How scammers drained $1,700 from a bank account using Starbucks cards - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/08/07/how-scammers-drained-1700-from-my-bank-account-using-starbucks-cards/ <comment><USER2> Contrary to what the article states, this is almost definitely not due to skimming of any kind. It is most likely related to a database leak or breach, whether it is documented or not is another question.

Also, typically these are not "actual" (card-present, pin entered) debit transactions. Starbucks, much like Amazon, authorizes some online purchases as pinless debit card transactions, due to the lower processing rate incurred by the merchant. This can all be done completely online, for example, via Starbucks Online Reload system.[1]

This is truly nothing new, Gift card fraud has been booming since 2006-2007, when companies (starting with Starbucks, followed by Subway, Walmart[2], Whole Foods, etc.) began offering reloads to existing cards. Unfortunately, most of these companies have laughably bad fraud detection.

For example, Whole Foods uses a platform formerly known as "Giftango", which was rebranded as "InComm" in the last couple weeks. They quite literally will let a credit card thief reload hundreds of dollars from an IP anywhere in the world, to any gift card powered by their platform. No fraud scoring, velocity checks, geolocation, etc. You can imagine how easy this would be just by taking a look at their default gift card management portal, used by Whole Foods.[3]

Conveniently for credit card theives, WalMart even offers an option to reload a spreadsheet, or a CSV list of cards off a single credit card, easy right?[4]

Overall, I think this problem is only going to grow, especially with Cardpool acquired by Safeway, and now offering instant cash for gift cards in stores. This is an extremely easy method to cash out these fraudulently created gift cards, conveniently located at your local grocery store.

[1] [https://www.starbucks.com/card/reload/one- time](https://www.starbucks.com/card/reload/one-time)

[2] [http://www.walmart.com/cp/Reload-Gift- Card/1097444](http://www.walmart.com/cp/Reload-Gift-Card/1097444)

[3] [https://app.giftango.com/GiftCardPortal/WholeFoods/GiftCardP...](https://app.giftango.com/GiftCardPortal/WholeFoods/GiftCardPortal.aspx)

[4] [http://www.walmart.com/cp/Reload-Gift- Cards/416242](http://www.walmart.com/cp/Reload-Gift-Cards/416242)

<comment><USER3> You would think that pinless debit card transactions would carry higher fees since there is a higher risk of fraud. Any thoughts as to why it's the opposite?

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't say there is any higher potential for fraud, as they're essentially verifying the same about of data. It may make it _slightly_ more difficult to recover funds if your card is used without your permission, however.

The processing rate is typically lower because of agreements between issuing banks and debit processing networks, and is a somewhat hot topic at the moment as technically pinless online debit transactions are only intended for when the customers identity has been "confirmed", such as individuals with running accounts at a wireless carrier.

However, for whatever reason, some big companies are being allowed to use the MasterCard Debit/Maestro/Visa Debit/STAR/PULSE networks in this manner. In this case that company is Starbucks.

I'd estimate the rate paid by Amazon/Starbucks for processing pinless debit is 0.8% or less. Compare this with the 0.9 - 2.2% interchange fee (depending on card type) they'd incur if they processed these transactions as credit. It might not sound like a lot, but at that scale it probably ends up being millions per day saved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why I refuse to use debit cards.

Also, the authorization that merchants do to make sure you have the money will tie up that money on your account even if you cancel the purchase before being charged. On a credit card it will tie up the equivalent credit, but at least it is not cash being locked up.

</comment><comment><USER5> My understanding is that one way to reduce the impact of card skimming would be to use a credit card for general purchases rather than a debit card. I would especially avoid pin-based transactions whenever possible.

<comment><USER6> One thing that helps about credit cards - credit card companies extend you more protection, which means they assume more liability. From what I've seen/heard, this translates (as you would hope) to increased vigilance on their part.

Personal example - driving cross country, I filled up maybe 4-5 times across several states. Got a call from my credit card company after the 4th fill-up. It had been less than 24 hours since the "spree" started, and I got the call in the middle of the night, _from a human_! (I was driving through the night)

<comment><USER7> > _credit card companies extend you more protection, which means they assume > more liability_ //

I thought it meant they placed more liability with retailers &c.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a pain in the *ss when this happens.

I had a credit card # stolen from a locked hotel safe. (It was overseas, I hadn't used the card on the trip, and there were charges to a sporting goods store down the street.)

If someone wants the #, they can get it. The nice thing is that the data analysis seems to be getting better and better. It gets caught very quickly nowadays (the current story being a poor counterexample) and it's been a few years since I had a false positive.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, Chase has false positive fraud alerts on my debit card 2-3 times a month.

<comment><USER10> My favorite, before online banking was like it is today, was the "please verify the last 10 (or 20) transactions" ordeal.

<comment><USER9> I still get this - they call with an automated system, give vague descriptions of the transactions which I can't actually recognise them from, then I go online and actually check the transactions.

<comment><USER8> I always assume that the inbound call is someone spamming...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> After the perpetrators skimmed my debit-card number (perhaps at a subway- station vending machine or a local merchant)_

Incidentally, someone cloned one of my credit cards and tried to buy gas with it in NY (not a big deal -- AmEx caught it when they tried to use it). I'd recently traveled to NYC and the only times I used the card were the subway ticket machine and an LIRR ticket machine. I think they need to keep a more careful eye on those machines.

<comment><USER12> Those MTA machines usually have security cameras pointed at them and (at least at the stations I frequent) cops are abound. Of course, I don't know exactly to what degree the readers are tamper-resistant.

This is another reason I try not to use my card in any machines, especially when I'm travelling. Cash can be risky, but it's good to keep a small amount on you at all times just in case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> what surprises me most is the high amount these cards sell for on ebay, when they presumably get electronically wiped pretty quickly once reported.

the link from the article has many of these, eg currently a $10 card with 5 bids at $9.39 - surely there's more than 7% of risk that the card ends up worthless for a buyer?

[http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.Xstarbucks+card&_nkw=starbucks+card&_sacat=0&_from=R40)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Starbucks-10-Gift-Card-FREE- SHIPPING...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Starbucks-10-Gift-Card-FREE- SHIPPING-/321176617067?pt=US_Gift_Certificates&hash=item4ac79e406b)

or is the answer just that some people on ebay are stupid? ...

<comment><USER14> * None of the sellers of auctions ending today with bids has less than a 100% feedback rating and a long feedback history. There does not appear to be a population of newly created accounts selling only gift cards.

* Should an account sell a worthless gift card, the auction would be disputed through eBay and PayPal, and if lost there, possibly through the credit card issuer too. One or two scams and the accounts would be locked.

* eBay, PayPal, and the buyer's credit cards all separately promise full reimbursement protection against fraud on eBay, so the risk to the buyer is small even if fraud were to occur.

* If a listing category on eBay were generating >7% chargebacks for PayPal, which is owned by eBay, they'd restrict or eliminate that category the same as they've done with others. The fact that it's available as a category is evidence that there is not widespread fraud.

I don't think there's a 7% chance of buying a worthless gift card on eBay. I don't think eBay buyers paying 93% face value of gift cards are stupid.

<comment><USER15> So having had the experience of having a 'starbucks card' get charged to a compromised account, I asked Starbucks about this and at that time (a bit over a year ago) they didn't invalidate the card because it was causing a lot of customer service complaints. Given the prevalence of the fraud I wonder if that was a wise choice, perhaps they have changed since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My question is why would the scammers launder the money through Starbucks then to eBay or some third party service... there seems to be too many points of failures... Starbucks can easily deactivate all the cards once they have been notified... eBay restricts the number of gift cards you can list, plus there are the fees and the credit card charge back, etc... Seems there are better ways to do this...

<comment><USER17> Most likely one of the easier ways to "cashout" on stolen credit cards. There is nothing to pick up/ship, its fairly anonymous and if you have the volume it can easily be worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the article the original debit card #, exp date and cvv could have been stolen online or via physical card skim. Online via database hack (this is a serious PCI-DSS violation if the perpetrator has the encryption keys or the system storing the info isn't protecting the data), could have been stored in her browser cache and someone sneaked a peak at starbucks when she went to the bathroom. Or a physical card skim which typically happens from skimming devices appended to gas station and atm card readers, or a server at a restaurant quickly skims the card data while taking your card away to pay for the meal.

Either way they got the card #. I don't think it's feasible to completely prevent card info from being compromised, too many possibilities for human error on behalf of the cardholder or merchants/processors trying to protect the data, which face a seemingly never ending list of people willing to steal card info for a quick buck.

Part of what makes thefts like this hard to track down is the fact that there are numerous parties and systems involved in the transaction. There's starbucks website, and I'm sure they use and outsourced provider to manage their stored value accounts, who in turn uses an outsourced payment provided to process the credit/debit card payments, who plugs into MC or Visa rails to hit the cardholder's bank. In my mind all of these parties are at fault for not catching this, but I admit it's easier said than done when processing billions of electronic transactions every day.

The easiest way to prevent identify this type of fraud would have landed on her bank's shoulders. First recognizing the initial test txn in Ohio was questionable, and then they should have had a velocity trigger on the same account # being used at the same merchant numerous times. Starbucks (and their partners) should have a similar velocity trigger looking for repeat purchases from the same card# within a certain time frame regardless of dollar amount.

In the end the crooks learn the fraud rules, adjust their practices, and the good guys have to play catchup while trying not to prevent good transactions from getting stopped.

Maybe the best way to protect yourself as a consumer is to routinely (daily, twice a week, etc) review the purchases made on your accounts. It's clear you can't depend on the companies making money off your spending (i.e. electronic payment providers and your bank) as they get paid when you spend more, and they'll only go so far to protect you before the ROI isn't there.

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't use a debit cards.

I destroyed most of my debit cards and the rest is locked away. I carry an ATM card (no expiration also, I had to request it from Chase to replace the debit card) and few credit cards. With a credit card I can charge back any transaction up to 180 days later.

<comment><USER20> I am not sure if there is any advantage at all of using a debit card over a credit card. Bottom line is that debit card fraud comes straight from your bank account and can cause problems with other payments etc. These days it is not possible to escape fraud even if you are very vigilant. You cannot assure that merchants are handling this data properly. For this reason I specifically requested that Chase stop sending me debit cards as my ATM card, and now I have a plain blue card that just says "ATM card" If you have a credit card use that and pay it off every month, far easier and safer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the simpler fraud checks is velocity (rapid orders) and flag them. In this scenario, he should do a charge back (through his bank) to recover the funds.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure it's possible to do a "charge back" on a PIN-based debit transaction.

It was years ago, but someone once stole my debit card number once and it took a few weeks to get my money back ("provisionally") from my local community bank.

<comment><USER21> Assuming this was setup on a website/phone app, it was not a pin-based transaction, most likely run over the credit or debit rails as a card not present or pre-approved transaction.

The customer should be able to request chargebacks through their bank without issue.

I would suggest you investigate getting a better local bank, as this is something any bank should be able to easily do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"suspicious activity" from store merchants (whatever that means)_

To my understanding, the concern is a store merchant who is palming a card scanner and sneaking a swipe of your card through their scanner.

<comment><USER22> They wouldn't necessarily even need to do that. With a camera just below the counter, and a little practice, they could capture the front and back of the card easily without appearing to do anything unusual. That would contain all the information they need to make a copy.</comment></comment>


17 Techniques Used to Scale Turntable.fm and Labmeeting to Millions of Users - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/9/26/17-techniques-used-to-scale-turntablefm-and-labmeeting-to-mi.html <comment><USER2> This is...just a bullet-point summary of Joseph Perla's original bullet-point article?

<comment><USER2> Original discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3026580></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dealing with Preferential Treatment - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I've been tormented for a while about some things I notice in the way our engineering teams work (I'm a software engineer in a tech company).
It seems like engineers are quite noticeably split into a handful who get access to more interesting/high-profile pieces of work and opportunities to grow, and the grunts who get assigned more menial pieces of work, with no serious growth prospect.
Since I'm quite new in the industry, I'm wondering if this is normal or usual in the field, or if it's a red flag that should make me wonder.
Does anyone have similar or contrasting experiences? <comment><USER2> > the grunts who get assigned more menial pieces of work

Funnily enough if you automate and re-architect those menial pieces of work, you will turn that pile of boredom into a "serious growth prospect".

> Does anyone have similar or contrasting experiences?

The grass is sometimes, not always, greener where you water it. I've been in that position, most of the boring stuff for me are related to internal operations. "High profile pieces of work" usually equate to "greenfield" customer facing UI or features, while it's always great to work on new stuff, there's also serious growth into improving something that currently works.

Personal experience on preferential treatment? it worked for me where if you try your best that every boring thing you touch turns into gold, you can make a new 'market'.

Example: slowly refactor some boring internal backend services, take 30 mins to sketch a few wireframes and show it around of what it could be to fellow users/officemates. It gets enough eyeballs that it turns into something exciting that other engineers would want to work on too. Management decides if it's worth the time or not, the key to win their approval is if the refactor/re-architecture/development is small enough to solve a very painful process point (ex: accounting needs data from different databases, solving a very buggy scenario from a current product currently solved by shoehorning manual data entries in some backend, etc.).

If you don't get approval, it's okay, you've refactored something crucial and your other officemates have definitely seen your worth. Just keep repeating it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the tip! I'll try and do something along those lines.

The problem is time, unfortunately - especially when developing products, the timelines are quite restricting: tickets are estimated by the team, large deviations usually need to be explained. So if there's something I can do in a sensible amount of time, I'd go for it. Plus all the overhead of helping others, reviewing/merging PRs etc.etc.

One of my main approaches to try and prove myself was to help out with identifying/fixing company-wide issues in some of our platforms. Got me some good contacts (and a very senior engineer offering to mentor me for a bit) and I certainly learned a lot doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where is ther a place on this planet that doesn't have a pecking order? Yes, engineers that are deemed to be more capable (whether they are or not) or experienced and/or are in the good graces of the organization's leaders get offered better choices than those who are not. If you're lucky, said leaders are themselves competent in identifying capable people and the organization prospers.

If you want better choices by an honest route, demonstrate that you're more capable than your colleagues who also want those opportunities, express your interest to your management chain and ask for their guidance in helping get them[1], and make sure you're well enough respected and liked by your colleagues that you won't be shot down when you're under consideration.

[1] And if your manager(s) aren't helping in this regard, transfer to another manager or find a new job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Been trying that for a while (to demonstrate things), and while I've spent tonnes of time helping colleagues (even more senior ones) both in my team and in others, it's almost irrelevant when it comes to management. (Been doing this for more than 2 years now.)

I'm starting to realise that there's a supply-demand chain - limited number of growth opportunities which need to be distributed among the engineers. So if I didn't catch the initial train, then there's little to no prospect of getting on it while it's going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do the "grunts" have different job titles? Are they more junior?

Is your problem that managers give the most important problems to the best programmers? Would you do it any differently?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, same job titles.

And no, not necessarily the best programmers. Sure, some of them are/were somewhat better to begin with, but by providing them with more growth prospects you're widening the gap.

Edit: I mean, sure, I'd give the difficult problems to the best engineers WHEN there's a tight time constraint or when it's something that only they can do. But difficult problems are not the only growth prospects in tech.

<comment><USER4> That does sound frustrating. I think it is good advice to view your work as an opportunity to take initiative and build something impressive, like a test suite or any kind of tool to automate some the work so there won't _be_ any "unimportant" tasks for anybody to work on.</comment></comment></comment>


Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wpears/spree/commit/823b05c90bc417fe698107ab86bc796a9f36bd9d

<comment><USER2> Here's the patent: [https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014011884A1?cl=en&dq=WO+20...](https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014011884A1?cl=en&dq=WO+2014-011884&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oZ2PU8n9OsiLqAbesYKgAQ&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA)

It's pretty ridiculous. It's very obtusely written and clearly cites work from others as the basis for their technique (primarily in description paragraphs 1-6). Then in paragraph 7 they claim "None of the previous research on word recognition has been applied to RSVP."

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think anybody familiar with the two services had any doubt that this would happen, eventually.

Squirt.io is another service that does the same thing as Spree, and I can't imagine that it won't soon be in Spritz's crosshairs as well -- especially since in its Acknowledgements section, the first to be credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending."

One thing I'm curious about is whether leaving the code publicly accessible, but in a "commented out" state, ostensibly rendering the program non- functional, is sufficient.

Like, suppose I wrote a small open-source text editor whose default text upon startup is the entirety of "Fifty Shades of Grey." And E.L. James' people contact me and say, "Hey, you can't do that. E.L. James holds the copyright to that text." If I merely comment out the text, rather than wipe it from the source code, have I really fulfilled my responsibility to not infringe on James' copyright?

<comment><USER4> > If I merely comment out the text, rather than wipe it from the source code, > have I really fulfilled my responsibility to not infringe on James' > copyright?

The difference is copyright versus patents. For copyright, you definitely need to remove it. For patents, I think it was openssh that used to have patented algorithms in the source that you could compile into your binary if you had a license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the Spritz-style technology, which allows me to read with high retention at 750+ WPM and skim casually at 900+ WPM, up from around 575 WPM and 700 WPM respectively, with other technologies.

I don't like to see them stopping open source versions, but at the same time they have little else to protect their algorithm, which brought some significant advances in the speed reading (RSVP) space that hadn't changed for years.

As screens get smaller with devices like smartwatches, this type of technology becomes even more important and may even be a requirement for reading text longer than a few sentences on such a small screen.

</comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who doesn't see what's so innovative about Spritz? About ten years ago or so, when people didn't create startups for every little side- project they had, there were speed reading java applets that did just about the exact same thing as Spritz.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know of an alternative to github that is hosted somewhere that doesn't recognise software patents?

</comment><comment><USER8> I just realized that this tech would be perfect for Smart Watches.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sorry but what is it about for people who know neither Spree or Spritz, what patent did Spree violate( ELI5,tried to read the paper but did understand nothing).

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm building a Spritz-like application but I don't live in the US so the patent doesn't apply. Is there anything else I should be worried about?

<comment><USER11> They also have a WIPO patent[0], which may or may not affect you, depending on where you are.

Also, since Github is based in US you might want to look elsewhere for project hosting (assuming that it's an open source project).

[0] [https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014011884A1](https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014011884A1)

<comment><USER12> they don't have a patent. as miket pointed out, it is an patent application and thus unproven and not granted and not enforceable

<comment><USER11> Sorry, who is miket?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Longest Conveyor Belt - <AUTHOR> http://www.conveyorbeltguide.com/LongestBelt.html <comment><USER2> From the homepage:

> "On 15th September 2013, the ConveyorBeltGuide has been online for 10 > years."

Wow, that is some serious dedication. Assuming there are no ulterior motives-- and I don't see evidence of any--it's wonderful to see someone so dedicated to sharing such intricate knowledge with anyone who's interested. And it's not abandoned, either; the disclaimer page notes that all videos on the site have been updated to HTML 5.

<comment><USER3> That's what I miss the most from pre-Web 2.0 Internet, the Geocities era: there were a lot of small and manually curated sites (as opposed to news aggregators and SEO spam sites) on any kind of topic.

Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real depth and passion in it.

<comment><USER4> > Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but > the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real > depth and passion in it.

Mostly because the Wikipedians won't even allow it (whether due to a lack of references or because it's not "relevant-" or "notable-enough") in the first place.

<comment><USER3> And for a good reason: your grandfather's recollection of WWII, for example, has no place in an encyclopedia, but it's surely more interesting and possibly instructive than reading about it from a history book. I'm saddened we're losing this.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't have a place in an encyclopedia, for sure, but I posit that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It was supposed to be, and ostensibly started as one, but the amount of content that gets placed into it (and then removed by the mods...) shows that a sizable amount of Wikipedia users use it as a "knowledge repository" instead, which I think is subtly different.

I mean, I wish we could collate the entire set of human knowledge into one place, however Wikipedia says that it doesn't want to be that place. The thing is, when you've already got 100,000 word treatises on Sailor Moon due to some Admin/Mod having that as his/her pet topic, it smacks of elitism, favoritism and hypocrisy.

<comment><USER6> Wikipedia is rather disappointing, particularly on engineering and math topics.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider- Man_(2012_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider- Man_\(2012_film\))

<comment><USER7> What more is there to say about conveyor belts?

It shouldn't be surprising that a major motion picture would have a detailed page written.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I shouldn't be surprised, but the second was already mapped in OpenStreetMap,[0] and I've now added the first.[1]

Unfortunately, the default renderer doesn't know how to draw a line of "man_made=conveyor_belt"...

[0] [http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/202757736](http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/202757736)

[1] [https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/278131952](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/278131952)

</comment><comment><USER9> Imagine being lost in the middle of nowhere. Then all of a sudden, conveyor belt.

<comment><USER10> I'd probably hop on. It has to go somewhere, after all. Unless it's the world's largest circular conveyor belt.

<comment><USER11> i would try to follow it, but i would definitely not hop on. especially if it's carrying rocks. nothing good happens to rocks on a conveyor belt.

<comment><USER12> Something tells me a 35 km conveyor belt is moving slowly enough to give you plenty of time to hop off before the big crushing thing.

<comment><USER13> Likely true for those longer ones but the site notes a 54 km/h conveyor belt in Germany. That could be a bit risky...

<comment><USER14> Oh, my. Suddenly I want to go find one of these things and hitch a ride on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of one Rio Tinto executive's dismissal of their $70M dollar purchase of a set of autonomous Komatsu haul trucks as "a very expensive reconfigurable conveyor belt".

<comment><USER16> For those of you who, like me, didn't know that autonomous mining trucks existed, here's a video of them in action

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

<comment><USER17> For those who have YouTube blocked at work: [http://www.komatsu.com.au/AboutKomatsu/Technology/Pages/AHS....](http://www.komatsu.com.au/AboutKomatsu/Technology/Pages/AHS.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always wonder what would have happened if humanity had invested in conveyor belts instead of cars and roads for the last 100 years. I can't shake away the sensation that it could have been a better call.

<comment><USER19> In Asimov's I Robot books, Earth has a public transport system based on conveyor belts. A 'highway' would have many lanes running next to each other, gradually getting faster as you moved towards the inner lanes.

When I first read that book, I thought it seemed like a lot of wasted space because of the amount of parallel lanes you would need to achieve highway speeds. Then I started driving and noticed how wide our highways already are.

<comment><USER20> Hmm, are you sure you aren't thinking of the short story "The Roads Must Roll" by Heinlein ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll))? The setup you're describing sounds just like the one in that story.

I don't recall the same setup in the I, Robot stories (but it's been a long time).

<comment><USER19> I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the fact that within five seconds of reading this comment, Google took me from "Issac Asimov Conveyor belt road" to [1], and a ^F for "Asimov" later I had "The concept of a megalopolis based on high-speed walkways is common in science fiction. The first works set in such a location are "A Story of the Days To Come" (1897) and When The Sleeper Wakes (1899) (also republished as The Sleeper Awakes) written by H. G. Wells, which take place in a future London. Thirty years later, the silent film Metropolis (1927) depicted several scenes showing moving sidewalks and escalators between skyscrapers at high levels. Later, the short story "The Roads Must Roll" (1940), written by Robert A. Heinlein, depicts the risk of a transportation strike in a society based on similar-speed sidewalks. The novel is part of the Future History saga, and takes place in 1976. Isaac Asimov, in the novel The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequels in the Robot series, uses similar enormous underground cities with a similar sidewalk system. The period described is about the year 3000." [1]

We might not have conveyor belts for roads, but we are defiantly living in the future.

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

<comment><USER20> Hmm, funny, I also googled with similar terms, but did not find the Asimov story (which I read when I was a kid). I'm sure you're right, of course -- just amused at my leaky memory.

To your comment, yes, that is pretty amazing, to have my (our) intelligence augmented in this way. Because just writing it down, and reading it once, is not sufficient to remember it.

It took us a long time to understand the power of writing, and it could be that eventual understanding of the power of search will also have vast implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The coordinates listed for the single longest conveyer belt are a little bit off. Here's the start: [https://goo.gl/maps/X2jg8](https://goo.gl/maps/X2jg8)

And here's the end: [https://goo.gl/maps/n0wvJ](https://goo.gl/maps/n0wvJ)

(is there a way to get coordinates out of the new Maps?)

And while I'm at it, a direct link for the longest combined conveyer belt: [https://goo.gl/maps/3kz4s](https://goo.gl/maps/3kz4s)

Pity, no streetview :p

<comment><USER22> Looks like a decimal version of the lat/lng are available in the urls of the links once clicked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not much to add because the article doesn't say much, but I do love these feats of engineering. Those are pretty much 10 times as long as I thought they would be. Amazing.

<comment><USER24> The colors speak for themselves. ;)

It is amazing how long that is. My only experience with a belt was working at Walgreens on warehouse truck days. Even our 60 foot belt continually had product falling off of it. I wonder what kind of oversight is done to make sure the items stay on it.

<comment><USER25> None, that's why you can see the phosphate spillage from space.

<comment><USER26> Still, it seems a little counterintuitive that it's not worth putting up an edge or something.

<comment><USER27> If they poured crushed rock directly onto the belt, not much would be left after only a few kilometers, what with all the curves, slopes, and vibration. The belt will also be damaged beyond repair if you keep rubbing rock against it.

So they probably put the rock in boxes and put the boxes on the conveyor belt. The tiny guardrails on either side should be enough to keep the boxes on the belt. Small pieces might spill over if the boxes aren't covered, but most of the cargo will arrive intact.

<comment><USER28> How would you get the boxes back to the beginning?

<comment><USER29> Well, you put another conveyor belt going in the other direction of course.

Then you will have the TWO longest conveyor belts in the world.

Ka-ching!

[Edit: Typo]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _One can easily detect it by the phosphate spillage south of it._

As a teenager I worked at the end of a delivery conveyor belt for a supermarket. This was an unusual setup for a supermarket (but maybe for industrial or factory settings it's nothing special). The supermarket is located over a major highway. It's the Star Market over the Mass Pike/I90 outside of Boston (1). Customers had to take an escalator to the second floor, and after shopping and paying, 2-3 paper grocery bags were loaded into a small numbered cart. The customers were given plastic cards with the corresponding numbers.

The carts were swung onto the top level of a double-decker conveyer belt. It went down to the first floor (street level) and into a long, basement like room with a conveyer belt and a road paralleling it. Customers would drive their cars into this long room, pop the trunk, and hand me their cards. I would match up the bags, and place them in the trunk. The empty carts were placed on the bottom level of the conveyer belt, to be brought back to the Muzak-filled main level of the supermarket.

The room was filled with fumes and noise from the waiting cars and the interstate tunnel that was next to it. The incessant rattling and squeaking of thousands of metal rollers on the conveyer belts was irritating, although we got used to it (one thing I just realized -- upstairs where the customers were it was an actual belt, which was quiet, but down where we were it was those damn rollers, which were like 1950s-era metal roller skate wheels). We were paid $3.65/hour (minimum wage at the time). But the things that worried us from day to day was the cry of "mix" (human error, wrong bags placed in wrong car) or a spill.

Here's what happened with the spills. As the carts came from the 2f to 1f, they went through a series of turns, including at least one 90 degree turn and a full 180 at the bottom of a decline. This spot was where most of the spills took place. It was apparently unavoidable, owing to the layout of the store, the location of the slopes on the belt, the road and loading area, and the needs of the customers to get their cars loaded quickly. The nature of groceries (heavy/light loads, multiple packaging sizes, etc.) and the technology used at the time made it hard to find an easy fix to the problem. Watermelons rolling around the bottom of the carts were the worst.

I don't have any profound observations about this, other than spillage is a consideration for people who design and manage conveyer belts, and that the cost can be made manageable for both small and large systems. And these belts can be designed to last years or decades. The belt that we used in that market was in use for more than 20 years by the time I started working there in the 1980s, and it (or a similar system, using the same route) is still in use today, some 50 years after it was installed.

1\. [https://firstname.lastname@example.com...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-71.208765,19z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x89e38291eaade731:0xab836219f578ebad)

<comment><USER31> For anyone interested, Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid" describes a setup like this too. It's a very funny book as well if anyone is after a good read.

<comment><USER32> >It's a very funny book as well if anyone is after a good read.

I think that can be said for all of Bill Bryson's books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A lot of fun can be had with conveyor belts. Unexpectedly turning one on whilst someone is standing on one is always funny, whether in an industrial 'dangerous' situation or in some made-for-TV scenario.

Incredibly there is good money to be made in conveyor belts designed specifically for film and television:

[http://www.canningconveyor.co.uk/videos/c/4/tumbleator- video...](http://www.canningconveyor.co.uk/videos/c/4/tumbleator-videos)

In the UK people of a certain age can remember the conveyor belt of 'The Generation Game', which always had a 'cuddly toy' on it, e.g.: [http://youtu.be/pa4KoACYzyU?t=4m45s](http://youtu.be/pa4KoACYzyU?t=4m45s)

</comment><comment><USER34> This belt crosses an international border. It would be interesting to see if there are any border security controls on a conveyor belt of its contents in both directions.

Anyone have any info on this?

</comment><comment><USER35> the phosphate trail the wind blew on the ground: [http://goo.gl/maps/j9wnh](http://goo.gl/maps/j9wnh)

</comment><comment><USER36> For the bay area locals there's a decent length conveyor system in the Santa Cruz mountains that runs into the cement plant in Davenport. It's hard to gauge the size of it with out trespassing, but you drive over it if you are on Bonny Dune Rd.

<comment><USER37> 2 miles, more or less, at least that's what I get eyeballing it: [http://goo.gl/maps/QQKqa](http://goo.gl/maps/QQKqa)</comment></comment>


Commodore 64 tips'n tricks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ricardoquesada/c64-tips-n-tricks

<comment><USER2> I saw the "test" folder and thought you'd also made some kind of unit test framework for 6502 :)</comment>


The Magnus Effect - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect <comment><USER2> Is presence of air / atmosphere essential to generate a drag?</comment>


Ask HN: being accused of running sockpuppets, what would you do? - <AUTHOR>

Being defensive about it seems to make things worse, being quite is not helping either, what would you do?<p>Edit: this is not specific to HN, but in general, wikipedia comes to mind where this problem is so acute. <comment><USER2> I would discuss it with PG via email, not in public.

<comment><USER3> I think he means on his own site, not here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

But it happened on HN too: I watch the logs all the time and cannot stop myself from jumping into discussion once a link to my site is posted somewhere, making it seem like I'm behind the original post. Probably should just stop doing it.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tldr++ – interactive tldr client - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/isacikgoz/tldr <comment><USER2> so elegant. what impressed me most is smart file suggestion

</comment><comment><USER3> very useful, nice shot..</comment>


Subway construction cost in China versus the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/03/28/subway-construction-cost-in-china-versus-the-us/ <comment><USER2> It doesn't discuss the differences in such things as environmental impact, quality of the construction, or worker: welfare: pay, safety, and the like. Or to be cynical, a sign saying 500 workers died to bring you this subway.

And it doesnt discuss how unnecessary waste and corruption increased the cost of the NY subway. It is a very lightweight article

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, that's why there is such a big difference between country GDP ratings in US$ vs. Purchasing Power Parity: Everything is cheaper in China. Everything except political freedom.</comment>


Bill Would Block Banks Taking TARP Money From Hiring H-1Bs - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/2/bill-would-block-banks-taking-tarp-money-from-hiring-h-1bs

<comment><USER2> This amendment won't pass. Too much "big money" benefits from the H1B program to let it get attached to the latest TARP.</comment>


Magic is often used to describe confusing code - <AUTHOR> http://www.quii.co.uk/Magic <comment><USER3> I tend to use the word magic for those situations when you can not easily examine the source code and follow the control flow. For instance, you are in some part of the code and you have a User object and you see the code calls the .babble() method on the object. You go to the User definition, and there's no babble method. You follow up the superclasses, and there's no babble method. Where did the babble method come from? Where is it going? Who created it? Where can I find the documentation for it (if any)? Even if I do find something that seems to implement it, can I be sure that some _other_ code didn't fiddle with the babble method in _another_ way?

Languages permit varying levels of this sort of magic, ranging from the Ruby extreme of dynamically rewriting classes and inheritance hierarchies on the fly, to the pretty-much-no-magic of C. (C _qua_ C anyhow. Preprocessor can get fun.)

I think this is one of the worst sorts of magic, and I've generally tried to arrange my code so that even when I'm using a dash of magic, the pathway back to where everything came from is still fairly clear. (Usually this can be done just by dealing with the fact you may need to use a few more keystrokes to leave the breadcrumb trail back to the implementation. Sometimes simplifying a bit of functionality down to zero bytes in the source code is going a step too far.)

I'll also observe that having used a number of both high-magic and low-magic languages, in terms of costs/benefits, I am generally underwhelmed by the benefits of the magic, and find the cost generally go up more quickly than most people realize as source code size goes up. I generally prefer low-magic languages. With just a bit of thought, you can still get a huge amount of power without the costs. (For instance, believe it or not, Haskell is a nearly-zero-magic language by this definition. For all the crazy stuff it seems to be able to do, you can always see what's going on just by following back the symbol definitions, with the exception of just a finite bit of syntax sugar implemented by the compiler, the most important of which is generally tutorial-level.)

<comment><USER4> the problem is when you use magic, you're deliberately being clever, and the only proper way to be clever is if you thoroughly document your cleverness with comments and diagrams and examples. the person you befuddle with how clever you are is probably yourself, 2 years from now.

<comment><USER5> Eh, try a month.

<comment><USER6> Later today: Wait, what was I doing again?

<comment><USER5> What is this in reply to?

<comment><USER7> I think they were raising your "try a month" to "try 6 hours".

<comment><USER5> Yes, and I was re-raising it to "five minutes" :( Apparently the joke wasn't very obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In practice, at work, I haven't found people using magic to describe code that they don't understand, but rather code that uses obscure or somewhat hidden features to try and do things in a smart way.

For instance if a method relied on it being modified at run time by it's caller to ensure sanity of it's input I would call it magical.

<comment><USER9> I hope you appreciate that the word "magic" is relative to the person using it. For you, it's self-modifying code. But to someone else, it's mapping. And to a third person, it's monkey-patching. And to a fourth person, it's lazy evaluation of infinite streams, and to a fifth person, it's ...

<comment><USER10> ...and the point is that magic is a word that's often used alongside readability to deride source code that isn't done the way you would have done it.

<comment><USER9> "Intuitive equals familiar"—Jef Raskin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In your specific case, the argument is much narrower: Scala's for comprehension is, in itself, a very magical construct that you have to read from the documentation, while map is a function you can actually find in the code and follow: I'd argue that scala's 'for' is its most magical feature, even more than implicits. So anyone that finds for easier than map doesn't really understand what for really does, just an approximation from another language.

That said, there is such thing as not using language features that your team isn't familiar with: There is cognitive cost in, say, understanding higher kinded types, adding cats as a project dependency, or, god forbids, shapeless. There is such thing as excessive complexity, or using features that make anyone that didn't write the code suffer to understand it.

So yes, there are definitely good reasons to say that something is magic, and wishing for a lower cognitive load. Now, the map function isn't it though. I'd just avoid making it dotless, because it's not really any clearer, especially in a case where it's a higher order function, like in your example.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is no magic other than the unfamiliar. The problem is not magic or the unfamiliar, it is complexity.

A technique can be understood, and still a pain in the ass to use; then it is bad. This is of course subjective, by comparison with other ways of solving the same problem.

Or, a technique can be useful, but too difficult to learn to justify using it on something simple; then it is inappropriate, and should be replaced by simpler, presumably less concise, code. This is of course subjective, dependent on the code's audience (readers, reviewers, maintainers). This is the root of the article's map vs for-loop example: different levels of familiarity with the technique of mapping functions over something.

</comment><comment><USER13> Working towards a rule to distinguish between _magic_ and powerful would be interesting and I for one would like to see some of HN take some swings here.

On first pass I'm having issues imagining a specific function that would be part of a standard library that is sufficiently magic that it warrants avoiding. Learning is just a part of programming. Something that initially seems like magic can quickly becomes one of your favorite hammers and make you more productive (just found reduce-kv the other day, it's awesome). If it's in the standard library then at least being able to use it seems wise. Note I'm not saying one should or could reasonably be demanded to know everything about the standard library, but rather that being asked to know something in it going forward from a point is likely reasonable.

Magic tends to live in side-effect heavy libraries and frameworks. Rails is full of magic that can make you very productive for specific tasks, but learning all the magic takes a lot of time and the incantations are not necessarily generalizable so when you switch over to Django or Node you need to go learn new magic, or sometimes the magic your looking for doesn't exist anymore and you need to learn what was actually happening (this happened to me switching from Rails to Django, I forget what in particular but it was somewhat jarring realizing how much I had been taking for granted). Learning something like map will translate even if the literal syntax doesn't, knowing and relying on x-many separate opt-args for defining an ActiveRecord relationship to save explicitly typing a dozen lines might be magic not worth it especially if the whole team has to know.

Edit: Just wanted to add that although I took a shot at a rough distinction I want to clarify that I am not suggesting that I have the correct answer, I only hope to elicit the thoughts of better thinkers and posters.

</comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago, I was working on a testing automation tool. The tests were written in Cucumber, and run on IronRuby, which hooked into a C# application and would press buttons and otherwise move around the application testing that everything did what it was supposed to. My job was to write the layer that sat between the Cucumber tests and the C# application and called the proper events when a Cucumber step was called.

The initial approach was to start the C# and IronRuby processes and have the IronRuby process watch the C# process for events, but this quickly broke down; the C# process ran in an STAThread, and in order to allow a second thread to interact with that it would have to be an MTAThread, and with 500K lines of existing code, there was no telling what changing that would do. So instead we inserted a callback in main. As soon as the CLR had loaded, if a command line parameter had been given, we started the IronRuby interpreter from the C# application. After hooking into some events we would drop out of the IronRuby interpreter and the C# application would start as normal, only going into IronRuby when an event handler was called.

There was just one problem. The IronRuby interpreter was starting in unmanaged code, and the CLR was seeing it as a noop. So when it got to the if statement that checked the command line parameter, it optimized the whole if statement out of existence.

My pair and I spent hours reading docs, trying to bend the optimizer to allow the if statement without hurting application performance. Finally, my pair inserted the following line into the if statement, after the call to the IronRuby interpreter:

        Console.PrintLn("magic!");

It worked. The optimizer recognized the print statement as C# code and left the if statement alone.

That's always what I think of when I think of magic in code.

</comment><comment><USER15> Many programming languages have features about which I would say, "You should either use them never, or all the time, but nowhere in between."

map is one of those features. Closures are another.

The reason is simple. The cost of learning the feature gets amortized over all of the times you use it. It really isn't worth learning the feature just to see it used a single time. But if you've paid the price to learn it, then there is no reason not to use it wherever it makes sense.

Unfortunately there are some very large languages with many reasonable working sets of features, but sharp corners when you combine the wrong ones. C++ is notorious for this, but it is hardly the only one. In that case it is important to agree on the subset of features that you will use. And not introduce others willy nilly.

I would therefore appreciate the right to use map. But if my co-workers do not know it, I would think hard about how hard to press for adding it to what is needed to understand my code.

<comment><USER16> That makes no sense. Maps and closures are tools like any other. Just as with many other tools, they are powerful, and should be used WHEN APPROPRIATE.

With maps, for instance, yes generally declarative programming is preferable to imperative programming ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1784664/what- is-the-diffe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1784664/what-is-the- difference-between-declarative-and-imperative-programming))

However, I've seen monster Java8 stream and C# LINQ statements that would benefit from additional intermediary variables, helper functions, and even cases where loops make things more clear.

<comment><USER17> >Just as with many other tools, they are powerful, and should be used WHEN APPROPRIATE.

You can't work in a vacuum on large projects. To be an effective engineer you have to understand the limitations of your team members. Forgoing map in lieu of a more verbose loop is completely appropriate if you're working with a bunch of junior people that need to maintain and fix bugs in the same codebase.

<comment><USER18> I didn't downvote you, but I'm guessing the reason for your downvotes is that in this day and age, even junior programmers should be expected to understand _map_. It's such a simple concept that anyone who writes code for a living should be reasonably expected to understand it. If you're on a team with a bunch of programmers and nobody understands _map_ , GTFO. It will not end well.

<comment><USER19> In fact, map is _simpler_ than a loop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't understand why you would use Scala and not use a simple higher order function such as map. It communicates the intentions clearly and is easy to understand.

<comment><USER21> I can't fathom how hard life with Scala has to be if map() is something you have issues with. Someone is clearly way in over their head. At least have him go through a tutorial or two, jesus...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My personal cutoff for magic is if it's determined at compile time, I'm happy.

If someone has proven to the compiler that a piece of code has a certain nonobvious behaviour, I'm usually intrigued.

If my interpreter starts parsing Roman numerals as constants because a gem depends on a gem which depends on gem `roman` (I'm looking at you Ruby), I'm not amused.

Scala's slick package is a fantastic example of advanced language features being used for good.

</comment><comment><USER23> There is nothing magical about computing (unless you use Source Mage [1]). But, I have to agree with the author: people tend to use the word magic if they cannot _immediately_ grasp the meaning of a piece of code. This code might use a language construct we are not familiar with, or implement a complex O(log N) algorithm, or it might use a magic number [2]. In most cases, however, it is worth to spend time to understand such code.

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code)

<comment><USER24> I wanted to get back into using Sorcerer, but the authors website has gone down (looks like for good this time).. sad

sorcerer.silverice.org

<comment><USER25> You could try the Wayback Machine: [http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://sorcerer.silverice.o...](http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://sorcerer.silverice.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _Don 't lazily conflate the unfamiliar with magic. It's short-sighted and > annoying._

Why? Because magic _exists_ , so save the word for when you see actual magic; don't waste the word on a metaphor?

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it me or does anyone else think that a single map function application is a really bad example? I've seen lots of errors introduced by for loops that have been malformed (although modern syntax like for(x:allthese) {stuff} helps ) but also map(stuff:x) means do all these, while for means do them one at a time in sequence

</comment><comment><USER28> WRT pragmatism, why

        val transformedCollection = collection map transformer

instead of

        val transformedCollection = collection.map(transformer)

    ?

<comment><USER22> The scala style guide suggests that the dotless notation be used for pure (side-effect-less) operations.

<comment><USER11> If there is a language where the style guide is rarely followed, it's Scala.

The dotless notation gets complicated easily the moment you try to extend it past one function call, as you start counting to figure out the order of operations. In fact, even using the shortcut of just using a function name instead of {x=> f(x)} or f(_) is seen as bad form in plenty of places, as knowing if a function has zero parameters, one m ten, or if it's varargs is very important information.

I'd limit dotless to very few cases, like symbolic operators, and very organic DSLs, and even then, it doesn't really work all the time: Just look at ScalaTest: Even Bill's wizardry doesn't let us say that "x should be 2": We have to write "x should be(2)", or "x shouldBe 2".

If it wasn't for symbolic operators, which are useful in some cases, I'd go as far as to not miss the existence of the feature at all.

<comment><USER22> Agreed the style guide is a guideline at best.

I've moved to the dotless notation because I like that it provides a way to indicate pure code. Postfix operators are poorly supported though.

      (xs map { x => x.key -> x }).toMap

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Magic is OK provided that it always delivers what it claims to offer (for any reasonable use case).

Most of the underlying details of the TCP, HTTP and SSL protocol stack are magic to me but it works pretty damn well - I'm really glad that I don't have to understand it fully in order to use it.

</comment><comment> alex- I sometime use the term magic to highlight code that is out of the current context/scope.

That ICA, FFT or MLP module is magic...

The module maybe complex but it is not magic. However it is something that I probably don't _need_ to understand to solve the problem I am currently working on.

Now I think about it, normally only very reliable code is called magic - <USER2> stuff that always goes wrong has some other choice descriptors.

</comment><comment><USER30> I foolishly picked C++ for an assignment I did at university once and I summed up the experience as "non-deterministic programming" to a friend. To me, it seemed as if I was ending up with different results when running the same code. Then I suddenly got everything working, and that was "magic". In retrospect, it was a much too hard language for me at the time.

</comment><comment><USER31> Until I got a grasp of the generated methods in Rails I considered them magical. You try to grep for them and they're nowhere to be found!

</comment><comment><USER32> What if you are not there to explain your "magic" (which is just another word for clever here)? I get useful abstractions, but if your code has reached a point where you have to explicitly explain what your code does to fellow programmers, then you should probably revisit it and make it better. If your code is clever but not readable, go back and make it readable.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sounds like you guys just need a in house style guide..it does get weird when I can tell a person wrote this half of a program and then tell someone else wrote the other half due to spacing or bracket returning

</comment><comment><USER34> That's why when I code something that I know will befuddle readers, I guard it with a warning about dark magic and an ascii wizard.

</comment><comment><USER35> readability is always more important. The "magic" is just a sign of bad code or code that is too heavily abstracted. why have everybody learn this so called magic when you can be more explicit? this is all religious programming views but i personally am pretty tired of things being way too abstracted. it makes getting shit done take too long.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

This is what I tried to address. "Too abstracted" is far too subjective. Is "map" on a collection too abstract?

Dont get me wrong, code _can_ be too abstract. But dont mistake too abstract for the unfamiliar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> That's fine as long as you don't try to get away with this for convoluted or spaghetti code.</comment>


Apple Intern Open Letter on Diversity - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20181029000224/https://github.com/AviAgarwal/OpenLetterApple <comment><USER2> Before we discuss the lack of thought and logic in this post -> [https://github.com/AviAgarwal/AccountHacked](https://github.com/AviAgarwal/AccountHacked)

<comment><USER3> JoeJob I gather.

I suppose Avi has identified and disclosed this information to HR / management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was going to say that this is a very stupid thing to post, not only because of the content, but because it would ruin your career.

Then I wondered why an archive.org link was posted. Then I found this:

[https://github.com/AviAgarwal/AccountHacked](https://github.com/AviAgarwal/AccountHacked)

Don't really know what is going on here.</comment>


Nyuzi: An experimental FPGA multicore GPGPU processor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor <comment><USER2> Just thinking about writing VHDL again gives me the heebie-jeebies. But this is very cool, and I love the possibilities enabled by FPGAs and OSS. However we're still a ways away from having an entire open source FPGA development stack.

<comment> brian-armstrong I've been really wanting to try Chisel [https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/](https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/)

They have a RISC V implementation in it so it can't be too bad

<comment><USER3> Chisel doesn't help. It just converts to verilog. The verilog is then converted by a closed source program to a closed file format that is then uploaded by a closed sourced program to closed fpga hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like he got it running on a Altera DE2-115 board, which has these specs:

        114,480 logic elements (LEs)
        3,888 Embedded memory (Kbits)
        266 Embedded 18 x 18 multipliers
        4 General-purpose PLLs
        528 User I/Os

[1]: [http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi- bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...](http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi- bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&No=502)

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if there's an opposite analog of this? I would very much like to run a parallel language like VHDL or Verilog on the GPU since:

1) OpenCL/CUDA have an OpenGL-inspired syntax with a steep learning curve and limited generalizability

2) FPGAs don't seem to be gaining the economies of scale of GPUs

I simply want to be able to emulate thousands of CPUs (millions of gates) for physics, AI, big data etc, in a way that's accessible, affordable and won't catch fire. I'm thinking MATLAB or Octave but with near-ideal speedup for embarrassingly parallel problems.

<comment><USER6> Do you already know VHDL or Verilog? Most people would not consider them simpler or more productive than OpenCL IMO.

Julia fits your last sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this GPGPU only, or does it also support GLES or OpenGL?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess you could implement GLES on top of it. They implemented a renderer for quake maps... [https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/tree/master/softw...](https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/tree/master/software/apps/quakeview)

<comment><USER8> Looks like it runs at about 1 FPS on a 50Mhz core(with screenshots): [http://latchup.blogspot.com/2015/06/not-so- fast.html](http://latchup.blogspot.com/2015/06/not-so-fast.html)

Still crazy awesome, that's a ton of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Man, it'd be super sweet if we could get an OpenCL frontend for this target.

<comment><USER10> Technically it already supports OpenCL, as it has an LLVM backend and Clang port. However, it will generate scalar code that doesn't take advantage of the vector unit. To support it properly, it would need extra passes for SPMD vectorization.

<comment><USER9> I think there's a lot of follow-through beyond just llvm and clang support in order to make a full OCL platform -- device enumeration, etc. Plus I don't think clang distributes a complete front end (headers/type defns etc). There's some open source projects that could supplement this, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Review: Lamy Safari (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://www.penaddict.com/blog/2008/11/24/review-lamy-safari.html <comment><USER2> If you get a Safari and don't particularly enjoy writing with it -- give other pens a chance. I personally find Lamy nibs atrocious, the sensation of their nibs on smooth paper reminds me of nails on glass.

Also, once the world returns to normal, check out a local pen show or pen meet, there's a pretty active community of fountain pen enthusiasts, if it's a rabbit hole you care to pursue.

<comment><USER3> I'm a long time Safari user and find the nibs very variable especially the thin ones which seem more common these days. I prefer the thick and find one in five or six have that horrible scratchiness. What I do love is the shape of the grip m on the barrel which I find just about the most comfortable of any writing implement I've tried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Safari is cool, but for the same price I've found some Pilots to be much better. And if you are willing to spend a tiny bit more there are tons of good options.

I really like Lamy 2000, though.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I haven't tried the Safari, but if anyone is curious/looking to see what the hype is about the Pilot Metropolitans are also great and affordable.

<comment><USER6> I just picked up a Pilot Metropolitan and am liking it. Be aware that a Pilot fine nib is closer to a Western extra-fine. It really is smaller, though the pen is well made for $30.

In the same price range you'll find the article's Lamy Safari, and the TWSBI Eco. The Eco, in particular, is an excellent value. It is a good piston- filling fountain pen. The nibs have slight feedback, so it feels like you're using a pencil on most paper.

Don't get me started on bottled inks. :)

One last bit of advice... Don't buy from Amazon (especially for the more popular pens). There's a huge counterfeiting problem on Amazon. Instead, buy from a specialty retailer. They'll give you better service, you'll get the real thing, and you'll be able to find ink samples. In the U.S. I've bought from Goulet Pens (love them, and their video tutorials [1]), Fountain Pen Revolution (for Indian-made pens), and Pen Chalet.

I had an old Waterman fountain pen in my closet. I wanted to figure out how to actually use the converter, because I had stuck to cartridges, but disliked running out. I checked out the videos and am really enjoying the hobby.

[1] [https://blog.gouletpens.com/fountain-pen- education/fountain-...](https://blog.gouletpens.com/fountain-pen- education/fountain-pen-101/)

<comment><USER7> Jetpens have pilot metropolitan at $20.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fountain pens are nice to write with for really long handwritten documents, but I do that so rarely these days that I spend longer cleaning out my pen to get the ink flowing than I do actually writing. That says far more about me than about fountain pens, however.

I have a Lamy with a clear grip so that you can see the feed--not sure which model. I also have a Pilot Metropolitan, which has a better seal and doesn't dry out as bad when it's disused.

I kind of want to get myself an electric typewriter so that I can write comfortably without really being able to edit (to force myself to keep writing instead of going back and editing), but I know that it will end up in disuse after writing a few dozen pages with it. My Apple Magic Keyboard, my full-size mechanical keyboard, and my ThinkPad's built-in keyboard are the only writing devices that get much use for me anymore.

<comment> dan-robertson FWIW the pens I've used have generally been fine and had ink flowing straight away after months of neglect. It might be related to the ink. I just use the simple cheap ink one can find in high street stationary stores.

<comment><USER9> Diamine inks are worth a look a look too, there's also converters for using bottled ink in cartridge pens.

That said if the pen is gunked up inside that won't help, either flush it through or some pens like the Lamy Safari come apart with a little effort.

For those in the UK, Cult Pens are a good online supplier, I'm sure the US will have some equally good outlets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Probably too late to be noticed, but I want to mention that I've found that HP Premium LaserJet paper has worked very well for writing on with fountain pens for me. I started with 24lb and now am on 32lb [0]

As some folks have mentioned, normal US notebook paper doesn't work particularly well with fountain pens (they tend to show through to the other side enough that I can only use one side of each page). Most printer paper also suffers from this problem. You can get nicer notebooks that address this but they tend to be very pricey and I take notes prolifically (and of things that I don't particularly care to keep) enough that those aren't a great solution for me either--I go through them too quickly, and then I have a collection of random ephemera that I feel bad about tossing. So I use the paper mentioned above with off-brand Levinger rings, which let me reorganize them fairly easily (though it's still enough of a hassle that I'm thinking about giving the good ol' 3-ring binder another try...)

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/HP-Printer-Paper- Premium32-Letter/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/HP-Printer-Paper- Premium32-Letter/dp/B000099O2W/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=hp+premium+32&qid=1591288692&s=office- products&sr=1-2)

</comment><comment><USER11> I really enjoy my Pilot Metropolitan, even more than pens costing x5 the price.

</comment><comment><USER12> I thoroughly enjoy my Pilot Vanishing Point fine. However, lately I use a Uniball Signo 0.38 more. Just less fuss and the ink is always there. I wish I had reason to write more but too often using a computer is the default.

I have tried pretty much every note taking system there is and unfortunately none that support a platform agnostic, simple, and clean way to have hybrid handwritten and typed notes. Apple notes with iPad and pencil came closest. I find (and studies suggest) that handwritten notes allow for much better understanding and organic brain recall than typed but lose a lot of search/machine recall functionality.

I think if more people enjoyed writing by hand we would soon have better hybrid analog/digital note taking solutions. Strongly recommend picking up a Lamy Safari!

<comment><USER13> I used to switch between Lamy Safari (or Vista, which is a Safari with clear instead of colored plastic in EF) and Pilot Vanishing Points (in F) depending how rich I felt when I lost the last one. I owned some other hundred-dollar- ish fountain pens too. The Pilot was the only one that ever wrote as nicely as the Lamy Safari.

I never settled on a notebook I really liked with the pens. Rhodia pads have the best texture for those two nibs, but were never great for anything but throwaway notes. Now I write short notes with a pencil.

<comment><USER12> Miraculously I am still on my one and only VP. Had the matte black and it has been scratched and used so the brass underneath shows through, I am pretty attached to it now. I strongly recommend Nanami Papers Journals and other Tomoe River products. Great quality and value, not much more than a Rhodia and 2x the pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a huge fountain pen buff, and own several dozen different fountain pens in the same price range as the Lamy, as well as several dozen pens that are far more expensive.

In the budget category, I think the Lamy Safari is actually quire overrated. For my money, the Twsbi Eco and Twsbi Go are the best budget fountain pens. After that the Pilot Metropolitan and the Platinum Preppy are also excellent. Only in the next tier do I put Lamy, Kaweco, and the rest.

If you want a truly excellent "techie" pen, check out the Pilot Vanishing Point. But it's several hundred dollars.

If you want that German feel, the Lamy 2000 is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER15> Pens from Boaer and Jin Hao are also good value, considering their very sturdy all metal construction and low prices.

Jin Hao 159 especially:

[https://youtu.be/QZt0-uz4II4](https://youtu.be/QZt0-uz4II4)

<comment><USER16> I will say I have had a Jin Hao x450 I purchased from aliexpress break and spill ink all over my bed. I think it was a fake or third-shift manufactured though. The ink that came with it was so watery that it cleaned up completely from the white quilt and sheets.

I have a Lamy Al-star (metal-body version of the Safari in the OP) and it has treated me very well for some years now. My only issue had been losing it, but have since bought a replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I attended a school where calligraphy was still a major aspect and we were taught to use fountain pens. You know how in the Harry Potter series there's all that very real-feeling 'tradition' about how a wand chooses its master? That feels real because J. K. Rowling drew inspiration from the tradition of schoolchildren choosing 'their' pen and it sticking with them for evermore.

I'm 39 now and use them almost exclusively, and I have a collection of over fifty (predominantly metal-bodied, because I like the heft, but I have three or four Lamy pens too, including two transparent ones loaded with fluo ink which I call "the lightsabers").

I still write letters by hand and send them by post. I sit down and erupt fifty handwritten page documents detailing my plans or thoughts before typing them up for editing. There's something almost zen-like and cathartic about writing in cursive with a good pen, weighty, well-balanced pen.

Anyway, if you're really interested in upper-crust writing, I strongly recommend the Graf von Faber-Castell "Tamitio" calligraphy set (see [http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/331163-first-l...](http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/331163-first- look-graf-von-faber-castell-tamitio-calligraphy-set/) for a review). If you have good cursive skills and know how to glide over the page rather than dig in and apply force, it's heaven to write with.

<comment><USER18> I love the idea of letters being hand-written. In fact, having just done the requisite minimum amount of writing with my fountain pens to keep them working[1], I wondered about building an app which can record you via the camera hand-writing a message, remove your hand and perhaps the pen from the video, speed-up and create a time-lapse video which can be sent to someone. Add a background from wherever you're holidaying (our desks for now, haha) and it's a modern-day postcard. I don't have the specific skills to build it but would love to show the time-investment in the process when sending someone a message. I'm sure that time-lapse video apps already exist, just not with the ability to auto-remove objects within the video.

[1] The two Lamy Safaris I have dry out if left pointing upwards after a couple of days. They're ridiculously wet and concentrated if left nib-down. Somewhat hit and miss if they're left level. The Waterman and Pelikan are both unaffected by their direction of repose. The cheap and now very old Parker doesn't seem to suffer either.

<comment><USER17> To be honest, I can see where your idea of the app is coming from... but what's the point? Wouldn't it be just yet another piece of self-aggrandising performance art in this already totally narcissistic age?

One writes to leave one's mark. One writes well because one recognises the importance of presenting one's thoughts in an aesthetically pleasing manner — a manner that in a certain sense 'costs' the writer a great deal because it implies maintaining discipline and order. One sends letters because one wishes to make an effort to avoid the transient and facile nature of modern electronic communication — and because in a certain sense one wishes one's communication to be 'timeless' and transcendent. How does filming oneself writing and sending it actually fit into this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would highly recommend the TWSBI Eco as a starter pen close to this price range. Piston-filled with a massive capacity, and comes with all the tools to disassemble and clean.

<comment><USER20> The Eco is great. I use it for any long documents I have to write because it's so comfortable and reliable. I do have to clean it more often than other pens due to the ink feed getting gunged up though.

Also I accidentally took mine on a flight (between two sea-level locations!) and it didn't leak in my bag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Safari is a kid's pen and it's great. I have one right here next to my laptop.

My actual kid graduated to grown up pens once school stopped requiring the standard set of kid's hardware, but I prefer the lighter weight.

For me, using a heavy pen is like eating with silver utensils: inconvenient and thus seemingly pretentious. But some people value the heft for functional, as well as style purposes. To each their own!

</comment><comment><USER22> If anyone is curious the clear version is known as the Vista.

I'd recommend checking out the Preppy from Platinum. It's a great pen and a good deal cheaper than the Safari. [https://unsharpen.com/pen/platinum-preppy- fountain-pen/](https://unsharpen.com/pen/platinum-preppy-fountain-pen/) The Safari is a lot of fun but it's less fun to experiment with a $25 pen than a few $3 ones!

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm generally puzzled why Lamy (although clearly with a distinctive design and marketing up the wazoo) gets so much attention. Maybe it's just a taste thing.

Give me this stylish, classic look for $19 from Pilot any day: [https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Metropolitan-Collection- Fountai...](https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Metropolitan-Collection- Fountain-91107/dp/B009X9Z2FW)

I have 2 of them, they are great. Solid metal, sleek construction.

</comment><comment><USER24> At some point I almost went down the fountain pen rabbit hole but never managed to buy one.

Here are some nice recommendations for beginners, including the Lamy Safari: [https://www.jetpens.com/blog/the-best-beginner-fountain- pens...](https://www.jetpens.com/blog/the-best-beginner-fountain-pens/pt/862)

</comment><comment><USER25> The Lamy Safari was the pen that started my addiction to fountain pens. It holds a special place in my heart.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been using a Lamy Safari for nearly 10 years now. The paint is wearing off the clip (I have the matte gray version; gloss finish versions have bare metal clips) and the snap-fit cap has become slightly loose, but it still writes as good as new.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not keen on the glossy finish, but at least the umbra colored one has a nice matte finish that feels very good in the hand. Plus the black nib looks great.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm a big fan of Lamy's design and quality. A pair of Al-Stars got me through HS and Uni.

</comment><comment><USER28> I write in both English and Chinese. I do find Pilot's pens somewhat better at writing Chinese.

<comment><USER29> I found that printing with a fountain pen is very difficult to do neatly, and switched over entirely to using a cursive handwriting style. Every lift of the pen tended to leave a short stray mark on the page that I couldn't manage to do neatly.

Chinese characters in print are composed with many pen lifts per character, but some cursive forms do exist. Do you prefer to use a cursive style or a printed style in your Chinese writing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Lamy Safari is really great for a daily pen. If you lose it, or it gets damaged, no big loss.

</comment><comment><USER31> As people have said in other comments, the Pilot Metropolitan is a pretty good pen, and a bit cheaper. If you buy one, keep in mind that a Pilot medium nib is similar to most Fine nibs. If I had to recommend one pen to start out with, it would be that one. And it was my favorite one until recently - I found it better than many of the more expensive ones.

You can get some really good looking, cheap, Jinhaos on the Internet (eBay, etc) (e.g. $4/pen). These are Chinese pens, and the quality control is fairly poor. You can buy 5 of the same model and one may be great and another may not. The good ones, though, are great. They are not cheap quality material. I got an x450, and swapped out the nib for a Goulet nib, and I love the pen.

penBBS[1] is a Chinese woman who makes pens and sells them on Etsy. These are of quite good quality - you can search the Internet for reviews. I have a 309 - it was the first pen among many that I've tried that dethroned the Pilot Metropolitan. She also has some creative designs like the 469 which has a nib and compartment at both ends, so you can fill it with 2 different inks. The nibs on the PenBBS are OK, but some of them will allow you to swap with other brands' nibs - be sure to research this though as not all her pens will allow for this (the caps may not fit with other nibs of the same size).

Most of the joy with fountain pens is using is trying different inks out. Various sites sell samplers. I usually buy mine from Goulet Pens[2]. Unless you really use the pen a lot a bottle of ink (35-50ml) will last years, and it's boring to use the same ink over and over. So I just buy the samplers. You may need a syringe to fill your pen with them, though.

Last but not least - the type of paper matters, and most notebooks in the US are not fountain pen ink friendly. You'll get feathering, bleed through, or both. Try Clairefontaine or Figurare notebooks. There are other options. If you have a Japanese store in your town with a stationery section, chances are most of their notebooks will be good with FP ink as I believe Japanese students still use FP a lot.

I don't recommend spending more on a pen than you are willing to lose. People lose pens all the time. I've personally lost 2 Pilot Metropolitans. If it's valuable, you will keep it at home and rarely use it.

(Yes, I walk around with a FP pen in my pocket. No pocket protector. I live dangerously).

[1] [https://www.etsy.com/shop/PENBBSOfficialStore](https://www.etsy.com/shop/PENBBSOfficialStore)

[2] [https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/ink-sample-package- se...](https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/ink-sample-package-sets)

</comment><comment><USER32> The barrels of these crack easily. Go with TWSBI.

<comment><USER33> Funny, I've heard that about TWSBIs before but not about Safaris.

And if your Safari barrel does crack it still won't leak ink all over, since the ink is in a cartridge and not directly in the barrel.

The capacity on TWSBIs is great though, my 580 is one of my favorite pens. In the Safari's price range the Eco is a great pen too.

<comment><USER22> I have cracked multiple Twsbi pens but never a Safari. Weird.

<comment><USER33> Never cracked the main body, but I did get a crack in the black plastic collar around the nib/feed which had ink seeping slowly out the front on to my fingertips. TWSBI sent a free replacement part.

Nib problems on the other hand, less helpful. A friend bent the tip of his Eco (fell off a table I think) and they said "buy a new pen". Spares not even for sale.

<comment><USER33> Meant to specify: the cracked collar was on my TWSBI 580AL</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Science of Passionate Sex - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-science-of-passionate-sex/ <comment><USER2> This article feels like it has been written by my wife, telling me I'm a primitive horny male. I was hoping on a bit more science and less talk about harmony, wellness, wholesomeness, totality of being and other intangible concepts. While not bad advice for many, as a straight-forward male, I'm not sure what to do with advice such as accept your sexuality and be more open.

The most important factor is that both people care for sex to be good, though I don't agree that both people might be looking for the exact same thing; being able to give each other what each wants without giving up your own needs and desires is probably the hard part.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be absolutely honest I gave up on the idea of really good sex after 45. Enjoy your twenties and thirties. If you are in good shape in your 40's and aren't terribly experienced, ok..you may have some good sex.

My definition of good sex is uninhibited and athletic with a committed emotional component.

There is a 'spiritual' aspect to sex that I have not experienced much but that is because it seemed laborious and counter-intuitive.

<comment><USER4> I am 42 and having the best sex of my life with my wife married 16 years ago. The book The Enlightened Sex Manual [0] is a great ressource on that matter.

TL;DR of the book: ejaculate less often, be more awake during sex.

[0] [https://www.amazon.fr/Enlightened-Sex-Manual-Sexual- Superior...](https://www.amazon.fr/Enlightened-Sex-Manual-Sexual- Superior/dp/1591795850)

<comment><USER3> If I married a woman 15 years younger than me and then kept the interpersonal tension high it would probably be great sex when it happened. I don't care for the drama and the WTF 'gtfo' nights when you are involved at that level.

The whole ejaculate less and be more awake thing I can scarcely contemplate seriously. If all it comes down to is satisfying your partner while wide eyed and eager for 'great sex' you are sadly mistaken and won't convince anyone other than sad sacks looking for formula.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are lots of ways to create a passionate sexual response in the human animal. [https://hypnosisfetish.com](https://hypnosisfetish.com) [NSFW]

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, paywall'd. Will post link to actual paper when available.

Companion article from Scientific American:

The Science of Passionate Sex

[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the- sci...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-science-of- passionate-sex/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the actual paper available or just the abstract?

<comment><USER7> If you paste the title into SciHub[0] you'll get the PDF

[0] [http://sci-hub.cc/](http://sci-hub.cc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> and before we could even care about that person, we have to care about ourself first :) .. to love ourself first. and I think ways to love ourself, and this is where it kind of get in full circle: \- surround ourselves with love (caring people) \- take care of our body, exercise daily and not too over exercise \- not to over eat \- and have sex with your love one :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone think we've maybe gone a little too far with the scientific method when we start seeing headlines like this. (I'm sure the paper itself is very good - the title just amused me)

<comment><USER10> The real title of the paper is "Understanding the Cognitive and Motivational Underpinnings of Sexual Passion From a Dualistic Model".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is like a short ad for NoFap.

Short on details. Should have explained factors that contribute to obsessive or harmonious sexuality. Not really much one can do with this article.

</comment><comment><USER12> Who needs passionate sex when I have my lovely python?

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's the science for you all. The key to passionate sex is actually caring about the person you're having sex with. Hooking up on Tinder isn't going to give you that.

<comment><USER14> Maybe _you 're_ not capable of a passionate hookup, but you're fooling yourself if you don't realize that people have very passionate sex from hookups all the time. In fact, the excitement of a strong mutual sexual attraction to a new person can heighten the sexual passion.

<comment> FLUX-YOU Some people might not understand this because it's better explained by simply experiencing it. It's an equally valid mindset just as the article's mindset, and just as equally valid as not having sex until marriage if that's what you choose. It's also very similar to fetishes -- experiencing it is just too different from watching videos or demos.</comment></comment></comment>


IBM job ad calls for 12 years' experience with Kubernetes – it is six years old - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/13/ibm_kubernetes_experience_job_ad/ <comment><USER2> Previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810519)

<comment><AUTHOR> I missed it! I don't think I can delete my submission but if moderator wants to that would be totally good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps there's 2 ways of thinking about it.

Critic: One year working with Kubernetes just feels like 12 years of stress.

Fan: One year working with Kubernetes gives me 12 years of productivity.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could be at least one valid reason: They put high number of years to make people feel inadequacy about their experience level to make it easier to low ball them. Of course it doesn't work in this case now that EVERYONE is memeing it, but it might have been the original intention.

<comment><USER5> Or maybe they just recycled an old openstack job posting and didn't clean it up properly.

<comment><USER4> yea, its more likely that someone didn't watch what they were doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of Chris Lattner's tweet saying he was the only one with 7 years (at the time) of Swift experience.

[https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877353276676612102](https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877353276676612102)

</comment><comment><USER7> Let's say that Kubernetes is 15 years old - just for the discussion.

Why did they land on the number 12? How much difference does 12 years yield, compared to 10? or 8?

When I see these somewhat arbitrary large numbers of years, I can't help but think that the laws of diminishing returns start to kick in.

Maybe instead of years, they should look at the actual work and experience people have done. Instead, use seniority levels.

<comment><USER8> It's the fault of the "Outliers" book [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_\(book\))

The argument was that all you needed to become an expert was 10,000 hours. It's since been debunked, though, but HR is a little behind in... EVERY EFFING RELEVANT THING

<comment><USER9> Since there are 2080 work-hours in a year (40 hours/week * 52 weeks/year) wouldn't that translate to roughly 5 years experience? But yeah, agree on HR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Clearly they want someone who has been working with Kubernetes for 80 hours a week

</comment><comment><USER11> The jab ad for anyone that wants the link

[https://intellijobs.ai/job/IBMCloud-Native-Infrastructure- En...](https://intellijobs.ai/job/IBMCloud-Native-Infrastructure-Engineer- Architect-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP)

My own opinion, but software APIs change over the years, experience from 8 years ago may not be relevant for a product with the same name.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait a second...

"We interviewed a 28yo designer in 2012 who told us he had 17 years experience designing websites. I said, "Tim Berners-Lee doesn't have 17 years experience designing websites."

"Who's Tim Berners-Lee?" he asked."

2012 - 17 = 1995. I was making websites, or at least pages, in 1995 and I didn't invent the WWW.

Is this intentional irony? If not, it's really depressing.

<comment><USER13> Good point. Tim Berners-Lee apparently put the first WWW page up by Christmas 1990, and Mosaic was released 1993.

Here's the web from 1992...

[http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)

<comment><USER12> Circa 1993, I was "browsing the web" on Lynx (IIRC) via dialing the local public library. That was, however, before I had created any web pages. And before I had any graphical browser running on my own computer.

I think I still have a physical book claiming to be a complete listing of the Internet from that era, when the WWW existed, but was a rather small portion of a 2-3 inch thick directory.

But it was still considerably more than one CERN site.

<comment><USER14> Ah yes, the Internet Yellow Pages by Harley Hahn. Literally thousands of sites catalogued for your browsing pleasure.

<comment><USER12> No, it was "THE INTERNET DIRECTORY" by Eric Braun. From 1994.

Mea culpa, it seems like the World Wide Web section was a list of public clients and I don't see a listing of websites. However, it did attempt to list most other resources on the internet.

"The guide with the MOST COMPLETE LISTINGS for:

1500+ Internet and Bitnet Mailing Lists

2700+ Usenet Newsgroups

1000+ Online Library Catalogs (OPACs)

100+ Anonymous FTP Archives and Archie Servers

300+ Gopher Servers

Wide Area Information Servers

World Wide Web

E-text Archives and Resources Project Gutenberg, CETH, OTA, etc.

250+ Electronic Journals

And more!

Getting access to the Internet

Finding resources on the Internet

Reaching other networks on the Internet

ALL ADDRESSES FULLY VERIFIED!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was questioned by HR hiring manager for not having "enough" experience in K8s. That company was IBM.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a well known phenomenon in Canada at least.

They write impossible job specs on purpose so that they can turn around and claim there is no suitable talent in North America, and then outsource the work to India/bring in temporary foreign workers at pennies to the dollar.

<comment><USER17> Right now I finishing my MSc studies in Canada and I am at job hunt with pretty solid background.

It is unbelievable. It seems all the ads are literally lie. Nobody answers any email. Nobody even invites to any interview. I am starting to think all the ads are lie to import foreign workers.

P.S. I don't know why my parent comments got negative vote. But I totally would vouch for his/her estimation.

<comment><USER18> Judging from your post, your English grammar could use some improvement. It's possible you're experiencing discrimination for that reason. Have your resume and cover letter edited by a fluent/native English speaker, and you may see increased response rates.

<comment><USER17> Your point about grammar is correct. But you have to take to the account I am not going to proof read a comment. I just don't have that much time. But I totally get your point. When I am applying to job I at my best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great way to cull out the liars.

Either that or sheer stupidity. With a big company, you can never tell for sure.

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of ads asking for 3 years of Java experience, in 1997.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you aren't giving 200%, you are probably not IBM material.

<comment><USER22> Or if you're over 30.</comment></comment>


Hire: Equity for talented developer - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I'm looking to find an equity partner to help develop an exciting idea for a site. It will be all about community participation with the community choosing and ranking the best ideas/users.
We want a partner with serious enterprise, initiative, creativity and coding skills. I don't know much about hacking but don't think it's a simple job, at least not to do it right. We'll talk in detail about features but community participation, voting and live community activity updates to keep it fresh are a given.
The aim of this project is to help start ups with great ideas, like a lot of the guys on here, to get in front of serious VCs.
I'm in Corporate Finance and have the relationship with VCs, the other partner is a Strategy Consultant at a big firm and now we need a skilled hacker. I think we have the pedigree to make this happen!
Sorry if this is a bad job spec, I'm no expert in hacking. <comment><USER2> Please post your email address here, or at least put it in your profile, so people can contact you privately instead of posting their own email addresses. I'm more than qualified, my email is in my profile (just click on my name) and I might be interested in working with you on a reciprocal basis if you're willing to consider such an arrangement.

Please email me because this forum doesn't alert me via email to new posts, so I seldom visit a thread more than once. Thanks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're based in London, there's a well documented funding gap in Europe. No Y-Combinator, etc. The money exists we just want to create a mechanism to get the best ideas to the money.

This idea fills a gap in the US too, it's a different approach to helping people get start up funding.

I'm not sure about the location thing. I can see how it would be really helpful to be able to sit down together, is it essential in the experience of you guys?

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's hoping News.YC doesn't become "Job board for suits looking for hackers"...

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi this is rather vague , but I'm intrigued to find out more. 15+ years experience in IT, creative, founded & ran company in gaming sector for several years etc. etc. Get in touch at email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER5> Where are you located? Do you need a local hacker?

I'd like to know more send me a message: email@example.com</comment>


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