Don't Make Everyone Do Customer Service (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://lauraroeder.com/stop-insulting-your-team-by-making-everyone-do-customer-service-7a7aa3370c68 <comment><USER2> As someone who has worked at a tech company in support, this is article is misguided. It assumes that all companies are being thoughtless and asking any employee to answer customer support tickets without any training or guidance. We had engineers and product manager answer a few tickets with customer support agents providing guidance. These folks had training and they volunteered to answer tickets for 1 hour/week for a few weeks (with supervision). The engineers and product managers who participated enjoyed the experience because they could see first had the user problems and the language they used. It helped them understand our product not just from the business/product perspective, but from the user perspective. In addition, it allowed them to gain insight into what customer service agents have to deal with on a day to day basis. This led to products being built and launched with customer service in mind. This was a cultural shift and still exists today. Customer service is looped in as product is being built to get help articles and CS agents familiar with how to support new features.

<comment><USER3> I dunno about the engineers where you work, but a lot of the game programmers at (name witheld, but pick any company. They all seem similar) are not good with interpersonal soft skills. Granted, I didn't read the article before looking at the comments (helps me weed out articles that are a waste of time), but most of our engineers (myself included) would just walk away from the CS role on tilt having learned nothing more than to be grateful they don't have to interact with any people, much less people who have gotten angry enough to contact CS, as a means of making their living. Maybe I'm completely wrong and I just got unlucky with myself and the engineers at the 3 companies I've worked at with programmers, and they really do enjoy confrontational human interactions. I've been wrong before, but the stereotype fits pretty close, though exaggerated, with my experience.

<comment><USER4> There's a world of difference between being customer support in the b2c space versus b2b imo.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. I answered phones and emails for a few years at a B2B software company, and the most I got was a veiled threat that they'd send a formal complaint. In general, abusive customers were were few and far between.

People I know who've worked on B2C support got verbal abuse almost daily.

<comment><USER6> > _People I know who 've worked on B2C support got verbal abuse almost daily._

Is this generally the case? I've answered thousands of customer service queries for my (mostly B2C) startup. I can count on two hands the number of angry/abusive emails I've received.

<comment><USER7> Yes. In a past life I did phone and email support for two wildly different industries (cellular and banking). I helped train new hires during the first couple of weeks that they answered calls, and several times people broke down in tears during the first few days. Average tenure at one company was only 3-4 months. The other managed close to a year.

I don't know how big your startup is, but I'd hazard a guess that you're small enough for your support to still feel "human." I think this is the biggest issue with most bigco CS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ehhh I don't know about this. As a (semi)senior programmer who still takes support calls, either because people call specifically for me or because I have to handle the call, I can't express the value of speaking with end users and clients over the phone. It's just there.

The value is just sitting there, like you're fishing. You just have to catch it and reel it in. If you're willing to work with the person on the other end and talk through the issue, you'll discover countless bits of information that will make your software or product better. Whether it's a workflow you didn't realize existed or a confusion caused by how you worded something or a random bug, the exchange can prove invaluable. You've got someone, most likely in the middle of their day, trying to use your thing, that you've created/sold, and their attention is focused solely on your thing. You have to take these opportunities and squeeze the most out of them!

Look, I get that some protocols like training are lacking and not everyone has the knack for calming people down, but communicating over the phone or via email with customers yields valuable insights and gives you an amazing perspective. If I ever have my own company, every new employee will almost most certainly do a rotation in customer support.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely!

My first experience of direct customer contact was when the call-center rep phoned me and said 'We have no idea what has happened, can you just call the agent and talk about it?'

In the ensuing series of calls we progressed from one of the F-keys not working properly in my application all the way back to discovering that the phone-line into his building had been hit by lightning, damaging various circuits in the office servers and equipment.

I had never heard someone so appreciative of my help, that's when I changed from closing tickets as 'cannot reproduce' to tagging them with 'tell customer to call me on ____'. We found so, so many bugs and broken processes in our applications just by talking to the users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How short sighted.

The biggest failure I see in software these days is software developers who are so far away from their customers that they build the wrong thing. They build what they _think_ is a good idea, and not what the customer actually needs.

We aren't all Steve Jobs, predicting and making the future. Most of us need to instead understand the customer. Working customer support? That's a fantastic way to get to know what your customers want.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely agreed. In a previous job, I was hired as a developer for a small company and also took most of the service/support calls. It gives a huge amount of insight into how people use the software/hardware, where they get stuck most frequently and also where any bugs lie.

We made most of the changes to the software as a direct result of customer feedback, targetted to the areas which generated the most calls because they caused the most problems for the user. Simple usability/workflow improvements significantly reduced the call volume and made the customers much happier with the software. It also meant that in cases where bugs were found, we could triage them directly on the call or shortly after and in many cases have a tested software update for them during the same working day. When someone runs their business with your product, they greatly appreciate the effort you make to keep their business running smoothly. I learned a lot about our customers' businesses by talking to them, even visted a few in person, and that all helped to make our software serve them better.

I had a few surprised callers when they realised that the tech support and the developers were one and the same; they often expected the tech support to be stupid/less well informed/script-following automatons, and were surprised when we could help them in great detail. Very few of them expected that suggestions for improvement would actually be acted upon, let alone implemented and delivered within a short timeframe. In a small company, with customer numbers in the small hundreds, this led to direct personal working relationships between the end users/customers and the developers, which I found very satisfying. Were we shielded from the customers by first-line support etc., we would have missed out on a lot of very valuable information. Of course, it's difficult to scale this approach, but I do think developers should be well exposed to end users' problems, needs and specific business/domain expertise in whatever type of organisation they are part of, rather than being isolated and disconnected. This is not in any way "insulting" to your team as the original article tries to justify; it's giving your team knowledge and understanding which they would otherwise not have, and getting them directly involved with the use of the software as well as its creation and maintenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> At MindSpring (an ISP from long ago) everyone was required to listen to 8 hours of live tech support calls every month. I was the lead of the tools team and during one of my call sessions I came up with a feature to our log search tool that reduced our talk times by 20% across the board within a month's time.

I would have never came up with the feature without being on those calls.

<comment><USER13> I'm a technical lead. I'd rather like to have the opportunity to listen to some support calls as it's not an area that I'm good in. It's never a bad thing to learn what your co-workers might face during their day, even if you think all they do is make your work life harder. The better we know each other and our customers, the better we can help each other to resolve day-to-day problems. If you don't care about your customers problems, you probably shouldn't be making their tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've long dreamt of having a company where there is only one job title and it is "Customer Service Representative".

<comment><USER15> It's amazing how radical that idea is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who's worked a lot in support and has been out of it for a while now, this article utterly misses the point and reeks of whining and excuse- making.

Anyone who's spent time in the support trenches knows that the rest of the company has contempt for them and doesn't know what actually happens on support calls. Getting everyone to do support, at least for a little while, shows what kind of problems support people encounter, both technical and social. Developers in particular see support staff as below them, not equals, and without any CS experience they're often clueless about what goes on in CS - they get a bit more empathic when they've actually seen what happens.

It was actually laughable when the article talked of CS being considered a finely-honed skill that takes years; I can guarantee you, that's not how anyone treats support staff. No-one ever talks of a concept like a "10x support staffer".

In any case, CS is like hospitality: it's an unpleasant job that can be done without much training, isn't well-paid, and few people like it or want to stay in it long-term. It's that unpleasantness which is the real reason why the author doesn't want to do it, not some supposed passion for high-quality CS.

<comment><USER17> I started in support and do software development now and support is a much harder job in the sense of being stressful and underpaid and under appreciated, but it's a much easier job in the sense of requiring knowledge and skill. I could drop into support again at any time and it would be like riding a bike, but I'd be miserable about it.

<comment><USER18> Yes and no. That ability to manage own negative emotions, reactions during call and attitudes is something you can get better at - there is learnable aspect to it.

However, it is not perceived as skill worth reward, so people are not inclined to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having done both help desk and development I think a taste of support is good for everyone. Of course it must be only a taste. And ideally it would include supervision from support professionals.

Another approach is to have people sit in on support for a brief period to get a snapshot of what it's like and the problems they encounter. Then these observers don't have to fulfill a role they aren't prepared to handle.

</comment><comment><USER20> While I agree that it takes good social and interpersonal skills to do support well (as well as empathy, communication etc.), I do think that programmers shouldn't be totally isolated from the people actually using their software.

Many times now, in my own experience, a screen that I thought was designed brilliantly tends to not work as well out in the wild. It is amazing how many visual cues people miss or misread. Sometimes you have to make things more than obvious, and unless you are hearing about it directly from the customer (or better still, watching them do it), then you cannot really understand the challenges they face.

I guess it is the same as making architects live in the houses they design...

</comment><comment><USER21> The only thing I didn't like about customer service was being hindered by ass backwards bureaucracy, lazy colleagues without empathy, or outright CRM bugs, to solve the problem. Or to be the first person to actually listen to something that had been fucked up (and documented so poorly) in the last few weeks/month with no fault of the customer. But the customers were awesome for the most part, in some way or another. Either people were lovely; it's amazing how patient and friendly and strong some people can be.. the things I saw (well heard), the odysseys customers went through. Or they and the situation were normal and it was awesome to be friendly to them and give them your best. Or they were assholes and I still learned a lot. I think I liked angry customers I managed to make progress with more than totally benign calls. It wasn't physically or mentally taxing, that is, 99% of the time the stress only ever lasted as long as the call itself at most, and as I said, most of the time I managed to turn stress into something better _during_ the call, and that feels like being a professional lion tamer in a circus run by evil clowns. I went home energized every day. One of my bigger surprises in life, I took the job because I had to, and then stay longer than I had to because I realized "serving" random people sometimes does me good. It also restored a lot of my faith in humanity, I was surprised how cool so many normal people are when you treat them fairly and openly.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was early at Twilio (roughly #25) and everyone had to do support. I think the threshold was ~20 tickets in your first two weeks. I had every Tuesday for my first six months and went down to one Sunday a month for the next six months until we had a bigger Support team.

Anyway, this article is a mischaracterization of the principle.

Having someone do support is GREAT. It gives them insight into what customers are struggling with, what might be better, how they talk and describe things, and all kinds of related aspects.

Putting new staffers on the front lines is misguided. Just because someone is assigned the ticket doesn't mean someone doesn't review and help refine a response before it goes out.. just like shipping code. Another set of eyes can solve problems, simplify solutions, and make the team better as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER23> Customer support is a great experience. Yes, there are users who aren't very technical and can be frustrating. But like many have said, doing support can gian insights into how users use the product, and often enough a bug or two would surface.

I enjoy working with production system (DevOps/SRE). I don't just take tickets from technical users like developers because I build tools and I relay feedback and production issues back to developers, but I also get to talk to end users and also with the business representatives like product owner.

The best out of doing support is actually learning how the product works, if you aren't doing the product development. The aha moment comes when you relay between dev and users.

Companies, especially the technology companies should offer employees diverse training like interpersonal skills and health talks, not just hackathons and technical talks. We work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, we should free our minds from programming or staring at the computer once in a while. I would take non-technical talk in a heartbeat if offered.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a small group, but we instituted a rule that our project manager would handle all customer communications. This was a win in many ways. Our dev team would not be interrupted except for very serious problems, and it actually made our customers feel better when he would tell them he's communicating with the "dev team."

</comment><comment><USER25> 1) always good to have devs close to customers.

2) people are different.

3) some people are better at tech, some better with people

4) if you care about your customer, they should be considered read-only.

5) read-write privileges should be EARNED, probably by experience.

6) generally a csr or acct manager should chaperon or help interactions.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a pretty good article.

I am just not good at Customer Service. I have no problems helping nice people out and answering questions. I will go out of my way to help people, but the second someone starts to become mean and rude, I will be mean back.

This is not what a company wants. I might end up costing my company a customer because of this. Heck, I even argue with other customers if I see them being rude to the service staff at restaurants and stores I visit.

Her suggestions at the end of the article are pretty good. This will ensure other departments know what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER27> The worse SaaS are the ones where it's almost impossible to get through to a developer even with a very technical issue. Nearly all SaaS customer service suck! I've dealt with so many this year, I nearly almost have to circumvent the CS reps by finding someone on twitter or emailing security/ceo@. Sure have dedicated CS resps, but I imagine it's whining entitled developers like this that encourage a fear of escalation environment.

Stop thinking your beyond speaking to customers

</comment><comment><USER28> Customer service is a very unrewarding job. First, you've to deal with angry customers then you've to explain yourself and get your answers from the developers who again shout at you or call you out on your mistakes.

Developers always consider customer service below them. Working as a customer service rep for even an hour a month will at least make them respect customer service team a bit.

</comment><comment><USER29> Alright, why not make everyone play role of CEO 1h/week then? Any arguments against it?

<comment><USER15> The average company has more customer service representatives than CEOs. That should tell you something about their relative importance to the success of the business.

Having said that, sure, why not? Job shadowing is a great exercise if you do it right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Article completely misses the point

<comment><USER31> Why, and what's the point they're missing? It's their article. They honed their point, not what point you think is the point they missed.

<comment><USER16> > _I understand how this whole idea got started — customers are the lifeblood > of any business. And keeping communication lines open between customers and > the entire team is definitely important._

^^ This right here is one example of the article missing the point. It doesn't even have internal consistency - if the devs only spent their _first_ month doing some CS as the article states, then after the first month they don't maintain those supposed open lines of communications.

<comment><USER30> Thank you. Developers closer to customers can easily fix problems that are generating many of the customer service calls. It also enables them to spot post deployment bugs quickly and keep on top of newly released code.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Voter Fraud Commission Wants Your Data; Experts Say They Can't Keep It Safe - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/crosscheck-the-voter-fraud-commission-wants-your-data-keep-it-safe <comment><USER2> Why are we doing this? Why are we wasting money on something whose sole purpose is to save face for a thin-skinned demagogue who can't stand being unpopular? He successfully played the American game of Electoral College to win his position, but is butthurt because more people voted against him. He waffles back and forth from one tweet to the next, and often they don't even have a shred of truth, so why is he even legally allowed to pursue this?

He has actual problems he could be trying to solve, or he could be pushing his and his follower's agenda, but instead he is burning the American taxpayer's money trying to substantiate a false claim made by a random twitter user with zero evidence, and for what? Simply to buoy his ego, or even worse, to try and rustle up more rhetoric for a new age of Jim Crow laws, laws proven to adversely affect Non-Republican voting groups. Nevermind the fact that it's totally possible to create voter ID laws that DON'T discriminate, if you are willing to piss off many Libertarians who don't want a National ID card.</comment>


Linux Outfit Canonical Launches Campaign to Silence Privacy Critic - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/fixubuntu/

<comment><USER2> This was just a misunderstanding, comments from Mark S:

[https://plus.google.com/116812394236590806058/posts/5jdibY5i...](https://plus.google.com/116812394236590806058/posts/5jdibY5iR9b)

EDIT: and subsequent blogpost: [http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1299](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1299)

<comment><USER3> I agree with Mark that it's not worth beating up Canonical over a bureaucratic slip up. Latching on to simple mistakes that are the result of internal miscommunication and misinterpretations of policy is foolish. And ideologues (especially in the software world) love to do that blindly, but it's not intelligent discourse.

That being said, I don't think that absolves Canonical of the underlying criticism: your company is active pushing a product, despite its open-source- ness, that betrays the trust and privacy of your users unless they're informed enough about the situation to opt-out.

I know Canonical is a corporation and has to generate revenue. I won't sit and pretend like I know how to solve that problem for your company. It doesn't change the dilemma, however. I'd like to recommend a user-friendly Linux to my friends and family. I won't recommend Ubuntu until the privacy issue is opt-in instead of opt-out. In fact, if they're less-technical, I recommend iPads and Macs. At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of. I hold enough trust with Apple to believe that they are not. It's unfortunate that I can't say the same for Canonical.

<comment><USER4> "At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of"

Care to wager what Apple resells your desktop/iphone/iPad search results for? I'm guessing it's on the order of 100 million dollars/year. Certainly more than 10 million dollars.

<comment><USER5> unless there is something new in the latest release of osx 10.9, what on earth are you talking about?

Also, apple sells google the right to be the default search engine on ios (see eg [1]); this is very different than selling your search queries or results. For instance, when you get a google results page, only the very stupidest could be unaware that, well, google knows what you searched for.

[1] [http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/google-apple-ios-default- search-1-...](http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/google-apple-ios-default- search-1-billion-324728/)

<comment><USER4> Ah. When I first read your response I was wondering, "What possible searches could be resold _other than the browser_ search results."

You obviously can't resell something like a file/application search on the local computer (akin to Spotlight search on OS X).

Apparently I was wrong: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/ubuntu-bakes- amazon-...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/ubuntu-bakes-amazon- search-results-into-os-to-raise-cash/)

That is bad on so many levels - privacy, security, network performance, etc... Presumably every time I do one of those searches, traffic is sent over my internet connection...

I wonder what's going through Canonical's mind - And why they think this is a good idea...

<comment><USER6> The idea is to join your offline and online worlds. Maybe you don't remember if you had that file on your desktop or google drive or dropbox or ubuntu one. The unfortunate part is that online searches were launched with just Amazon, which makes it look like a money grab, when it was intended just to help the user keep their worlds in order. More online scopes will launch soon, and it'll be a lot more obvious that this is just trying to make your life better.

Yes, Canonical also makes a tiny bit of money for the Amazon integration, but that was not the driving factor behind the feature as a whole. There will be more online scopes to come, and the hope is to make your life easier, by not having to remember exactly where you put all your stuff.

Also, you can easily turn off all online searches with a single toggle inside Settings -> Security and Privacy -> Search.

Canonical knows there is a lot of heat around the feature, and they're not ignoring that, despite what it may seem like from the outside.

<comment><USER5> bs. companies implement the most important things first. now maybe canonical is running to implement searching other stuff as a fig leaf -- oh guys, no wait, we weren't just doing this to sell your local searches to advertisers. but if that weren't the purpose dropbox and google drive would have been the first implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see an Ubuntu/Canonical trademark on this website.

Certainly if: "[http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/"](http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/") doesn't get shut down, "fixubuntu.com" should be ok.

Edit: from: [http://blog.canonical.com/2013/11/08/trademarks-community- an...](http://blog.canonical.com/2013/11/08/trademarks-community-and- criticism/) "The site owner has already agreed to remove the Ubuntu logo and clarified that there is no connection; from our perspective the situation has been resolved, "

</comment><comment><USER7> "But Lee isn't taking the thing down"

Good for you.

Hosting a shell script with informative keywords seems like completely reasonable fair use, so if this goes to court, I doubt they will have a case.

The site fixubuntu.com doesn't appear to have any logos on it now, maybe it did before? So at the very least, it looks like he pulled that, if they were there in the first place. This article seems to imply the logo was there.

<comment><USER8> Seems they only like it when it has "good" connotations to the name, as sites like OMGUbuntu and other sites stay up, while sites that want to help users remove the Amazon go down.

<comment><USER9> legitimate question: how many of these 'anti-ubuntu/amazon' sites are there, and how many of them have actually been threatened to be taken down in the past?

Because right now this is looking like an isolated incident (albeit an inconvenient one for Canonical's PR), so it could be meaningless to try and read into it too much...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Been a longtime Ubuntu fan but Canonical's newfound disrespect for users privacy and ham fisted response means I'm looking for another distro now. Nice try by Mark Shuttleworth to explain the whole thing away (plays the "blame it all on the new guy" card) but once you've turned to into a datapimp it's hard to regain trust.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ubuntu, meet Streissand Effect.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well obviously Canonical isn't going to bother OMG! Ubuntu!, it generally helps users to keep using Ubuntu and stay in the "Ubuntu community".

Edit: as another user just commented: [https://plus.google.com/116812394236590806058/posts/5jdibY5i...](https://plus.google.com/116812394236590806058/posts/5jdibY5iR9b)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you generate changelogs for repositories? - <AUTHOR> How do you generate changelogs in git repos? GitHub has a really good 'releases' feature that builds on tagging, but how do you create your changelog when you may have hundreds of commits where the messages are not all that relevant? <comment><USER2> The changelog should be a document written by humans for humans.

So you manually maintain the changelog while working on fixes / features and you add any remaining notes just prior to each release.

</comment><comment><USER3> Using [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gitchangelog](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gitchangelog)</comment>


Lou Reed, Rock 'n' Roll Pioneer, Dies at 71 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/arts/music/lou-reed-dies-at-71.html?emc=edit_na_20131027 <comment><USER2> Topic previously posted with lots of discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622621) (174 points, 40 comments)</comment>


CloudFlare Is Now a Google Cloud Platform Technology Partner - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-is-now-a-google-cloud-platform-technology-partner/ <comment><USER2> Recently I have been getting cautious about Cloudflare. I do use them and like them a lot, also enjoy reading their technical blogposts. However from a privacy stand point it makes me feel uneasy. Cloudflare is just everywhere now: HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit and countless other sites. You can block a cookie, connection to a third party script, but how do you block an internal proxy? All your cookies, credentials, heck even HTTP request and response goes through them. Also why is there cloudflare specific cookie (__cfduid) on sites may not prefer tracking users? (eg: HN)

Maybe I am just being paranoid...

<comment><AUTHOR> What CloudFlare logs: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare- logs/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/)

<comment><USER3> However, there is no way to verify that is all they log.

CloudFlare gets to see the cleartext of all traffic they serve as they MITM HTTPS connections.

<comment><USER4> From an engineering feasibility/cost standpoint: there is no scenario in which they could log (as in packet capture) and dedupe all traffic without a nation- state-like (alphabet orgs, interested companies a la Google) budget.

CloudFlare's (non-enterprise) prices simply aren't even in the required order of magnitude.

Now: whether or not metadata, request bodies, etc. are logged, and to what scale, is another story/discussion of possibility.

At some small, targeted scale, it's safe to say that total duplication (certainly request bodies, etc.) is possible, if they were so interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is sorta an internet architecture question for those in the know. Assuming there's no issue with client reachability/latency, what's stopping CloudFlare from having a single IP?

Suppose the IP was behind a fat enough pipe, why not load balance behind it instead of DNS load-balancing in front of it (and additionally behind each as I presume now happens)? Also, if that IP was anycast then you could ignore the issue of client latency as well, assuming you have the necessary private network behind endpoints to manage state.

If you don't like/can't solve the problem at the level of IP anycast, when not leverage a third-party anycast DNS and just have a few fixed IP for specific geographic locales, again with fat enough pipes and load balancing behind them.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's no reason for an organization, a monolithic entity, to have more that a handful IP addresses at most.

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that they basically "fast flux" IPs to funnel traffic for targeted attack to a specific data center. So, while you normally may be sharing IPs, if an enterprise customer's website example.com starts getting attacked they will put it on dedicated IPs, then broadcast those IPs from one or two data centers. They will then reroute all other enterprise traffic away from those data centers, thus minimizing the attack effect on other customers. If these websites were all on the same IP, it would be impossible to distribute traffic selectively between data centers like this.

Another thing they can do is use anycast to load balance across data centers. So, if a data center rather than a website is a target - the attackers will need to know which IPs to attack. They can start flooding the broadcasted IPs from a particular route. However, if this happens then hypothetically Cloudflare could just stop broadcasting the IPs at this particular data center, re-broadcast them at all the surrounding data centers, and basically spread out the attack load across multiple sites. If the attackers change the IPs that they target based on new routes, then Cloudflare can continue fast- fluxing the IPs every 5 minutes and mitigate the attack.

It's pretty cool use of BGP and anycast, but being able to change IPs of website and where they are broadcasted in real-time is core to Cloudflare's security.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this comment. I guess, along with jgrahamc's sibling comment, you have to make a routing decision based on (source, port) at most if you have a fixed IP, since HTTPS ports are stupidly fixed. That is 32+16 bits of info at most, so an ethernet MACs worth. So now I can clarify my question as follows: with X bits of data, what is the present state-of-the-art latency wrt to routing T Gbps of traffic. And it's not just that, you have to have good latency for updating that routing table.

Any research on the real entropy of (source,port) entropy on the Internet? The are also real issues like the distribution of (source, port) is hardly uniform, and is especially nasty when undergoing an attack, i.e. you want to manage latency based the both the distribution and authenticity of traffic.

This is a very interesting mathematical problem. I have to work on expressing it a bit better before I can hope of formulating a solution, but yes I can totally see now how leveraging BGP, anycast, and DNS TTL are all knobs to heuristically solve this problem, instead of a some crazy genius way of making use of router TCAM silicon.

<comment><USER5> As a further observation, it makes the GitHub attack an interesting case study. You now have to further route on the GET target, and if traffic is encrypted, the routing decision is moved to a later stage.

In order to protect latency to other GET targets, you're going to have to start doing interesting things.

One future solution I can see is multipath-tcp the anomalous traffic, and closing the original connection. But at that point you have to refilter based on genuine vs malicious traffic, and then there's the encrypted state you have to share for the proper stream handover. Ooof... what a nightmare.

At least it's an interesting one. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this is one of those strategic deals that would lead to an acquisition. With the push surrounding cloud and Google actively competing hard in this space, it would make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER8> Problem is that (besides for the brand) Cloudflare really has nothing to offer for Google. Google has spent the last 20 years solving the same problems CF is aiming to solve, they've even got a competing service Google PageSpeed that does exactly what CF does, except better (in my personal experience.).

<comment><USER9> Google sucks at productizing their infrastructure expertise. The underlying tech at Google is indeed better than CloudFlare, but CloudFlare understands marketing, ease-of-use, product simplicity, all those stuff that are necessary to get people to actually use your offering.

<comment><USER10> I was amazingly surprised by Google Compute Engine. I've never used such a simple IaaS provider. Especially compared to the direction Azure's new portal is taking, GCE is refreshingly simple. EC2 is alright but still feels a lot more complicated than GCE. The UI is simpler, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is this different from before they were a GCP partner?

<comment><USER12> It sounds like they are now peering directly. Google could also be operating Cloudflare's [Railgun]([https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun](https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun)) software at the edge of their network to reduce content transfer times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What does this add? Before the partnership, could gce users not use cloudflare? Does the peering agreement result in lower transit costs on my gce bill?

<comment><USER14> Did you read the post, specifically the benefits section? Or the Google page they linked: [https://www.cloudflare.com/google](https://www.cloudflare.com/google)

It sounds like they now have a peering agreement so Google can directly communicate with CloudFlare's network, resulting in 2x faster performance. It looks like that's the primary benefit (other than the regular benefits of CloudFlare).

<comment><USER13> They never actually say that the peering agreement results in 2x faster performance, just that they use SPDY for 2x speed (which is something they've been doing for a while now).

>2x Web Performance Speed - CloudFlare uses advanced caching and the SPDY protocol to double web content transfer speeds, making web content transfer times significantly faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "double web content transfer times"

That should be speeds.

<comment><USER16> Maybe they're gonna be twice as slow now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I misread the title and thought that Google has acquired CloudFlare.

And that made me _a little uneasy_.

</comment><comment><USER18> Didn't Google announce their own DDOS protection service some month ago?

<comment><USER19> You mean the Project Shield[1] ?

[1]: [https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/en/](https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So is this basically GCP and Cloudflare peering with each other?

</comment><comment><USER21> Cloudways also became Google Cloud Platform Technology partner. And the invester in more than 10 cloud companies Ben Kepes wrote about it on Forbes. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/02/04/cloudways- ad...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/02/04/cloudways-adds-google- compute-engine-to-its-application-hosting-platform/)

And that's what they have built using Google Cloud Platform: [http://www.cloudways.com/en/managed-google-compute- engine.ph...](http://www.cloudways.com/en/managed-google-compute-engine.php)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it going to be beta or alpha, like most Google Cloud services?

<comment><USER23> Google Product Manager here.

Not sure why you think most Google Cloud Services are in beta.

The Google Cloud products page [1] lists 17 main products. Two are in alpha (Container Engine, Deployment Manager), one is in beta (Pub/Sub).

The rest are fully supported. There are some beta features here and there...but saying "most" are in beta is certainly not correct.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/products/](https://cloud.google.com/products/)

<comment><USER24> _The Google Cloud products page [1] lists 17 main products. Two are in alpha (Container Engine, Deployment Manager), one is in beta (Pub /Sub). The rest are fully supported._

Wait a second. I just clicked though the items on that page, and the following are listed as alpha:

      Container Engine
      Cloud Dataflow
      Cloud Deployment Manager

The following are in Beta:

      HTTP/HTTPS Load Balancing
      Virtual Private Network
      Cloud Pub/Sub
      Cloud Monitoring
      Cloud Logging

If these aren't in beta/alpha, then maybe you should update your docs.

<comment><USER23> Actually, I just filed a bug internally to fix docs. You're right -- alpha/beta is not clearly shown consistently enough (I missed at least one in going through that list).

In some cases, there are GA products with alpha/beta features & languages, so it may be difficult to figure out the best way to communicate at the top level (e.g., the examples pointed out for a given feature in a given language, or HTTP load balancing vs Network Load balancing).

But in cases where it's clearly a beta product, it should be clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What percentage of the web traffic flows through CloudFlare now?

<comment><USER26> Apparently around 5% [http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-is-ready-to- take-o...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-is-ready-to-take-on- cisco-2014-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does this mean it will be even harder to DDoS sites protected by Cloudflare now?

<comment><USER28> It's always been hard to DDoS sites protected by Cloudflare. Their business model is to promise to absorb any DDoS attack against you - and I think they've delivered so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do we have to do anything special to make this work? We've already been using CloudFlare with our App Engine application, using a CNAME in CloudFlare DNS.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wait, isnt google appengine already using SPDY?

<comment><USER31> HTTP/2 is replacing SPDY [http://blog.chromium.org/2015/02/hello- http2-goodbye-spdy-ht...](http://blog.chromium.org/2015/02/hello- http2-goodbye-spdy-http-is_9.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> CloudFlare hosts reddit, is that correct?

<comment><USER33> Yes. The NS records list reddit nameservers (usually you need to use CF nameservers for using their service, using your own nameservers require more config) but the A records list CF IPs (free users just get two IPs, reddit has quite a lot)

        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	18.104.22.168
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	126.96.36.199
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	184.108.40.206
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	188.8.131.52
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	18.104.22.168
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	220.127.116.11
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	22.214.171.124
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	184.108.40.206
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	220.127.116.11
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	220.127.116.11
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	184.108.40.206
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	184.108.40.206
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	126.96.36.199
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	188.8.131.52
        reddit.com.		22	IN	A	18.104.22.168

<comment><USER34> Huh, interesting. I didn't even know they'd allow you to do that. I assumed CF requires full DNS control to allow quickly switching over IP's in case of DOS and such.

<comment><USER33> HN does it via CNAMEs (this doesn't require manual editing of the IPs and CF can do it when they need to):

        news.ycombinator.com.   76  IN  CNAME   news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
        news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 124 IN A 22.214.171.124
        news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 124 IN A 22.214.171.124

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good time to stop using CloudFlare now :-) Thanks for the heads up OP.</comment>


A better (she|hash)bang your shell scripts - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/a-rodin/c3b5000568ecc176e2d3eed0ccad4015 <comment><USER2> Prefer an extra space like so:

        #! /bin/bash

to let the name of the interpreter stand on its own on the line.</comment>


Google will ban inline extensions starting with Chrome 71 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3034085/google-will-ban-inline-extensions-starting-with-chrome-71 <comment><USER2> This is bad news for the Chrome Extension Archive¹

¹[https://crx.dam.io/](https://crx.dam.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I assume the ability for devs to manually install locally will be retained?

</comment><comment><USER4> so that means we can't use tamper monkey anymore?</comment>


Visualization of storm surge – Unreal Engine real-time rendering - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/blkahn/status/1040306476273868800 <comment><AUTHOR> This visualisation is a remarkably clear & effective way to communicate the (otherwise abstract) risk data.

From: [https://twitter.com/itsren/status/1040313433978286082](https://twitter.com/itsren/status/1040313433978286082) \- rendered real-time using Unreal Engine

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been looking for a reason to overlay real time physics i.e. fluids in 3D GIS for a while, and here it is!

There's no reason bar processing demands that this couldn't be done for any arbitrary 3D GIS dataset - this example seems to be just a very small area constructed specifically for the video, whereas it would be possible to zoom into any area and view the effects. Not to take away from this video, because it is certainly compelling.

<comment><USER3> Do you think fluid simulation is advanced enough at this stage to simulate something like, "Assuming sea level rises 6 feet at the coast, this is how the surge will propagate across the landscape"?

Or will it be more like "If 6 feet of water is in this (fairly localized) area, this is how the local region will be affected"?

<comment><USER4> Possibly, though I imagine the complication there is getting a good enough base geometry to be happy with your simulation.

You could cut some corners by starting from the national floodplain data, which has a lot of engineering hours already in estimating the floodable area for a region, based on water height (and is what your area's flood insurance rates are based on).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> She's very lucky that the storm surge avoided the spot where she was standing.

<comment><USER6> She applied a bubble spell before it all started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool usage of UE. It's such a fantastic engine. They're also making a big push into architecture visualization.</comment>


List of 24,000 Available Brand Names (.com) For Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-brandables-com-domains-full-list <comment><USER2> Watch out world, here comes sloiw.com!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if these qualify as brand names so much as 4-5 character alphabetic permutations run through a pronouncability filter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like the technical definition of brandable :)

<comment><USER4> Though I'm not sure I'd want my brand associated with retud.com. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like utalu. I suppose you could pronounce it either _OO-TALL-OO_ or _YOO- TUH-LOOH_ or _OO-TUH-LOO_ (which I prefer, because it rolls off the tongue better and sounds really playful).

</comment><comment><USER6> You picked out some good ones, but skimming through the list, I don't see many others that catch my eye. A lot that sound vaguely Turkish.

Probably some good Linux distro names in there, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot sounded Japanese to me.

<comment><USER7> I think it will have a lot to do with the knowledge of the speaker. I saw lots of nihongo looking stuff, plenty of swahili and polynesian looking things too.

Edit: Though it all starts to blur together after the first 10,000 :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely agree with you, it's contextual to each person. I'm Japanese, Japanese stuff stands out to me. Out of curiosity what do swahili and polynesian ones sound like?

EDIT: why can't I reply to you joshu? That sounds interesting, would be curious to see the results.

<comment><USER8> I've been working on language modeling. I built a word generator which makes medical-sounding names. I wonder if you could rank japaneseness, polynesianness, medicalness, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to give it a try, I'd be happy to work with you (contact me off my blog)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My mind was slightly blown today, when I realized that <http://productivitycalendar.com> and .net (and all other permutations) were available.

There are still some excellent domains left, as difficult as it can seem to find some good ones.

Let this be some anecdotal pep talk.

Using NLTK to "mine" for viable domains also sounds like an interesting idea. Might even be a business model.

</comment><comment><USER10> If there's nothing here that is satisfactory, then it's quite easy to generate random pronounceable words, just alternate between vowels and consonants. As an example: <https://github.com/Stuk/generate-words>

<comment><AUTHOR> I started out with something similar to this, but randomly playing combinations created a lot of garbage relative of things that sounded pronounceable. A lot of letters are simply unpopular/bad (looking at you Q, J, Z, X) in most combinations (often the exception is the end).

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that's true. I like using it more as a launchpad for ideas. It's definitely not going to generate the next Flickr!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the beauty to creativity, there is no rules for how to get there :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For shits and giggles I took Kevin's lists and created a fun little startup name generator that you can play around with.

<http://whatthefuckshouldinamemystartup.com>

Visit the About page and donate to Kevin for all of his hard work :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why are there none that start with v,w,x,y,z? Plenty of perfectly pronounceable strings should exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> I removed a lot of garbage. Some exist, but the relative proportion wasn't good enough. There had to be cuts otherwise it would just be 26^5 combos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> dehog.com! I'd buy it if I had use for it.

Also, a clever use of this data set would be to run it against the Google Search API, and order them by the number of results. Theoretically, more results = better word. Or, less results means easier SEO.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have a way to hit the API that hard, if you do, would love to see the results!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I grabbed gleeh.com, might be good for resale at least. Thank you for the list!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feedback welcome :) this list is bigger and better than the last one

</comment><comment><USER14> "alohu" is pretty good, but someone's already snagged it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect the top of the list was looked at the most, perhaps strategically looking at other areas may lead to better success?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some wealthy jerk will probably register all of these.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why I posted it here instead of WealthyJerks.com. Go find something you like and tell anyone you know looking now before they see it.

<comment><USER16> WealthyJerks.com is available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HiSux.com ... smells like opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER18> None starting with 'sh'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Apparently I missed that combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> huroi !</comment>


The American Banking System Is Still in the 1990s - <AUTHOR> http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is-still-in-the-1990s/ <comment><USER2> Banking is big business and as long as they can prevent competition, whether through innovation that limits their ability to collect fees or through what we see as true competitors, our banking systems will not change.

They wield power and exert great influence with our lawmakers and the government. Until that changes the banks will continue to transact business in a manner that benefits them the most.

As far as the IRS goes and automated systems for tax reporting/verification goes etc., we need to do something that allows direct reporting to more sophisticated systems if no other other reason than to get a better handle on the fraudulent returns that are submitted every year. Are far as Turbo Tax and H & R Block goes, a $5 million investment in tax reporting software is nothing compared to the fees they collect every year from people who utilize their software for reporting. Of course the icing on the cake are those who use their early return loan programs. Clearly they have every reason to lobby to maintain the tax reporting system as it currently functions.</comment>


U.S. Accuses Tech Firm of Bias Against Asian Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/technology/us-accuses-tech-firm-of-bias-against-asian-software-engineers.html?referer=https://news.google.com <comment><USER2> unconscious bias, conscious bias, outright discrimination. What a quagmire of human existence these topics drift into eh?

No secret, I'm a 51 year old black man living in America. I've been in "high tech" all my life (Commodore Pet). I've run my own company, and worked in and around others, and now reside at Microsoft. My current non-tech mission is the promotion of diversity in hiring in core tech jobs [http://www.industryexplorers.com](http://www.industryexplorers.com)

These are complex issues in complex times. I can say one thing though, much of the current set of biases will slowly dissipate as our children get into positions of power. Ethnicity itself is starting to get very blended. My college aged daughter (who is mixed herself) has friends of all stripes. As they form companies, and hire people, they'll hire like themselves, which is to say an eclectic bunch of people.

The next frontier in bias might be economic stratus, or hair color, or which side of the egg you break open.

I think the best we can do is be as aware as possible, and simply strive to find and work with good people, while holding everyone in high esteem and with respect.

<comment><USER3> deleted

<comment><USER2> I'm personally not into diversity for diversity's sake, because I'm not quite sure what that is.

What I am for is equal opportunities. In some instances, giving that "equal" to one set of people requires work because they have been put on an unequal footing for some time. This was true in America for blacks because the origin of blacks was slavery (blacks were considered chattle, nothing more than cows, pigs, and goats). That kind of disadvantage requires some amount of work to overcome. The voting rights act wasn't enacted until 1965, the year after I was born, so that's something to consider.

With respect to tech, it's really easy for me. The back of my employment badge has our company's mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

I believe we greatly enhance our ability to do that by creating a more inclusive and diverse workforce. It's not simply about DNA diversity (women and 'minorities'), but it's also a diversity of experiences, from around the world. I'm willing to take the math major from Tunisia and teach them to be a great coder so they can contribute their experience to our mission, and help create software that's appropriate for their origin.

So, long answer I guess.

To me, everything is about learning and growth (probably due to my current age). So, I see your experience in Oakland, and say "great, you've gained another perspective on life". Let's see what you can do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...](https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsreleases/OFCCP20160926_0.pdf)

The article implies they preferred white candidates, but the preferred races are not mentioned in the government's press release, simply "non-Asian." I would not jump to conclusions about the non-Asian candidates as there are other possible scenarios.

<comment><USER5> Yep...With companies attempting to appear diverse in I.T., that means a company needs to hire less Asians AND less white people in IT.

They could have been trying to prefer black, Hispanic, or Native American to boost up their diversity numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always wondered why many of the larger tech firms don't have anonymous interviewing. Wouldn't it be pretty trivial to implement?

You could just have the candidate go into a room with a computer with no internet access and type out answers to algorithmic questions. The instructions could be delivered via typed text. It would be incredibly impersonal, but it would be hard to discern personality given the industry's propensity to have trivia/algorithm questions.

<comment><USER7> > anonymous interviewing

This goes against the entire reason you interview.

This is not about hiring a mechanical labourer (Musician, Factor worker, Computer Repairer) it's about professionals which is team work.

<comment><USER8> I think this is the first time I've seen a musician called a mechanical worker. Ensemble music is teamwork, and good solo music isn't mechanical either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who does Palantir think they are ?? The ivy league?? Geesh we all know only tier 1 colleges can discriminate against asians using the "diversity" card....

</comment><comment><USER10> dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12585250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12585250)

</comment><comment><USER11> According to the article, 85% of applicants were Asian. Does anyone ever ask why that ratio is so high?

My wife (who is Asian) graduated from Australia's top high school, where 90% of students are Asian. She and her friends now go to the most prestigious universities in Australia where they study medicine, law and engineering.

She explained to me that as a child of Asian parents if you can't get into medicine, you get into law. If you can't do law, you do engineering or commerce. It really doesn't matter if you want to be a musician or a photographer or do something else with your life. The end product is that we have a huge number of Asian kids graduating from top universities in professions that they don't personally care about, and I bet that comes out in the interview.

I don't believe that people should be discriminated on for their race, but I wonder how much racial diversity gets swept under the rug in the debate. Sometimes racial values stand in direct or indirect opposition to the values of other cultures. Perhaps Asian culture has opposing values to the culture of the software industry, and when that emerges in hiring statistics law suits get filed.

</comment><comment><USER7> ""The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in 3.4 million," the Labor Department said in its complaint."

Which is obviously BS.

They are heavily correlated, not independent events.

At a guess most studied at universities in country X known for it's sub quality education.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this isn't some long lingering reverberation of the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Is this the influence of the institutional memory of the US government security community?

Alternatively, this could be the natural result of defensive measures against a concerted effort on the part of e.g. the Chinese government to place people inside of an organization that deals with a lot of secure data.

It's probably reasonable to assume the worst (naked racism), but you never know.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not surprising. Rich white people want to stick together and give opportunities to other rich white people in their own circle. It's the same for Asian people in Silicon Valley as well--I don't think it's fair to single out one particular race for this type of behavior. Racism seems to be a human characteristic--whether it's in prison or tech firms, racism is pervasive. It would be more interesting and very much more innovative if SV where a true meritocracy.

<comment><USER14> I call bullshit. Give me some numbers to back that up. I do 2-3 interviews a week and race is never a consideration. When an engineer is reviewing another engineer's code, I have never ever seen this be an issue.

<comment><USER15> They'd call that anecdotal evidence.

I don't have numbers to back up the original post, but I'm interested in seeing what he comes back with.

<comment><USER13> No comeback--just my personal comment. You guys don't have to agree. My original point is that I wasn't surprised regarding the hiring practices at Palantir.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Disadvantaged Start Hurts Boys More Than Girls - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/upshot/a-disadvantaged-start-hurts-boys-more-than-girls.html?ref=business <comment><USER2> Glad that there's a discussion. It would help humanity to also give enough focus on boy child development so that we could save their future, avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails.

<comment><USER3> I've always wondered how much of the gap comes from a near total lack of male teachers in K-5.

<comment><USER4> Probably quite a lot. I'm reminded of a study I read a year or two ago which looked at academic performance in high school; girls received considerably higher class marks on average. However, this effect vanished when they took standardized tests ... and it also vanished when they had male teachers.

Whether it's teaching style, the teacher acting as a role model, or something else, I don't know; but gender definitely makes a difference in teaching.

<comment><USER5> Would there be a suspicion that this was because of sexism, if the genders were reversed?

<comment><USER6> I think you are looking for something voluntary when that is almost certainly not the case.

1) A friend of mine once astutely commented that the diagnosis for ADHD was basically "middle class with behaviors which annoy female schoolteachers."

2) Boys tend to challenge authority from teens to early 20's to try and work out their place in the world. Most male teachers just roll with it until they have to make a sarcastic, embarrassing remark which short circuits it (never heckle a teacher or a stand-up comic--they've seen it all before). Female teachers tend to react more strongly. I suspect its a physical thing--boys start getting problematically large for most women about 7th or 8th grade and if, as a female, you don't nip it in the bud hard and fast, you can lose control over the situation.

3) Boys need male role models just as women need female role models.

4) Male teachers don't tend to view approval by their students as something useful or desirable (in the case of approval by the female students--it's downright dangerous). The better female teachers are in the same boat, but there are a _LOT_ of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's approval.

If we stew all that together with an absence of male teachers, I suspect that you have more than enough unconscious bias to account for everything.

<comment><USER7> (1) doesn't apply to the actual results of the study reported, which finds the (oft-found) effect that boys from low socioeconomic groups (not the middle class) are disproportionately disadvantaged compared to their female peers.

The usual explanation tends to be that the outs in progression to university- level education are much more available to young men than women overall, as well as the worst excesses of lost potential (i.e. gang membership and fatalities are disproportionately male).

(2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will, what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real improvement in teaching outcomes.

(4) also demands actual evidence.

<comment><USER6> Evidence? Mostly personal experience of my own teaching along with my parents who both taught.

> (2) demands actual evidence, since the implication that male teachers will, > what? allow things to escalate to physical violence? Hardly belies any real > improvement in teaching outcomes.

There are two pieces to this. One is physical and one is social.

As for physical: if I'm managing a classroom, I have a lot of authority by virtue of being 6"+, 100bs+ bigger than most of the students. My voice alone is far more powerful than that of a woman. In addition, I can embarrass or insult a troublemaker without much fear of physical repercussion. This is really huge as it gives me a lot of graded options that a woman would have to think twice about. And, at bottom, the students have to wonder exactly how much damage I could do to them if they really push me into a corner.

As for social: my personal experience is that a lot of female teachers want compliance (personal control dynamic) while male teachers can function as long as there is no interference (group outcome dynamic). A good example of this was an exchange between my parents:

<female> "I want them to quit chewing tobacco in my class" (Note: personal control dynamic).

<male> "Well, you're not going to get that without throwing somebody out of class every day. Are you willing to disrupt your class for that?"

<female> "Not really."

<male> "Okay, so presumably you could ignore it if they don't spit in the back of the class (group outcome dynamic)?"

<female> "I guess, but ..."

<male> "Fine. That's achievable by telling them: "If you're man enough to chew, you're man enough to swallow it (Note: peer embarrassment). If I see any on the floor, all the people I see chewing are cleaning it." Now they'll police each other, and you'll only occasionally have to send one to the office."

> there are a LOT of female teachers that actively try to gain their student's > approval.

Go teach at a school. There are always quite a few women who want to be "buds" with the students. I don't really see this among the men except in the genuinely dangerous cases.

<comment><USER8> In regards to your point about the physical size being a thing: I worked at an inner city school and one of the teachers that could get students in line like nobody else was a 6'5" 275 lb man who worked as a biker bar bouncer on weekends.

This was middle school, so maybe the effect was exaggerated, but he could stop fights like no other.

To your point about trying to gain the approval of students, the dynamic definitely makes a big difference. Teachers that tried to be the 'fun' teacher were taken advantage of time and time again. I wish this wasn't the case, but an authoritarian role was the best way to provide consistency, stability, and true opportunity for learning in these types of classrooms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suspect this is true for a larger cross-section of society in the USA – _disadvantaged_ males are hurt more than _disadvantaged_ females. However, _advantaged_ males are way more successful than _advantaged_ females. This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where males in high positions positing that men have an advantage because of their gender (because in the already advantaged group, they have seen the additional advantages of being male), and calling for more opportunities for females.

To give a practical example – as an Asian male who is not that good at coding, if I ask someone to explain some code to me, I am met with way less enthusiasm than if a female coder asks the same question. On the other hand, the guy giving the talk at the event has already written 10 libraries used by thousands of users, and codes kernel exploits in his spare time. He _is already at a high position in life_ (in geek terms anyway), and tells me, "Hey, you have male privilege and weren't told to not code at elementary school. So we're going to focus on helping women more at this event."

I wonder how we can solve this conundrum and give disadvantaged women at the top, and disadvantaged men at the bottom access to opportunities. One thing that would definitely lead to progress (in my opinion) is a recognition and broader understanding that "male privilege" is often (but not always) confined to the top 1-2% of males in a given broad category. The rest of us often suffer the same impostor syndrome, rejection, and nervousness, regardless of our gender.

<comment><USER10> I think a good start would be getting rid of the feminism-as-status-symbol problem. That guy who dismissed you because you're not a woman and therefore privileged was expressing a belief that's most likely just signalling his status as "enlightened person". If we can stop that, we can start having a movement towards equality that doesn't hurt both genders more than it helps them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Boys have trouble being ready for kindergarten and having self discipline. But those that do make it, even though they are fewer, tend to do better than their female counterparts in later life.

Kindergarten activities and society's ideas of self discipline aren't really the conditions human life evolved under. Maybe fighting and looking for action/excitement are the same qualities that make boys successful later (if it doesn't kill or otherwise ruin them first).

Here is my theory (after hours of watching the discovery channel). You don't need many males biologically speaking. So for males, it's do or die from day one. Mostly it's die, but there are a few winners that pass their genes on. Women, as long as they are fertile, don't necessarily enter the same competition... they are the prizes.

Of course civilization doesn't work very well with all the males running around trying to kill each other and breed all the women, so we have laws and religions and kindergartens and diversity training classes. Which kind of puts males (and females maybe to an extent) in a biologically uncomfortable position. Those that succeed in this unnatural environment are those that channel their natural impulses into the pathways society has set up. The poor disadvantaged souls that aren't ready for kindergarten and wind up in prison for violent crimes? Well... they might have been leading the pack 20,000 years ago.

<comment><USER7> Evopsyche is pseudo-science.

EDIT: To expand - it is useless to speculate on psychology in an evolutionary context, because we have precisely 0 observation supported models of what anything was like many thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of evidence that a lot of modern narrative was constructed to suit the current gender roles.

For example, "hunter-gatherer" is a complete misnomer. It should "gatherer- hunter". Because evidence shows that 80-90% of early nutrition was likely gathered by the tribe, and that hunting was exceptionally infrequent and probably a huge waste of resources the majority of time it was engaged in.

<comment><USER12> > EDIT: To expand - it is useless to speculate on psychology in an > evolutionary context, because we have precisely 0 observation supported > models of what anything was like many thousands of years ago. We do however > have plenty of evidence that a lot of modern narrative was constructed to > suit the current gender roles.

Really? I thought that anthropologists studied remote tribe in e.g. the Amazon basin in order to gather exactly this type of data?

<comment><USER7> There's very few uncontacted tribes, and more importantly, uncontacted tribes themselves _are_ outliers to the general human population.

They also tend to defy most evopsyche gender stereotyping anyway because they're totally different cultures with wildly different understandings of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At a very basic level, when I was volunteering helping the homeless, I saw a great deal of disparity. There are many homeless shelters and programs that only take in women and children, and many shelters which accept people of all genders but have limited space will make men wait to gain entrance, while letting in women and children, so that if someone doesn't get in, it's always men. Donations are frequently given under the condition that they go to help homeless women and children.

I do understand some of the legitimate reasons for this: women are at higher risk to be raped and experience more medical issues related to homelessness. But this only accounts for some of the disparity.

Part of the issue here is that there's a belief that adult males _should_ be able to support themselves. This is evident in the programs that do serve men: while homeless programs that target women provide food, shelter, medical care, and childcare, the few homeless programs which target men almost universally focus on helping homeless men get jobs. Men do experience privilege in employment when they're actually employed, but this idea is inapplicable to the homeless. Most homeless people are mentally ill, and a mentally ill man is no more employable than a mentally ill woman.

<comment><USER14> children?! where do you live?

in sf finding a shelter for children is disgustingly difficult and, as i finally concluded, impossible on weekends

i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs' about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing ire

programs to help the homeless are flawed, i know it first hand, but complaining about someone else's idea of a solution does the least possible to help

if you want a shelter organised under your own incentives i'd suggest starting your own

it's an asshole thing to say but look at the landscape of shelters

currently we have overcrowded, underfunded understaffed solutions:

some universal, few women only, few men only

how do we remove the gender bias?

bulk the universal with the necessary staff that administer the specific needs of the gender exclusive shelters

but the universal shelters are already overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed so to ask more of them would only aggravate the issues further

so we need more shelters, and to have more people willing to open and operate a shelter, and some people get the will to do so by focusing their attention on a specific group, in this case gender based

why is there gender bias in shelters? i'd argue because the people who are willing to put in the work choose to create an environment for the gender bias

should we regulate out the bias with legislation forbidding discrimination based on gender? in the current landscape i only see that harming the issues because then those that have the personal will to run a gender biased shelter will lose their incentive and simply do something else, limiting the number of shelters available to share in the solution

instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out proactively

<comment><USER13> > i'm sorry, but conflating the issue of a perceived disparity with 'beliefs' > about social gender consensus is unhelpful and only incites issue derailing > ire

It's not a conflation, it's acknowledging what I believe to be a causal relation. If I'm correct, changing the beliefs will help fix the issue.

> instead i think the argument should be to fund a state run universal shelter > program well enough that specific interest shelters get phased out > proactively

Yes. The solution to disparity is enough abundance that it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER14> my bad, i called it conflating because the differences between your own beliefs and the apparent beliefs of others were lost and i interpreted your statement as speaking for each

        ..acknowledging what I believe to be a causal
        relation. If I'm correct..

this new language clears up that confusion

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I notice on boys vs girls is that girls are more likely to get/accept help from their families and people around them. Specially financially for like the purpose of education.

I was there, I just pretended like more education doesn't worth it that much (not on US btw).

</comment><comment><USER16> My guess is that most things---good and bad---have a disproportionate effect on boys.

<comment><USER17> Makes sense. Consistent with a greater prevalence of men than women at both of society's extremes. Evolutionary strategy suggests taking higher-risk paths for male phenotypes than female phenotypes.

<comment><USER18> Maybe it's just cultural. I don't see why risk taking favors men millions of years ago.

<comment><USER19> Large risks imply large potential rewards (otherwise you're just being dumb).

But in terms of genetics the female upside is limited by the very high costs of child bearing & the limited number of children they can physically have. The male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can have sex with.

1 / 200 men are apparently descended from Genghis Khan! This feat would simply be impossible for any woman of that era.

<comment><USER20> You are describing one reproductive strategy used by males, which is not true for all men, and is defently not true when looking beyond humans.

Having many low investments into offspring can be effective, but it is also risky. The more champion based a race is (one male per many females), the more energy is going to be spent on competition. The offspring will also have to depend solely on the mother, since each child is just one of many from a single male and has thus less individual investment value.

The alternative strategy is to focus on a smaller number of children, making sure that that the reproductive investment has a higher chance to be successful. Children gets the value of having two parents that are invested in the offspring, but there are issues of "cheating" (an observed behavior in many animals).

Of course, I am only describing male strategy here and naturally it can not exist in a vacuum. Female strategy often has higher initial cost, but it does not dictate the outcome. In the case of humans also, the observed strategy in both sexes is normally said to be a mix strategy, so it is far more complex than just saying that the male genetic upside to risk is limited by the number of women they can have sex with.

<comment><USER19> So you would argue that men (particularly young men) do not exhibit greater risk taking behaviour than women? Or do you have some other explanation for this propensity?

Non-humans do not I think enter into the discussion, and a strategy doesn't have to be universal to have a big enough effect on our psychology to be worth worrying about at the level of education policy.

<comment><USER20> Im saying that the conclusion will never be correct if we try categorize men, particularly young men, as having a reproductive strategy which research has shown as not true for humans.

Risk behavior is complex concept, goes well beyond reproductive strategies. Behavior is significant more effected by culture than genes, and culture is effected by gender identification rather than sex.

Would you be surprised if transgenders has a identical risk taking behavior in relation to the gender which they identify themselves as? Would you be surprised if sexual presence has no impact at all? In both cases it would strongly imply that reproductive strategy has no impact on risk taking behavior.

Some explanation for the claimed propensity of men taking higher risk would be that being successful is more rewarded socially for men then women, while averageness and failure is generally socially more for men than women. Finding root causes for that social pressure is harder, but my guess is that it has both biological reasons and historical ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Where to even begin,

Part of this issue I feel is, as mentioned in the article, is that boys are taught from the young age to take care of their problems, which leads to more isolation. Another important reason I feel is the rising amount of "girls- only" opportunities that systematically make boys feel inadequate and since they are not able to participate for whatever reason (e.g. "its only for girls") they continue to lag behind. I even have a perfect example of this, my city has a "Girls Learning Code" meetup / lecture series that while advertises being gender neutral is clearly not so, the question is how many meetups are there that are for boys, e.g. "Boys Learning Code" (creating these would be classified under men 's rights activism and therefore dismissed). My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds. There has also been a decline in male bonding occurring at the young age, which I (and some academics) believe is very important to male development over all. This is caused by the fact that traditionally boys-only facilities (in this specific example Scouts Canada) have been pressured into accepting girls, which prohibits boys from...essentially being boys. Girl Guides of Canada received no such pressure. Coming back to the issue of masculinity, even though many young adults might have good enough grades to get into university they might not be high enough to go into fields that wouldn't cause strange questions and don't have stigma around them if you're male (I'm talking about fields such as Medicine, Law, Engineering, Computer Science), they might have the grades to get into Arts, specifically psychology, nursing and things such as women studies, all of which have a very high female to male ratio (and are generally considered a "girls" field) making boys pursue other interests (such as not going to university) instead for the fears of unsexing themselves.

(Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America? I've immigrated from an Eastern-Block country as a teenager to NA and I've never seen these problems because communism required that all members of the society do essentially the same jobs, that is why would you sacrifice half of the working populace, so you have women in high power positions, police, factories, the military, a lot of girls even take mathematics and computational sciences, sure there were problems but not at this scale (my grandmother was a Chemist and my mother was a corporal in the Defense Ministry and also studied thermal physics in University); I've never even imagined it was an issue elsewhere in the world until after I moved to Canada)

<comment> nv-vn >My point is (or rather society's) is that if you're male and have a good start then you're automatically golden, but for those that do not have the same starting opportunities there are simply no other options that are, on the other hand, available to girls from all backgrounds.

This is definitely due to the mentality of "all boys are the same" and "all girls are the same" collectivist mentality that's so popular today. The same thing exists for races, ethnicities, etc. Basically, rather than looking at the background of a person these people tend to blindly make assumptions about exactly who and what they are. I think that this is one of the reasons affirmative action is especially broken -- a poor Asian student is basically doomed for failure whereas a rich Black student is going to have a huge advantage (over both White students at their socioeconomic level and poorer Black students). Rather than fixing the problem that people get unequal opportunities it sort of decides what the opportunities should be for every single person regardless of their actual situation, and that creates really skewed edge cases.

>Whats the deal with gender issues anyway in North America...

I think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole it's proven extremely difficult to do.

<comment><USER22> > think that the root of this issue is that there are basically two ways to > fix inequalities: flattening out the entire system or raising those below up > to the same level as everyone else. The technique that has proven most > successful was really the type of communist philosophy that was used by lots > of these Eastern European states, and that essentially comes out to be > leveling the playing system by putting everyone below where they could > possibly be. Of course raising everyone up is a possibility, but as a whole > it's proven extremely difficult to do.

I disagree there is a binary choice. Educational system in Finland was intended to address the inequality, but in the effect it actually helped the performance.

On the other hand, the U.S. with No Child Left Behind policy failed, mostly because it didn't address the inequality.

I think there are two things conflated here: power and choice. We should strive for equality in power, but still give people the choice. If you have the choice, then no one puts you below. I think the fallacy here is that people actually don't need huge resources to become successful, only modest ones. So you can distribute resources equally and yet the best people won't be topped out.

Contrary to popular opinion, lack of possibility to be rich wasn't the biggest obstacle in Eastern European countries. The biggest obstacle was existing bureaucracy (which actually had more power than normal people, it just wasn't expressed in money). Good innovators don't need financial incentives; they need (at least modest) access to resources and freedom. For example, this guy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article was pretty all over the place, and had too many speculative, opinion based quotes. Shouldn't this problem be handed over to the CDC? The writer briefly alludes to the fact that gender inequity may be related to gender roles, which are a construct. Yes, the CDC should study gender roles.

<comment><USER24> What I found particularly frustrating about the article was its focus on race, despite the fact that poverty and absentee fathers are the true culprits, with race simply having a correlation to the root cause condition.

I grew up in an impoverished, white rural community, and the boys without fathers go nuts. It's a common pattern that doesn't even call for data. Everyone just knows it.

My wife's father died when she was young, and her mother simply collected social security checks and lapsed into depression. Her sister and her did alright. Both of her brothers dropped out of high school, one of them committed suicide, and the other died at 21 of a medical condition while attempting to earn a GED and working for $8/hour at a gas station. Both were in and out of jail from their teen years and up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What a sexist comment. In this world where equality for men means "avoid the crimes they commit and their languishing in jails", does equality for women means that they will start take a job and not just spend the money of men?

Is the discussion so infected that we can't simply share a goal that every person should be equal in worth, be able to pursue their passion in life, and to have liberty. If we can't agree to such simple goals, then how can we ever have progress beyond political lines than just shout at each other, forever arguing and never fixing anything for the better.

<comment><USER26> You're punching air mate.

I think the point was just that if we don't help these boys - then they are more likely to fall into patterns of crime and violence - which is a cost everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?

<comment><USER25> "If we don't help these girls - then they are more likely to fall into patterns of parasitic behavior - which is a cost everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?"

You don't see a problem with phrasing equality in that way?

<comment><USER27> Are you suggesting there are zero behavioural differences between boys and girls?

<comment><USER25> Calling boys for future criminals and girls for future parasites is not going to help creating equality. It has nothing to do with "behavioural" differences from genes, and everything to do about sexism.

<comment><USER28> That's exaggerating his position. It's not sexist to acknowledge differences between males and females.

<comment><USER29> It is likely sexist to acknowledge differences as being biological in origin when they are sociological in origin. Of course, some differences are biological, but the outcome of how the biological differences result in different social trends is part sociological.

For an example of a difference which is sexist, imagine someone saying women are less fit for critical roles because they are more emotional, when in fact it is that our society works to repress male expression of emotions and both men and women are, at the core, emotional entities.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optimizing Software in C++ [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimizing_cpp.pdf <comment><USER2> Anyone who is interested in maximizing the output of computer hardware should read this. 100% of times I've been able to significantly speed up a piece of C++ code, I did it by using a technique from this document. Cannot recommend highly enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great overall. One nitpick:

> How compilers optimize

This didn't mention scalar replacement of aggregates [1]! This is easily one of the most important optimizations for programmers in C++ and similar languages to know about.

[1]: [https://books.google.com/books?id=Pq7pHwG1_OkC&pg=PA331&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Pq7pHwG1_OkC&pg=PA331&lpg=PA331&dq=scalar+replacement+of+aggregates&source=bl&ots=4Y8WHoc7lU&sig=iqAwWCX6_gyYGfHoF_x392b_zIg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiHoraj1OHJAhUOxGMKHTuJBZcQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=scalar%20replacement%20of%20aggregates&f=false) is a reasonable explanation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of good stuff there. Caches(including i-cache and d-cache), volatile(and how it gets mis-construed), pointer-aliasing, float to int overhead, alloca. I don't think I've seen so much good performance stuff in a single place.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does this have second part ? (I saw "1" at first page in headline). I am asking because I am in love with this . Thank you so much

<comment><USER5> [http://www.agner.org/optimize/](http://www.agner.org/optimize/)

for anyone who wants complete series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chapter 14 is twenty-four carat gold. Would love to see optimize.com as a dedicated site with Rosetta Code-style ports of optimization recipes across languages, platforms ;)

Quick link to grab all five manuals:

[http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimization_manuals.zip](http://www.agner.org/optimize/optimization_manuals.zip)

<comment><USER7> > Chapter 14 is twenty-four carat gold

Maybe, but the bounds-checking optimisation [14.2] just looks dangerous. If you end up with an erroneous 'int' index of -1 then the original code will error out, whereas the new code will interpret it as 2^32 - 1. This is a perfectly valid index in an array of 2^32 values. This optimisation just isn't equivalent if INT_MAX < size <= UINT_MAX.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> size is a const int that holds a positive value so you won't ever have INT_MAX < size.

<comment><USER7> Yes, and the compiler knows that as well. GCC even merges the two versions because they're equivalent[0]

My point is, if size is dynamic, this is a dangerous optimisation.

[0] [http://goo.gl/4Ev8as](http://goo.gl/4Ev8as)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This optimization guide is a very interesting book.

there is another article "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory" by Ulrich Drepper [http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf](http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf) ; it has a section on how to optimize memory access / tools that help in the process.

I put up my notes/summary on this article (more like a book with a 100+ pages) [http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blog/2015/12/11/wep...](http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blog/2015/12/11/wepskn.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Thank you for sharing this.</comment>