' thing. They say it's because its 5-10x faster (and it is... compared to the specific C# runtime they're using...). I'd guess that lets them do some legal loop hole things.

Licensing. Devil's in the details.

Unreal just nipped the whole thing in the bud by saying; make it free and open source, or don't come to the party.

<comment><USER4> According to the Mono project's website they are open source: [http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/](http://www.mono- project.com/docs/about-mono/)

It's all MIT and GPL: [http://www.mono- project.com/docs/faq/licensing/](http://www.mono- project.com/docs/faq/licensing/)

<comment><USER2> Devils in the details huh? [https://store.xamarin.com/](https://store.xamarin.com/)

Doesn't look free to me.

(and I'm not being narky. _This_ is the point I'm making; it's only superficially free. Then you have to say, ship a game, and woa~ wait, it has to be GPL now if you bundle the runtime, or you have to pay a licensing fee?)

<comment><USER4> " _When do I need to obtain a license from Xamarin to the Mono Runtime?_ We only require licensing for uses of Mono and Moonlight on embedded systems, or systems where you are unable to fulfill the obligations of the GNU LGPL.

For example, if you manufacture a device where the end user is not able to do an upgrade of the Mono virtual machine or the Moonlight runtime from the source code, you will need a commercial license of Mono and Moonlight.

Or if you ship an application that requires to statically link the Mono runtime and you are not able to provide the object code to relink Mono, you must obtain a commercial license from Xamarin."

You can bundle as much as you want, as long as you adhere to the rules.

<comment><USER2> I don't even know what point you're making.

'as long as you adhere to the rules.'

Yes, by 'obtain a commercial license from Xamarin', they mean, 'pay a license fee'.

Like say, if you ship a mobile game. The only reason Unity gets away with it is because they have a _licensing deal_ that permits them to ship mono.

If _you_ want to write a mobile game, you pay for it.

That's not freedom.

<comment><USER5> > I don't even know what point you're making.

Then read again.

The fact is the runtime and libraries are MIT and LGPL. Your statement that your game has to be GPL if you use them is totally wrong. Least of all, because the GPL is neither of those two licenses, but most importantly, those licenses allow you to release a game under a license that's not even MIT or the LGPL, _because that 's the nature of those two licenses_.

Unity is required to pay a custom license because they didn't want to accept the terms that are available to everyone. (I almost wrote "everyone else" there, but that would have been wrong because the terms were available even to Unity.)

<comment><USER5> You mind explaining that downvote there, buddy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mono and C# are now being used by both Unity and Unreal. This certainly gives further momentum to the language for game developers. With all the past license changes and the cross platform nature of Unreal and Unity this makes it a lot more pursading to learn C#\Mono for game development.

Personally I have a few educational games I would like to write and still can't decide what tool would be best, certainly Unreal will be to over the top for my ideas, but Unity keeps seeming like it would get me out the door quicker. The issue always was writing in Java Script or C# with C# always looking like a much better option.

<comment><USER7> Unreal doesn't use Mono or C#.

<comment><USER6> > Unreal doesn't use Mono or C#

FROM THE READING "With Mono for Unreal Engine, you can now use the latest version of C# to write your gameplay code, AI behaviors, UI elements, and more."

<comment><USER7> As someone already said, project is dead and doesn't work with the latest versions of UE.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's current traffic on the mailing list. Everybody talks about it like it's alive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cody'sLab channel suspended [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXT5T9MH7cI <comment><USER2> The world is a better place with CodysLab, youtube need to sort their shit out. He may have made a couple of slightly dodgy videos, but the vast majority are really good and sometimes very impressive science videos.

<comment><USER3> Which ones? I wasn't aware that Cody's Lab could receive strikes. The content is so tame, copyright free, and educational.

<comment><USER4> Probably things that deal with explosives. He may have had a video on making nitroglycerin.

<comment><USER5> Nothing on making it that I remember But several on how sensitive it is and how powerful.

<comment><USER6> He literally has a video titled "Making Nitroglycerine": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmYPAS9xB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmYPAS9xB0)

Not that I have any reason to think this has anything to do with the channel suspension.

<comment><USER5> My mistake, I hadn't seen that far back into his videos yet, he has way too many to watch them all. I was thinking of the recent ones where he was hitting nitroglycerine with knives and filming it at high speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A big problem with Youtube's three-strikes approach is that it's the same for all channels, big or small. It doesn't matter how much good content you've produced or how long you've been making it, if you get 3 strikes in a short period, your account is deleted, same as any channel.

So channels that produce a lot of content or upload videos quickly have to be _more_ careful about what they upload. There's no credit for good behaviour or allowance for the extra risk channels take if they post lots of videos, potentially getting a strike with each one.

But little old me only uploads one or two videos a year. So I can afford to have every video copyright striked and I'll suffer no consequences since they expire in 6 months.

It seems unfair.

<comment><USER8> We go through this every time there's a copyright law or something. Baseball is not a good system for moderation.

At least the billion hours of content added you youtube constantly needs no nuance at all.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like he did some kind of experiment related to microwaves and bugs. People reported and the channel got taken down.

Are people really that sensitive nowadays? And why they take the whole channel down, just disable the ads if the advertisers are the problem. This channel was really big, so I believe it gets plenty of attention.

<comment><USER9> Regardless of people's sensitivity, I think the system functioned the way it is supposed to function, enough people report the content, it gets taken down, and apparently this isn't the channel's first strike. The only criticism I see fit is that they should add a manual check of the content if the channel is big enough, that is before it gets automatically taken down.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. Flagging a channel should disable it solely for the overly sensitive dimwitted user that voluntarily selected to view the video in the first place. YouTube is not a broadcast medium. Videos are available by voluntary positive action of the viewer only. Taking a video down, much less a whole channel, doesn't protect the viewer whose sensibilities were aroused. It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves.

<comment><USER11> > It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to > view the content themselves.

No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US.

Also, fringe stuff like antivaxxers, "freemen/Reichsbürger movements", flat- earthers, chemtrail believers, other conspiracy theories or Russian fake news would be by far smaller if Youtube had decided that this content is not wanted on their platform. Instead Youtube willingly provides a platform for this content and therefore is directly responsible for the resulting problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> And you want to be the judge who decides what is right and wrong?

Homosexuality is morally and legally wrong in many countries in the world, and sensitive topic, why not ban it by default because it's the joy of a fringe group of Americans?

<comment><USER11> > And you want to be the judge who decides what is right and wrong?

As soon as a minority is discriminated, no matter what minority it is (be it PoC, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, or even social groups as poor people) it's wrong.

Dead easy definition, and for racial and gender based discrimination it's a worldwide agreed-upon international law anyway: racism => ICERD, [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinko...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_%C3%9Cbereinkommen_zur_Beseitigung_jeder_Form_von_Rassendiskriminierung), gender-based discrimination => CEDAW, [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN- Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN- Konvention_zur_Beseitigung_jeder_Form_von_Diskriminierung_der_Frau). And for the other forms of discrimination, a judicial base may be extracted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

<comment><USER10> Well that's clearly not believed by most of society. The young are discriminated against ferociously and denigrated at every turn, yet few would call it wrong. Few would argue that teenagers shouldn't be spied upon, controlled, and given fewer choices in their day to day life than felons in prison. It is 'for their own good' after all. As discrimination always has been, and always will be, couched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with large platforms is that they are open to abuse you see the same problems at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, it's basically an infinite problem.

All of the "machine learning" algorithms aren't really that intelligent, because they have no real human context, so then you augment that with a trust and safety team to do manual review.

When you couple that with a platform that has millions, or billions of users, you simply do not have enough trained people doing the review process so legitimate users, even with large followings, sometimes get nabbed.

Just like legitimate people with less subscribers can be caught in the same web.

Then you are basically at the mercy of the queue and the number of actual people they have doing the manual review work, which in YouTube's case I'm guessing is rather massive.

<comment><USER13> Google really needs to have a human contact that can be reachable for channels with a large amount of subscribers. Advertisers do provide Google with nearly all of their revenue, but then again so do content providers as Google provides next to no content of their own. The fact that we have large channels being arbitrarily taken down with no warning shows how obtuse Google is.

<comment><USER14> Or maybe content creators need to get away from Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Suggestions for YouTube I've seen here and elsewhere I like:

\- flagging a video suspends a video, not the channel

\- flagging a video hides the video (or channel) from the user who flags (this is one of my favorite features on Reddit, allowing me to distance myself from a few subreddits I prefer not to see)

I do not like:

\- a few flags to a single video takes down the entire channel. It feels disproportionate to me.

<comment><USER16> It's not just disproportionate, it's going to push people away from the platform.

YouTube isn't too big to fail. If you push out the people who are creating the content your business model relies on, you'll fail. YouTube isn't too big to fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Managing important infrastructure needs to be independent of exploitation, management, and/or regulation of content. You are either involved in editorial decisions or not. If you deliberately stay out of content decisions, and act like a common carrier, your liability should be limited and you get safe harbor protection. Editorializing and acting like a manager brings responsibility, - and liability.

Yoytube (Goole/Alphabet) needs to decide which level of involvement they want to have? Do they want to stay out these decision and close accounts only with a valet court order? Or are they a manager with greater power... that might be liable for problems casused by their negligence.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does Google not care to fix this issue, or do they fully understand the consequences to content creators and allow it to persist anyways? I.E. are they so beholden to advertisers that it has to be this way?

<comment><USER19> > Does Google not care to fix this issue

Why would they care? YouTube is the only game in town for content like this. Where else is this channel, or a new one looking for a platform, gonna go?

<comment><USER20> Vid.me is attempting to become this, although they are very far behind.

The problem is that basic large-scale issues (business not technical) become hard or impossible to handle without serious investment and cashflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> from his video description "I will be moving videos over time to other sites and to here". I think this content duplication/redundancy (with likely vimeo and I'm not sure what else) is going to be the future of things to come. I wonder what sort of legal challenges may come to the fore if such battles ensue.

</comment><comment><USER22> Par for the course. Youtube has gone completely insane and it is leaving a huge opening for less completely insane competitor platforms.

</comment><comment><USER23> Youtube are just really, really desperate to kill Youtube by any means necessary these days.</comment>


What is the password for hide and seek.com? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know the password for www.hideandseek.com? <comment><USER2> Bit of a wierd question as the site doesn't seem to index on Google atleast. Can you tell me what the site does and why you want access?

Ultimatley, find out for yourself what the password is? [http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-45/pr...](http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-45/product_id-66/version_id-109442/Apache-Http- Server-2.2.16.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> These are the guys behind the site, you can contact them directly:

[http://fenzi.com/](http://fenzi.com/)</comment>


Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits <comment><USER2> BTW Rich Hickey talks are great music albums: The first time you listen to them you think "yeah, I guess it's ok, but not a big deal."

Then 6 months later you are still thinking about points he made in the talk.

<comment> unkown-unknowns Rich Hickey reminds me a little bit of Bob Ross. Maybe sometime many years in the future Rich will be known by as many people as Bob is today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Related: [https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey- fanclub](https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think people like the sound of the ideas he's espousing in "Simple made easy", but toward he has some pretty specific examples of complexity that are often ignored. Like, I've worked with people who would fervently recommend the talk, but still love for-loops.

<comment><USER5> Pesky human behavior!

<comment><USER4> I suppose. But if you're talking about keeping things simple and not complecting them, but then you go around doing just that... what are you really talking about, you know?

<comment><USER6> Well, for-loops also aren't really the complexity that matters in a large app. I'd rather someone write for-loops yet aim for higher level simplicity.

Maybe you're overscrutinizing the trees.

<comment><USER4> Aaaaaa I'm not specifically talking about for-loops

<comment><USER7> perhaps you've 'complected' this thread. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like Hickey and Clojure. But part of me feels sad and pessimistic when I think him and his project. The stuff he was working on at the beginning, although new to most people who were exposed to it, wasn't new to the software engineering community at large. And now it's a decade later and it still feels like it hasn't progressed as far as it aught to given how much time and how many man-hours have been spent on it.

<comment><USER9> Doing things right is hard and it often requires more time. My feeling is that the majority of software engineers are less interested in detail and doing things right and more interested in getting things done. And most environments encourage to get things done (time to market) with all the bad results (broken / insecure software, bad architecture). In pure functional languages doing what's right is often the only way to get things done. This is why there is a smaller audience to Clojure or Haskell.

It's dreadful to explain the average engineer (in my environment) basic principles of design and architecture over and over again (like what is an URI / URN / URL, or why should I use Strings as general identifiers rather than exposing the numeric value from the database to the outside) just to see them dismissing everything in the next second. Now, when I tell them to look into Clojure or Haskell just to learn something.... No I don't do that. Its sad.

But Kudos to Rich. I find it is more important that he is talking / lecturing about basic principles of software design and architecture and using Clojure as an example, despite Clojure's actual success.

<comment><USER10> When you say "doing things right", what does "right" mean exactly? I see people say this a lot, and I think that I do things "right", but my definition of "right" is very different from yours.

My definition of "right", create the most value at the lowest cost.

My assumption is that when you say "right" you mean, "done in a way that produces the fewest bugs". If this is true, there is no consideration of the costs in your definition which seems wrong to me. At this point I usually hear people who make similar claims to you respond by saying, our "right" way doesn't cost more, or even costs less.

I don't think this is true, and here's why. If it's true, your "right" way would produce better software at the same price. If that's true one of the following would also be true.

1\. companies doing it the "right" way would, on average, beat companies doing it the not "right" way. I have seen no evidence of this, in fact the opposite seems true. 2\. Having a lower bug count has no bearing on the success of companies so there is no correlation between the "right" way and the not "right way. I doubt this is true, but I could be wrong.

What I think is true is that your "right" way costs significantly more, and the market in most cases has shown time and again that it's not worth the cost.

Edit: fixed a typo and some formatting.

<comment><USER11> I don't know that financial success is the be-all end-all measuring stick that I want to measure my code against. It is important because I also like to eat and sleep in a bed. But most any talented engineers could make vastly more money doing shady stuff. But very few do and that's a fact that I find rather amazing and gives me great pride in this profession.

Point is simply that I don't want to throw out all measures of quality of craftsmanship except financial.

I love Bob Martin's line that the dirty secret of programmers is that we'd still do it whether they paid us or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dorian-graph Related: One of my current side-projects I'm creating is a podcast of 'greatest hits' from any authors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a list/gist you can share already?

<comment> dorian-graph Kind of—I have several lists, compiled by others. Here's some:

\- [http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/05/29/must-see-tech- tal...](http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/05/29/must-see-tech-talks-for- every-programmer/)

\- [https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1198/what- video...](https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1198/what-videos- should-everybody-watch)

\- [https://github.com/JanVanRyswyck/awesome- talks](https://github.com/JanVanRyswyck/awesome-talks)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511466)

\- [https://github.com/hellerve/programming- talks](https://github.com/hellerve/programming-talks)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239)

Plenty of material. ;)

<comment><USER12> Would be interesting to have a monthly mailshot with recent ones, so much material but a lot of chaff as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there an updated list? This is from 2013

<comment><USER14> Original author here. I will take a whack at updating it.</comment></comment>


Do Seed Companies Control GM Crop Research? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research <comment><USER2> Researchers should simply buy these seeds, do all the research they want and publish the results, and put the EULAs that come with the seeds to good use in the smallest room of their department.

Let them sue.

Some 'agreements' (that's what that 'A' stands for wasn't it) are meant to be broken, this one seems like a particularly good example of one.

GM is good, or it is bad. Knowledge about that concerns all of us. Imagine a country where the politicians can gag the press, this is very much comparable to that.</comment>


iTerm2 Version 3.3 Released - <AUTHOR> https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_3_0.changelog <comment><AUTHOR> Major New Features

\- A Python scripting API has been added to enable extensive configuration and customization. See [https://iterm2.com/python-api](https://iterm2.com/python- api) for details. \- A scriptable status bar has been added with 13 built-in configurable components. \- Two new themes: Minimal: Reduces visual clutter. Modernist. Compact: Moves tabs into the title bar to save space, while preserving the general appearance of a macOS app.</comment>


Verizon to allow unlimited Skype calling over 3G starting next month - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/16/verizon-to-allow-unlimited-skype-calling-over-3g-starting-next-m/?s=t5 <comment><USER2> "You cannot use the Skype client to make any calls to U.S. PSTN numbers." according to GigaOM <http://gigaom.com/2010/02/16/skype-verizon-iphone/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this really big news? The Skype for Android client has supported Skype calls for over one year. It works around the carriers' limitations by initiating an outbound call to a toll-free Skype number.

Every day, I happily roll down the highway at 75mph talking to my Skype contacts in Europe and Asia.

How is this any different for me? (Note: it's much cheaper for Skype, because they can now offer the same functionality without maintaining the toll-free local numbers that they need to maintain today.)

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's news until you can get a phone without a voice plan.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans- detail.a...](http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans- detail.aspx?tp=tb1&rateplan=T-Mobile-Total-Internet-Rate-Plan)

I use this with my Nexus One. Works for SIP and tethering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the rational behind this? Are they hoping that people won't abuse it because the quality isn't that great? Or are they just making more of their money off data than voice now to justify this?

Hard to believe, in any case, perhaps Skype is giving them a kickback now that it is an independent entity and can make disruptive progress again without being held back by the bureaucracy that is ebay.

<comment><USER7> Data is becoming cheaper/easier to deploy than voice. Eventually all "voice" traffic will be data, this is just an intermediate step.

<comment><USER8> You hit it right. According to this article: <http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-10453550-78.html> Verizon is having trouble getting voice to work over LTE in their test markets, so they are going to go data only on LTE initially and use CDMA for voice. When I read that, I wondered if the voice problem was a function of something basic in LTE (like latency) or if the voice gear just doesn't play well with LTE yet. If it's the latter, then Skype VoIP applications would help offload voice traffic from CDMA for "power users".

<comment><USER9> Voice over LTE is supposed to work using IMS - but will require a fairly expensive upgrade to the network. Operators are keenly aware of the pitfalls of over-the-top voice losing them revenue, but this is an experiment to see if they can do away with IMS altogether. That, and the fact that someone else may try it first...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll believe it when I see it (that said, I really hope to see it).</comment>


I Hire Engineers at Google–Here's What I Look for (And Why) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3062713/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/i-hire-engineers-at-google-heres-what-i-look-for-and-why <comment><USER2> Slightly off topic, but one unexpected skill I got from French Engineering schools is the " _Colles_ " (Search for "The verbal exams" in [1] for a detailed description). This is a weekly oral exam you have with a teacher/T.A. in front of a blackboard, and you have to solve a difficult math/physics problem in 30-45mn.

These _colles_ are a really good preparation to the US tech companies whiteboard coding interviews.Advices like:

        try going analog—use a whiteboard
        Consider thinking out loud while you complete the coding exercise

appear 100% obvious, but most importantly:

        stay calm under pressure

Is really what _colles_ prepare you for.

I think US Colleges should consider doing something similar to _colles_ on their curriculum, not necessarily Computer Science related, to prepare the students to this.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-going-through-the- Fren...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-going-through-the-French- Classes-Pr%C3%A9paratoires-aux-Grandes-%C3%89coles)</comment>


Being Black in the Startup World - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i/moments/711613576302034945 <comment><USER2> All too often, people use excuses for their own failure s.

Getting funding is damn hard. African americans make up only 14% of the population. Only a small percentage of this will pitch VC and an even smaller percentage will get accepted.</comment>


Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/norris-numbers.html <comment><USER2> If he had that insight in 2011 then he was pretty late to the party. By then the 1K to 2K line limit for 'beginner programmers' was very well established.

To go beyond that you need a few tricks of the trade, mostly structured programming and avoiding global scope will get you to 10K and up.

After 50K or so you will need even more tricks: version control will become a must, naming conventions matter and you're probably well into modularization territory. Some actual high level documentation would also not be a bad idea.

By the time you hit 100's of thousands of lines you are probably looking at a life-time's worth of achievement by a single programmer, or more likely you are looking at teamwork. And so you'll need yet more infrastructure around your project to keep it afloat.

You can see quite a bit of this at work when you browse through open source repositories at github, those are roughly the points at which plenty of projects and up being abandoned, as often as not through lack of insight in how to organize a larger project as through the demotivation that comes from lack of adoption.

<comment><USER3> agree, but it also depends on programing language.

I do not see how 1K of C and Python lines are same.

<comment><USER4> As I understand it the evidence is, surprisingly, just the opposite: defect rate per line of code is the same, independent of which language you use.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's particularly surprising, and in fact that's the other half of the point: a 2K 'beginner program' in haskell or lisp could do all the work of a 50K C or java program, but because it's so much smaller, you have/need much less support structures and, yes, much fewer total defects.

<comment><USER4> My intuition is that code with 2kloc "worth" of language constructs would have the same defect rate across languages (and you can get a lot more done in n constructs in some languages than others), but that code using shorter identifiers or symbolic operators should have the same defect rate per "construct" i.e. a higher defect rate per line. But AIUI the evidence doesn't bear this out, and the per-line defect rate in APL or Perl is the same as in other languages.

<comment><USER6> As programmers we like our lines to have a given level of cognitive load, depending on personal taste, so regardless of the language you'll end up with on average the same number of language constructs per line. In high level languages those constructs do more than in lower level languages, but since they are already debugged the defect rate per construct is not higher, ergo the defect rate per line is also stable across languages.

<comment><USER4> > regardless of the language you'll end up with on average the same number of > language constructs per line

I'm saying this isn't true. APL is the extreme example, but languages vary quite a lot in how many constructs you can and do cram onto a single line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This can be true for a beginner, for a developer who never hit that wall before or for a developer without enough talent to learn how to do it right after all. But once you start using the right methodologies, making things highly modular and as much as possible independent from each other, you can go quite a distance before new "walls" arise.

Sometimes I take more time to think of a proper and scalable name for variables and methods than the time it actually took to write the implementation. While refactoring I might do another round of thinking about naming and make sure there are no or an absolute minimum of possible side effects for the implementation, etc..

I'm coding almost 30 years now. I'm still learning and make my mistakes of course, but most of the time they occur because I rush for some reason. Writing good code takes time, especially to rethink what you're doing, refactoring, making the right adjustments so it completes the codebase. Before I complete the beta release of a codebase I've made thousands and thousands of decisions, where only 1 wrong decision can cause a terrible amount of trouble later on.

For me it's a creative process. It goes in waves. I cannot always be a top performer, I've accepted that. When I recognise I was in a low during some implementation I might do a total rewrite of it or apply some serious refactoring(and force myself to take the time for that).

I still experience coding to be much harder to get right than I ever expected it to be. For me a codebase is a highly complex system of maybe hundreds of files with API's working together, not just a bunch of algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel that there is some naiveté in this perspective, although the OP does touch on it somewhat. A novice most likely would write their code in a very monolithic fashion. That same approach fails significantly with larger code bases.

As a seasoned developer I have come to realize that one of the most important things to be a good developer is organizational skills. Unfortunately it seems that ways to organize code bases, including things like naming, mutable state, modularization, cohesion/coupling, etc., are not as well developed or understood in general in our industry as they should be.

While understanding and knowing the right algorithms is important. I sometimes wonder if our emphasis on the knowing algorithms off the top of your head interviewing process contributes to putting the emphasis on the wrong things in software development.

<comment><USER9> >Unfortunately it seems that ways to organize code bases, including things like naming, mutable state, modularization, cohesion/coupling, etc., are not as well developed or understood in general in our industry as they should be.

True, but I think any attempt to standardize or to make it another engineering discipline would mean the end of high programmer salaries. Just follow guidelines and standard procedure in a book and you'll end up with a reasonable solution that is reasonably good and reasonably reliable at a reasonable cost. Most businesses would jump at that...

And I'd argue that would be a good thing for all the sectors where programming is important, but no good programmer wants to actually join because its not sexy. (coal mining, medical equipment, etc)

> I sometimes wonder if our emphasis on the knowing algorithms off the top of > your head interviewing process contributes to putting the emphasis on the > wrong things in software development.

Yes but no business actually cares about creative solutions, unless algorithms are core to their business (and even then, other human factors outweigh finding the optimal, bestest, fastest solution). They simply want to use computers to solve a business problem. They want a runner to run from A to B, not an Olympic sprinter who is going to break a world record. Do you know a reasonably decent sort algorithm? Good, just use it. Profiling? Optimizing? That's for Olympic sprinters. Design patterns? Blindly apply a GoF design pattern that approximates your problem, etc etc.

<comment><USER10> I think our industry can come to _understand_ and _articulate_ the skill set without having to standardize/certify it.

Civil architects can be wildly creative and artful in their industry which understands its own domain deeply.

<comment><USER9> Right, but when you hire an architect to design a random office building, you're not expecting a piece of art. My point is the vast majority of programming projects are random office building # 23.

<comment><USER10> Then we're in the realm of automated or at least codified/systematic process, or we _should_ be, no?

<comment><USER9> Yes, and we should be encouraging more of that. But as programmers (well to my mind anyway) it nags us when we look at inefficient solutions, even those which are reasonably robost/adequate. We tend to scoff at people using Visual Basic to solve a business problem, when its probably the best language for a large chunk of the problem space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Absolutely refuse to add any feature or line of code unless you need it right now, and need it badly."

As I've gotten older I've seen the value of this rule. Though it sounds merely negative, it can produce effects that seem little short of genius.

<comment><USER12> Excepting those features which allow you to cull large chunks of code. Those are my favorite features, rare as they are.

<comment><USER13> In my experience this is often possible by removing duplicated functionality into a shared implementation. That is by exchanging multiple features of linear complexity into a single implementation. Due to being shared, that implementation will tend to have geometric complexity.

That means the duplication has to be highly significant and variations need to be few for it to pay off. ... And you'll better hope you have a good set of tests to verify everything is still working.

In most cases it's still a good idea, but it's still a case where you need to argue that you really need it, so it's no exeption at all.

<comment><USER14> Sounds like the perennial redundancy vs dependency struggle [0]. I do like the explanation in terms of linear vs geometric complexity though.

[0] [https://yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which- is-...](https://yosefk.com/blog/redundancy-vs-dependencies-which-is- worse.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a novice just building my first 2k+ program and the thing that seems crazy to me is that based on what you learn in intro courses, thinks like namespaces and organization and modularization not only aren't emphasized, but seem like unimportant distractions from the core task of programming

Based on all the blogs and HN comments and comments here, that couldn't be further from the truth. Are these just things you learn from experience / mentors?

<comment><USER16> > thinks like namespaces and organization and modularization not only aren't > emphasized, but seem like unimportant distractions from the core task of > programming

There's an analogy I've heard, and I can't remember where. It might be a Feynman quote I'm recalling...

It'd be crazy to start design work on an airplane, if you're hungry and want to go to the corner store a block away for chips. It'd also be crazy to try to walk to China, since it's a long way, and also you might drown. The approach you take to solving the problem of getting from here to there depends completely on where here and there are, and what else you want to carry with you.

I don't use namespaces and build modules for an Arduino project, or a simple command line tool. But for large projects, I literally can't live without namespacing and modularization.

The core task of programming constitutes _very_ different activities at different scales, as different as comparing walking to building jet engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this depend on language? 20k lines of Perl is a different beast from 20k lines of Python, or 20k lines of verbose Java, I would expect. If not, does it suggest we should be aiming to use more expressive languages, that can get more done in less lines?

<comment><USER18> _20k lines of Perl is a different beast from 20k lines of Python, or 20k lines of verbose Java_

Very good point. We're all familiar with the "I can do ${lambda} in ${n} lines with ${lang} language".

It seems to take me 10x more lines to do something in Java vs. Python, and 10x lines to do something in Python vs. Perl. Except that the Java is laborious to read, the Python is nicely readable, and the Perl will never be understood by a programmer.

I had great fun writing Perl many years ago but I used to joke that Perl was a "write only" language.

<comment><USER19> I had lunch with Eric Raymond here in Austin a 15-20 years ago, and he was lamenting the fact that he couldn't read _his own_ Perl programs less than a year after writing them, so he was rewriting them all in Python. I never get religious about languages or platforms, but Python, which has been described as "executable pseudocode" does a nice job of balancing power and readbility. Idiomatic Perl is powerful, but opaque enough to be effectively unmaintainable. Since errors are pretty much proportional to LOC, it _is_ best to use languages that offer "high leverage": Python, Tcl, and Lua come to mind. Note that C is still almost the only choice for real embedded work - it's unsurpassed at register bit-banging. (Well, except for assembly, but that requires skills that are no longer taught - interestingly, the same ones that make good embedded C programmers...)

<comment><USER18> _he couldn 't read his own Perl programs less than a year after writing them_

A year? I often lost a half day trying to understand Perl I'd written less than a week before. I'm not exaggerating.

I'm not sure what that says about me as a programmer but I'm terrified to find out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hadn't come across this before, and sure enough, looking at the current personal project I'm working on, it's composed of 3 main files of C++, a Windows program, a parser [1] and a custom OpenGL control [2], each is 500 - 600 lines.

For me, I use Stepwise Refinement [3] to get to this point, but to get further, I have to start breaking out a more abstract approach. I found this definition of Structured Programming that puts it very nicely [4].

There's also a perhaps self-imposed wall, where you might trial a solution and implement a prototype, then use that to realize that it no point in pressing on without some serious redesign of a key component. For my example above, the rendering part is old-style OpenGL, which works pretty nicely at 60 fps, but I'm holding off doing more until I can slot in and benchmark a better approach using vertex buffers and shaders, with the goals of enabling me to shape and scale the renderings in an abstracted coordinate system, and scale to rendering hundreds of files instead of just one.

[1] [https://twitter.com/watmough/status/962470455037841409](https://twitter.com/watmough/status/962470455037841409)

[2] [https://twitter.com/watmough/status/965007110391128064](https://twitter.com/watmough/status/965007110391128064)

[3] [http://www.informatik.uni- bremen.de/gdpa/def/def_s/STEPWISE_...](http://www.informatik.uni- bremen.de/gdpa/def/def_s/STEPWISE_REFINEMENT.htm)

[4] [https://www.encyclopedia.com/computing/dictionaries- thesauru...](https://www.encyclopedia.com/computing/dictionaries-thesauruses- pictures-and-press-releases/structured-programming)

</comment><comment><USER21> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8072730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8072730)

and in 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10191540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10191540)

</comment><comment><USER22> I avoid these walls entirely by never using newlines in my code.

<comment><USER23> That's webscale af

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. My main project is getting near the 20k range. I haven't hit a wall, but it is getting noticeably harder to stay fluent in every part of the program. When I switch from one major system to another, there is a few days ramp-up. Still happy with readability and complexity.

<comment><USER25> Same. There are some parts of the code that I haven't touched in a few years, and when I do there's a significant effort to refamiliarise myself... and a whole lot of "what stupid idiot wrote this", oh yeah, that was me three years ago. :)

I just finished the Python 2 -> 3 upgrade on it, that was fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are there projects we can undertake to intentionally hit those walls and measure ourselves?

<comment><USER27> Like the equivalent of 'memory-hard' problems - 'lines-of-code' hard problems.

I suppose that's close to what [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity) is.

<comment><USER26> Ah no. I meant what task can we undertake to see this in action? For example, writing your own compiler is bound to make you hit the 1k wall. If you're able to write it chances are you have passed the 1k wall some time in your past. That kind of measurement.

<comment><USER27> Part of the problem is that people who are good at dealing with large codebases tend to write fewer lines of code if they can at all get away with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A bit over dramatic. I remember Unreal 3 was close to 2 mil and that's the normal region for games (and has been for a decade) and trust me, gamedev studios are _not_ staffed by seasoned programmers.

<comment><USER29> Is that just scripting, or does that include the engine?

If it's just game scripting, then I could imagine it's possible to squeeze 2 mil lines out of junior devs. I assume there are very few things that can go drastically "wrong".

<comment><USER28> "Scripting" vs coding is not a clear cut case also a lot of studios (back in the day that is, since now the unreal model is different and everyone has access to the source) had source access so games would usually make changes to the engine. 2 mil is just the base engine. There's of course loads of middleware and plugins and integration for it all, probably doubling the size and of course the "scripting" which adds complexity like anything else and it relies on support for things in the main codebase. Customising the engine is not a matter of tweaking variables but extending the base classes. And for game logic you might be writing completely separate systems with their own architecture.

Repos were big. Really big. Especially since we're talking about people who will check in FMVs into source control.

Ah... what a horrible world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> what about paulg onlisp and leveraging nested macros ?

what about kay vpri efforts to reduce a full system to 100K (OMeta)

</comment><comment><USER31> shard your problem space.

<comment><USER32> Indeed, micro services can be a pain in the butt to debug, due to communication, but they can help you to view the world as a collection of smaller easily understood programs, rather than one huge monolith.

<comment><USER19> Not exactly a new idea: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)</comment></comment></comment>


Pompeo Hints at Huawei Ultimatum to Countries Buying Equipment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-11/pompeo-hints-at-huawei-ultimatum-to-countries-buying-equipment <comment><USER2> > The administration has argued for providers of next-generation mobile gear > to rely on U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems Inc.

Please stop using their backdoored equipment, use ours instead!

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/backdoors_in_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/backdoors_in_ci.html)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but is officially an ally, (the states where Pompeo mentioned this are all parts of NATO imho).

But still there are european providers such as nokia networks, ericsson..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pompeo's ex-CIA background coming to the fore- My way or the Huawei.

<comment><USER5> This guy just said yesterday that Hezbollah is in Venezuela, so reality doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Who knows?

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Are you a domain expert in this area? Did you do some research before posting?

[http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/22/world/fg- cocainering...](http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/22/world/fg- cocainering22)

From Wikipedia: "There are small but influential Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish communities. The Muslim community of more than 100,000 is concentrated among persons of Lebanese and Syrian descent living in Nueva Esparta State, Punto Fijo and the Caracas area."

Is it hard to imagine a terrorist organization would expand it's operations into drug smuggling?

<comment><USER7> There's a lot of Lebanese immigrants in Venezuela. Do you think they're all members of Hezbollah?

<comment><USER6> Yes. That is what I was implying. Every single one.

Or I was providing context, showing that Hezbollah connections to Venezuela are not implausible in this particular reality

<comment><USER8> That is a horrible racist argument. to imply that it's arguable that 3,4,5 generation muslims living in South America are terrorist just because they are.

A quick look at your comments says you are not thou. The statement is missguided

<comment><USER6> I get the sense that detecting sarcasm isn't your strong suit.

<comment><USER8> I realise the 1st paragraph is sarcastic, the original post and the 2nd paragraph is what I'm replying to

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Despite demands to other countries, the US telecom providers still use Huawei equipment. The US government has made demands for them to stop using Huawei base stations but ultimately the economics don't make sense. I don't see the US government ripping out domestic equipment anytime soon, yet alone being able to enforce any kind of demands internationally.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there any concrete evidence of Huawei backdoors?

<comment><USER11> No. The US wants tech and equipment from the US-based companies to be the standard across the world because it would allow more influence over those countries. They would also be able to intercept the equipment as it leaves the US. [0]

[0] Infamous "NSA intercepts Cisco equipment slide" [https://archive.fo/7Zosk](https://archive.fo/7Zosk)

<comment><USER12> It's worth noting that none of the telecom providers for wireless gear are from the US.

The top 5 equipment manufacturers for 5G gear are — Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE and Samsung.

<comment><USER13> There's money for Qualcomm in there somewhere, isn't there?

<comment><USER12> Huawei is banned from an infrastructure point of view. Qualcomm does device chips for phones and whatnot, not network infrastructure.

The US government hasn't banned consumer devices of Huawei (except for government purchases). So you can still buy a Huawei phone or laptop.

Also, Qualcomm basically had a monopoly in the US due to patents applying to CDMA phone tech (it's why most phones had different SKUs in the US versus the rest of the world, as you effectively needed a Qualcomm chip to get on Verizon's or Sprint's networks.)

<comment><USER13> I assumed they had some patents this time around too and if you had to license it for the handset you had to license it for the other side also. But I guess not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't imagine China wouldn't retaliate on such a ban? Maybe Apple will have to scale back those expectations on sales in China again?

<comment><USER15> With such a severe trade imbalance, any retaliation would be shooting themselves in the feet.</comment></comment>


LinkedIn's startup story: Connecting the business world - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/02/smallbusiness/linkedin_startup_story.smb/?postversion=2009060204

<comment><USER2> Posted earlier:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=637594></comment>


Draw Something Loses 5 Million Users a Month After Zynga Purchase - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/05/04/draw-something-loses-5m-users-a-month-after-zynga-purchase/ <comment><USER4> Is this surprising? I've drawn an airport 7 times now.

Might seem like a trivial comment, but this is a classic case reflecting inability to service player wants. If they kept their word list updated and used a better algorithm to filter out repeat-words, they probably could have mitigated their user churn rate.

Yes, perhaps a larger word list was part of their monetization strategy - <USER2> Zynga should've realized that was a bad idea when it acquired the company. When users pay for something, there needs to be an instant sense of reward, _and_ a noticeable lasting sense of reward. A larger word list doesn't really fall into either of those categories.

<comment><USER5> This, and the number of games I had going on at one time were the main reasons for me uninstalling it. The game was fun, up until I had 30 games going on at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Soon after the Zynga acquisition I opened the app and it asked me for a new/additional Facebook permission to have access to post on my wall, with no easy way to play my friends anymore if I said no. Could have something to do with it.

<comment><USER7> I agree, but I am not so bothered with that these days... you can set permissions within FB so that anything an app posts will only be seen by yourself.

<comment><USER8> I am not so motivated to set my permissions. I'll just play different games now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Zynga completely abused the product. I started getting requests to give them more rights on facebook, which I solved my signing in with my email - <USER3> they started to send me push messages about weird things - I've heard they even asked for read/write sms rights on Android devices. I can only see it one way - Zynga might make cool games, but they are hardcore abusing regular people - also non-techinal people unlike us, that does not realize the outcome of granting these priveledges.

<comment><USER10> The SMS permissions on Android are for an alternative payment system via SMS. It's in the app description on Google Play.

Edit: Looks like they've since removed the permission and text related to it. _shrug_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Halo 3 looses 5 Million Users 1 Month After Release" ... well of course it did, because most games get old pretty quickly.

To understand if Zynga overpaid, you'd need to know if they bought OMGPOP for a single hit title, or if they see them as a creative group with many hits to come, like Blizzard or Valve.

<comment><USER12> What you're failing to consider here is that every user Halo 3 had paid approx. $60 up front to become a user in the first place. The problem with these free-mium games is that the average revenue per user is so much lower.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. There's no loyalty. Users won't hang around unless they've put something in the pot. Zynga knows this though, since it's the whole premise behind their initial success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To be fair, people get bored of mobile apps, in general, pretty easily. I remember playing Draw Something constantly for a few weeks then I eventually stopped playing because it got old pretty fast. I don't think Zynga is the reason why this is happening.

<comment><USER15> Nothing in the title or article implies that the Zynga acquisition caused the decline.

<comment> k-mcgrady The title makes it sounds like the user decline is related to the Zynga acquisition.

<comment><USER16> What's important is that the relation is _being discussed_. Is it related? Is it not?

We aren't asking these questions if Draw Something _added_ 5 million users since the Zynga purchase. In fact, that would be expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A friend who really loved the game tried to show it to me, but it kept having server problems. I wonder if that was just an isolated case or if it was frequent, in which case it could drive off users.

<comment><USER18> My girl and I stopped playing because of that. It went from playable to unplayable literally within a week or two.

It would lose our moves (returning to "Your move" when you'd submitted something hours before).

It would give strange errors "You're using this on more than once device"... erm, no I'm not.

And once it forgot who I was and showed no active games once I logged in again... effectively losing the games I was involved in from my account perspective, but my girl could still see the game and when she nudged it re- appeared on my phone.

And then there is just the non-responsiveness of the server. The start-up splash used to show for less than a second, but now it takes 5-10 seconds if it works at all.

For such a simple app and game it went from being a pleasant distraction to a chore very quickly. As such, our use has plummeted in turn.

<comment><USER19> Anyone have technical insight into the issues? Non-responsiveness sounds like performance scaling issues.

<comment><USER20> They posted about their infrastructure and mad dash to scale during the launch weeks. [http://code.zynga.com/2012/04/scale-something-how-draw- somet...](http://code.zynga.com/2012/04/scale-something-how-draw-something- rode-its-rocket-ship-of-growth/)

It doesn't talk about current problems, but it may be possible to extrapolate. Still, with user counts going down, scaling problems should be a thing of the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Every smartphone-equipped college student played Robot Unicorn Attack for a month at one point too. It's a pretty well-made game, hilarious, fairly demanding...and absolutely boring after you play it for the 50th time.

At this point, the speed of viral distribution represents both the blessing and the curse of social companies. You can take your exponential growth this month and extrapolate it over the next year, but that doesn't take into account the dozen newcomers that will catch the attention of the fickle 15M next month. When Metcalfe's law works on a scale of weeks instead of years, network effects become more transient and less valuable. Hopefully this helps teach the market that eyeballs alone should not justify an enormous purchase price.

</comment><comment><USER22> I stopped playing it solely because I wholly disagree with Zynga the company and how they operate.

<comment><USER23> i respect people like you alot. company's mission and how they behave before their product.

+1.

<comment><USER24> I find it funny this was being down-voted when I found it. Are we now against the idea of voting with your dollars on what companies you buy from?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I noticed that about a week after Zynga purchased Draw Something, all of my friends stopped playing. I no longer play either.

<comment><USER26> I also stopped for a while, but then I created a throw-away email address and used email signup instead of facebook. It's not convenient, but it lets you play the game again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems odd that a company of that size and experience would stand back and allow such a massive drop. 5 million of 15 million in a month. Ouch.

This drop is " active " users. This is not the end of the world but suggests something bad happened.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Whatever happens with the game now, they've made out like bandits."

Am I the only one who thought 'and jolly good luck to them'?

<comment><USER29> That was my first thought, too; they've got a princely sum out of "the man", by creating a popular product through (no doubt) a lot of hard work, and without (it seems) wilfully screwing anyone over. Good for them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In addition to the limited word list, poor repeat detection and Facebook integration, another thing that probably rubbed some folks the wrong way are the Sponsored Words.

Not everyone wants to draw Doritos, KFC or Coca-Cola.

</comment><comment><USER31> zynga. think one million cold people in a dark room without hope for a light

<comment><USER23> can you imagine it to be a penny stock? they are right now where they were in january.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have to wonder how much of this drop can be attributed directly to Zynga buying it (and their subsequent changes to the app). I know I stopped playing the moment Zynga announced the buyout.

<comment><USER33> I doubt that Zynga is even on the radar for most of those 5m people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> After the acquisition I started getting spam push notifications and promptly deleted the app. Not sure if this was a Zynga move, but it didn't make me want to continue playing the game.

</comment><comment><USER35> I deleted the game the day I found out Zynga was buying them. I refuse to have anything to do with Zynga. I will never play their games, buy their stock or support them in general.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can't help thinking that number would be of use if you were trying to estimate the worldwide cardinality of techno-hipsters.

<comment><USER37> aleph-null? what the fuck?

<comment><USER38> for a finite set, its cardinality is just the number of elements in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think the reason for this is the principle of the game.. with the time it's boring..

</comment><comment><USER40> I am tired of drawing the same things. I bet others are as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> Surely Zynga must have negotiated some earnout agreements or contigency payments in order to mitigate the risk?

</comment><comment><USER42> So Zynga got screwed over. _fake tear_

</comment><comment><USER43> This is simply because of college finals.

</comment><comment><USER44> Also called 'regression to the mean'

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the Zynga acquisition had something to do with the peak.

Social network fatigue started a couple of years ago. That doesn't mean people are ready to ditch social networks outright, but it means that the stupidest abuses are going to leave a sour taste in peoples' mouths, and Zynga is so well associated with these behaviors that, even if people like some of their games, no one likes _them_.

Zynga's asset is that they understand addictive behavior and are probably the world's leading experts in a specific niche, which is the online delivery of addictive (not always high-quality) games through social media, and the monetization thereof. This knowledge is going to be valuable no matter what happens in social media over the next 5 years. Their brand and reputation are decidedly _NOT_ assets. The opposite, actually.

If Zynga's executive team is smart, they're going to stop being a primary publisher and acquirer and start working behind the scenes, like a consultant, using their knowledge without doing brand-damage to the games they work on, because even though 90% of people don't care about a game company's reputation, the people who set trends do, and by 2014 no one will play Zynga games.

<comment><USER46> Zynga didn't buy every other game this year and yet substantially all will have a growth curve shaped like that, with the main question being height at peak. I also think that zynga would lose in the poll "Who makes FarmVille?" to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Kim kardashian, even of you asked active paying players of it rather than regular people.

<comment><USER47> They have billboards up and down 101 advertising some -Ville game all the time. I think the average person around here will know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> And ? Zynga wasn't buying an app. They were buying a team.

<comment><USER23> Not really. They were buying $120,000 per day of an in-app sales. DS was the only OMGPOP hit; had they not succeed financially with DS, Zynga wouldn't have had bought them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> In other words, their timing was perfect. Doubt Zynga had much to do with their downfall, another new game somewhere is gaining millions of users...

<comment><USER50> Looking at ([http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/app_store_apps?id=3781-to...](http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/app_store_apps?id=3781-top- free-apps)), I'd say 100 floors, Rope'n Fly, Sponge Bob.</comment></comment>


Startups learn a painful lesson: The 'Dropbox effect' is a myth - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/06/enterprise-myth/

<comment><USER2> i stopped reading when they described a company bringing in some 'adult supervision'...</comment>


Ask HN: Live translation via Siri + Google Translate? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN; does anyone know if there have been any efforts to combine Siri's voice recognition technology with google translate to allow live on the spot translation to any available language which Siri could then read back aloud?  How has this problem been addressed, and how could it be implemented given the inherent difficulty of combining technology from apple and google? <comment><USER2> Hmm, is there any reason to use Siri over Google's own voice recognition/text to speech stacks? I really doubt there's any significant difference between them in that regard at this point.

I don't think this is a problem worth attempting for anyone except Google at this point - they're pretty much there. Translate has a conversation mode, you choose the languages, and tap which language you're speaking in, it translates to + speaks in the other pretty much instantly. They've just added always listening to the Nexus 5's home screen and to Google Now.

Putting those two together, they pretty much have this working - 'just' add always listening to conversation mode for hardware that will support it (Siri can't do this by the way as far as I know), and then detect which language is being spoken (I suspect Google already have algorithms to get a language for webpages) and translate+speak back as normal.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh cool i didn't realize that translate had that capacity, but what you're talking about is a really elegant solution. thank you.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your experience with a dedicated test team? - <AUTHOR> Does your team use a dedicated test (non-developer) team? What has your experience been with them? Do they add value? Do you find yourself questioning or being impressed by their skills? Do you use an in-house team or a crowdsourced team (like uTest)?
My own experience has been 50/50.
Some testers are really good and they really like getting deep into the system, learning its intricacies and some are very confortable with code, yet they prefer testing instead of development. These testers show you things of your application that surprise you, and even seem to know the system under test better than you.
But others are really stubborn and seem to want to use the latest fad they learned in the latest testing conference. I discovered that the ones that tend to be bad are the ones that follow three prominent consultants of manual testing: Rex Black, James Bach and Michael Bolton, who really play down all forms of automation, especially BDD. <comment><USER2> I think domain knowledge is the most important quality of a good manual tester.

We've had great luck with testers that moved from users to testers. We had a nurse testing as a tester on our clinical app and she was invaluable, we had a geologist testing our seismic applications and she was also invaluable. They also focused on what issues were important in an app, and were great at prioritization.

And we've had cross-domain testers, and they were not as valuable. They seemed to be more nit-picky because they didn't have the domain knowledge to judge what was truly important and what wasn't.

What makes a good automation engineer is pretty similar to what makes a good software engineer.

<comment><USER3> I agree that domain knowledge is essential. Without domain knowledge, testers may spend way too much time testing insignificant scenarios which a user would be very unlikely to perform, while missing obvious problems that every user would run into.

Overall, my experiences with testers has been positive. As a developer under constant time pressure, it's very easy for me to make stupid mistakes that end up causing grief for users. Since unit tests (or any tests written by a developer) can only test scenarios that the developer has actually thought of, it's good that someone else is testing the product from a user's perspective that's not biased by preconceived notions of how the code should behave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think an auxillary testing group is a good idea. Someone who tests all the components as a cohesive whole. Ensuring it acts as expected in terms of businesss expectations.

My experience though has been counter productive though. I expect a bit of lead time, introducing them to the code base. But I had daily meetings covering the code base, and what it was delivering. Then several weeks of meetings mapping out test cases into a spread sheet, with the various results.

There is a fine balance, but when executed properly they are worth it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like having a tester watch my back.

I have been helped by different kinds of testers. I like the guys who keep careful notes, have automation, and can hand the automation code to me so I can reproduce the bug in a split second.

There also was a guy that we hired to do customers who could and would screw anything up and we made him a tester; if he could not screw a system up, nobody could!</comment>


Karma - <AUTHOR> hi, how can I raise my Karma? <comment><USER2> Post interesting stuff.

No, really! That's all there is to it.

Sincerely, smacktoward (45,920 karma)

</comment><comment><USER3> With comments, or submitting interesting stories.

</comment><comment><USER4> post</comment>


CryptoPass – The authentication system of the future - <AUTHOR> https://cryptopass.xyz <comment><USER2> Assuming this uses RSA for symmetric keys, offering "4096 bit keys to ensure the highest level of security." is a rather off-putting statement. The amount of bits of security offered by 4096-bit (Around 140 bits) keys over 2048-bit (112 bits) ones is negligible. You would be better off using ECDSA for security, offering up to 517 bits of security.

</comment><comment><USER3> You wrote this app but didn't want to spend more than $1 on a domain? I would think about that, it is probably not to late to change.</comment>


Ask HN: Banned URL? - <AUTHOR> When I submit this link [1], it says "Sorry, that story was previously submitted." but it doesn't take me to the previous submission like it usually does... and searching for it doesn't give any results.<p>1. https://www.retaildetail.eu/en/news/elektronica/eu-aims-abolish-planned-obsolescence <comment><USER2> Speaking as one with no inside knowledge ...

Sometimes a link can be submitted and then deleted, and sometimes it can be submitted and flagged dead. What you describe is consistent with both of those.

It could be something else.

<comment><USER3> Just mixing some guess too... It looks like it was autokilled [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744642)

@trumped: If you send an email to the mods firstname.lastname@example.com , they can unkill it.</comment></comment>


300 Million and On - <AUTHOR> http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=136782277130 <comment><USER2> "Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter"

Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> earlier thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824657></comment>


Python Developers Survey 2019 Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/python-developers-survey-2019/ <comment><USER2> One statistic that stood out for me was "Professional coding experience":

< 1 year: 29%

1-2 years: 20%

3-5 years: 20%

6-10 years: 14%

11+ years: 17%

\--

That means almost half of the respondents have 2 years or less professional experience with python. Not sure how that influences all the other results.

<comment><USER3> Due to roughly exponential growth in the number of developers of all kind over last couple of decades it is true that at any point most developers have very little experience. I don't remember what was doubling time but I think it was more than two years but less than 5 years. It as also easy to see that the growth is already flattening out with some interesting repercussions in the near future (experienced/inexperienced developers ration finally getting better, etc.)

Doubling time shorter for python developers could be explained to be a result of python getting more popular (so even though programming gets more popular as a job, python grows even faster within developer community).

<comment><USER4> > Due to roughly exponential growth in the number of developers of all kind > over last couple of decades

That is certainly true until ~2010, but I wonder if it still holds today. At some point it's got to taper off due to the global population being finite. Anyone got some data on this?

<comment><USER5> I interview a decent number. At least in my area, college grads have leveled off. There's still a ton of them, maybe 5% growth a year and a lot more applying for first jobs. But its a steady percentage.

There's been a huge jump in code camp grads. Gigantic. And unfortunately the vast majority are not great. We give them coding assignments first, otherwise there's just too many to even sort through. I would say over half are unable to complete the (very simple) coding assignment. Build 3 API endpoints in any language that can do a couple different sorts and limits of a static set of data in CSV.

<comment><USER3> I work in a large corp as a senior developer/tech lead. I interview 1-2 candidates every week. These are typically people who either passed screening or are already employed by an external company. Unfortunately, I have little influence on that process (remember... Big Co...)

Because I typically hire for more senior roles I get candidates with 5 years of experience at the minimum.

Roughly 4 out of 5 candidates do not know answer to ANY of these questions:

\- What is virtual memory?

\- Can you pass data to another process by passing a pointer to the data? (tricky, but generally processes have separate address spaces unless you put extra effort to have part of the space mapped to same address, using shared memory, mmap, etc.)

\- Can you explain what is a breakpoint? (an instruction injected by debugging program that stops execution and causing an interrupt that causes OS to call debugger)

\- Can a process allocate more memory than is physically available on the host?

\- Is inserting random integers into a huge sorted array faster or slower than inserting into singly linked list (absent any indexes)? (Inserting to array list will require huge data copy but linear search over linked list is so much slower it will cause linked list to be slower than array every time).

\- Please, write a program to group an input list of words into lists of anagrams.

Etc.

<comment><USER5> HN community is quite self selected. The average engineer I've met chose their career for the money and isn't interested in much that's not right in front of them

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Glad to see Flask surpass Django, it's always been my favorite web framework regardless of language and forces users to learn their style of software architecture. I personally prefer MVC: [https://github.com/esteininger/flask- mvc-boilerplate](https://github.com/esteininger/flask-mvc-boilerplate)

<comment><USER7> Oh god. I would not recommend that git repo to anyone. It is doing a lot wrong.

Look at exploreflask.com for a great example on how to structure production grade flask applications. Read the flask docs, the later sections deal with the create_app factory function and how to use it. It is really good in that sense.

<comment><USER6> thanks for that link! that's my repo and what i've historically used for projects, have been looking for a good framework :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it only my, or the color scheme for some plots (e.g. Python version) is atrocious from the UX perspective? (Small differences in shades, making it hard to read.)

good UX != pretty colors

</comment><comment><USER9> Well... type hinting does not seem to be very popular

<comment><USER10> At 65% of developers using it at least sometimes, it seems surprisingly widespread.

Now obviously this survey is going to be somewhat self selected among devs that like to keep up to date and try new things, but 65% having used it in some capacity is pretty comparable to Typescript: [https://2019.stateofjs.com/javascript- flavors/typescript/](https://2019.stateofjs.com/javascript- flavors/typescript/)

<comment><USER11> The survey has 75% of users on python 3 in 2017, when a good half of popular libraries still didn't support python 3 at all.

It's clearly skewed toward devs on the bleeding edge.

<comment><USER12> I mostly use Python for web development and I've stopped using Python 2 for that with 3.5, so in early 2016, but I do remember that some machine learning or data analysis tools were stuck on Py2 for a little longer.

I definitely wouldn't say that half of popular libraries in general didn't support python 3 at all back then, but for some use cases that may have been true tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Happy to see Rust crawl in into top languages list :)

</comment><comment><USER14> web development seems to be twice as popular as ML use. Anyone knows why?

Given node.js is known to be much faster while still offering the dev speed of a scripting language. I love python for algorithms and DevOps scripts but feel afraid of using for web as it might end up with huge cost for hosting (higher CPU power)

<comment><USER15> python has a sane packaging ecosystem and type system.

CPU power is cheap and developers are not.

<comment><USER16> Until 7 years down the line you have to round up a team of your most experienced engineers and add some to figure out how to scale the frecking' thing.

<comment><USER17> This is an outcome most startups pray they are lucky enough to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man I can't believe BBEdit didn't make the editor list!</comment>


Reasons Why San Francisco is the Worst Place Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/reasons-why-san-francisco-is-the-worst-place-ever

<comment><USER2> The same thing is happening to London: www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking- man/10744997/Cool-London-is-dead-and-the-rich-kids-are-to-blame.html</comment>


Amazon ECS vs. Joyent Triton - <AUTHOR> http://stackshare.io/convox/amazon-ecs-vs-joyent-triton <comment><USER2> This was exactly my experience when creating the architecture for my last startup. Joyent's GUI, instance management, and fast helpful support were invaluable and kept their promise of 100% uptime over a 9 month period (unlike AWS, Heroku, and Linode who all gave us downtime during that same period).

The security features of SmartOS can not be understated. Managing an AWS stack seems archaic in comparison, but AWS does seem cheap and more flexible at first glance. I think it's too easy these days to overcomplicate a stack with AWS and/or Docker, and Joyent has picked the right pain points to streamline. I'm using Joyent in my new ventures without hesitation.

<comment><USER3> Author of the post here.

Nice to hear more Joyent success stories!

How do you handle load balancing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worry about Joyent as a company. They have very interesting talent, but end up doing some sketchy things.

For years, they successfully positioned themselves as a "competitor" to AWS in the press. But at the time, they were a simple hosting provider with no API and no self-provisioning. Of course, the press didn't know any better and kept printing that they were a competitor. But even today, Gartner doesn't even consider them a competitor to AWS.

[http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2IH2LGI&c...](http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2IH2LGI&ct=150626&st=sb)

Triton seems to be a _very_ limited port of "Docker" to their custom version of Solaris. For example, it supports only one "\--volumes-from" argument per container. And I'd be worried running on an OS supported by basically one company.

[https://www.joyent.com/developers/triton- faq](https://www.joyent.com/developers/triton-faq)

It's also important to note that their S3 knock-off has had an embarrassing 8-day outage. Oops. They literally didn't have any backups, because they didn't think they needed them with ZFS!

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent- services-back-after-8-day-outage/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I'm the CTO for Joyent.

Normally I wouldn't respond to something that is so clearly a troll, but I wouldn't want someone to stumble on this and confuse what you've said for the truth. So at the risk of feeding the trolls...

First, the Gartner magic quadrant that you quoted is for cloud storage, not for cloud infrastructure as a service. We _are_ in the MQ for cloud infrastructure as a service[1], in which Gartner has this to say about us:

 _Joyent has long been an advocate of OS containers, and the growing popularity of container technologies, especially Docker, has been beneficial both for its service and software businesses. Joyent 's architecture is well- suited to running containers securely within a multitenant environment, and it is one of the first providers to launch a Docker-based container service. Because Joyent maintains a single codebase across its own service offerings and the cloud infrastructure framework software that it sells, customers can more easily consume Joyent technology in a hybrid fashion._

Now, to be fair, we're by no means AWS-sized and we're not trying to be everything to all people -- which Gartner also points out, under "Cautions":

 _Joyent focuses on developing its own technology, and has a track record of releasing innovative capabilities. However, it faces a long-term challenge to compete against providers with greater development resources. Joyent has a capable basic cloud IaaS offering, but its feature set is strongly oriented toward cloud-native use cases, and it is highly developer-centric._

On the particular point of "worry about Joyent as a company", Gartner adds:

 _Joyent needs an ecosystem of third-party tools that support its platform, along with a software marketplace, and managed and professional service partners. Although Joyent can take advantage of the growing Docker ecosystem, it must find ways to bring that ecosystem to its platform, and that ecosystem will not by itself be sufficient to support customer needs._

I feel that that's a pretty balanced view: we have been longtime advocates of containers; we're focused on hybrid-cloud and Docker use cases; and we have the challenges endemic to being a much smaller player relative to AWS, Google and Microsoft.

As for the limitations of Triton and the divergences from Docker, we are very explicit about them[2]. Yes, there are limitations (e.g., missing support for "docker build"), but what is there is production-grade -- and we're busily working on filling in the gaps. (Which, given the degree to which the entire ecosystem is in flux, is better than par for the course.) Further, if you look at the enthusiasm in the community[3][4], it's clear that the choices we've made in Triton solve real production problems.

Finally, in terms of that 8-day outage from over seven years ago: Joyent divested from that service six years ago.[5] In its stead, we built Manta, a container-oriented storage service that has been in production since 2013.[6] I'm not seeking to defend the outage that you refer to (though it pre-dates me personally at the company and I know very few of the technical details surrounding it), but it's important to put it in its context -- and to make clear that this hasn't been Joyent's storage offering for the better half of a decade.

[1] [http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2G2O5FC&c...](http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519&st=sb)

[2] [https://docs.joyent.com/public- cloud/containers/docker/diver...](https://docs.joyent.com/public- cloud/containers/docker/divergence)

[3] [https://twitter.com/ahl/status/626801451663294465](https://twitter.com/ahl/status/626801451663294465)

[4] [https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/626840507235311617](https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/626840507235311617)

[5] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-sells-strongspace-and- bin...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-sells-strongspace-and-bingodisk-to- expandrive)

[6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939340)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dunno. From the viewpoint of "ease of use" AWS definitely can use a layer to improve things.

<comment><USER3> Author of the post here. I agree. But that has always been the case. My best understanding is that AWS focuses on system correctness and leaves experience to the ecosystem.</comment></comment>


The Hitchhiker's Guide to D3.js - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@enjalot/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-d3-js-a8552174733a <comment><USER2> Great article, even for those with some experience already.

Thought I'd drop this here: site I helped create that uses d3 to create interactive visualizations from csv files [https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/](https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/)

<comment><USER3> Watched the demo video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auIdJfTKfWo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auIdJfTKfWo&feature=youtu.be)

Really impressive!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I loved D3 until I used highcharts. I find highscharts just fits the general case better and has options that are straightforward to enable/implement, comparatively.

Here's a completely worthless comparison article (one of many):

[https://www.slant.co/versus/10577/11579/~d3-js_vs_highcharts](https://www.slant.co/versus/10577/11579/~d3-js_vs_highcharts)

</comment><comment><USER5> I needed to quickly create a graph in the browser that updated as a simulation ran, and found using Dimple along with d3 was quick and easy.

[http://dimplejs.org](http://dimplejs.org)

</comment><comment><USER6> The guide does a good job of, "here's some concept, explained in order". But after finished reading I'm left with the question, "So how do I start?" (especially making use of the concepts already explained in sequence, e.g. d3-scale -> d3-shape -> d3.selection)

It's like reading a list of concepts for some new programming language, and then you get the idea, but then there's no, "You need to download the IDE here, create a Main.mylang file, and type func main(args) {...}, and click Run"

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is learning D3.js, I tried to collect most on useful resources here: [http://p.migdal.pl/2016/02/09/d3js-icm- kfnrd.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2016/02/09/d3js-icm-kfnrd.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is by far the best introduction to D3 I've ever seen.</comment>


Ask HN:  Brainstorm buddies - <AUTHOR>

Steve Blank says it's a good idea to find "Brainstorm buddies".<p>Who's interested in meeting up for a beer and having brainstorm sessions to help each other's businesses? <comment><USER2> I was actually thinking today after I read his blog post about having a web app for this. Could be interesting for people living outside startup hubs.</comment>


Heat Your Home with Data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/re-form/heat-your-home-with-data-ab27fe7d6f01

<comment><USER2> Wow is this such a bad article. I'm still not even sure what exactly Orsini and his startup aim to accomplish.

"That's the basic idea behind Orsini's startup, Project Exergy: rather than transporting electricity across power lines to generate our heat — and wasting most of the power in the process — Exergy proposes that households and business can generate the heat they need onsite, using computation"

Computation uses electricity...

</comment><comment><USER3> I have AdDetector extension installed and it gave me a prominent warning at the top of the page saying:

>[AdDetector] This page is an ad paid for by BMW

</comment><comment><USER4> I've thought through this idea a few times (cloud processing in people's homes for heating). It's pretty hard to make the economics work out. You can bring down hardware costs using older processor tech, which is ok since you don't care about efficiency. Alternately you put a shit ton of mobile phone processors on a board. You also need some really advanced software systems if you want to do any real processing and be robust to random failure of nodes. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm skeptical. Cryptomining doesn't seem like a sufficient return these days, and if you're using electricity over gas it's a total no-go.

It's the sort of idea that my physics background loves (why the hell are we turning so much energy straight into entropy all the time instead of doing useful work first?) but pragmatically it doesn't seem to work out.

As a side note, if you want to be fun at parties talk about your computer as your new 100% efficient space heater :)

</comment><comment><USER5> The article is so bad I can't tell whether they are somehow arguing that computers should be made "more efficient" at making heat (news flash, they are already 100% efficient at that) or whether it's an infrastructure proposal where they are arguing that data centers should be farmed out into peoples homes and thus keep them warm...

<comment><USER6> I'm not reassured by the fact that it links to [http://ramblings.jamestindall.info/post/102216847/1mb-1-lump...](http://ramblings.jamestindall.info/post/102216847/1mb-1-lump- of-coal) as a source. That page manages to overestimate the energy cost of data transmission by _9 orders of magniture_ by confusing milliwatt-hours with megawatt-hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Data" doesn't make (much) heat. Data processing might. Calculation certainly does.

I heat some of my house with cryptocurrency miners (which are not cost- effective to run during warm months, but in the winter are as effective as space heaters, and slightly offset their cost to operate with cryptocurrency returns). If there were a service that provided computation for a few and paid people with big GPUs to run it, that'd be really cool. I'd like for my computers to be doing something a bit more useful to the world than "proof-of- work" for a handful of also-ran cryptocurrencies. (I also have some Bitcoin ASICs, but they produce so little revenue that I don't run them anymore, even in the winter.)

<comment><USER5> Do the miners also offset their investment cost? It seems that, depending on how expensive they are, it _may_ be a better solution to just run the space heater.

<comment><USER7> Did mine? Pretty close to it, at least when Bitcoin was high. Would they today? Certainly not. I bought my ASICs and within a couple of months had recouped about 80% of the cost, and probably another 5% in the following couple of months before I turned them off due to heat. The GPU miners continued to make a reasonable amount of money by using currency hopping pools. But, they probably reached only about 65% of being recouped. Now, it would take a couple of winters to make another 5% back (but, since I'd be running heaters anyway, it might still work out OK...or, I may still be better off selling the GPUs, since they are still roughly current generation technology (I have a mix of R270, R280, and R290). I bought before the demand drove prices up, but still it was a pretty big chunk of change compared to the four or five space heaters they could replace.

I certainly don't recommend mining. I got involved partly for the experience, as I was writing a novel that included Bitcoin oriented stuff, and partly for the GPU (I wanted a better gaming system anyway, so one 290 was getting purchased, no matter what), and partly for the gold rush (knowing it was probably a poor investment).

But, it seems like there _ought_ to be a system that pays people for their GPU cycles. Though what they'd be doing is up in the air. I can't think of much that doesn't also require fast communication. Folding@Home and SETI@Home are cool, but don't pay, which is unfortunate, since I don't run these things without something offsetting the electrical cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you are otherwise heating your home using electrical heating, then this is correct. However, heat pumps are more than 100% "efficient". Using X electrical energy you can heat your home more than 2X. Don't replace a heat pump with computers.

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://mobile.eweek.com/servers/german-company-offers-to- hea...](http://mobile.eweek.com/servers/german-company-offers-to-heat-homes- with-cloud-servers.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Microsoft proposed this in 2011: [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1502...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=150265)

</comment><comment><USER11> In the summer I'm guessing heat would just be vented outside, eh?

<comment><USER12> Or used for domestic hot water, which is done in some data centers.</comment></comment>


Will YC fund non-American startups? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> This is answered in our faq: <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, there quite a few now. Hey San, Auctomatic and a lot in the summer round.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone for your responses :) I was worried about the visas, but I think I need to focus on the hacking instead..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response sharpshoot. Would anyone know if there were any folks from India?

<comment><USER4> View3 are 2/3 Indian, I believe. Also on student visas at Stanford, if I recall correctly.

<comment><USER4> But, I understand getting a work visa can be challenging and time-consuming. Temporary for the 3 months might not be as big of a problem...Auctomatic came from England for YC and only stayed 90 days (with plans to return ASAP). Maybe Kulveer or Harj will chime in with what they had to go through to make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does YC help with the visas?</comment>


Show HN: Eschersket.ch – a symmetry drawing app to design custom wrapping paper - <AUTHOR> https://eschersket.ch <comment><USER2> This is an example butterfly kaleidoscope design: [https://eschersket.ch/s/aff6c357dc17153fe3d973ca23f9a0c2](https://eschersket.ch/s/aff6c357dc17153fe3d973ca23f9a0c2)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was fun. Thank you for sharing. I found myself sufficiently distracted.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should consider adding gradients in addition to flat colors!</comment>


Magic Leap says it will debut its product . . . "hopefully soonish" - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/12/magic-leap-says-it-will-debut-its-product-hopefully-soonish/ <comment><USER2> If they are already manufacturing it and it's that unique then why wouldn't they want to show it? At that point no one is going to beat them to market.

The longer they wait the more it seems like snake oil.</comment>


Stop complaining - <AUTHOR> http://outofcomfortzone.net/2015/07/27/stop-complaining/ <comment><USER2> I've stuck by this principal both online and offline for a long time now & I'm a lot happier and more positive from it.

The only downside I've noticed personally is that as your personal grievances decrease and you become less of a whingebag (technical term), other peoples' complaints and whines become far duller and tedious to listen to than before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps there is a karmic build up of complaints that gathers over time and people end up blurting out complaints when the right circumstances allow it. Twitter is a petri dish for complaining because it is trivial to setup a vent account and just start whining. In other situations complaining is subdued for whatever reason...</comment></comment>