Designed by Apple in California - noir-york http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/15/13635788/apple-coffee-table-book-products-images <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/11/designed-by-apple- in-c...](http://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/11/designed-by-apple-in- california-chronicles-20-years-of-apple-design.html)

Actual link.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's their cheapest Mac book yet!</comment>


Analysis of 5,230 game industry salaries - <AUTHOR> https://orcahq.com/blog/game-industry-salary-explorer <comment><USER2> Man, top grade data presentation here!</comment>


How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/how-steve-wozniak-wrote-basic-for-the-original-apple-fr-1570573636/all <comment><USER2> The update that describes why 4KB of RAM was necessary was interesting to me. In 1998 I wrote a Java Virtual Machine in assembly language for a PIC-like microcontroller that only had 4k of ROM (actually it was 4k instructions, but they were 12-bit words giving 6kB). I managed to get all of the important features of the language to fit, including exception handling and an interactive debugger. However by the end, each time I wanted to add a new instruction to my code I had to find something else to optimize first so it would still fit in 4k.

By the end I convinced myself that 4k was the minimum possible code size for implementing a JVM.

The JVM was used in the Parallax Javelin Stamp - a Java version of the BASIC Stamp ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Stamp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Stamp)).

As an aside, the SX microcontroller only had 256 bytes (yes bytes!) of RAM internally so I used an external 32kB SRAM for the Java heap and stack. The 256 bytes of internal RAM held the internal state of the interpreter and memory manager.

<comment><USER3> Around the same time, I wrote a JVM for the PalmPilot [1]. I think it had to fit into 128K of ram with an additional 256K of memory for data (like the class libraries). I was able to fit the entire JDK 1.0.2 runtime into it by transforming the byte code.

But 4K...wow!

[1] [http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/papers/ghost.pdf](http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/papers/ghost.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Yep, 4k is pretty wow indeed.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, which only had 1K or RAM, but there was 8K of ROM, and the BASIC interpreter was pretty, um basic.

<comment><USER5> The hardware was interesting too. It bit-banged the video display circuit, leaving only the re-trace interval for general purpose computation, including running BASIC programs. Yet the result was an extremely simple and inexpensive design.

Every early microcomputer had to come up with a solution to the video display problem. As I understand it, the Apple II had a bus architecture that interleaved the clock timing of the video circuit and the CPU, sharing a single bus. The Commodore computers had custom video graphics chips. And so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "In 1967 or 1968, as a senior in high school, our electronics teacher ... arranged for me to go to a company in Sunnyvale (Sylvania) to program a computer because I already knew all the electronics in class at school. Mr. McCollum did this for students with electronics abilities every year, finding local companies with engineers and projects that would let high school students come and and get some experience."

It's amazing that his high school had electronics classes and vocational externships. Is that something that was common at the time or just another amazing aspect of Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER7> I grew up in a small-to-mid-sized town in California's central valley, east of the Bay Area and SV. We had an electronics class, and as a freshman, I took it.

If you needed parts for a homework assignment, the only store that had them was Radio Shack (yes, they actually sold lots of electronic parts back then). So one day, I meandered into The Shack to get a resistor I needed. Lo and behold, there was a new manager, a guy named Tony. This guy was _much_ friendlier than the previous manager had been. That other manager just tried to get us in and out, apparently presuming we wanted to shoplift or something.

This new guy? Happy to show me the new TRS-80, and though my parents wouldn't pay for one, he scarcely complained as I went back to use it every day for more than a year. I taught myself how to code on that machine, and so I have that freshman electronics class to thank, in part, for my career.

<comment><USER8> Similar background, only got hooked on the commodore BBS scene... I'd ride my bmx bike holding a box of floppies to a friends to hack on, with the warm smell of manure rising up through the air. (Turlock)

<comment><USER9> Cool. My first programming experience was as a high school senior going to the CSU, Stanislaus (Turlock) computer lab to play on the Apple II's, and later on the C-64 in that lab. It was my job to be the "lab assistant" for about 6 months before starting school there. (put paper in the printers, make sure equipment stays in the room, show people where the "on" buttons are)

Yeah, a ride down Monte Vista Ave was a pretty "pastoral" experience.

Going from toying with analog electronics to getting to use an actual computer was pretty exciting, at least for somebody in a rural area who could not afford such toys otherwise. Putting simple graphics into the Apple was a stroke of genius and made it quite an experience to play with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> " _The other 'bible' was a book "101 Games in BASIC." I was a fan of computer games and knew that as soon as I had a computer of my own I would want to type in all these games to play._"

I don't know for sure, but I think Mr. Wozniak is referring to the book edited by David H. Ahl, _BASIC Computer Games_ :

[http://atariarchives.org/basicgames/](http://atariarchives.org/basicgames/)

Notes on the page mention the book was "[a]lso published as 101 BASIC Computer Games".

This book happened to be a great influence on me. Reading it in grade school gave me a small taste of what fun programming can be. I especially liked how some of the programs showed how simple rules can result in emergent and unexpected behavior. Not to mention how easy and fun it was to change the source (sometimes by accident... SYNTAX ERROR anyone?) and seeing what would happen.

Today, I have the distinct privilege to do effectively the same (different platforms, of course :)), and now it even pays the bills.

<comment><USER11> This was how I learned to program BASIC at six years old.

Of course, I also figured out I could get my TRS-80 Model 1 to make sounds of various pitches by tuning an FM radio to its CPU and running loops with varying delays. I added sound to a pinball game this way back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Woz is, for me, the ISO standard geek, the distillation of all that I aspire to. Somewhere in Paris is a vault, and in that vault is a platinum-iridium Steve Wozniak, against which all of us are judged and found wanting.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're interested in the actual details of the implementation of the syntax table, I had a great exchange on the 6502.org forum a couple of years back.

[http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?p=17736](http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?p=17736)

There is a (relatively easier to understand) stack-based expression evaluator, with hooks to allow for operator precedence. The interesting part is the scanner, which converts each line of BASIC into the tokens used by the evaluator. This is the bit that has the "syntax table diagram".

You may also find this article by Woz on the Apple][ from the '77 BYTE magazine a pretty interesting read.

[http://www.downloads.reactivemicro.com/Public/Users/Grant_St...](http://www.downloads.reactivemicro.com/Public/Users/Grant_Stockley/Apple2WozSystemDescription.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> In India I studied in a school that had only one electric bulb per class and a second hand MS-DOS machine donated by a politician. The school and teachers were glad to let me use it and I am eternally thankful to them for the same. It changed me totally.

We also had awesome electronics equipment lying around which we could use. I used IC-555 when I was in 8th grade to program a flashing LED and I can not explain the joy of doing it in words.

<comment><USER15> Our school had no computers. I first saw computers in my University in a air- conditioned room and we were not allowed to go inside. We had a Fortran-77 module (elective) which I took in the hopes of getting a chance to use the computers. However, it turned out that we were supposed to write our code on paper and the teacher would evaluate them by reading them, not compiling them! So the end result was me scoring very well in the exam by writing code on paper, the teacher evaluating it by reading it. Sigh.

<comment><USER14> That is how C programming was taught in my engineering college and so was Java and even HTML.

There would be a short note table tag or a 10 mark question on what is the difference between Interfaces and Inheritance in Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I programmed in Forth some time ago and I wonder why didn't Wozniak implement Forth on his first computer. Surely, it would be easier to do and run faster than BASIC. That BASIC was a naive interpreter, it couldn't help being slow, except for the primitives that Woz coded in machine language, I'm sure they were fast.

Was it already clear for Wozniak in 1975 that Forth looks weird and people won't get it?

<comment><USER17> Wozniak was all about bringing computers into wider use. At the time, BASIC was considered the "easy" language to learn. So easy that kids could do it.

<comment><USER16> I thought Logo was, too, and Logo is based on Forth, but I checked Wikipedia article and Forth is not mentioned. Also, don't know about the popularity of Logo back in the day, but I thought it enjoyed some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like gaming has always been an important application for driving hardware innovation.

It's interesting that this article shows that goes at least all the way back to Woz's home-built computer that turned into the first Apple.

<comment><USER19> Games aren't given nearly the credit they deserve for driving the PC revolution. My house was one of a very few in our neighborhood that had an Apple II in the house (this was 1980), which cost $2000 in 1980 dollars. For that kind of money, people _said_ the reason they bought the computer was for <x>, but the _real_ reason was almost always for the games.

<comment><USER20> Not to mention the consumer-grade GPU market that preceded GPGPU and a lot of the modern scientific uses for commodity/commodity-like hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "But I had in the back of my head that I could be a star, that I could get a little fame in the hobby world, like Bill Gates, if I created the first BASIC for the 6502." Big things start small!

<comment><USER22> Baby steps are fine as long as you keep moving your feet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _" I kept about 50 chronological folders of papers throughout all my BASIC design work. Each one was labelled GAME BASIC. So you can see where my head was coming from."_

I'm not sure whether that 'kept' means they are gone, with that " _can_ see" a sentence later, but if they exist, somebody should write a book or a paper on them.

</comment><comment><USER24> this is a serious question.

does anyone know if woz lifted weights or participated in any other kind of serious athletics when he was younger? he's always very fit and muscular in early pictures and as many athletes do, he's gained some weight in later years.

i only ask because some contemporary biopic films/representations have portrayed him as out of shape in his early years and that's clearly bullshit.

<comment><USER25> I suspect what's going on is that he was chubby by early-70s standards, and so contemporary representations start with chubby-by-2010s standards and blow that up for effect. (I've wondered about this too.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember a quote by Woz I think it was with the hardware however, about being forced to design everything more completely before even starting to build it. There's got to be a lesson in that somewhere.

<comment><USER27> A few days of coding could save you a few hours of designing. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Judging by my own feelings, I assumed that..._

 _At least then I was sure that my computer could possible do the important things that high priced computers do, but I wasn 't sure._

 _I sniffed the wind and knew..._

 _I never saw my name in print so I didn 't get that 'Bill Gates' fame, but I was known in my club._

 _Every club meeting I 'd have a few more commands that worked fully._

 _Had I not cared about BASIC, I probably would have just built another switches and lights computer with minimal static memory and been done with it._

<comment><USER28> Emotional decision. Uncertainty. Gut feeling as compass. Mild recognition to ability. Incremental progress. Emotional tie.

These might be the ingredients for innovation.

HN penalizes them without reflection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "When you code by hand (couldn't afford a time-share account) it's hard to make changes in the middle structure of things that have to be at fixed addresses."

</comment><comment><USER30> Woz wrote BASIC from scratch and I'm having trouble with call and apply...

</comment><comment><USER31> Wozniak is the closest I get to idolising. There's just something about the combination his extreme talent, humbleness, and humanity.

</comment><comment><USER32> People always ask me, "what was it like to be homeschooled" and I never have an answer for them. It was all I knew. What was it like to go to public school? But this. This is what it was like. My sister and I did things, made things, whatever we wanted. We went places and interacted with adults and worked on real projects. Nothing as impressive as this, but lots of things far more impressive than our peers.

But that wasn't "being homeschooled", that was having our parents. I've learned that most of our homeschooled peers didn't do anything like we did. It was kind of a weird revelation to grow up in this group of supposed-academic- over-achievers, often feel like the dumb one because I hadn't read all of the books they did (which I now realize was because I had a much more balanced up bringing that included sports and other studies), and then be the only two (my sister and I) to make something out of our lives.

Religious zealotry will do that to people. And they were zealous in both homeschooling and Christianity. I'm now somewhat surprised one or two of them haven't committed suicide yet. I know one has tried, but his zealotry makes him refuse to get help. His father, being the local physician in our small town, apparently doesn't believe depression is a real thing. And yet half or more of his 11 kids are textbook cases.

It makes me sick. But again, that's not homeschooling, that's having certain parents. One's parents are, naturally, the biggest influence on their lives.

</comment><comment><USER33> I believe I know exactly how he did it - the Richard Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:

      * Write down the problem.
      * Think very hard.
      * Write down the solution.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Wow, so, you mean people can develop software without using TDD and an OO language?!"

Edit: yes, this is why I have much more respect for Wozniak than for Uncle Bob or other consultants

<comment><USER35> Ordinarily I'd vote this down for snark not contributing to the conversation, but I actually do this the underlying thought here is worthy and contributes to the conversation.

There is a core aspect of hacking/making/doing that Woz demonstrated well and aren't represented by many modern thought leaders in the industry.

<comment><USER36> > _Ordinarily I 'd vote this down for snark not contributing to the > conversation [...]_

You're right, it doesn't contribute to the conversation.

> _I actually do this the underlying thought here is worthy and contributes to > the conversation_

Unless someone actually takes the "underlying thought" and expresses it as more than 12 words of snark, there's nothing to discuss.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What OS X software / tweaks / tricks can you not live without? - <AUTHOR> I recently switched to a mac for my primary development machine, and I'm trying to get used to the ecosystem.  Development tools, terminal tweaks and that kind of thing, but anything else that you would immediately put on a new mac. <comment><USER2> Some tools I use daily on OS X

Atom: [https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

XtraFinder: [http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/](http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/)

iTerm2: [https://www.iterm2.com/](https://www.iterm2.com/)

SourceTree: [https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/](https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/)

Asepsis: [http://asepsis.binaryage.com/](http://asepsis.binaryage.com/) (This prevents creation of new .DS_Store files - nice but doesn't work anymore with OS X 10.11)

homebrew, npm, git, bash aliases..

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll give this a go.

Above all I think the most essential tool for me is Spectacle [https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/)

Homebrew is also a requirement.

Iterm2 to replace the default terminal. I also added this [https://github.com/SebastienElet/iterm2-borderless](https://github.com/SebastienElet/iterm2-borderless).

Everything else is pretty developer specific in my opinion. I'd recommend Visual Studio Code for a text editor (if you don't already have a preference). It has built-in git integration and installing new plugins is trivial.

</comment><comment><USER4> I won't say I can't live without them but here are a few I always do. These require a root shell.

Install Xcode command line tools

      xcode-select --install

verbose boot messages

      nvram boot-args="-v"

make Library visible

      chflags nohidden ~/Library

verify Time Machine backups

      tmutil compare

</comment><comment><USER5> This has been covered many times.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=setup%20mac%20for%20development](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=setup%20mac%20for%20development)

In the future if you want better help for a question like this, you should state whether you're familiar with UNIX or not, what type of development you do, what stack you develop for, what languages, what you have already done. etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Homebrew

alfred

Spectacle

Bartender

Textbar

Geektool

Xtools

Pushbullet

Mixmax menubar extension</comment>


A simple story of a 19-year-old refugee from Somalia - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/stories-from/somalia-kenya-malaysia-425b72913976#.6f76xyulj <comment><AUTHOR> We have all heard about the refugee crisis in media. Some stories are horrifying, some are simply heartbreaking. For the most of us "refugee crisis" is a few minutes worth of reading on social media. But for others, words "refugee crisis" represent their whole life

<comment><USER2> Zainab is a female name.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup www.LetsLunch.com - <AUTHOR>

I am curious to see what everyones opinion is on open graphing your lunch availability and grabbing lunch with other entrepreneur. How many lunches would you goto if chances are of meeting other entrepreneurs? <comment><USER2> I would definitely do that once a week, so long as there was enough participation to alternate between those with more experience and those with less experience.</comment>


Top Ecommerce Purchase Drivers for Your Online Store Sales - <AUTHOR> Ready to make online shopping a wonderful experience for your customers? Implement these top 5 ecommerce purchase drivers to ensure seamless shopping. <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.purchasecommerce.com/blog/top-5-purchase- drivers...](https://www.purchasecommerce.com/blog/top-5-purchase-drivers-for- your-ecommerce-store)</comment>


Product Discovery Methods - <AUTHOR> https://pdmethods.com <comment><USER2> Funny, the website aims at "Design Thinking" and fails to understand some basic needs right on the front page. The collapsible "Goals" section has arrows flop-sided. They point upwards when the goal is collapsed and downwards when the goal is expanded. Seems like a 101 error to me.

And before someone points out, I understand design thinking goes beyond pixel design.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the point of the site is to be an example of Design Thinking, rather it seems to be presenting the slideshare (original document, [https://www.slideshare.net/almingwork/nyt-product- discovery-...](https://www.slideshare.net/almingwork/nyt-product-discovery- activity-guide)) so that it's more easily accessible.</comment></comment>


NHL partners with GoPro to deliver fans unique perspectives of the game - <AUTHOR> http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=750014 <comment><USER2> The NHL has started adding additional "non-standard" camera angles to their streaming (pay) NHL GameCenter app/service. Many (perhaps all, I don't know) now give you a top-down shot of each goalie in addition to the standard home and away broadcasts. I watch them now and then, and it's really interesting if you're a fan of the game.

I know the adoption of this is mostly going to be extracurricular for now, maybe used during All-Star games and such (they've been known to mic up and interview goalies in those _while_ they're in goal).

Although these videos did make me dizzy, it's such an interesting way to become more engaged in the game. I love that the NHL (being the "4th-place league" in the US) is always doing interesting, creative things to try to make their league better.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested in that, but as I understand it they black out your home games; so I'd still have to watch them on cable anyway without the whiz-bang features. I'd guess most people are like me and are fans of the team in their market.

<comment><USER2> They blackout your home games _and_ all nationally televised games (although there may be a carrier-exclusive deal worked out here and there).

It's a shame that the NHL signed such a long deal with NBC. I know it was just a couple years ago, but everything was so different then. I hope when their next deal comes around, the NHL is the first to abandon these stupid blackout restrictions.

Besides, if you stream it live, you're still watching the commercials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands This was a video that was making the rounds last year in early 2014 of an AHL ref who wore a GoPro for a game:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEBoOr12BrI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEBoOr12BrI)

If it's anything like this, I'm all for it. This is about as close as you can get to the action without actually playing. Plus, you get all the commentary from the refs, which is really where all the action is.

You also get to find out all the BS they have to put up with the players and coaches.

EDIT: forgot to mention, you get a good reality check on how big and how fast these guys are, and these are essentially minor league NHL players

<comment><USER4> I'm really curious if they're going to offer the audio feed along with the video feed. We have the technology to broadcast audio from the players in basically every major sport in the US but broadcasters are terrified of doing so because... well let's say pro athletes aren't real big on self-censorship while they're playing.

I get the impression that the NHL (and NFL and everyone else) doesn't want home viewers to actually hear what the players are saying to each other and it drives me nuts, because I really feel like the interpersonal aggression is a part of the sport that nobody wants me to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what GoPro's end game is here. A partnership to deliver content isn't much of a revenue boost (in terms of #units sold). Seems like GoPro wins because of new market penetration via NHL (i.e. reaching traditional sports with its camera products) and the NHL wins because fans another reason to tune in to NHL content.

I also wouldn't be surprised if this partnership pushes GoPro's mechanical and/or software image stabilization technology forward magnitudes. It's a cool project with a big name customer the engineers will be spurred to find creative solutions to enhance the viewing experience.

<comment><USER6> Don't underestimate the completely different experience of watching sports from a first-person perspective instead of the God view we get today. As broadcast TV becomes more slanted towards live sports, since all other content can be consumed in other, more convenient ways, these kinds of deals are going to be very important to a space filled with a lot of money.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, the first time someone hits a goalie-mounted one of these with a slapshot from the blue line it's going to make people jump out of their seats.

<comment><USER8> GoPro + Oculus Rift? We could see injuries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is interesting to read the comments here and notice what brand-power GoPro has achieved.

No-one is saying 'I'll attach a mini-cam to my helmet.'

It would be an interesting thesis topic to study how this was achieved.

'Wrote this comment on my LG'

</comment><comment><USER10> That's interesting, but I worry about safety. I saw in the news that the severity of Schumacher's accident was due to the support of the camera (GoPro?) he was using at his helmet at the time.

If someone could confirm this, please. But a rigid cilinder (as I imagine consists a cam support) on a helmet might be an issue.

<comment><USER11> Presumably, the issue is a non smooth helment. One option would be to use a fiber optic line to seperate the camera's location from immage capture. The other is a slightly taller helment with a built in camera window. Sure it would be bulky but I doubt an extra inch or so would mean all that much and looking at celphone camra's you could probably make it vary thin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How awesome would it be if they could pull off 3D? A 3D view from the goalie would actually make me want to break out those 3D glasses I got with my TV that are still in the plastic wrapping.

This is a great first step however - getting into the market will open the doors for some really cool stuff - and hopefully give fans a better appreciation for the real speed of the game .

<comment><USER13> I'd never thought much about that because I've always found 3D to be kind of gimmicky, but POV 3D video in realtime sports broadcasts could really make for an unreal experience.

<comment><USER12> Totally agree - 3D is a fn gimmick. Hockey goalie view is the only scenario i can currently think of that would make me really want to use it. GoPRO I'm here for you if you want help in implementing :)

<comment><USER14> View of the quarterback in football comes to mind. Not on a regular basis, but on some plays it would be incredible. I've seen it before where the quarterback was sacked from behind. The camera panned up, you could see the lights and the night sky, then rapidly came back down past the lights, the stands, the sidelines, the players and finally into the ground and dark.

<comment><USER12> That would be awesome. They already have other electronics in their helmet for the in-helmet speaker - so why not add a few more ha

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is interesting for GoPro (good client, huge promo), the fans (great new angles, different perspectives), but I like to see this as big upgrade for the NHL and the players too, as they rely more and more on cameras to enforce the rulebook, review plays, rewatch sequences, etc.. For example:

\- Illegal & dangerous checks often come with a suspension, which is always dished out after video evidence is reviewed by the department of player safety \- It's very common for goals to get reviewed in-game to check whether there was goalie interference, high stick, kicked in, etc. \- All players watch countless hours of video during a week to improve their game and study their opponents (ex: shootout moves)

All in all, more power to the referees, more power to the coaches/players = better, safer, more entertaining hockey, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER16> These new views could bring a lot more entertainment to the game, especially if they can stream it live from the devices. Even cooler if they had this in pro cycling.

Does anyone know what attachment they are using on the helmets to get that overhang angle looking back at the player?

<comment><USER17> > Even cooler if they had this in pro cycling.

They started with on-bike cameras last season. Not streamed yet, though.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE97iUvSHk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE97iUvSHk0)

<comment><USER16> Yes, those have been great to see. But a live stream, similar to F1 would be a huge step forward and make the viewing more engaging to a larger audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It will be amazing when I can watch sports from the first person views of the players.

<comment> k-mcgrady Do you think so? I'm not sure I agree. It's useful from time to time but generally you need an overview of everything going on to understand a game. F1 has had this for a while (each weekend you can select from several cars to view live, onboard footage for the entire race. Just watching that you have no idea what's going on overall and it's quite boring. A picture in picture scenario is more useful.

<comment><USER19> It probably depends greatly on the sport. American Football seems particularly well suited to first person speciation, given there are only about 11 minutes of actual gameplay in a 3 hour broadcast - there is already a lot of detailed replay after you've seen the bigger picture. There are also lots of individual sports where the big picture isn't as important to understanding what's happening, where a mix of first and third person sounds pretty exciting - skiing, maybe tennis if it isn't too disorienting, for example. And some team sports have predictable moments where the big picture is not necessary, like the pitch and swing in baseball.

Plus, if first person is compelling enough, sports may adapt to be a better fit, especially if they suffer from competition with sports that are already well suited to that type of spectation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The video seems kind of misleading since it looks like the camera is mounted to an arm extended from the helmets. In a real game they're not going to be like that.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is great for NHL viewers, but even better for GoPro - good to keep getting their name out there as the go to for amazing action footage wherever you are.

</comment><comment><USER22> I hope it works and is safe for the players. Hockey is one of those sports that looks like crud on a TV as opposed to having ok seats at an arena. Hockey is one of those sports that I have only met fans that became fans by watching a live game. Its not quite as bad for motorsports since TV seems ok for them, but in person is so much better.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, but I found watching this video that I felt more like I did while at the game than the standard "god view" that you usually see. It wasn't fully as good, but it was closer.

I believe they experimented with the refs wearing GoPro cameras for a couple of games. You rarely saw them live, but when they were helpful or interesting or worth watching for novelty they were included in the replays.

<comment><USER22> Good, anything they can do to make it more like going to the game will help. I would dearly like live views off the ref cams. It might (note I said might) help the folks see things for penalties and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be interesting if they could stitch the video together so we could see the play from any angle. Kind of like using street view and microsoft photosynth to create something like the latest star-trek khan bombing photo.

<comment><USER24> IMHO adding the new camera angle is only half the battle. The other really important half is having a director that can use that angle to add value to the viewer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is amazing. I love hockey, but I had no idea how amazingly good these guys are at handling the puck. I didn't even read the article, just watched the video a couple times.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great idea. Next best thing to getting people inside the arena. It really is a great spectator sport. Even passes look like laser beams at ice level.

</comment><comment><USER26> I read this as "NHL partners with GoPro to deliver fans' unique perspectives of the game" and thought that would be very boring.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am so hyped for this, I might elect to not go to as many games now so I can watch the NHL channel's POV content.</comment>


Why We Pair Interview - <AUTHOR> http://corner.squareup.com/2011/10/why-we-pair-interview.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds smart. Work with the candidate doing what you want the candidate to be able to do.

Btw, your jobs page is totally broken without JS and your blog page didn't resize properly - the text moved off the side but there was no scrollbar.

I really like your security quiz - it's a good idea of what I'd be doing. Have you thought about something like that for the SWEng positions?</comment>


PHP 7.2 to 7.3 10x performance improvement? - <AUTHOR> We upgraded a job from php 7.2 to 7.3 and it runs right at 10x faster. Anyone else seen that? Tested on several different systems and the results are consistent. The code is very array heavy. <comment><USER2> If you can make a microbenchmark to show this, it could be a nice blog post.

(Some recommendations: Make sure that the run time of each version is at least 1 or 2 seconds. Repeat the measurement 5 or 10 times, preferably in some pattern like ABABABABAB, Not AAAAABBBBB. Repeat this with different arrays sizes to have a guess of the complexity order and see if the reduction is constant on the startup time or is proportional to the total time. Make some graphics, graphics are nice.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Performance was always going to be better is it more you're surprised it is that much better?</comment>


Mitro is Shutting Down on August 31st - <AUTHOR> https://www.mitro.co/shutdown.html

<comment><USER2> I've used Mitro ever since I heard about it. It's been really fantastic to use, and the team did an incredible job creating it. It has everything I look for in a password manager, even without any updates or changes since it's been open sourced.

On a different note, even though I'd pay to use it, after following the Google Group pretty closely, it seems like Mitro has been unable to foster any sort of development community in the short time the project has been open source. I would have loved to help, but mitro-core is written in Java[0], a language I have little experience with (I don't count my Data Structures class in college).

I'm curious if the demise of Mitro could be a useful case study of how not to open source a big codebase. It seems that they're shutting it down primarily because of lack of development interest, including lack of interest from the original creators. It could be naturally assumed that they were "expecting" a community to form around Mitro, and embrace the open sourceness of it, but that obviously didn't happen. I wonder if the founders would have done something different with the way they open sourced Mitro, given what has transpired.

[0] [https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro/tree/master/mitro- core](https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro/tree/master/mitro-core)

<comment><USER3> Open source Firefox took a _long_ time to get anywhere, from Jan 1998 to Sept 2002 for initial release; as Jamie Zawinski when he checked out in March 1999 ([http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html](http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html)):

 _Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there 's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty stunned by the number of projects or services I discover exist by people posting their "X is shutting down" announcements on HN.

<comment><USER5> That might explain why they are shutting down.

<comment><USER6> Pretty much. It turns out that marketing is hard. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They were apparently acquihired by Twitter a year ago: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/twitter- mitro/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/twitter-mitro/)

So not unusual.

<comment><USER8> Even @twittereng replied saying "welcome to the flock" so indeed they were acquired/aquihired by twitters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such a shame to see it go. A fantastic password manager to use. Amazingly slick interface, cross-platform support, intuitive UI. We would have happily paid for it (we can't afford $200/month, but maybe $20 or $40 - we're a small team of 5 people using it).

Big thanks to the Mitro team for keeping it alive until now. I'm still hopeful that this imminent closure will prompt someone to pick up the open-source project and keep it alive for longer (but understand that it's not an easy task).

<comment><USER10> Honestly, you'd pay $4 to $8 per month per user for a password manager?

<comment><USER11> At SeatGeek, we use Lastpass. I don't personally know what it costs - yes, I'm a lazy operations person - but it seems like it might be $24 per person at our size[1].

I personally use 1Password and if it had group password sharing, I would be lobbying to switch every day of the fucking week. The lastpass interface is confusing, slow, and ugly (I've beens spoiled by the spit and polish we've built). $8 per person compared to what we may be paying now seems very small, so it's probably not unreasonable (to be fair, enterprise pricing is hella weird).

\- [1] [https://lastpass.com/enterprise/pricing- roi/](https://lastpass.com/enterprise/pricing-roi/)

<comment><USER12> Isn't it $24 for a year of subscription?

<comment><USER11> Thats what I get for not reading :(

Is/was Mitro $8 per person per year?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've also used Mitro ever since I first saw it, and I'm really sad to see it go (had plans to implement the server in python, but at the risk of overseing a security flaw I opted not to)

Lately I've been looking at pass[0], do any of you have experience running this (with git)?

[0] [http://www.passwordstore.org/](http://www.passwordstore.org/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I only had a brief look at the source code (it's over at Github) but it seems one could easily run their own server?

<comment><USER15> yes. you can do this failry easy. There are ansible playbooks and some readmes. There is some mailservice baked in, which you might have to change.

The only 'harder' part is (the last time I tried): You have to build the browser extensions you want to use, and override the path to the mitro server to point to your server. The config file is all centralized. So you change it once and can build all extensions at once. I did not find an options to customize the mitro server via the extension itself. (this is probably a good thing).

To get your customized extensions to your users, you might have to create an extra download site or fix the links in the mitro webpage.

<comment><USER16> that makes me wonder if it would not be an interesting idea to have a plugin that points to a known proxy and you register your host with it. then the operations cost is low, a single plugin can be released, and you control the server and data. just a random thought (typing on mobile with no spelling check, please excuse typos).

<comment><USER17> A password manager really needs to be a high-availability service -- it should work even (especially) when AWS is down. Since our service (intentionally) does not cache secret data on the client, running a proxy is not substantially easier than running our service. Plus we'd have to write this proxy :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They've put out the indication as early as March this year. Just found this:

@MitroCo's Tweet: [https://twitter.com/MitroCo/status/577435506524336128?s=09](https://twitter.com/MitroCo/status/577435506524336128?s=09)

</comment><comment><USER19> This was a fantastic program and it saddens me greatly to see it go. I hope that someone will pick it up again, or perhaps find a way for the rest of us to run our own servers, since switching to another password manager that doesn't do as good of a job (at least not for free) is going to be quite the inconvenience.

<comment><USER17> The code is open sourced as GPL3, you should be able to run your own server pretty easily. Please let us know if you have issues.

[https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro](https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I assume at $200/month it somehow becomes worth it to keep going as someone's side project? I can't imagine twitter would keep it around for that little revenue (unless the acquihire from last year was simply just a hire, without buying the legal mitro entity)

<comment><USER9> it seems to be the case. According to [0] Twitter just hired the devs without the legal entity behind Mitro, and seems like with no intention of supporting the project going forward.

[0][https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mitro- dev/cgFhvuPyUiE/o-sFkE...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mitro- dev/cgFhvuPyUiE/o-sFkEQ5VBoJ) ( _Legally speaking: Mitro is run by Lectorius Inc, which has no legal relationship to Twitter Inc. It is a wholly owned independent company._ )

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am interested in taking over. I have a business idea for it, maybe it might just save the project.

<comment><USER22> Can you provide a bit more info? I'd be interested in maintaining the project as it is right now in my spare time...

<comment><USER21> Email?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, no, too bad! Mitro is a real life-saver, using it since the very beginning... This will be quite a step back for my web-usage-happiness-level.

I was wondering how will they make money, and looks like I need not to wonder any longer :(

</comment><comment><USER24> It's not long, but why leave a week where you can create new accounts for a dying service?

<comment><USER6> There are some companies using it. It is possible that on-boarding a new person RIGHT NOW while they figure out their long-term solution is helpful. Small possibility, but I want to make this transition as easy as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> $200/month for the whole technical infrastructure?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, our largest costs are: \- a primary server running on AWS \- a read-only replica running on google compute engine. Other smaller costs include networking, DNS, and various tax/administrative/regulatory fees

<comment><USER26> How much of this is the $$$ and how much is the effort?

IOW, if this thing was to generate $500/month, would you keep bothering to operate it?

I happily pay $24/year for NewsBlur. I would happily pay/donate at that rate for Mitro.

And it sounds like _just_ the people in this thread would get you pretty close to $200/month given a model like that. I know more that would.

As other commenters said, the platform integration and password sharing are really, really great.

<comment><USER6> Sorry for the delay. The monthly costs (which are actually closer ~$800-1000/month), are a small part. A bigger worry is if we take money from people, we really have some obligation to provide "reasonable" service. We've had relatively few system-administration incidents so far, but I'm concerned about something happening when we are on vacation or busy with other things.

Worst case scenario is Chrome changing how extensions work, which requires us to actually write code, or someone finding a serious security vulnerability.

As a conclusion: It really would take more like a total of $3000/month in fees to make it worth someone's time to deal with the paperwork, the administration, and to be willing to be on call. It seems unlikely we'll get there, but I'm investigating the possibility.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Apple vs Your Wedding - <AUTHOR> http://applevsyourwedding.com/

<comment><USER2> That's depressing and my wedding wsan't that long ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neither was mine! My number is ridiculous (worth over $1M) so that's why I made the site.

<comment><USER2> Mine was 12/31/11...

Slick site!</comment></comment></comment>


The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana <comment><USER2> I contend this entire (and entirely interesting) article was written solely so the OP could use the word "bananageddon".

If so, well played, well played.

<comment><USER3> Well, that and "large squads of banana sex workers"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wouldn't situations like these be one of the easier cases for GM food to be accepted by the vast majority of the population? I mean, if normal bananas die out, and the only ones left are GM bananas, it's not like anyone can claim that GM bananas are crowding out 'real' bananas. And hell, since they're all clones (by hand!!), there's no worry about them 'alien genes contaminating nature'.

If people were given a choice between no bananas and GM bananas, doesn't that make GM bananas a no brainer? (I can't answer directly as I actually dislike bananas...)

<comment><USER5> Essentially all food people is eat GM food. Some of it was just GMed in by people who might not have had helpful tools like computers, DNA, Mendellevian hereditary, or written language.

Take a look at the cow: four little bitty legs attached to a bag of delicious meat. The cow cannot exist in nature. It doesn't have to, since when nature comes close to our delicious meat we _kill_ it.

<comment><USER6> It's like that old joke - if you want to save an endangered species, you just have to convince everyone that it tastes good.

<comment><USER7> Considering the plight of tuna, we can safely put this old saw away.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that nobody effectively owns Tuna.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The server gives an intermittent 503 for me, so just in case:

<http://cache.historious.net/cached/1204/>

</comment><comment><USER10> A----- less erotic than expected.

</comment><comment><USER11> Really interesting. in Brazil we have some dozen completely different kind of bananas, so I really never thought about why they replanted the roots for a new tree.

<comment><USER12> Does anyone know why the "upscale" grocery stores in the US (e.g. Whole Foods) don't try to sell other varieties of bananas? It seems like they could charge quite a premium for the "exotic" bananas not available to the people of Walmart.

<comment><USER13> Just a guess, but every non-cavendish variety I've seen in southeast asia is much smaller. Haven't tried them though. Maybe they taste better.

<comment><USER11> some upscale markets in Brazil did have the south Asian varieties.

They were darker in color (reminding a month old regular banana in some cases and reddish in others). much smaller. less sweet. way more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Poor me</comment>


How GitHub No Longer Works - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-no-longer-works/ <comment><USER3> I've found it interesting how many people in the Bay Area, particularly veterans of the 90s boom, discount a lot of the ideas pushed by GitHub and 37signals. Anedotally, one of the common responses whenever I reference either company is, "Yeah, but how big is [GitHub|37signals], really?" It's actually somewhat surprising to me how consistently I've encountered this response (so consistent, it feels as if it was distributed like a political talking point). As mentioned in the slides, publicly announced funding definitely serves as a signal, and I haven't heard anyone say that about GitHub since then, though someone said it to me regarding 37signals within the past few months.

What I think it really has to do with is that GitHub seems to make an effort to hire doers, whereas many companies develop processes to deal with non- doers, eg, having staging servers so non-technical staff can check the work of "their" developers. Remote work also doesn't serve the interests of non-doers, since they want to Have Meetings and Make Decisions.

<comment><USER4> >> staging servers so non-technical staff can check the work of "their" developers

Surely staging servers have some other benefits? Maybe some teams consider running code on the production setup for the first time to be risky to their customers? Perhaps some teams have encountered differences between dev laptops and production servers, which run on different OS/memory/etc. combinations?

<comment><USER3> Short-lived staging environments (eg, a temporary clone of a production environment) certainly have a place, such as when making architectural changes, but these kinds of changes are generally not happening on a regular basis if you are making incremental changes and doing continuous deployment.

I'm sure that there are companies that have a valid engineering need for perpetual staging environments rather than feature flags, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that staging servers are commonly engineering driven. Certainly in every part of the web startup world I've had contact with or heard about, staging environments have consistently been for product QA in organizations with heavy-handed processes and/or product management by non- technical stakeholders.

Edit for the people responding: This is not about haphazardly pushing to production. You should familiarize yourselves with continuous integration ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration)) and the various deployment strategies of major web companies.

<comment><USER5> You honestly can't think of good engineering reasons not to push new code directly into production?

<comment><USER6> too busy crushing it to use a staging server

sorry you aren't a technical coder

you probably even file bugs instead of just monkey-patching it in production like a real man

(srcub)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love almost eveything GitHub does, and the way they do them. I'm a GitHub fanboy. There it is.

I had a similar crush on Google, maybe 6-7 years ago, they lost me somewhere on the road.

<comment><USER8> What's the big deal about Github? Too much hype.

Whenever you hear about the number of repos, most of them are just forks. In fact, I've created many by accident because Github changed their UI so clicking the icon instantly starts a fork instead of asking for confirmation first. I guess it's good for bumping the numbers up when getting private equity investors interested (cynical, I know).

Security wise, meh. Why would anybody pay to put their closed-source proprietary code onto Github? More holes than a sieve with their Rails setup.

Ok, you want somewhere to stash some private repos, nothing confidential. So why would you pay for Github when you can use Bitbucket for unlimited private repos? Plenty of other providers too.

Their enterprise product? Expensive meh. Atlassian's enterprise Stash is shared/open source when you get a license. You can also just install Gitlab, Gitorious, etc. for free on your own servers.

Github fanboys get excited whenever a big name dumps some code onto Github, like when Linus copied the kernel code over, but it was just a dumping ground while they sorted out server problems of their own. Ubuntu uses Bazaar and Trac, Linux Kernel development uses git on their own servers, KDE is over at Gitorious. Heck, there are some people still using Darcs and SVN.

Github is popular but it's not essential unless crave social karma points and your name/handle in lights.

Sorry for the rant like writing, lots of thoughts above, but I just never saw what the big deal about Github was. A good business and a slick offering but it's not going to suddenly transform your software projects or your abilities as a programmer.

<comment><USER9> The big deal about GitHub is that they were in large part responsible for the current Open Source Renaissance we currently find ourselves in. Do you remember the world before? Where you would hunt for someone's private SVN repo on their personal site and email them patches, only to hope that something comes of your effort? Compare that with the world of today, where, if I'm using GitHub, I can submit a fix to a project I happen upon entirely from my web browser, if I wish. The maintainer is notified immediately, we can have a line-by-line discussion about the change, and then it can be merged - <USER2> entirely from the browser, if that's what you're into.

Introducing DVCS and the pull request model to the wider development world is the reason that the pace of OS software development has accelerated so much in the past half decade. Of course, GitHub did not invent git, but they made it easy to host your repositories, and once Rails migrated to GitHub, the rest of the Ruby world came with it - followed shortly thereafter by a sizable chunk of the wider web development community. If you use one of their many competitors, that's fine - but they wouldn't exist had it not been for GitHub. Remember that Bitbucket started out as a GitHub clone for Mercurial. Gitlab is unashamedly an OS clone of GitHub.

> More holes than a sieve with their Rails setup.

This is just unnecessary FUD. The GitHub and Rails teams have both been fast to deal with security issues as they are raised. Just because a security issue is well publicized, it does not mean that every other piece of software ever written does not have its own security issues.

<comment><USER10> Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. All the previous social constructs around properly documenting, testing, and _releasing_ stable versions of your code have been swept away.

Instead we're faced with the constant churn of semi-functional code, users working in silos and then showing up with patches well after it's too late to give them direction, animated GIFs instead of careful engineering discussion.

Github optimized being lazy, and this was appealing, and in doing so they broke most of the technical and social structure that held together open source's ability to produce reliable, stable, well-documented software.

I've watched stable projects either wither and die or become commercialized, and now instead we live in a world of rolling mostly-broken hacked out releases (if there are releases at all), a confusion of forks (which one is the 'real' one?), while animated GIFs and "oh snap" responses permeate our bug trackers.

This isn't a renaissance, it's a circus.

<comment><USER11> >Github optimized being lazy, and this was appealing, and in doing so they broke most of the technical and social structure that held together open source's ability to produce reliable, stable, well-documented software.

And yet, here we are, years after Github optimized being lazy and broke most of the technical and social structure of open source, and we still have _hundreds of thousands_ of usable and awesome open source projects available to use and contribute to. The internet and the apps built on it still run just fine, people are getting more done with technology than ever before, and more people are getting their code out to the world than before Github.

I think that you're either overly cynical and negative, or you're upset because Github has taken away implicit social power you used to have or you're pissed off cause you have to deal with the plebs who use your obviously brilliant software in ways that aren't correct (i.e. ways you didn't think) then have the audacity to file bugs on it in ways that are wrong (i.e. ways you don't like).

<comment><USER10> Your core premises are flawed:

1) The internet and the apps built on it still run just fine.

There is very little maintainership and investment in core difficult technology development. Most core projects that make up the foundation of the internet subsist on the oft-dwindling maintainership of what you seem to consider to be a legacy generation of engineers.

Outside of areas where companies hold direct commercial interest, _many_ core technology projects are withering or stagnate. There are an infinite variety of new JavaScript frameworks, however.

2) Hundreds of thousands of usable and awesome open source projects available to use and contribute to

We're reinventing wheels at a prodigious pace, but your comment demonstrates and underlying shift in the opensource mindset that Github has invoked. Whereas open source was previously something to be produced as a stable, reliable entity, and consumed by users, it has instead become an expensive participatory process for all comers, in which stability and reliability and even documentation is discarded in favor of quick fixes and local patches and increased expenses for the entirety of the ecosystem.

3) More people are getting their code out to the world than before Github.

It's the conceit of every generation that they exceed the previous, but this statement (and the implication that this is due to Github's introduction) is simply not true.

<comment><USER12> You're both arguing by anecdote here. It seems to me self-evident that Github has many more projects on it -- not just forks of existing projects, but original projects, period -- than its predecessors and competitors do. This just about definitionally implies that it has a lot more crap. While it would be hard to prove that Github has a higher percentage of crap on it than its predecessors and competitors, that's certainly _plausible._

However, you're essentially taking it as a given that the _absolute number of worthwhile projects_ has dropped thanks to GitHub. If there's convincing evidence of this, I'd honestly like to see it, along with a plausible theory as to why that would be the case. What does, for example, Sourceforge get right that GitHub doesn't? (At least from _my_ anecdotal experience, Sourceforge is in fact full of under-documented, unfinished and effectively abandoned crap to more or less the same degree that GitHub is.)

<comment><USER10> > _However, you 're essentially taking it as a given that the absolute number > of worthwhile projects has dropped thanks to GitHub._

Not just dropped -- they're drying up. I can only speak from anecdote (nobody has paid me to run a study), but while I've seen no dip in usage of my libraries, and I've seen my projects explode with half-baked forks on Github, I've seen mailing list participation and worthwhile code patch submissions drop to very nearly 0.

> _What does, for example, Sourceforge get right that GitHub doesn 't?_

SourceForge essentially died out for modern projects upon the release of Google Code in 2006.

However, what (traditionally) SourceForge and Google Code did right -- and, what projects did in their own hosting for decades before and after that -- was place the _project 's_ community in the forefront, and the _code_ in the background.

This meant that documentation, releases, mailing lists and other constituents of a vibrant community project were placed in the forefront, with the code being something that one worked on as _part_ of the community.

By contrast, Github made projects secondary. The code was (originally) always attached to an individual account name. The primary project page was the code itself. Forks existed at the same namespace hierarchy as the projects they forked.

The result was that Github sucked community energy into Github itself, and in doing so, began to redefine the community social constructs in a way that allowed users to maximize social and personal rewards while minimizing work necessary to conform or participate in the _project 's_ community.

<comment><USER13> +1. I couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm always skeptical when companies say they have "no managers" and are a completely flat organization with 100+ employees. I don't pretend to fully understand organizational theory, but I take it that at some point, there will be someone doing the "management" work. Whether that's someone with the title of ninja/hacker/product guy/project manager/director/CEO/BDFL

<comment><USER15> (Disclaimer: Hubber.)

Here's the thing about "management work": it turns out you don't necessarily need management to do it.

Setting priorities? This can be done through consensus.

Making sure schedules are met? Don't have schedules. (1)

Hiring? Have everybody do it.

Giving out raises? Set up a deterministic system and forget about it.

Giving feedback? Everybody can do this.

Running meetings? Don't have meetings.

Communicating with the other parts of the company? We have technology for this.

1) EDIT: forgot my footnote. Of course, we're in sort of a fortunate situation here, and not every company can just not have a schedule.

<comment><USER16> _> Making sure schedules are met? Don't have schedules. (1)_

Did you forgot a footnote (1)? I'm curious to read more.

<comment><USER15> Heh. Whoops. Thanks. :*)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Please remove "[video]" from the title.

As of right now there's no video (there's a placeholder saying it's coming soon.)

<comment><USER18> That's funny. I didn't click on the link cause I thought it was a video, until I saw this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I get from these really great presentations presentations/posts/slidehows that Zach creates is that obviously GitHub is an interesting place right now, and Zach has got some really good insight but I can't help feeling that Zach really needs to get some experience with working at few more companies for some of the points he makes. Companies that succeed in different ways, companies that get bought out, companies that fail.

From the outside GitHub is in a really interesting space in that they can dog- food their own product very successfully, they have a huge market and intellectual share, and he writes as if this is the way that all companies could operate - but they simply can't.

For instances some companies have to play safe with what they say and do because they are in regulated industries, some just operate by people that have other values or outlets for their own time. I personally think it's fine if a company that I use has given up blogging or whatever to spend more time on creating a great product, or doing that while enjoying friends and family. I will leave/stop buying when the company no longer creates value for me, not when they stop talking at events or the original founders cash out because some people are born to create new interesting companies but are not suited to the 100+ person growth.

Zach if you are reading this, keep up the good work, but damn your writing is going to be interesting in 10 years time with a few more companies under your belt.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Our tech stack shrinks as we age, fewer trendy languages and databases, your product should be cutting edge, not your tech"

I'm glad this was said. I find it hard to quell the excitement about new FOTM language/framework/database in our internal team and always wanting to use the hot new stuff that HN is raving about.

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems like 20% of that slide deck is about chat rooms... GitHub still uses Campfire for chat?

I tried Campfire and Hipchat a couple years ago, neither stuck. Not sure why, maybe poor offline notifications and logging? Or maybe our team didn't have enough timezone overlap or things to chat about? Hard to say.

Is strong chat as important to Github as Zach implies?

<comment><USER22> Absolutely.

As I mentioned, we have 150+ rooms that we chill in, and most of our day-to- day work practices are tied into chat. Mention someone's name in a room they're not present in and we send push notifications to their phone and desktop- works great to pull people in as needed, without needing to distract them with the noise of being in the room 24/7.

Our ops team is particularly in deep with chat. Instead of siloing everyone's process off individually in SSH sessions, many operations happen in chat, so everyone can learn and help out when diagnosing problems. They've built some really fascinating tooling around the problems they face- if you're interested, check out @jnewland's talk on ChatOps: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw)

<comment><USER23> I still don't get how do you manage to do security-sensitive things in Campfire via Hubot :-/

<comment><USER24> I've been working on adding configuration management via environment variables at work. We allow setting configs via the command line, but it posts a notification to our devops room in Hipchat showing who made the change, and which config was changed, but not the new value.

This means that people can see _what_ is going on, without having full access to the settings which may be sensitive.

I suppose you could also set sensitive credentials in a one on one chat with Hubot.

<comment><USER15> I've seen this done by locking the room, too. That way, everyone in the room when you make the change sees _everything_ (and can check your work), but it's not recorded in the transcripts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice presentation, thanks for sharing!

Favorite quote: "your product should be cutting edge, not your tech"

</comment><comment><USER26> Love these talks from Zach Holman.

Brilliant work happening at GitHub, of course. Seeing the rise of the "primarily responsible person" is huge for us in our small company - we've found it's natural to work this way, without a label.

Keep on putting out these fantastic slides, Zach.

<comment><USER27> Admittedly I'm cynical, but how is a "primarily responsible person" different from a lead developer? It feels a bit like you're just calling things different to avoid manager-like names.

<comment><USER28> We use PRP in any situation where someone explicitly takes responsibility for an outcome, no matter whether the outcome is some software or a clean office or an accurate tax return.

<comment><USER29> I'm intrigued as to what happens when no-one 'takes responsibility' for a non- optional task. Like a compliance issue, or that tax return.

Who assigns the shit task to whom?

<comment><USER28> There is no such thing as a shit task.

Added: That's a little too glib, sorry. Let me try again: From my perspective, if there's something that _needs_ to be done at GitHub there are a few possibilities:

1\. It needs to be done and it's getting done,

2\. It needs to be done and it's _not_ getting done, or

3\. It's bullshit.

Cases of #3 become obvious pretty quickly. The best evidence: Searching for ways to _make_ someone do it because nobody stepped up.

Cases of #2 can happen for a bunch of different reasons, but malice, apathy, laziness, or incompetence are the least likely ones. The most likely: Not enough hours in the day or not enough people with the knowledge necessary to be worried. No matter the reason for #2, someone at GitHub who _is_ worried will generally try to get others to share their priorities, by persuasion, by hiring, or by prototyping.

Or occasionally by just jumping up and down and wailing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anybody else made sad by

Open positions: Technical Account Manager

or just me?

Or it's like my company, and they don't bother to list positions for software engineers because they're hiring those all the time.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a big fan of Zach Holman's talks and slides. He's a great speaker on these topics. Looking forward to seeing the video up soon.

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't wait to try Github/REDACTED

<comment><USER33> Which one? It's confusing to have 2 teams with the same name, github:[redacted].

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Funny, couple days ago I was wondering why zach stopped talking about the github internal.. which I found illuminating and highly entertaining, and then, a couple days later, boom an amazing presentation.

If I may add a question: How do you manage to keep a consistent design across all teams considering that there's no manager and that most teams have different designers?

<comment><USER22> We keep a styleguide (which is actually public: [https://github.com/styleguide](https://github.com/styleguide)) that we loosely use across many products and apps. Beyond that, we have two libraries (one CSS, one JavaScript) that we pull into projects that help us maintain a general feeling of consistency.

Beyond that, designers get passed around the company a lot. Typically they can implement the frontend quicker than the backend can be finished. This has an interesting and unintended side effect of getting designers working all across the company. I think this plays a large role in getting a lot of the consistent feel across different projects: there's a lot of transfer of taste across the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Dear github, please sort out your: \- Intermittent angry unicorns \- Slow data transfer (150kb/sec?!) \- Poor support \- Expensive enterprise licence, why don't you host a better service and i will pay for it?

<comment><USER36> If you are so fed up with them, why not host an internal Git service with gitolite for user access rules [1]. You could even add something like gitweb as a web interface for git/gitolite [2]. Or, better yet, use something like GitLab [3].

[1] [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/11-internal-git-server- wit...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/11-internal-git-server-with- gitolite)

[2] [https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gitweb](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gitweb)

[3] [http://gitlab.org/](http://gitlab.org/)

<comment><USER37> We used gerrit at amazon and my current employer and it seems to have plenty of enterprise features out-of-the-box.

[https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/](https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow, I'm taking notes on the slide design. Looking forward to the video.

<comment><USER39> He has an earlier blog post on how he designs his slides. Not extremely informative but csn give you couple of tips on how to get that zach holman look. Iirc it was in response to the how github uses github to build github talk.

<comment><USER38> Here's the blog post I think you're referring to.

[http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for- developers/](http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> [Video] coming soon.

So.. the topic is wrong?

</comment><comment><USER41> That guy knows how to make good looking slides.

<comment><USER42> The one thing that would make it better would be to black-line border the text I think so that it stands out on the black AND white parts of the slide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> So... you guys are relying on a bot on a 3rd party chat system to do live- deploys?

Does that scare the crap out of anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER44> How GitHub works is one of my favourite slides, looking forward see how things have changed.

</comment><comment><USER45> I was at the talk. It was great. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER46> Not actually a video.</comment>


This is how a Privacy Policy should look - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogabond.com/Promo/Privacy.aspx

<comment><USER2> I think tarsnap's is far better: <http://www.tarsnap.com/legal.html>

That one just adds excessive text by trying to be funny.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. One that has bulleted, clearly defined bright lines is better for user peace of mind and, you know, for the main reason Privacy Policies are written: legal liabilities.

More imporantly, I'm not interested in just "trusting them or not trusting them". I'd rather trust a privacy policy. Although Facebook has taught us that changing them silently, creating new privacy settings and defaulting them to open, and opting people into Instant Personalization and just HANDING OUT their information is... well, one way to do it.</comment></comment>


Volcano Power Could Be 'Most Exciting Thing Since the Moon Landing' - <AUTHOR> https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/icelands-volcano-power-could-be-the-most-exciting-thing-since-the-moon <comment><USER2> Powering other countries from Iceland has always been an idea tossed around, but the problem was never generating the power, the main problem is the difficulty of the transmission of the power between Iceland and the UK, and this article mostly glosses over that topic.</comment>


Leading the World's Aurora Hunters - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/liz-macdonald-leads-the-worlds-aurora-hunters-20200709/ <comment><USER2> I wondered why we hadn't seen her in The Rovers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't find the app on Google Play. Am I looking past it somehow?</comment>


Show HN: Kelsa.io – Recruitment AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.kelsa.io <comment><USER2> I don't understand why this needs to be a chatbot, rather than a web form. It seems like an attempt to get on the hype train without any good reason to.

A candidate friendly UX would offer best in class resume parsing, since this is a document with all the relevant information that a candidate already has.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that a candidate can be screened with a web form but this method isn't very popular as web forms can be quite boring and unpleasant to use. A chatbot can strive to replicate the human aspect that a recruiter provides. Also talking to a bot is probably more fun than filling out a form.

Resume parsing is it's own problem that has no universal solution and we aren't tackling this at the moment. Some candidates may prefer to apply with LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. rather than resume and hence I believe there are multiple places to obtain candidate information. As this is an MVP we haven't built this feature yet, but we are actively working on the next iteration.

<comment><USER2> Web forms suck, but IMO this sucks even more. Ask yourselves why web forms suck, and those same things apply to a chatbot.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to know why a chatbot sucks more than a web form in your opinion? In my experience web forms are static, tedious, not interactive and as a candidate can feel quite disrespectful that the company does not want to "talk" to me.

<comment><USER2> The problem with web forms (for me) is that they're tedious, but a chatbot is just as tedious to fill out, making edits is hard and I also don't know how well your NLP will work and I can't see how many things you're going to want me to fill out before you do something useful, and showing me job results in a chat window is significantly worse than showing them to me in a list.

A good website/app still beats the pants off a chatbot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea!</comment>


How to smear your enemies and silence critics, Chinese Communist Party style - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/712187/how-to-smear-your-enemies-and-silence-your-critics-chinese-communist-party-style/ <comment><USER2> The strategy of convicting them of a seemingly unrelated non-political crime is one reason why mass surveillance is a big problem. An entity with a grudge against you can surely find some minor crime you committed.

It's also why the Hong Kong extradition bill not covering political crimes is not a real reassurance to protestors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing new there. Most of these are standard techniques on social media and used all over the world.

<comment><USER4> Whether this information is new or not is irrelevant. China continues to use these techniques and the world should be aware of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related information [1] about the German secret police unit that operated in much the same fashion in East Germany after WWII ended.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi)</comment>


IQ Isn't Set In Stone, Suggests Study That Finds Big Jumps, Dips In Teens - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/10/19/141511314/iq-isnt-set-in-stone-suggests-study-that-finds-big-jumps-dips-in-teens?ft=1&f=1001&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER3> I love when people ask "what does your IQ score measure". The only thing it can possibly measure is your ability to perform an IQ test. Now you can ask the question "What does your IQ score strongly correlate with", but I'm pretty sure as it stands 'intelligence' is not well defined enough assign it a quantitative value (or even know if one can be defined).

I used to hate standardized tests (and still somewhat do in principle) but when you can show that a test score correlates to performance it does make sense to assist in making decision when there are very large sets of data to process (like college applications). It turns out that SATs do correlate somewhat to freshman year performance. It doesn't really matter if it's for the right reason, if you have thousands of similar applicants it makes sense to use that data point if there are no other options. This is the logic of machine learning too: I don't really care why 2 variables correlate, if they do it can help me make decisions.

The issue for me is that I have yet to see anything interesting about what IQ really correlates to. Pretending it is a test that measures intelligence is completely asinine if you take 2 minutes to think about what that claim means.

<comment><USER4> I'll take the other side of that bet!

What kind of odds would you give me that a group of people in the 10th percentile will have a higher average income than a group of people from the 90th percentile? If all IQ measures is your ability to take an IQ test, I think you'd be pretty confident that the bottom 10% will perform about as well as the top 10%. So, would you up up for 1:1 odds on that?

If you're willing to bet consistently with your beliefs, please get in touch; my email address is in my profile.

<comment><USER5> "If all IQ measures is your ability to take an IQ test, I think you'd be pretty confident that the bottom 10% will perform about as well as the top 10%."

Unless the top 10% has some systemic advantage at taking IQ tests. Type words into a search engine for further inquiries in this area.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't that seem kind of redundant? "People who do well on IQ tests have systematic advantages which allow them to do well on IQ tests, but IQ tests are meaningless."

Obviously, it's possible to imagine a world in which IQ is not largely heritable, and in which rich people pay lots of money to game their kids' IQ numbers, and then the kids somehow use these IQ test numbers to get better jobs (even though IQ testing from employers is basically illegal).

But we can adjust for that. I'd be happy to do the same bet controlling for parental socio-economic status.

<comment><USER5> "it's possible to imagine a world in which IQ is not largely heritable, and in which rich people pay lots of money to game their kids' IQ numbers, and then the kids somehow use these IQ test numbers to get better jobs"

You don't need to _imagine_ that world, we live in it. Kids who go to private schools with SAT prep classes and practice the test dozens of times are at a several hundred point advantage to kids who don't. This gets them into better colleges which gets them better jobs and gets them better income.

<comment><USER6> I beg to differ: I grew up in a trailer park, with an alcoholic carpenter for a dad. We certainly didn't have the money to send me to prep classes or private school. I did have one thing going for me: a love of books. I read more books than an whole classroom of kids at my school. As a result, my SAT scores were in the top 1%. I make well above the average now, and my family enjoys the type of lifestyle that I could only dream about as a child.

<comment><USER5> Observing that preparation generally improves scores =/= you can't score well without preparation. Moving the bell curve a little to the left or right doesn't cut off the tail on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Suggesting that IQ is not set in stone also implies that IQ exists. That they don't claim otherwise, and in fact show structural brain changes in accordance with the measured changes, should be well noted by folks who make a habit of discounting it. It should also be noted that IQ was already thought to be malleable into the teens, so I'm not sure why the researchers were so surprised.

<comment><USER8> It's not that people deny it exists, or discount it all together - it's just a terrible indicator or measurement of one's capabilities. Measurements should be accountable. A few cups of coffee or a bad sleep shouldn't matter if IQ is as reliable as some like to believe.

Since it is used to _judge_ one's abilities, it's hardly fair to use it as a practical measurement, just as BMI is impractical to use for judging a body builder's fat percentage.

Anecdotally, medication which I take for ADHD/PI doesn't permanently alter my brain's chemistry, yet my IQ takes a noticeable dive without it.

<comment><USER9> Nonsense.

Of course bad sleep will affect your IQ, and it doesn't make it less reliable. Why? You brain is less reliable when you had bad sleep, and IQ is a measurement of its peak performance. If you're not at peak performance any given day, your results will show.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but what is the upper limit for peak performance for each individual? If you can't use IQ to compare to other people's IQ (because of innumerable variations imposing on peak performance) and you can't use it to compare to your own potential peak performance (because you don't know if you've attained it yet), then how or why is IQ relevant at all?

No one who does well on an IQ test likes to be told an IQ test means very little, keeping in mind that high IQ doesn't determine your success, or guarantee you any specific lifestyle.

IQ is more of a _horoscope_ than it is a method of science.

<comment><USER9> If one is not able to reach his peak potential, then his own problem and not an IQ measurement deficiency. I'll read the IQ value that you're able to reach, not the value that you might reach potentially if you make an effort.

Being able to reach your peak IQ potential consistently is part of the daily hygiene of eating well, sleeping well, exercising well. And it's also a question of making the effort. If I can't measure it, it means you don't reach it. Or at least not often enough.

On the other hand, I agree that it might be overstated. But having worked with people that don't have the best minds, you start to believe IQ is not just crap.

<comment><USER8> If you've suffered with a disorder of any kind that effects the brain, _make an effort_ holds no meaning to you, other than possible ignorance.

If I use a measuring tape to record the length of a piece of wood - unless I cut the piece of wood, or damage it in some way - this measurement will always be the same. In the cold, it might shrink and in the heat it may expand - <USER2> I can measure those variations and account for them using the basic laws of math. Can you do the same with IQ?

> But having worked with people that don't have the best minds, you start to > believe IQ is not just crap.

It's not that I don't believe intelligence varies, I just don't think we have the ability to measure it - yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ? We already know that things like whether the child can wait 20 minutes on a marshmallow at age 4 is a better indicator of scholastic success than IQ.

I fear people use IQ as an excuse for a (lack of) their success rather than face up to it and improve (or just accept and move on).

<comment><USER11> Setting aside the possibility that the delayed-marshmallow-gratification thing has been exaggerated by people wanting to downplay IQ, and taking it at face value: the fact that IQ is not the single most important predictor of scholastic and/or life success does not make it unimportant. It warrants discussion, especially if it can be improved.

For example, eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly across whole populations. Isn't that something to be excited about?

<comment><USER12>
      eliminating childhood malnutrition
      can improve IQ significantly

I suspect it can improve the marshmallow-related behavior as well. But I could just be excited about the elimination of malnutrition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The following two paragraphs are from the article:

"Price and her colleagues used brain scans to confirm that these big fluctuations in performance were not random — or just a fluke. They evaluated the structure of the teens' brain in the early teen years and again in the late teenage years.

"We were able to see that the degree to which their IQ had changed was proportional to the degree to which different parts of their brain had changed," explains Price. For instance, an increase in verbal IQ score correlated with a structural change in the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when we speak."

So, if there were structural changes in the brain that correlated with change in IQ score, then IQ likely tells us _something_ other than "this person does this well or badly at IQ tests." Many people are very skeptical about IQ tests. As depressing as it is, the basic science behind psychometrics has been mostly stable for decades. Look up the work of Linda Gottfredson (sp?).

As for this particular study, psychometricians already knew that generalized intelligence (the so-called _g_ -factor) crystallized in adolescence or early adulthood. The surprising thing about this study is how much change some of the subjects showed. Going from the fiftieth percentile to the ninety- something or, worse, going in reverse, is a big deal. The researchers behind this study should get more funding to continue their work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Link to original study: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10514.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nature is paywalled so only the abstract is viewable for me.

<comment><USER15> "Nature is paywalled" is a sentence I fear I will see again, with a different meaning, at some time in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any idea how reliable a single IQ score is? If you repeat the test a week or a month later, too soon for changes to reflect a significant change in cognitive abilities, but far enough away to get rid of effects like a poor night's sleep, stress from school or relationships, &c., by how much is the score expected to vary?

<comment><USER17> A proper IQ test done under the same conditions (well rested, etc) will give the same results. It's vulnerable to poor conditions - if you're not well rested, you're not going to do as well as you could otherwise.

<comment><USER18> In my childhood I did enough IQ tests [1] to be able to say "Oh, it's one of this class of problems again". I assume that people taking repeated IQ tests get better at them, because there's a limited selection of problem types.

[1] Only three or four. I'm sure there are lots of kids out there getting far more over-tested than I.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well of course IQ isn't set in stone, IQ is based on the results of a test that babies can't take. QED.

<comment><USER20> Honest question: do people actually believe something like that could be hard- coded? It just seems like a horribly depressing worldview to believe that you're stuck with whatever INT points you rolled at the start... not even to mention being trivially disprovable.

<comment><USER11> I think there's some semantic confusion here.

1\. There are degrees of mutability; "changeable" versus "hard-coded" is a false dichotomy. For instance, I can increase my arithmetic ability with practice, but I'm never going to be able to improve it so much that I can diagonalize huge matrices faster than a computer.

2\. Whether or not a belief is depressing has no bearing on whether or not it is true.

So I would reframe the question a bit: to what extent can IQ be changed? How reliable are the tests? And if we can improve IQ, what's the best way to do it? For example, childhood malnutrition can lower IQ, so improving childhood nutrition can pay off big. The Flynn effect -- the rise in IQ scores over time -- suggests that there are other things that can raise people's IQ as well, so if we can find and exploit those, and they actually raise intelligence, then that would be great.

<comment><USER17> Yes, you can improve your intelligence or IQ. For example, one subtest of the IQ test is a spatial reasoning test - you have a series of split-colour cubes and have to arrange them to match a card you're shown.

Now, there is a flaw in the point that you can train for tests - if you trained in this task, then the task has no diagnostic meaning for you. But if you genuinely start working with more spatial reasoning gear - say you become a mechanic of some sort - you get better at recognising how things fit together spatially. You have, in effect, trained yourself to be better at spatial reasoning in general, and would do better at the subtest.

But the important thing to note here is that your intelligence _has_ improved in that way - your ability to reason spatially has improved; you are actually able to cognitively do more than you could previously.

Likewise with the (culturally-referenced) verbal tests. Someone might get an IQ test at 20, then 'find books' and become a voracious reader. Tested a couple of years later, their vocabulary and verbal reasoning has been significantly exercised and improved. With an improved vocabulary, you are better able to express or consider more advanced concepts, so again, that aspect of your intelligence has actually improved.

<comment><USER21> >Now, there is a flaw in the point that you can train for tests - if you trained in this task, then the task has no diagnostic meaning for you. But if you genuinely start working with more spatial reasoning gear - say you become a mechanic of some sort - you get better at recognising how things fit together spatially.

Has it been tested whether training for the spatial reasoning tasks on an IQ test will make someone better at other spatial reasoning tasks (like being a mechanic)?

<comment><USER17> There's been lots of testing, refinement, and correlation for each subtest and what real-world aspects they're meant to represent. The test derives from a number of psych tests and concepts which have been well-researched over the years.

I don't know if you could say "would mean you would make a good mechanic" based on that one test because that involves other aspects, not just spatial reasoning, but being a mechanic would mean you (probably) deal with spatial reasoning more often than say a journalist or call-centre worker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting; for me, the cool thing is not the variations (after all, we have long known from childhood IQ tests that there's a lot of variation along the way to one's adult IQ) but the nailing it down to the structural brain changes as opposed to more transient or environmental stuff like, say, having a bad day or test-retest effects or something.

</comment><comment><USER23> How many other people here have avoided taking an IQ test there entire life thus far?</comment>