Ask HN: cofounders as couples ? - <AUTHOR> Just curious (really) - are there cofounders on HN that are also in couple ?<p>Note that I'm not looking for pros and cons on the situation, more wondering if our situation is very common or not :) <comment><USER2> If you're in a startup and happen to be married, your spouse _is_ a cofounder whether you like it or not. So are the spouses of all the founders.

This applies both from a legal perspective and an emotional one. Plan for it. Write it in to the original agreement. Don't wait for divorce or (worst case) death to find out how much trouble this can cause.

I have to say though, having my wife actually involved, for us, makes everything better. Its much easier to bear the risks and make tough decisions with each other's support. Your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER3> Disagree. Your wife is an investor and there are legal and emotional issues to consider, but they otherwise aren't remotely like a co-founder.

<comment><USER4> That depends on how you choose to manage your company, your work/life balance, and your family system. Erin isn't a pro-forma "cofounder" of my company, but the more involved we've had her get, the smoother things have functioned for us.

Your mileage will clearly vary.

I've worked with founders whose spouses were completely disconnected from the company. They managed the "home front", took care of the kids, made sure the bills got paid.

I've also worked with founders whose spouses were part of the fabric of the company.

It just totally depends, Tony.

<comment><USER3> Oh, THAT I agree with. I know two husband-wife teams who are badass... And a few more where the wife participates in varying ways but has a day job.

I was taking issue with the "your wife IS your co-founder, whether you like it or not".

My wife has a job and has had no involvement with RescueTime other than a bit o' moral support. If that makes her a co-founder "whether I like it or not", then I have a bunch of good friends and a few family members who fit the bill, too. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My wife and I cofounded our company. She is very good at product development and relationship building and I handle the technical side.

Plus since we have a near psychic connection our meetings are very short.

</comment><comment><USER6> My wife and I have been co-founders of our nights/weekends startup from day one. She runs customer support (phone and e-mail) and is the prototype "seller" in our online marketplace. I handle product development, marketing, finances and some front-end design.

We spend most evenings laptop-to-laptop in "Genlighten World Headquarters" (our daughter's old bedroom.) Last night we worked the booth together at a startup demo event. It was tremendous fun and particularly exhilirating to be doing it as a couple.

Our CTO lives in another part of the US, and so far (~2 years) we haven't experienced any obvious problems with the couple + third founder arrangement.

Bottom line: it works for us.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes, late at night, maybe you're pair programming with your co-founder and your hands accidentally touch. And before you know it you're in a full-on agile scrum, burning down the back log, one of you the chicken, one of you the pig.

It happens. It's extreme.

<comment><USER4> Ew.

<comment><USER7> You never wondered why most people selected for YC are twentysomething men?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Erin isn't my cofounder, but she works for us full-time (both of us in technical roles). It works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing - are you just the two of you or are there more people working with you as founders ?

<comment><USER4> The company's 5 years old; we have a lot of people. I have two cofounders (Dave & Jeremy), both in NYC (we're in Chicago). When we started, Erin had a different job outside Matasano.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My parents started a company together. My mom had more drive and interest in managing, so as they grew she became CEO while my dad continued to tinker with IT. They've been working together for ~16 years, their company is doing OK, but my dad hasn't seemed happy about the situation in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I run a company that makes money.

My wife works for me and I work for her and it works great.

She is on my board so she is part of the team that can fire me.

She does the books (accounting) for the company so she works for me.

She's a very smart person and I value her opinion and every time she says that we should get someone else to do the books I say no because then she'd be less connected to the company and her board value would go down.

I do not think this will work for everyone. I suspect it works for us because we are a team in our marriage and we know it and own it. I pity the fool that messes with us, we're a team.

BTW, I agree with the comments that said that if you are in a startup your spouse is there too. When we got going I always got the permission of the spouse to hire the person. It's the right thing to do in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER10> My wife helps me get perspective on lots of problems. She's not technical so it's good for me to solicit her views.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's something that I find truely useful too. Cécile is less technical than me too, but she's very helpful on this.

When you're stuck, going back to the "why" and finding another way is very precious IMO.

<comment><USER11> I'm running a single founder startup and my wife is definitely filling in as a cofounder when it comes to helping me stay focused, talking me through problems, and basically just keeping me motivated. Every time I start getting distracted she brings me back around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ivan and Abby Kirigin of the (now defunct) TipJoy seemed to do pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have a life outside of the startup. You really shouldn't talk business 24x7.

Some investors are assholes about women. Some investors have scar tissue from other couples. That is largely an incorrect view - when founders that are just friends break up a company, there is no reason to hate friends who are founders.

My rubric for picking a wife was more rigorous than picking a cofounder could possibly be. I have no idea how people find cofounders beyond long-term friends.

</comment><comment><USER14> My longtime gf and I co-own our business. I run the technical side, she runs the business side. It works well, but you definitely need a strong relationship for it to work.

Also, since I do business in China and I'm a white foreigner, her presence as a native mainlander is absolutely essential. I have yet to meet a successful foreign entrepreneur here who does not have a native romantic+business partner helping him/her.

</comment><comment><USER15> My wife and I are co-founders of our company. She handles the non-technical side, and I handle the technical side.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just curious: are you sometimes trying to share the know-how (ie: her getting more technical a bit, and the other way round) ?

I'm asking because we're doing that a bit. The idea here is not to ensure she would be able to implement difficult features, but maybe deploy a simple ruby site on her own, or hack more css/html so that we're a bit more interchangeable.

What's your opinion on that ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Collis & Cyan from Envato are an awesome and successful married founder team.

An interview with them is here: [http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/news/birthday-interview- wit...](http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/news/birthday-interview-with-envato- founders-collis-and-cyan/)

</comment><comment><USER17> When one of my businesses took a major nosedive in 2003, my wife worked for me, she did the bookkeeping while I tried to keep the business alive (successfully, in the end). We fought a lot, but I have always appreciated that time -- I think it was a big help to our relationship for her to understand some of the ins and outs of business life.

We also have 'overshared' about business; for a few years of my life in a previous startup, she put in 3+ hours a day talking / planning / processing with me. That was not a good plan for us; my (unsolicited) advice: have some outside-of-work hobbies with your co-founding spouse so that end-of-job for one of you does not equal end of relationship.

</comment><comment><USER18> My favorite restaurant (Rachel, in Jersey City) was just such a situation. The hostess/owner and the cook were dating. They broke up.

I miss their shakshuka, french toast, the brie and avocado sandwiches. Anyone know where to get good (and spicy) Shakshuka in NYC?

<comment><USER19> The Hummus Place (several locations throughout Manhattan) has great Shakshouka. They also have amazing hummus. Explains their name, I suppose ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's your own take? Good/bad idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's a very good idea in our specific case :)

Pros: \- we're used to talking together a lot, including on topics that usually matter a lot for a startup: money-management, how to grow something in a sustainable fashion, bootstrapping, risk, handling conflict, trade-offs, brainstorming, ... \- we're both in 'we want more time to accomplish things in trade of less money for everyday' mode \- we've worked together already on difficult projects and it worked out really well \- we're complementary on some topics and unique on others (I'm more technical / product owner, she's more business + brick and mortar) \- validating an idea takes much less effort in this mode for us, apparently

Cons: \- split work/home life properly takes hard work :) We've been doing plenty of personal development over the years \- you have to ensure each one stays independent (money-wise) in case something bad happens between us (never know)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It can work well or it can be that one day you wake up next to your business partner instead of your wife.

The chances of that happening are larger as you get more successful.

I've tried this in one of my '9 lives', I will not try it again.

</comment><comment><USER22> Our startup Webnographer is run by my partner and me. It works well. We have had the funny situation of having separate hotel rooms booked, as a client did not know that we where together.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've run into several happy founding couples (not married, just dating). They rarely publicize it, so at first glance it seems to be less common than it actually is.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm pretty sure Ravelry was founded by a couple.

<comment><USER25> On the other anecdotal side Bebo was founded by a husband wife team as well. They seem to be successful on both sides

Other side of that anecdote. Flickr was started by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield who are now divorced.

<comment><USER25> oh but back on the good side. Six Apart is a husband wife team

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cisco Systems was started by a married couple, Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack.

</comment><comment><USER27> The founders of SixApart (TypePad, Vox, etc.) are married. She originally did the design, he wrote the code. They're still married.</comment>


Seesmic responds to the new Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seesmic.com/2010/09/congratulations-to-our-friends-at-twitter-for-their-new-web-client.html

<comment><USER2> I think that kind of read:

"Dude, you fucked me bad.Real Bad-But,hey- I am still alive!"</comment>


Ask HN: How do Swipely and Blippy get their data? - <AUTHOR>

I couldn't find this online, but was wondering how they were going about pulling people's purchases?<p>I doubt all or any banks have apis. Are they then simply scraping data by using the customers log-in info? <comment><USER2> Probably the similar to how Mint and inDinero works; they use a third party service (such as Yodlee) which provide aggregation of financial data.

There was a thread about this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537825></comment>


Elementary Graph Theory and Networks: The one-way street theorem - <AUTHOR> http://11011110.livejournal.com/226483.html

<comment><USER2> The wikipedia article that's linked there is much more informative than the blog post. Please, link to original source.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_theorem>

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered that, and first submitted the WP article. But then I looked at the first line or two of each, and thought that the blog post was more engaging that the WP article. The WP article is then one click away, but the blog post loads quickly, gives an immediate sense of what it's about, and includes the essence of the proof.

So in the end I thought, after consideration, that the blog post was the better thing to submit. I felt it added some value, and wasn't a totally content-free wrapper. Yes, there's more in the WP article, but it feels like it requires more digging. If you're in a hurry and it might not be of interest or relevance to you, I think the blog post is the better item.</comment></comment>


Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU - <AUTHOR> https://justin.searls.co/posts/gaming-with-a-mac-plus-egpu/ <comment><USER2> I know this is about games, but I wanted to relay my experience using an eGPU (using the Razer enclosure and an AMD RX Vega 64) in a professional context.

I had a good performance boost using Photoshop and Maya. But if you're using a portable MacBook Pro that you're connecting every day, I wouldn't recommend it. The connect/disconnect experience is really flaky, and you'll probably spend a few times a week trying to figure out why the eGPU isn't connecting/disconnecting.

I switched to a Mac Mini at work (stock GPU build of course) with the same enclosure and graphics card, and the experience has been pretty delightful. If you're doing visual stuff, it's the budget version of a Mac Pro. It seemed to improve overall OSX responsiveness too, but perhaps that's just the new Mac Mini in action.

I still use the old MacBook Pro at home, but it's not my daily machine. Now I don't have to carry a bag to work, and my home laptop can cover things in a pinch. Using a desktop machine at the office for work has improved my work- life balance, and my productivity.

<comment><USER3> I've been using an eGPU (15" 2018 MBP i9, RX 580, 10.14.x) for over half a year and only ran into connect/disconnect issues once. If you're having disconnect issues I'd urge you to see if killing the QuickLookUIService process causes the eGPU to immediately disconnect. If it does, you probably have a buggy QuickLook plugin with one or more apps. In my case there was a QuickLook plugin from a recently installed trial app that was preventing the eGPU from disconnecting. I uninstalled the app and everything went back to normal. I've googled around and it appears like other people are also having this issue with QuickLookUIService. Hope this helps.

I love my 2018 MBP + eGPU setup to the point that I chuckle whenever I see people claiming how awful these MBPs are. I've finally reached computing nirvana. The i9/32GB RAM in my MBP is powerful enough for me needs at home and on the go. The eGPU makes for a great dock and access to a more powerful GPU at home. It has built-in gigabit ethernet, an SSD, and several USB 3.1 ports.

<comment><USER4> The comment regarding QuickLookUIService is interesting. Not because I use an eGPU but because QuickLookUIService is always reported as using significant energy on my mid 2014 15" MBP.

This has encouraged me to dig deeper and to try to find the reason for this once more.

<comment><USER3> I found my problematic quick look plugin by running ```qlmanage -m plugins``` and doing a hack binary search where possible. I identified 3rd party plugins, assumed the problem was there, then disabled half of them by temporarily removing the associated apps. It only took a few iterations over a couple of days of casual use to pinpoint the culprit and the problem has not returned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Loved this post. But I'd recommend to not try this at home. You'll end up spending way too much money, and wasting way too much time.

Just grab a PC or console for gaming. Trying to game on a Mac is just swimming upstream, without the payoff. Apple does not want you.

<comment><USER6> Not really.

Apple supports EGPU's natively, and they also have native drivers for AMD cards.

Literally plug and play on MacOS.

On Windows, depending on which Mac you have it ranges from plug and play (update drivers) to basically what the author wrote here.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but most of the games are on win, and egpu's on bootcamp are not so P&P. Been there, done that. Lots of wasted time :(

[edit] especialy enoying "Error 12". As article mentions:

There is a really good chance, however, that you'll see a yellow exclamation point over the GPU's icon, and instead of "This device is working properly", you'll be greeted by "Error 12" and a message that the device doesn't have sufficient resources (read: either memory addressing or bandwidth) to be used. If you see this, your GPU won't engage at all, and you'll have to troubleshoot it. There are a bunch of ideas in this thread, but what will work for you depends on a combination of factors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gaming on Mac is okay if you have a good time manually editing files with magic strings from the internet to trick the OS into using an appropriate resolution/refresh rate, and ultimately ending up with noticable input lag.

I went from gaming on a $6k mac pro to gaming on a $1k Alienware and realized I'd been playing in the kids pool the whole time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would refrain from saying "gaming on MacBook" because it creates confusion about whether one is using Windows or macOS.

When playing on Windows (Bootcamp) the MacBook is just a regular Intel based hardware, the experience is no different from using any other laptop out there (aside from Windows install process).

Playing on macOS that's another story. Mouse acceleration can not be disabled, switching to and from fullscreen games is sometimes buggy, and not many popular names are available natively on macOS.

<comment><USER10> Tangentially, I know of killmouseaccel[1] which does exactly what it says: disables mouse acceleration on macOS. However, it needs to be executed at every restart, or deamonized.

[1] [https://github.com/docwhat/killmouseaccel](https://github.com/docwhat/killmouseaccel)

<comment><USER11> SteerMouse, among other things, has a nice total bypass for it. Here, I am just using the raw DPI and linear movement of my mouse: [https://i.imgur.com/xEEjjVD.png](https://i.imgur.com/xEEjjVD.png)

[http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/](http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/)

They have a more focused product too, but I haven't tried that personally: [http://plentycom.jp/en/cursorsense/](http://plentycom.jp/en/cursorsense/)

\---

As I understand it, Windows too has mouse-acceleration that remains (rather subtly) even after disabling "Enhance pointer precision" in Control Panel. When I was into competitive gaming, there was a Registry fix doing the rounds that got rid of it completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The sheer frustration and potential undiscovered bugs of getting gaming to work with a GPU on a Mac caused me to give up trying to game on a desktop.

Which is actually perfectly fine unless you need 4k60fps or 1440p144fps, which I do not. I originally started gaming on the PC a decade ago when many games and sales were PC only: the gaming market is at a place now where the game selection and prices between consoles and PCs are similar. There isn't anything on a PC/Mac I'm missing that I can't get on my PS4 Pro (or even a mobile device!).

<comment><USER13> FPS games are a joke on console, if you're into shooty shooty bang-bang type games.

In fairness, gaming has never (Last decade at least...) been the intended purpose of Mac

<comment><USER14> I don't know if they're a joke. There are quite a few players out there who seem to like it just fine. But I, on the other hand, am absolutely a joke trying to play FPS games with a controller. I need a keyboard and mouse or I can barely play at all. There are ways to hook up a keyboard and mouse to some consoles and some games, but it's generally considered "cheating".

Doesn't matter anyway. My reflexes aren't what they were when I was a teenager.

<comment><USER15> From what I remember, console fps games will snap your aim on to targets because its next to impossible to properly aim with a joystick.

<comment><USER16> I feel like auto-aim has always been kind of a sad hack, in that it's done on consoles but not on PC, so it effectively isolates console multiplayer from PC multiplayer.

I feel like a more "proper" solution would be to come up with shooty-shooty bang-bang game mechanics where "ability to aim with finesse at the things you're shooting at" is mechanically irrelevant, so that "aiming at things" isn't really a part of the console _or_ the PC experience. I.e., design the game so that, despite complete ignorance of your input method, there is still absolutely no advantage in using a mouse compared to a joystick.

Any ideas on how such a thing could be accomplished?

• Maybe a game could snap all the _people_ to a 3D voxel grid. You'd move smoothly, but your "shadow" would always exist within a certain voxel; and you'd always see everyone else over the network as popping between voxels. To shoot someone, you just have to target the right voxel.

• Maybe a game could give people, instead of hitscan _line_ guns, extruded hitscan _beam_ weapons of some diameter. Everyone is blowing 1m-wide holes in one-another [and the terrain] with giant laser cannons. I'd play that!

<comment><USER17> > I feel like a more "proper" solution would be to come up with shooty-shooty > bang-bang game mechanics where "ability to aim with finesse at the things > you're shooting at" is mechanically irrelevant, so that "aiming at things" > isn't really a part of the console or the PC experience

The thing is, even if you remove the finesse, mouse may well STILL have an advantage. I can whip a mouse around to do a 180 far quicker than I can on a controller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now if only Apple stopped crippling OpenGL in an affort to push Metal, maybe we would get better games.

This is Microsoft's playbook from a couple of decades ago.

<comment><USER19> OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The only alternative they had was Vulkan. And Vulkan is not perfect either. Personally I prefer Metal to Vulkan. It's very easy to transition from OpenGL to Metal, it feels like an improved API without global state and packing stuff into structs. Meanwhile Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you and you suddenly have to worry about memory barriers, image transitions, semaphores/synchronization, even in the simplest of applications.

<comment><USER20> > OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically.

The OpenGL 4.6 spec was released four months ago with new features and extensions come out all the time.

> Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you

Vulkan's API is unnecessarily ugly, it gives the impression of a low level API with all the structs and such but in reality the driver just picks up data from those structs to move around. In real low level APIs you use structs because they are memory mapped and/or aligned pretty much as the hardware expects it, but Vulkan is a hardware agnostic API.

And yeah, Metal is probably a better API but it is also only available on Mac which makes it a no-go for pretty much everyone outside the Apple bubble.

Personally i'll stick with OpenGL for the time being. I do not need much of the fancy stuff newer OpenGL versions have anyway (i don't do AAA-game level rendering) and i do not see OpenGL being dropped any time soon from any sane platform.

When it comes to Apple's stuff i'll decide between writing a small OpenGL wrapper myself for the functionality it use or just dropping the platform altogether when the time comes and they drop support for the API. Considering they still support Carbon (even if only for 32 bit programs), it might be a while until they drop OpenGL though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why does no one bother talking about eGPU behaviour with mac native games? Believe it or not, there are a few.

<comment><USER22> Probably because it's the wrong tool for the job. If you want to play games, a Mac is easily one of the worst ways to do that.

The eGPU method of bolting functionality onto a platform which doesn't want it is only neat on a technical level at best. It is essentially the world's biggest dongle.

<comment><USER23> > _The eGPU method of bolting functionality onto a platform which doesn 't > want it is only neat on a technical level at best._

It's neat on every level. To quote the article:

> _" …you are now able to take a top-of-the-line gaming GPU, seat it inside an > external box, plug that box into your computer, and—using a single high- > bandwidth cable—push the necessary instructions to render 4K games at 60 > frames per second on the card before (over the very same cable!) pushing > those frames back to your notebook's built-in monitor without introducing > any perceptible latency."_

I know God intended for us to use PCI cards by opening up cases and inserting them into slots on a motherboard, but it's incredibly cool to be able to just plug one in like a USB device.

<comment><USER24> But "just plugging in one USB device" wasn't even what happened in this post. The amount of steps described inside literally were 10x what it takes to just build a PC, boot it, install games and play

<comment><USER25> Huh? There were two steps to get macOS working.

      1) Put GPU in enclosure
      2) Plug Thunderbolt 3 cable into enclosure and MBP

Perhaps you're referring to the novel written on how to make BootCamp Windows work with the eGPU?

<comment><USER24> ...all of which is because the drivers/config are proprietary

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had a eGPU box with a GTX 1060 for months, but was using it for Windows 10 and a zbook 15 notebook. Unfortunately there is no Mac support for NVIDIA but some users get it working themselves - never tried it as it looked a bit to cumbersome for my taste. On Windows 10 the setup worked great. Was able to play games like PUBG or Quake Champions with decent (Medium) settings at Full HD and a reasonable framerate (I believe usually 70-90 FPS). But in the end I decided that I wanted to switch away from Apple and also sold my Laptop to buy a Desktop PC with more horsepower. My wife still has a rather new MacBook Pro, so if I want to fire up some Final Cut Pro or Garage bend I could still do it. Was not sure if the whole setup of eGPU was worth it for me, it surely allowed me to play those titles which were not playable without the eGPU but I believe it would have been wiser to spent the money directly on a new PC. But of course, with switching away from the Mac my case is a bit special.

</comment><comment><USER27> A very nice how to. For some good real world numbers I always look to [https://barefeats.com/](https://barefeats.com/) which has been testing eGPU setups for quite some time on different Macs

</comment><comment><USER28> I've yet to see an eGPU review measure latency. I've always been skeptical of their ability to render frames out with adding meaningful latency to the system.

I know it's theoretical possible to work just fine. But it's a long pipeline with lots of opportunity for inefficiency and connection bugs.

I love my 144Hz gaming monitor on my desktop. I'd be thrilled to connect my laptop to an eGPU if it can produce an identical gaming experience.

But my spidey sense says eGPu's are a convoluted buggy mess. And that's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future due to lack of users.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone chime in on WHY apple doesn't care about the gaming segment? Is it just elitism from the design/dev team or do they truly think no one wants to game on a mac? It's strange behavior for a company.

<comment><USER30> I wonder how much of it is history. Steve Jobs initially rejected the idea of gaming on the iPhone. They opened their arms only when mobile game revenue became impossible to ignore.

<comment><USER31> "The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. [....] He's not a gamer. [....] It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it." ~John Carmack (2008)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been using an eGPU for about 6 months now with my 2018 13in Macbook Pro and I love it. It drives my 4k monitor so much better for work tasks, and gaming is fun.

The only issue is the eject never seems to actually work, so I just unplug the eGPU every time rather than safely eject. It's a bit annoying to have every app reboot when unplugging. I'm hoping the next version handles it a bit better.

One change I've made from the article is installing Windows on an external M2 drive over USB-C (I don't believe it's Thunderbolt, just standard USB) because my Macbook was running out of space between Windows and MacOS..looking at you, Ark and your ridiculous 100GB install with another 100GB of scratch space required to update.. Everything seems to work at full speed!

<comment><USER3> In case it helps, you might want to see my comments about QuickLookUIService preventing seamless eGPU disconnects here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340602)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This NVidia stuff is getting ridiculous. Apple basically killed off any Deep Learning enthusiasts and nobody could do any serious computing-intense stuff on their platform. A polished toy.

<comment><USER34> The extra-painful part about this whole situation is that it's apparently only due to Apple blocking NVIDIA from signing and publishing their drivers. (for whatever bizarre reason they may have to do that)

<comment><USER35> I know it stinks for the people who are acustom to Nvidia's workflow, but it is quite hard to feel bad for Nvidia. A bigger fish is doing to them what they do to smaller players.

Nvidia blocks the Nouveau drivers from working properly on Maxwell2 or newer cards: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau- XDC2017)

<comment><USER36> Related:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18834715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18834715)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Now if only Apple and AMD could come up with a good way to write GPU- accelerated programs like CUDA lets you...

<comment><USER38> They named it OpenCL.

<comment><USER39> Apple's support for OpenCL is deprecated as of 10.14. Metal is the supported way forward.

<comment><USER15> OpenCL is what the rest of the world uses and will continue to use. All this means is many programs will drop mac support like they have already done and some will be created as mac exclusive because no one wants to support both.

<comment><USER40> It seems like the rest of the world uses CUDA.

<comment><USER15> That was what I remember being the case years ago. I used to be tracking the progress of the blender project ans they where making some good progress on getting everything running on OpenCL because it works on all cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The writer is pretending that egpu is some sort of hidden secret that no one wants you to know about, I don't understand why - since this is not the case - many companies are actively marketing egpu solutions.

It also falsely presents egpu as a silver bullet, in particular it claims that there is no latency even when using the laptop's built-in monitor (as opposed to an external monitor plugged into the GPU) which is absolutely not true (an external monitor will perform better).

Many reliable sources have published independent benchmarks comparing the 3 solutions (internal gpu, external gpu over internal monitor, external gpu over external monitor) you should look at the benchmarks in case you want to make up your own mind about this topic.

<comment><USER42> Quoting the article:

"Why an external monitor? While both macOS and Windows can "loopback" frames rendered by the eGPU over the cable and onto the computer's built-in monitor, operating system support for this is very recent and it introduces a nonzero bandwidth cost which can result in lower framerates as well as frames being dropped."

<comment><USER41> Fair point, there is another section of the article that seems to suggest otherwise, but this section that you quoted addresses it so I take my comment back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Not brought up here, but the Apple Thunderbolt 2 -> Thunderbolt 3 adapter is one of the only ones that actually works in _reverse_ , too. With some hacks from eGPU.io, I ran an Nvidia GTX 1060 on a Mac Mini for a while over TB2 for hashcat work.

<comment><USER44> I have a mid-2013 MBP with TB2. If I get a TB2 -> TB3 then this should work ok?

<comment><USER43> It should. You'll need to run a script such as this:

[https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on- tb1-2...](https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2-macs- on-macos-10-13-4/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I gamed a bit on my previous MBP, a 15" from 2012. The CPU and GPU got so hot, I suspect it reduced the lifespan of the laptop battery. Does anyone else have concerns about this for gaming on laptops? Would unloading to the EGPU mitigate this issue?

<comment><USER46> This was a concern for me trying to play ~2005-era games on macOS on a 12" MacBook. One of the reasons I offloaded to Steam streaming and stream from my Windows HTPC now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anyone know the type of mouse being used in the photo? [https://justin.searls.co/uploads/egpu/IMG_4122.jpg](https://justin.searls.co/uploads/egpu/IMG_4122.jpg)

<comment><USER48> Looks like a J-Tech Digital V628

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I tried this with a Mac eGPU Dev Kit and a 2014 MBPr... right before they removed the ability to run it with a TB2 cable. Jerks. Anyway, the amount of hassle with trying this is high, and I say that as someone who ran Linux on all my desktops and servers from '94-'14\. Installing Windows on Bootcamp to do this? That's a hard pass from me, dawg. I'm done with Windows. Even for gaming. It's all Mac-native or Playstation for me now.

</comment><comment><USER50> What's the easiest way to turn your desktop to a Remote Desktop for ssh (eg, to run ml models)? The dynamic ip is the only weird part. Which service or solution do people use?

<comment><USER51> Not sure if I understand the issue completely but if you have problem with the dynamic IP addresses in LAN and don't want to fix the addresses you can use .local domains (this works in Apple and Linux worlds, in Windows you need LLMNR), i.e. connect to yourhostname.local instead of 192.168.x.somerandomnumber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Apple doesn't seem to have it's ear to the ground. Ever since windows 10, the software and design advantage Apple had over PCs has arguably narrowed down to irrelevance.

Windows today boasts of good design, higher security than previous versions, a Microsoft supported full blown embedded Linux (WSL) and a much larger selection of apps/tools

It all comes down to specs and build quality in 2019. If one is paying top of the line for Apple, they better ship decent spec-ed hardware, including GPU

</comment><comment><USER53> I follow Justin on Twitter and just wanna say he's awesome

</comment><comment><USER54> Is a eGPU setup sufficient for running a Oculus Rift S?</comment>


GNU APL 1.3 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-apl/2014-03/msg00179.html <comment><USER2> About Ken Iverson, author of APL, who was at age 84, working on J when hit by a fatal stroke:

 _Ken didn't get tenure at Harvard. He did his five years as an assistant professor and the Faculty decided not to put him up for promotion. I asked him what went wrong and he said, "Well, the Dean called me in and said, 'the trouble is, you haven't published anything but the one little book'"._

 _The one little book later got [him] the Turing Award.:_

[http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming- lan...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-language- source-code/#A-Short-Biography-of-Ken-Iverson)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're interested in getting a taste of APL while keeping in ASCII, you might want to check out the J programming language. Ken Iverson (the creator of APL) had a hand in its development. J implements most APL operators and is sometimes known as its successor, along with K and Q.

Get started here: [http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm](http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/contents.htm)

This family of languages really leads to a new way of thinking, evident in the J incunabulum (the C interpreter that started J, purportedly written in one afternoon) [1]. The code looks really dense and borderline gibberish at first glance, but I found it very expressive after a good read.

[1]: [http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum](http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum)

<comment><USER4> Whenever APL and it's ilk are discussed I tend to wonder, other than project Euler, what are good "little problems" to start getting your feet wet?

<comment><USER5> I decided once to write a C preprocessor in a clean C. Some weeks and 5000 lines of code later, I had many features of it done except functional macro resolution. By that time I've got substantially tired with manual memory management. So I shelved the project.

Then I started learning J, and after some time decided to implement a project in it. After some months I've got working an LR parser generator. I've got so impressed with J convenience - the whole thing was about 700 lines, majority of that was comments and I was writing really simple J, as I was just learning it. You can check out some preliminary notes about parser generator building (only the beginning of the process) here - [http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AlexMikhailov/Parsing](http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/AlexMikhailov/Parsing) .

I think J could be much better - by certain criteria - suited for many real projects. And I have other examples as well.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the comment! I'll have a look at the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite example of APL: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4)

<comment><USER7> I'm quite amazed how the author has not made any mistake in the presentation. I wonder if using APL leads to a different state of mind where tool is out of your way or was it simply a well rehearsed demo?

<comment><USER8> It does. I programmed in an APL 'derivative' (Q) for a while, it's quite easy to get the hang of it. The problem is that it's write only.

<comment><USER9> [https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona](https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona)

Kona is free and would give people a flavour of this style of programming (minus the database tools).

[http://www.jsoftware.com/](http://www.jsoftware.com/)

J is mentioned by another poster below (EDIT)

Grandparent post: if you are half a bagel and a housebrick, this stuff makes me feel like a few grains of sand and a peanut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting. I didn't know a GNU APL existed. Looks like it's a quite recent, from-scratch implementation mainly by one author, with its first release only a few months ago, in September 2013: [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info- gnu/2013-09/msg00014....](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info- gnu/2013-09/msg00014.html)

The author, Jürgen Sauermann, doesn't seem to have a web-presence; would be curious what else he's up to, besides singlehandedly launching a new APL implementation. Is it a hobby project? Motivated by an existing APL codebase? Part of a research project? He must have quite some experience with APL, since he wrote a PhD thesis on a parallel APL system 25 years ago: [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307](http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=63307)

</comment><comment><USER11> Just in case anyone is interested, Unicomp is still selling APL-keyboards and keys (for Model-Ms). [http://pckeyboard.com](http://pckeyboard.com)

<comment><USER12> direct link [http://pckeyboard.com/page/Buttons/USAPLSET](http://pckeyboard.com/page/Buttons/USAPLSET)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can try GNU APL 1.3 with my online compiled-to-javascript version (I used emscripten for compiling it): [http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/](http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/)

The page is customizable with 5 colours: try [http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=0000001E2C3363A209F...](http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=0000001E2C3363A209F3F3F3D7D5D5) (you will probably need to force reloading the page) or [http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=4E525D687389ECEAEDF...](http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/i/#c=4E525D687389ECEAEDF5AB0EB5B8BF)

(choice of 5 colors from Adobe Kuler website).

</comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one who thought they just released an updated version of a license?

<comment><USER15> That's what I was thinking (confused) until I read your comment...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So does this require special a keyboard ? How does inputting those special symbols work. Are APL's typically JITed ?

<comment><USER6> You can use a standard keyboard, if you learn the mapping or get key caps. [http://www.rexswain.com/aplkeyb.gif](http://www.rexswain.com/aplkeyb.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> APL and vim have a similar outlook in that they both give their users a set of simple, easy to apply, and composable functions, that can then be used, in the hands of experts, to manipulate their underlying data structures with awesome suppleness.

<comment><USER18> Watching the vid linked by gfosco I was wondering this myself. It is an interesting comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> At first I thought this was referring to the Affero Public License, and thus was extremely confused.

</comment><comment><USER20> This would be cool if you weren't required to be a build tools dojo to use it. Windows binary please! Complete working stand alone binary. Then it might make an impact.

<comment><USER21> Core GNU seems to often be quite passive-aggressive about its Windows support.

<comment><USER22> I think it's part of their philosophy. They don't want to encourage people to use a non-free operating system.

edit: also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work

<comment><USER23> > also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work

Yeah, GNU tools are generally written to assume a Unix-like environment. As a result it's relatively easy to port them to anything Unix-like (the BSDs, OS X, etc.). On Windows, Cygwin provides a Unix-like environment, so it's relatively easy to port things to there as well. But to making things work on "native" Windows requires a bunch of Windows-specific porting. That isn't impossible (e.g. GNU Octave has a Windows port), but it requires there being Windows developers interested in volunteering to do it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to break into product development? - <AUTHOR> I'm a developer who has knack for product development. I'm enjoy working off of vague, incomplete, confusing requirements but still produces useful software (I consider myself a decent/average dev, nothing special in coding department). I also thoroughly enjoy talking to even the most difficult users and extracting useful info out of them.<p>Given this situation, is there a way I can break into product development? Has anyone done it here, if so, how? To be clear, I am not interested in sales, team management etc. I'm only interested in talking to people about their problems and coming up with software solutions wherever possible. <comment><USER2> The term for what you're describing is Product Management. My favorite speaker on the topic is Marty Cagan [https://svpg.com](https://svpg.com). As a developer you're in a great position to just do it by building a product of your own.</comment>


Yelp Fired Manager After He Didn't Take Calls, Check Email 24/7, Lawsuit Claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/20/yelp-fired-manager-after-he-didnt-take-calls-check-email-24-7-365-lawsuit-claims/ <comment><USER2> We ALL need to be against 24/7/365 "on call". I did it for 10 years. It not only sucks, but I'm confident hurt my overall productivity. If it's not important enough to hire a backup or two, it's simply not important.

<comment><USER3> What I can't reconcile is the prevalence of this type of abuse (along with many other types of abuse) when we're supposedly hard to find, hard to replace and hard to retain. I don't expect the rock star treatment, but there are a lot of positions that are MUCH easier to find people to fill who are treated with a lot more respect or, failing that, at least not with utter contempt.

<comment><USER4> >hard to find, hard to replace and hard to retain

You only get this line if you're a US citizen as justification as to why H1B visa quotas need to be increased. If you're here on an H1B visa, you get reminded daily that your replacement is waiting back in your home country, you can be replaced with a single phone call, and you better have a plan to get all of your things and family back to your home country quickly when you get bounced.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like slavery.

<comment><USER6> Indentured servitude with a new name basically. My friend works in the health industry and I can confirm this. The second he got his greencard, everything changed as far as employer abuse. Now it's just the typical abuses we all deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being a backend engineer with occasional on-call responsibilities, this is an unfortunate reality I've had to deal with.

My religious tradition (reformed evangelical christian) takes the sabbath pretty seriously, as stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith:

> VIII. This Sabbath is to be kept holy unto the Lord when men, after a due > preparing of their hearts, and ordering of their common affairs beforehand, > do not only observe an holy rest all the day from their own works, words, > and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations, but also are > taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of his worship, > and in the duties of necessity and mercy.

Notice the last statement makes an allowance for acts of mercy and duties of necessity, which would certainly include things like being a Doctor or a Policeman, but I've always considered my duties as a Software Engineer being on-call to be borderline on whether or not they meet that standard. Certainly my employer(s) have thought they were necessary... But who are we kidding. Most of this stuff isn't life or death and waiting till Monday to get it fixed probably wouldn't be that big of a deal.

(I should probably mention that although these are the standards of the Church I attend they're rarely enforced in any meaningful sense - being treated more as a matter of personal conscience than of discipline... and particularly when it comes to the Sabbath)

Still I wrestle with it... not having a firm enough conviction to quit a job where I've had to do it, though if it were an every week thing, particularly if I had to regularly miss the Sunday service, I almost certainly would.

If I could make one plea, it would be for tolerance and compromise. I realize religious beliefs can be pretty weird in this day and age, but they're often sincerely held, and there's usually a solution available if the company is willing to consider it. (for example I'm just fine being on-call any other day of the week, and a surprising oddity of the reformed tradition, we don't really have religious holidays: [https://heidelblog.net/2017/03/the- westminster-divines-on-ho...](https://heidelblog.net/2017/03/the-westminster- divines-on-holy-days/))

<comment><USER8> having on call responsibilities and being available 24/7 are significantly different. On call is a structured rotation that is usually explicitly part of a job description.

<comment><USER9> Unpaid work is unpaid work (wage theft), full stop. You're not paid for 40 hours and then "heh, you're on call outside of 9-5 for the next week, but that's what you're paid for". Call it what it is: wage theft.

<comment><USER10> That's not how many employment opportunities work. Allowances, expenses--hell, even salaried compensation are all ways in which non-40hr-work-week positions are handled. Whether compensation/interaction in these circumstances happens ethically versus exploitatively depends on many things, but not "whether or not someone works more than 40 hours a week for a non-hourly-wage position".

<comment><USER9> Indeed, I'm pointing out the labor law deficiency that needs remediation. Your employer should never be able to have unconstrained demands on your time for a fixed wage.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure I understand. You're saying that it's not possible for someone of sound mind to decide to trade a technically-unconstrained probability distribution of demands on their time (with exit rights) for a fixed wage, no matter how high? And that two parties should be prohibited by law from making this exchange?

I'm not making a general-purpose argument against regulating nominally consensual labor agreements, but this specific example is an awfully weird context to decide that people need to be protected from themselves. I've had jobs where the exact hours of oncall rotations weren't explicitly spelled out in the contract, and I made the decision that the oncall rotation was worth the fixed pay. Trading fixed amounts of money for probability distributions is all over the economy (this is what insurance is), and you're the first person I've ever heard suggest that it should be prohibited.

Would you mind elaborating on why you think this is so egregious that people need to be protecting from themselves so they don't engage in it?

<comment><USER9> We're not talking about unique agreements. We're talking about below or at market rate compensated roles where you're expected to be available after hours, on top of a 40 hour work week. No, I don't think that should be allowed unless you're compensated specially for the time you're on call, as well as when you need to actively engage while on call (removing exempt employee status for technology professionals). This is no different than roles like nursing, or IT in developed countries with robust labor regulations.

People don't need to be protected from themselves. They need to be protected from employers, who have more power than labor (through at will employment and a lack of collective bargaining). Simply because some are willing to work for free does not mean that technology professionals as a whole should accept such a poor arrangement, because it's been normalized as such by employees who accept it.

European countries are moving in this direction (prohibiting email access outside of business hours), and I hope to see more progress on this front in the US over time.

<comment><USER12> The attitude that salaried employees are expected to be available at all hours is such a US labour market thing.

So much so that a (US headquartered) multinational I worked for gave up trying to get their EU employees to do weekend on call, as the team didn't want to get treated that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article says he claims he was fired based on his religion, but it doesn't sound like it was related to religion. It just so happened it was a religious holiday. Maybe there is more to the story, but it sounds like he could just as well have been golfing.

Either way, Yelp sounds absolutely toxic if they required him to be available like that. Expecting anyone to be available 24/7/365 is absurd. Set up an on- call rotation. Establish escalation chains. Designate backups. These are basic procedures. If this guy was so critical that there was no-one else in the company that could do whatever it was, hire someone else.

<comment><USER14> Companies have an obligation to make reasonable accommodations of employee's religions. Not expecting them to be available during major religious holidays is well within the bounds of reasonable accommodations _. In addition, unless there is more to the story, it doesn 't seem believable that someone acting in good faith wouldn't be able to work something out; I mean Christianity only has two major holidays.

_ This is excluding extreme cases like if someone claimed that their religion has dozens of major holidays a year. To my knowledge, no major religion does that.

<comment><USER15> I hate to sound like whining, but I feel jealous and cheated that people with professed religions get special benefits. It's not as though people who don't profess their religions, or those without specific religious affiliation don't have inner needs of their own which they also need time to tend to.

I feel like there should be an "average" compromise and everyone should get the benefit. That way there is no awkward incentive in any direction.

<comment><USER16> I feel the same. Everybody should get the same benefits independently of religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If the lawsuit fails he could always create a employer review site, post a bunch of negative reviews of Yelp, and then offer to remove the offending reviews if they purchase an annual subscription.

<comment><USER18> Sooo.... Glassdoor?

<comment><USER19> Is there evidence of Glassdoor charging companies to get better reviews?

<comment><USER20> I personally know that Glassdoor magically vanished my not so critical review of my past employer (I said nice things about the company and employees, but called out how they mislead/screwed me in immigration matters)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> We should all spend a moment to really take in the fact that Yelp is a website that has reviews of restaraunts and other services. That this person needed to be on call 24/7 for a review website.

Not a hospital. Nothing was burning down. Not even transportation or infrastructure related.

A review website. 24/7/365\. For a review website.

<comment><USER22> It's a big site, so any downtime is a lot of lost revenue. I'm sure the cost of 24/7/365 coverage is justified.

The trouble is that they apparently don't want to pay for actual 24/7 coverage with a defined on-call schedule. They just try to declare it into existence.

<comment><USER23> I think you're sending this same message, but just to rephrase it - 24/7 coverage _is_ important to the business due to the continuous traffic they receive, but 24/7 coverage has to be provided by multiple people and/or teams; it shouldn't and can't be an individual responsibility.

<comment><USER22> That is indeed what I was implying, but it's good to state it explicitly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > On Good Friday last March, Weathers' boss, head of security Rick Lee, sent > him an email about an employee in Yelp's Phoenix offices seeking after-hours > access to a building, the suit said.

Expecting employees to respond to non-emergencies off hours is an excellent way to get them to become less responsive.

When everything is urgent, nothing is.

</comment><comment><USER25> Who would have thought that the company that extorts businesses to bury negative reviews isn't very nice to work at?

<comment><USER26> Yelp is terrible. They actually extort business to show good reviews as well

<comment><USER27> Indeed!! Yelp specifically makes me glad that I'm in a B2B sort of business and not subject to their extortionate behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What did his job description say? Did it clearly specify having to be on call 24/7/365\. That would be key especially for a position that seems to require that kind of response.

Otherwise this is a bit like "unlimited vacation". Yes you can take it, but you never know when they'll come back and say "looks like you're not applying your full potential, so we're gonna go ahead an put you on probation".

> Lee also told Weathers [...] that he didn't care about Weathers' religious > holidays or children, the suit claimed.

I think this is mostly about naming and shaming. As the lawsuit could involve a discovery phase, Yelp might want to settle to avoid revealing to the whole world their management "culture".

<comment><USER29> Even if it is written on a contract isn't being on call at every seconds of your life against human rights? It seems to be near slavery condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The headline is at least somewhat misleading. The plaintiff did not work in software, they seemed to have worked in physical security. It sucks that there was work to be done on a major religious holiday, but it seems reasonable to me that there's an expectation you are 'on-call' outside of normal work hours for a role like that. I'd really like to know what the job expectation was going in.

<comment><USER31> _it seems reasonable to me that there 's an expectation you are 'on-call' outside of normal work hours_

24/7/365 isn't considered "reasonable" outside of the SV bubble. If you need that kind of coverage, you have two or three people available, sometimes on rotation. Even doctors — people who save lives, not tally reviews — aren't on call 24/7/365.

No company should have a single employee that essential. Will Yelp shut down if he gets hit by a bus?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Forgetting the merits of the suit for a minute, if Yelp really needed 24/7 access, why not hire another security manager to work nights? If his job is so mission critical do you really want to risk him not being able to wake up at 3am in the morning from a phonecall?

<comment><USER33> > why not hire another security manager to work nights

Money

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it really religious discrimination though? It's pretty clear that the plaintiff's boss didn't care _why_ he was incommunicado, only that he was. It doesn't appear that he displayed any religious hostility or intolerance, the outcome would have been the same if the employee was an atheist who decided to spend time with his family on a Sunday.

<comment><USER35> Yes, it is.

You're correct that any employee who decided to not answer their phone for a period might attract the same displeasure, but we have laws in the US that protect people who are observing religious holidays and he was, in fact, observing one. I guess Yelp could argue that his observation was unreasonably extreme, but that seems unlikely to pass muster.

<comment><USER36> > we have laws in the US that protect people who are observing religious > holidays

Do we?

From: [https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/FAQ_Holidays.htm](https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/FAQ_Holidays.htm)

> California law does not require that an employer provide its employees with > paid holidays, that it close its business on any holiday, or that employees > be given the day off for any particular holiday

<comment><USER31> United States > California.

[https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/religion.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/religion.cfm)

"The law requires an employer or other covered entity to reasonably accommodate an employee's religious beliefs or practices, unless doing so would cause more than a minimal burden on the operations of the employer's business. This means an employer may be required to make reasonable adjustments to the work environment that will allow an employee to practice his or her religion.

Examples of some common religious accommodations include flexible scheduling, voluntary shift substitutions or swaps, job reassignments, and modifications to workplace policies or practices."

<comment><USER36> > unless doing so would cause more than a minimal burden on the operations of > the employer's business

No employer is required to approve PTO for religious holidays if something needs to get done.

There are tons of employees who get scheduled to work on Christmas all the time.

<comment><USER37> So, if an employee was not at work, not expected to be at work, do they need to apply for and get PTO to avoid getting calls in that off time?

It seems pretty clear that if the employer expects response in a certain time frame, the employee is engaged, and there may be issues even for salaried overtime-exempt employees with keeping an employee engaged 24/7/365.

<comment><USER36> That's the more important point in my opinion. The demands weren't reasonable regardless if it was a religious holiday or not.

Saying you were observing a religious holiday will definitely earn you sympathy from the public but probably not legal relief from the courts.

<comment><USER38> If the plaintiff is saying that they are observing a religious holiday, then it is up to the defendant to show that this is a hardship for the business or otherwise not a reasonable accommodation. This is pretty standard stuff, with lots of case law to back it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The language from Yelp pretty much spells out their case:

> "Yelp respects religious and personal responsibilities and makes reasonable > accommodations _when requested_ " (emphasis added)

I haven't read any court papers. My guess is their defense will hinge on them trying to prove the plaintiff didn't adequate accommodations.

Doesn't pass the smell test if you ask me. If it's important enough to fire somebody over, it's important enough to have a clear escalation strategy in case one person isn't available.

</comment><comment><USER40> No comment on the merits of the case, but the headline is really hiding the ball. Instead of "Manager" they should say "Man Tasked With Granting Out-Of- Hours-Access to Office".

I.e. this wasn't just some random manager, but evidently someone they needed to be available to grant out of hours access to their offices.

<comment><USER41> Unless that was his only job function (unlikely), I dont see why the headline should be that granular.

<comment><USER40> Because it means one of two things.

One, Yelp is incompetent enough to make it someone's literal job to open the office in a timely manner at all hours without thinking to have a conversation first that establishes an SLA for that.

Two, they did have such an agreement, but the employee is claiming a religious exception supersedes any such agreement.

Both would be interesting to discuss, but the article doesn't have any details.

<comment><USER42> If there was an important function that relied on the availability of a single employee, with no bus factor, that rather implies Yelp is incompetent to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> True 24/7 can be really disruptive. I've had consulting gigs where some people would rather call me at 3AM then talk with the person next to them in the Ops room. Irritating as all can be, having a sleep schedule disrupted. Same customer ended up having you come in for a normal work day, cater supper, have you do evening deployments/change control/bug fix, then the late night/early AM stuff on prod would start till 5/6AM. You could possibly grab a couple hours of sleep before starting the 'normal' next day - but it was easier to just pound through a 32 hour day and then collapse on the airplane home. Nothing productive happened from those long days. Just like water skiing, more and more mistakes happen the longer a person is at it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Posts like this make me want to remind people that there ARE good places to work. If you're stuck in this kind of BS, there ARE alternatives. Just like relationships, there are many job fish in the sea, so don't get discouraged, just find a way out.

<comment><USER45> The problem is finding them. The job search sites are trash as far as being a competent mediator to make the hiring process smoother. And companies are way too standoffish to hire quickly. It's a frustrating process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> [https://outline.com/pHSqZN](https://outline.com/pHSqZN)

</comment><comment><USER47> We can thank labor unions for the concept of weekends and the 8-hour workday. The decline in labor union participation tracks with the erosion of the benefits our predecessors fought so hard for.

</comment><comment><USER48> I am the manager of a decent sized R&D org in a company on the order of Yelp's size and not only do I find this inexcusable on Yelp's part, but where I work we would put the firing manager into a training/coaching program to sensitize him to the work life balance needs of his team. If he refused he would probably be removed as a manager and perhaps shown the door.

I work for large adtech company in France and out here oncall is paid (even if you're not called) and we never intrude on personal time unless there is a major disaster, and even then there are almost always enough folks being paid to handle the oncall event to take care of things.

We do have R&D offices in the US and I don't know the specifics of HR policy wrt oncall there, but everyone rolls up to the French HQ so I know it remains human-first.

</comment><comment><USER49> I take the approach of telling people to call or text me if something is urgent (my number is in the company directory), because I likely won't notice an email quickly, and will ignore Slack/IM completely so soon as I walk out the door. The only time my phone buzzes is when something is actually on fire.

I remember previous jobs where late night emails demanding edits to someone's slide deck were routine (and anything is not urgent, it is editing some product manager's slide deck). That shit can wait until Monday, and if you are throwing it on me because you procrastinated, that's your problem.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yelp will lose this lawsuit and this is a PR nightmare.

<comment><USER51> Yelp seems like a super toxic workplace and essentially a pay-to-play extortion racket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> In nyc there are Orthodox Jews who work in medicine and finance and law who will not answer the phone or work on the sabbath. These are people who can make millions a year and are otherwise slaves to their jobs working 80 hour+ weeks. They have backups during the day they are off. The jobs they do are much more intense then tech work

</comment><comment><USER53> My guess is that religion thing was added to make the case more robust. Unfortunately the meat of the case (having to be on call 247) might be considered "less outrageous" these days :(

</comment><comment><USER54> My question is what were the expectations? Did he agree to be on call then? Or did he inform that he wouldn't be available? There's a lot of context missing here...

</comment><comment><USER55> I like the yelp service - but working for yelp has always seemed like a terrible idea.

</comment><comment><USER56> The case [https://imgur.com/a/qp57XAP](https://imgur.com/a/qp57XAP)

COMES NOW PLAINTIFF MARK WEATHERS for causes of action, and alleges as follows: I. ALLEGATIONS

1\. Plaintiff Mark Weathers ("Mr. Weathers" or "Plaintiff") resides in California and is a former employee of Defendant Yelp Inc. At all relevant times herein, Mr. Weathers worked for Defendant in San Francisco.

2\. Defendant Yelp Inc. ("Yelp" or "Defendant") hosts an online database of user-generated reviews of local businesses and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

3\. The true names and capacities, whether individual, corporate or otherwise, of DOES 1 through 10 are at this time unknown to Plaintiff, who therefore sues* said Defendants by such fictitious names. Plaintiff will ask leave to amend this complaint for damages to reflect their true names and capacities when* the same have been ascertained. Plaintiff is informed and believes, and thereon alleges, that each of said Defendants is responsible, jointly and severally, for the events and injuries described herein and caused damages thereby as alleged herein.

4\. Plaintiff is informed and believes, and thereon alleges, that at all times mentioned herein each and every co-Defendant was and is the predecessor-in- interest, successor-in-interest, agent, counselor, employee, servant, partner, franchisee and/or joint venturer of each of other co Defendant, and in doing the actions hereinafter mentioned, was and/or is acting within the scope of its authority within such agency, employment, counseling, service, partnership, franchise and/or joint venture or single enterprise, and with the permission and consent of each co-Defendant. Plaintiff alleges that each of said Defendants is responsible, jointly and severally, for the events and injuries described herein and caused damages thereby to Plaintiff as alleged herein.

5\. In October of 2016, Yelp offered Mr. Weathers the position of Security Manager starting on November 14, 2016, and reporting to the Head of Security Rick Lee.

6\. Mr. Weathers' duties included overseeing several site managers located throughout the country. His compensation included an annual salary, an equity award, a relocation bonus, and a benefits package that included health, dental, vision, life insurance, long term disability, and 401(k).

7\. At all times, Mr. Weathers fulfilled the expectations of his . position. In January of 2018, Yelp increased Mr. Weathers' compensation and granted him stock.

8\. On Saturday, March 31, 2018, which was Easter weekend, Mr. Lee called Mr. Weathers about an email he had sent the previous night (Good Friday) at 11:49 p.m. Mr. Lee wanted to know why Mr. Weathers had not yet responded to an email. Mr. Weathers indicated that he had not checked his email because it was Easter weekend and he was spending time with his family and attending church services. In fact, Mr. Weathers was attending a church-sponsored event when he answered Mr. Lee's phone call. Mr. Lee was upset that no one, including Mr. Weathers, had responded to an employee's ticket request for after-hours access to Yelp's offices in Phoenix the prior evening after normal business hours. Mr. Lee said Mr. Weathers needed to be responsive, even while he was attending church services.

9\. At 12:40 p.m. on Easter Sunday, April 1, while Mr. Weathers was attending church services with his family, Mr. Lee emailed Mr. Weathers and the site managers regarding this situation. He instructed Mr. Weathers to contact each of the site managers to find out what had happened with the ticket request and how to prevent the situation from recurring. He demanded that Mr. Weathers provide an "after action review" to him by the close of business the following day, necessitating that Mr. Weathers contact each of his co-workers on Easter Sunday. In addition, Mr. Lee admonished, "Each leader on this email should make a regular practice of checking email and setting cell phones to take inbound calls 24/7/365 ... so that your phone still rings even if you set it to 'do not disturb' mode." Otherwise, he threatened to "make some changes" if employees could not "commit to being attentive to [their] inbound communiques."

10\. On April 2, Mr. Weathers timely provided the information that Mr. Lee had requested. As part of this information, Mr. Weathers explained to Mr. Lee that, "I made a choice to focus on Easter Weekend (Good Friday, Easter Sunday), a very important weekend for me ... I did not check email as I usually would on other weekends." Mr. Lee responded, "You should be checking emails and vmails/inbound calls every day (regardless of weekend or holiday). I understand that church services likely require you to turn off devices. However, a 12-hour gap of non-checking is not acceptable. (Recall that I worked on an incident for 4 hours on Christmas Eve when my personal priority was to be with my family.)" Mr. Lee also verbally told Mr. Weathers, "I don't care about your PTO, religious holidays, your kids or your birthday. I expect a response to my emails." He made this statement despite knowing that Mr. Weathers is a person of faith who is pursuing a degree in ministry leadership and whose son is severely autistic.

11\. On April 3, Mr. Weathers approached human resources. He told a human resources representative about the incident that had occurred over Easter weekend, and specifically that Mr. Lee demanded that employees be responsive to work issues even during religious and family commitments. Mr. Weathers also conveyed that his direct reports had expressed concerns about being required to work on Easter Sunday or during paid time off. The human resources representative said she would follow up on this issue. She also suggested that he could include this information as part of his feedback in the manager's survey-a companywide anonymous survey completed by all employees, which he did.

12\. On May 15, the day after the manager's survey results were published, Mr. Lee met with Mr. Weathers for their quarterly conversation. During this meeting, for the first time, Mr. Lee was critical of Mr. Weathers performance. He accused Mr. Weathers of needing 'recognition." He said that Mr. Weathers' work on a physical security review the previous month had been disappointing, even though at the time, he commended Mr. Weathers for having done a "great" job. When Mr. Weathers pointed this out, Mr. Lee claimed that his earlier positive feedback had been a "miscommunication." Mr. Lee also said that there had been a "ranking meeting" in February of 2018, and that he and Yelp's CFO had ranked Mr. Weathers as "third or fourth" in ''performance and potential." He never mentioned before that such a meeting had taken place, or that supposedly there were issues with Mr. Weathers' performance or career potential. In fact, Mr. Lee previously had been complimentary of Mr. Weathers' performance and told him that the CFO had praised Mr. Weathers for having a "growth mindset." Finally, Mr. Lee said that he did not like Mr. Weathers' response to the situation that had occurred over Easter Weekend-in which Mr. Weathers stated, "I made a choice to focus on Easter Weekend (Good Friday, Easter Sunday), a very important weekend for me ... I did not check email as I usually would on other weekends"-and reiterated that he was not concerned about Mr. Weathers' ::hurch or family obligations.

13\. After this meeting, Mr. Lee all but stopped communicating with VJr. Weathers and sidelined Mr. Weathers from participating in work matters.

14\. On May 25, 2018, Mr. Lee and the* human resources *epresentative met with Mr. Weathers. Mr. Lee advised Mr. Weathers that he Nas "not a good fit for this role" and presented him with three options: a performance plan, one month's severance, or termination. Mr. Weathers pointed out that Mr. Lee had previously told Mr. Weathers that "people do not survive [performance plans]." In fact, Mr. Lee said this on numerous occasions about various employees. Mr. Weathers pointed out that, in light of this, a performance improvement plan did not seem like a viable option.

15\. On May 29, the human resources representative told Mr. Weathers that the company was "concerned" about how Mr. Lee had managed the situation and, therefore, would be investigating whether there was retaliation. She interviewed Mr. Weathers over the next few days, including about Mr. Lee's statements that Mr. Weathers and other employees are required to work during paid time off and regardless of church or family obligations.

16\. On May 31, 2018, the human resources representative told Mr. Weathers that she had "looked into" the situation but supposedly determined that Mr. Lee had not said anything illegal.

17\. On June 4, 2018, the human resources representative sent Mr. Weathers a meeting request and said that Mr. Lee wanted to present Mr. Weathers with a list of performance issues. Mr. Weathers asked for a copy of the list in advance, so that he could be prepared for their meeting, but no one provided him with a copy.

18\. Instead, on June 5, when Mr. Weathers met with the human resources representative, she told him that given the "toxic environment," "it would be better" for Mr. Weathers to leave his employment at Yelp. Yelp terminated Mr. Weathers from his employment effective June 5, 2018.

19\. Plaintiff timely exhausted his administrative remedies by filing a :harge of discrimination with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing and obtaining a right to sue.

20\. Defendant's actions were undertaken for improper purposes as alleged above and were willful, oppressive and in conscious disregard of Plaintiff's rights, and were designed and intended to cause and did, in fact, cause Plaintiff to suffer severe emotional distress, pain and suffering, and substantial economic damage and, therefore, justify the awarding of exemplary and punitive damages.

<comment><USER57> Yikes if this is true. If I were on a jury there is absolutely no way Yelp would survive this assuming this is true and assuming there is not evidence that makes me reconsider my position on this. The fact that the documents were not provided to the plaintiff upon request and before a meeting with HR alone already has me seriously suspect. HR should probably be accountable in this situation as well as the manager involved. It seems like Yelp failed at every step of this process which is designed to protect the legal and business interests of Yelp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> The engineer who wanted access is going to feel like a right idiot.

</comment><comment><USER59> And companies wonder why their employees try to unionize.

</comment><comment><USER60> Madness. Hire shift workers. Geezus. And don't fire, manage them out with a pip. Does it take a long time? Sure! But thats what you get for having stupid policies.

</comment><comment><USER61> TL;DR: lawsuit claims dude's boss had unreasonable-but-believable demands on availability, yelp denies it. No real information is given as to the up-front understanding of expectation, nor evidence for either side.

I'd be interested in the details once everything is decided, but as it stands there just isn't much to do other than speculate....or crack jokes about reviewing Yelp.

<comment><USER62> > as it stands there just isn't much to do other than speculate....or crack > jokes about reviewing Yelp.

Or we could debate the merits of managers and/or company policies requiring "24/7/365" availability, even without enough evidence to make an informed judgment in this particular case.

I personally think it's bullshit.

<comment><USER61> Sure...but is there really a debate? I'm willing to accept a sliver of jobs that require that availability, if they involve saving lives or huge sums of money AND are explicitly agreed to by both parties.

Other than some quibbles about if money qualifies and if so how much, I don't really expect a lot of argument - even the jerks demanding such availability without caveats tend to only demand it when they are the boss involved.

Edit: Based on the other comments on the story so far...I may be wrong.

<comment><USER63> Just rotate on-call hours around several employees. Putting "lives or huge sums of money" onto one singular employee who must be in contact at all times is a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER61> I was thinking of things like a personal accountant for a mega-millionaire or a doctor on a crisis case...but even then you're right. Even with my qualifier of "sliver" and that I was mentally thinking in time-spans of less than 365 days...yeah. No call.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What if Star Wars was Real? - <AUTHOR> http://nighttimebrothers.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-if-star-wars-was-real.html

<comment><USER3> What if?? Listen, we went from a wagon and horses stepping in their own shit.....overnight to the moon.....of course star wars theories are real....listen, stopping thinking about what God to pray to and start thinking as if you were a fish at the bottom of the ocean, think that fish knows the ocean has anything above the water?? when you look up, think whats on the other side looking down - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER4> Direct link: <http://ifstarwarswasreal.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Why Tinder is so terrible of an app? - <AUTHOR> As a somewhat recent user of Tinder I can't help but wonder how extremely popular app like Tinder can be so badly made? I use Android so I can't speak for iOS but it feels like it was built hastily by bunch of junior developers with complete lack of regard for quality.
Okey some UI mistakes here and there sure, not a big deal. However for an app like Tinder I'd assume that there was a throughout testing for errors due to internationalization. In my language at least there is one glaring error in the spelling or at least it reads very weirdly.
But what really bothers me and contributed me to submit this question is that I recently or well I think it has been ongoing for a while is a bug that stops me from changing my personal information. Like really, this is the level of quality I can expect? Contacting the customer support was no help either and they haven't responded in 3 working days since I last sent an email.
I am astonished and wonder what could have led to this, is there a serious lack of experienced developers in the team? Is the culture terrible inside Tinder? No one admits mistakes and there is a lot of defensive coding? I'd love to hear from someone who knows the inner workings of Tinder and why its current state is what it is. <comment><USER2> One company owns all the main dating apps. That plus the dynamics of the dating market means they don't have to compete much, and instead focus on monetizing. They definitely don't have to compete on tech, it's pretty irrelevant in the dating market.

</comment><comment><USER3> I totally agree, I am also android user and its terrible. I cannot update my profile and I have sent them screenshots of issues many times but their replies are unclear and unhelpful, so I got fed up with it and uninstalled the app.

<comment><USER4> can you send me an email at email@example.com regarding the bug? thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> can you shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com?</comment>


Dear Dumb Founder - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/a9c3286360b8#

<comment><USER2> Great read, but I believe movie quote is from Bill Dukes, Menace II Society (perhaps Denzel said it too, but Bill made it famous ;) ).

</comment><comment><USER3> Ha ha, made you look!</comment>


AWS Public Datasets - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/ <comment><USER2> Google Cloud has something similar, [https://cloud.google.com/public- datasets/](https://cloud.google.com/public-datasets/)

I think it would show a kind of gilded age maturity if all the cloud providers cooperated on their public datasets, because they are for the public good.

<comment><USER3> And the first terabyte of analysis for free in BigQuery!!

(Work at g)

<comment><USER4> That's all fine and dandy, but I assume I could also pull down the entire dataset for free and run unlimited analysis locally for free?

<comment><USER5> Yes, although data transfer fees may apply if you go over the free quota.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I see. These "public" datasets are not actually public as they are only available if you login (and I assume input your payment details before).

Shame on me to think "Public Datasets" meant that I could just download them via rsync/http.

If you're interested in truly public datasets, see [http://academictorrents.com/](http://academictorrents.com/) which hosts datasets as torrents.

<comment><USER6> This seems critical - as Google is a corporation, I wonder where this sense comes from? Obviously we have certain expectations for a couple who's tagline reads "don't be evil," but does that extend to criticizing them for not providing terabytes of free transfers of terabytes of free data, which they pay to host and serve?

<comment><USER4> > criticizing them for not providing terabytes of free transfers of terabytes > of free data

My criticism is not towards them not providing free transfers of data. My criticism is that they say "these datasets are freely hosted and accessible" and public, while only being available while logged in to Google, which I don't think classifies as public.

I would not have any problem if it's just called "Google-hosted Datasets" or "Google-only Public Datasets", I just think the current naming is misleading.

Edit: compare this to the AWS Public Datasets which are actually available without a AWS account, just go to [https://landsat- pds.s3.amazonaws.com/c1/L8/139/045/LC08_L1TP...](https://landsat- pds.s3.amazonaws.com/c1/L8/139/045/LC08_L1TP_139045_20170304_20170316_01_T1/index.html) for example, which is the Landsat Dataset

<comment><USER7> A public library still requires a library card...

the term public means its available to the public. Signing up google, library card, doesn't negate that fact that any member of the public can access the data with a reasonable and insignificant barrier.

<comment><USER4> Sure, the difference between getting a library card and signing up to a Google account is that usually the first has a user agreement which is about 10 lines long with human language and the second one has a user agreement which is 10+ pages with lawyer speak and probably includes that they are allowed to sell your data. How is it reasonable for a normal person to understand those kind of user agreements?

And if that's your definition of public, isn't everything public, if you have the right amount of money, knows the right people and can get access to the right place?

<comment><USER7> You only pay a price because you are using someone else system. Which cost money. Public library are public, you also pay taxes on them. Because using it as a service still has a cost.

Google give you 1TB on data to query each month. That is a lot of data, if you need more for free collect the data over time.

But you still need a library card and if the facility gets overused they ask for a small tax to cover the operating costs.

I fail to see how this isn't considered public. Public literally just means accessible to the general public. That all. A public event can still charge a fee for entry. As long as the fee doesn't create a barrier for most the public, you know accessible to the general public.

Also if a library sold their data would it no longer be considered public? I believe it would still be considered public. User data isn't sold typically by name or email, byt activity. If a library compiled a list of books checked out and their frequency, the amount of people entering everyday etc that be the equivalent of most user data being sold. Very rare for a company to sell your actual personal data, when they do they disassociate your personal information with it.

So if the above doesn't disqualify a library from being public, then neither would this dataset that is public. If you really disagree with that then you are just trying to be pedantic at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anybody is interested in AI/bioinformatics projects on AWS, I'm currently involved in a project to harmonize _all_ of the publicly available RNA data (many petabytes) into easily sliced, AI/ML-ready datasets for anybody to use:

Website: [http://www.refine.bio/](http://www.refine.bio/)

Source: [https://github.com/AlexsLemonade/refinebio](https://github.com/AlexsLemonade/refinebio)

<comment><USER9> Would this allow rapid realignment of the data against a given reference (graph?) model? Or is the alignment somehow baked in?

<comment><USER8> We do the alignment too, yes.

<comment><USER9> What reference model do you align the RNAseq against? That would seem to have a huge effect on results no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Over 13,000 community-uploaded public datasets: [https://www.kaggle.com/datasets](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets)

(I work at Kaggle)

<comment><USER11> I take the chance to ask you: is there any command line utility similar to pip to import datasets from kaggle? Something like:

`kik pull titanic`

<comment><USER12> [https://github.com/Kaggle/kaggle-api](https://github.com/Kaggle/kaggle-api)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of these datasets have been available for some time: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-data-sets- tc...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-data-sets-tcga-and- icgc/). Perhaps what is most surprising is that the list hasn't grown a ton since then.

<comment><USER14> As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time on data that has ended up on this page, I think the fact that the list hasn't grown says more about the priorities of other companies than of AWS. Amazon doesn't (yet) have time to build and maintain these datasets themselves: they work with others to build and maintain it and then fund the storage and transmission fees.

I helped build the Terrain Tiles dataset as part of Mapzen, which recently shut down. The OpenStreetMap data exists on the AWS Public Datasets page because it's useful to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. If you're able to convince your company to generate and work with a public dataset, consider reaching out to the AWS and Google public datasets teams to get it hosted and publicized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting, they used to have Wikipedia data and now it's gone from the list, anyone know why?

<comment><USER16> Also curious...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How much does it cost to export/process this data from Amazon? Unlike GCP/BigQuery which has free cloud processing built in, downloading/analyzing these GB/TB datasets for personal analysis can't be cheap.

The descriptions note "Educators, researchers and students can apply for free promotional credits to take advantage of Public Datasets on AWS." which is not a good sign.

<comment><USER18> It's the normal data cost. EG the Landsat data is stored in S3, so it's free to EC2 (in the same region), and somewhere around $0.09/gb to the public internet.

However, the idea is not that you download it all (there's probably cheaper ways to acquire Landsat data), the idea is if you want to do whatever analysis on AWS, they've already got it neatly ingested for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Importance of data for machine learning algorithms can't be stressed enough. I remember talking to a friend in Google Translate team. they had a good also but they were struggling to get quality translation data to train their service. the problem was more severe when it came to language which was not very popular. translation set was next to nothing for Say something like Turkish, Hindi, Latvian etc.

They finally solved this by using meeting notes from UN Assembly. Which were transcribed by best of the translators? that access to meeting transcription was (unfair ??) advantage Google had over other tools. Was it wrong ? I don't think so. Should have been those meeting notes be public: Yes

<comment><USER20> When Google Translate was new in my language Finnish, their translation quality was atrocious.

I tried this sentence: "Hei äiti, puhun suomea". The expected translation would be "Hi mom, I speak Finnish".

Instead Google's result was: "July's mother, I speak English".

Obviously the engine had been trained on unvetted data sets where the word "English" occurred in translations in a position where the original had the word "Finnish", and no context was provided to avoid this kind of mistake.

The word "July" came about because "hei" is also used as an abbreviation for "heinäkuu" (July). It was sobering that a supposed world-class AI couldn't distinguish between these two usages. Machine learning needs a lot of old- fashioned handtuned human-made heuristics.

<comment><USER6> Sobering perhaps to learn what the state of the art is for "world class" AI indeed ;)

Cortana when??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Adding one more source of open datasets in the thread: Manually tagged high- quality datasets :

[https://dataturks.com/projects/trending](https://dataturks.com/projects/trending)

<comment> ah- Seems to be down. What do they have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This doesn't appear to be publicized on the linked to page, but two of the major open access fMRI dataset repositories (FCP-INDI [1] and OpenfMRI [2] are hosted in S3.

[1] [http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/](http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/) [2] [https://openfmri.org/](https://openfmri.org/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if anyone has processed Common Crawl's dataset for a list of all the existing domains (I don't care if the data are old).

<comment><USER24> You can get the URL data (and parse out the domains yourself) at [http://index.commoncrawl.org/](http://index.commoncrawl.org/) Be aware that commoncrawl, while huge, only crawls a fraction of the web, and so you won't get all of the "existing domains" (i.e. all domains that exist) if that is what you are after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish they'd centralize WHOIS data and clean it up... that is some messy stuff there.</comment>


Show HN: We automatically fix your Python code for you - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantifiedcode.com/how-it-works <comment><USER2> Very cool. I have a similar python script that uses PushBullet to do this.

[https://instapush.im/](https://instapush.im/) is pretty similar to your project.

<comment><USER3> Did you respond in the wrong thread? Maybe you intended to reply to 'Show HN: Notify – CLI to notify your phone' [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10667183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10667183)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great! It will save so much time and energy!

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be more valuable to build this functionality into a linter that coders can use as they develop.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great idea!</comment>


Many 'Hacker Safe' Web Sites Found Vulnerable  - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205900444

<comment><USER2> This is unfortunately the case with automated vulnerability scans. And while it's true that XSS can't be used to hack the SERVER it's still a major concern for two reasons:

1\. the user's data is still at risk due to client side attacks 2\. lack of attention paid to validating user input could mean that other more serious problems are likely to occur as well (like SQL injection)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well I am shocked, just SHOCKED! Who'd have though that just putting a little "hacker safe" logo on your website wouldn't actually make you safe from hackers??

And what are people supposed to do now? Write secure web sites? You know that's hard, right?

</comment><comment><USER4> "Hacker Safe" badge = huge target on your back.</comment>


Meet Zorya, New OSS Google Compute Engine Instance Scheduler - <AUTHOR> Zorya helps to reduce compute costs of non-production environments by about 60%<p>GitHub: https://github.com/doitintl/zorya <comment><USER2> 10x guys for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER3> AMAZING!</comment>


Will There Be a Ban on Killer Robots? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-weapons.html <comment><USER2> How is this going to affect the laws of war?

Hypothetically speaking, in case of wanton killing of civilians, who's going to be held responsible? The engineers who designed it? The maintenance crew who launched it? The general in charge of that particular division or branch? The minister?

Furthermore, with the emergence of AI, do we even know the algorithms actually used to make such decisions?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm quite torn on this subject, of course I see the reason for having a framework in place to prevent the use of autonomous weapons, but what happens if another country doesn't abide by the agreement (even so, this could happen with anything)?</comment>