Request HN: A request to all Freelancers - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone, esp. all the freelancers on HN
I started Grep42 (http://www.grep42.com) 8 months ago with the vision of making a freelancer's life easy. I was a freelancer and I realized that we guys spend a lot of time looking for work on different platforms - which could be saved if a technology could bring those jobs to us instead of us going out looking for them. That's how Grep42 was born. I built the product and shared it with you and received a lot of suggestions and support for which I'm very thankful.
However, I've now run into a thought-block. The analytics haven't improved and I get a lot of 1 time visits. I've added most of the stuff you guys requested but somehow you're still not finding it very usable - and I'm dumbfounded. A request to all freelancers here, please try it out and tell me what can I do to help you. If you feel this is useless garbage, I'll throw it away. If you feel you would be willing to bet your dollar on this, I would appreciate that with the same amount of grace. So help me, help you. Your 2 cents are appreciated.
Some questions you could ask yourself:
- As a freelancer, what are the 5 most nagging problems? (technical or non-technical, more personal the better. "no fixed hours" qualifies as a valid problem)
- What are your favorite sites that you use to search for projects?
- Do you get direct referrals? Is there something I can do to make that better?
I look forward to your answers, thanks!
Jagtesh
jagtesh A.T gmail D.O.T com <comment><USER2> I like the concept of the site, but it looks like 100% of the iOS/iPhone/iPad projects are from elance and odesk, which I refuse to work through.

a. Most nagging problem: clients slow to make decisions.

b. Sites: many RSS feeds, but I rarely look at them (see c).

c. Direct referrals: Yes, this and repeat clients are the primary ways I get projects.

If you had an RSS feed that excluded elance and odesk, I'd add it to my feed reader.

It seems more difficult for clients to find quality freelancers than it is for quality freelancers to find clients, so perhaps you could look into solving problems for the clients. I agree that direct referrals are most important, so perhaps you could make a tool to crawl the social graph to find freelancers who are a friend-of-a-friend?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've used elance, freelancer, and v-worker, and a few others without much success.

The Aussie companies have retarded policies for allowing you to get your funds out of their account (freelancer makes you wait 15 business days for instance for the first transaction). They also take their cut before you even start the work, often placing your account into the negative and then if the client bails they keep your money.

It's hard to get bids accepted when most people are choosing providers based solely on lowest price rather than aptitude. Also, like 90% of the people that I've worked with on these sites are high-maintenance and change the project's scope every five minutes. One guy even is trying to sue me even though I implemented what it is he wanted (pre-scope-creep).

And as for Craigslist being better; I don't think so! Every job that I've gotten through Craigslist except for one has been low pay, the client dragged their feet with everything and yet was super demanding and unrealistic in their expectations.

There's gotta be a better way to do freelance business but these sites don't appear to be it. Many of them are just places with sub-par services for freelancers that are designed to upsell you add-ons like testing and badges.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am currently trying to find my first project post graduation to do. I am having a very hard time getting started in the freelance. So I would say getting the "first one" is a pretty large problem, at least for me.

<comment><USER5> Similar situation here! I've tried oDesk and others without much luck.

<comment><USER6> I got my first gig on odesk but I can't find anything good on there any more. All the jobs I am interested the employer wants to pay $10 for.

Elance on the other hand has some good jobs and good pay but I can't snag anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was a very interesting comment here, some mins ago about the quality of work on these sites. This dude was arguing that its cheap and mostly done by Indians. Hell yeah its cheap work - and oDesk I'm looking at you. They've created swarms of data-entry workers who occasionally try their hands at web/software development. One argument is that they're increasing competition and polluting the freelance-ecosystem. But another argument is that these clients who hire the "cheap workers" are small-timers couldn't afford "the real programmers". So their market is entirely different. They aren't really eating our market share - just that those kind of "cheap" jobs are overwhelmingly more it's becoming harder to find niche jobs. This answers my own question in a way - focusing on experienced coders who have a reputation for delivering and not fucking up. And doing what I can to make their lives easy.

Btw, I'm Indian. Bad code and not shipping on time has little to do with being Indian (or there wouldn't be so many Indians in the valley). Call them what they are - inexperienced and unprofessional programmers.

</comment><comment><USER7> First result on my search turned up "We want to start with contractor as 2-5 $ per hour". If I'm going to have to filter out all the crap like this I probably won't come back. I did notice after you can set a minbudget but my first impression 'here we go again!'. Unless you expect to cater to the low, low end maybe a sensible default filter level would be a good idea? If you really want to get $2/hr then you can override.

Answers:

1\. As with other people here, pickiness, constantly changing specs, ridiculous demands (the classic Facebook for $500 - which even innocuous postings can turn out to be)

2\. I've stopped completely now as I no longer have time to weigh through 100 pages of crap for the one good job. I found most "joy" with vworker, but my last 2 hour job beat my 4 month earnings from there.

3\. Some. Though I'm afraid I can't think of way you could improve this right now.

</comment><comment><USER8> a) 1\. Picky high-maintenance clients that change or add requirements midstream 2\. Clients who don't pay on time 3\. My own issues with estimating and managing time 4\. Finding _quality_ clients 5\. Finding _ethically appropriate_ projects – I've been roped into religion-oriented work unwittingly as a subcontractor far too often.

b) Craigslist is consistently the best, because Craigslist is just a thin technology layer over real people talking to each other. The barriers to entry and restrictions that come with oDesk and elance are more than I have time to deal with (I'm also a full time student).

c) I get direct referrals sometimes, but right now, my best bet is new clients.

Also, is there some kind of filtering mechanism on your site? That would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.virtualrockstars.com/> does something similar (not affiliated)</comment>


Ask HN: Micro services at macro-scale? - <AUTHOR>

I am the main developer of a relatively-high throughput API - upwards of 1000 req/sec at peak times. The core app is built in Python mostly because it started as an experiment, and was never meant to handle so much traffic.
We use AWS autoscaling, and build ephemeral front-end servers to handle wildly fluctuating traffic levels throughout the day. We can be as low as 3 servers, and as high as 13 (front-end only, does not include DB/Redis).
I've been tearing off piece9s of what has become a large-scale app in to "micro-services" (for lack of a better name). Most are written in Go, as I both enjoy it and find it fast to develop in. But when looking at the future, I'm trying to decide between Go and Elixir for a port of the largest part of the app. I know Elixir's OTP layer lets servers almost work as a hive-mind, whereas Go would be better to services that could have several instances launched in parallel that are not necessarily aware of each other. Our current practice of having all front-end servers load-balance requests and have no inter-communication (so scaling down doesn't cause any real problems) seems to work well.
My question is mostly around architecture, and comparing OTP-based smart clustering with "dumb scaling" of many instances of the same small services that don't inter-communicate. I don't want to get into a language debate, but rather am looking for thoughts about building services to scale to many thousands of requests per second, and the different approaches to doing so.
Thoughts? (Edit: clarity) <comment><USER2> Elixir is usually the best bet for high throughput with low memory requirements.

But I think you should read some presentations about microservices before you decide to code a giant new architecture. There are other solutions already developed. A guide on the mindset of microservices that is useful is well written in these two articles: [http://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology- forecast/2014/cloud-comp...](http://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology- forecast/2014/cloud-computing/features/microservices.jhtml) and [http://www.tigerteam.dk/2014/micro-services-its-not-only- the...](http://www.tigerteam.dk/2014/micro-services-its-not-only-the-size- that-matters-its-also-how-you-use-them-part-1/)

Xing used elixir/erlang built an rabbit mq, riak, and redis based service that seemed like a good build for scaling a large system with minimal memory and latency. You can watch that video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38yKu5HR- tM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38yKu5HR-tM)

For scaling microservices you generally want to use http and queueing services for distributing the messages. There are many options in this retrospect. Redis and RabbitMQ are some of the better ones. Something newly being developed but could be of interest is syncfree: [https://github.com/SyncFree](https://github.com/SyncFree) . The reason syncfree is a good fit for a distirbuted service is it will not get bulky from updates based on timed services. For the rabbitmq version of riak: [https://github.com/jbrisbin/riak-exchange](https://github.com/jbrisbin/riak- exchange)

An alternatives to riak is hibaridb, but may take a bit more work to get functional with other stuff: [https://github.com/hibari/](https://github.com/hibari/)

With http APIs you can just curl into your APIs. Or load balance and proxy them with HAProxy, Nginx, Varnish etc. Amazon has route53 for managing it by dns. There is also zonify: [https://github.com/airbnb/zonify](https://github.com/airbnb/zonify)

Microservices are also usually built on some form of actor framework. Akka is what Gilt used. You can watch a video on Gilt's microservices: [http://tech.gilt.com/post/65070094551/gilts-kevin- scaldeferr...](http://tech.gilt.com/post/65070094551/gilts-kevin-scaldeferri- on-enabling-micro-service) .

Serialization is just as important in microservices for scaling up small microservices to handle larger loads. For example, when Gilt wanted to scale they used Jackson json serialization. Jackson (www.github.com/fastxml/) is fairly scalable because it is as fast as protocolbuff and has support for hierarchies. They also used the sbt runtime packaging for automatically re- creating and re-compiling their components. They built components using ClusterMate ([https://github.com/cowtowncoder/ClusterMate](https://github.com/cowtowncoder/ClusterMate)) I think.

You might be interested in a startup that hook's github gists for microservices at hook.io .

As for updates they often use pubsub architectures. I think Gilt used one as well. You can infer a lot of what they did from their released github code at www.github.com/gilt/ .

Other resources to read about microservices: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994540)

Disclaimer: I do a lot of reading, not a lot of building. Though sometimes a lot of reading means reading research papers, and whitepapers from companies to get an idea of what works or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome links - thank you!

<comment><USER2> No problem. I also post stuff so I can refer to stuff later as well. : ) If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

In addition thought I'd mention theres a few good resources as well listed from this github account based on java actors/microservices: [https://github.com/puniverse](https://github.com/puniverse)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > many instances of the same small services that don't really need to be aware > of each other

Then your problem is embarrassingly parallel and your solution does not need to be "micro services" to scale.

Sorry if I missed something, I skimmed your text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, it's not micro-services the buzz word. It's easier to have different services that are logically separable - say, push notification services - pulled out of the main app. Testing, maintenance, etc., are much simpler.

Of _course_ certain services have to be aware of others, but they don't necessarily need to be aware of other copies of themselves behind the same LB.

But yes, currently, everything is just parallel instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless I missed something there is no mention of why you want to rewrite/alter your system?

\- Is it for cost?

\- Reliability?

\- Scratch a tech itch?

\- Not flexible enough for future needs?

As obviously that will affect a lot of decisions

<comment><AUTHOR> "Not flexible enough for future needs" is a large part of it. There are some slow-moving parts that need to be better executed, and some migration to better data stores for certain types of data, so touching a lot of the code is going to be happening anyway.

Concurrency as a first-class feature would allow me to actually simplify things, which is a bonus, as I am loathe to use the threading or multi- processing libraries in Python. I could rewrite parts in say, Twisted, but that's still rewriting.

This is not scratch-a-tech-itch, I assure you. I have plenty of new work to be done that will give me that. It's about taking an academic exercise and battle-hardening it and making appropriate design decisions for scale even above where we currently are.

(Squeezing more req/s out of each AWS instance isn't going to hurt our bottom line either, but that's secondary.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you prepare your own taxes? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a single individual with no spouse, children, house or small business.  I'm reticent to use programs like TurboTax because I just don't see what value they add above doing it myself.
I could definitely see the advantage of using a program or going to a professional for a small business, but for one person it just doesn't seem that hard.
Am I just being naive? <comment><USER2> I did my own taxes from when I started earning enough money to report it (age 19) to when I moved out of my parents house (age 27), because my dad was always distrustful of tax programs or advisors. I switched to TurboTax for the past 2 years.

I've found that TurboTax cut down on the time required to do my taxes from "a weekend" to "about 3 hours", and saves me roughly $300/year in deductions that I didn't know I could take. It's been well worth the $50 or so I pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kinds of deductions did TurboTax reveal?

<comment><USER2> Things like:

Certain moving expenses are tax deductible if you're moving for work, from a location that is more than 50 miles away from your new job to a location that is less than 50 miles away.

Money received from paid family leave is tax-deductible on state taxes in California, but not on federal taxes. This can be a big chunk, since PFL is basically a replacement of income for the duration, and having your income be non-taxed is a pretty big refund.

Charitable contributions are tax-deductible. I think everyone knows this, but the wording on form 1040 can be somewhat confusing as to when you can take itemized charitable deductions and when you should take the standard deduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your question phrasing is a little odd; I would consider using software (rather than paid help) as "preparing my own taxes".

TurboTax and similar are barely $30, for federal + state. Plus they're tax- deductible!

What's the value of your time? They don't need to save that much time to pay for themselves, much less if they catch an error or opportunity that you would miss (unless devoting a lot more reading and care to the paper forms/instructions).

Sure, if you've only got one W-2, no or very simple retirement accounts, no or very simple deductions, you can probably do without any software. But even then, I think there are then free online forms to help avoid simple mistakes or tallying errors.

(In my platonic-ideal digital republic, the tax code and the tax preparation software would be one and the same, and subject to a capped complexity budget in kB.)

<comment><USER2> "TurboTax and similar are barely $30, for federal + state. Plus they're tax- deductible!"

I think they're only tax-deductible up to certain income limits or something. I remember seeing that section, saying "Sweet, I can deduct the cost of TurboTax on my taxes!", then having it come back with "Sorry, your income is too high to take the deduction for tax preparation services". Bummer. Why'd it even ask, since it knew my income before the deduction section?

"(In my platonic-ideal digital republic, the tax code and the tax preparation software would be one and the same, and subject to a capped complexity budget in kB.)"

The way we handle taxes is kinda absurd anyway. Almost all the input data we feed into TurboTax is information that's reported to the government anyway, and they crunch the numbers too to figure out if you should be audited (ever noticed that if you make an arithmetic mistake on your taxes, they'll just fix it for you and deduct the appropriate amount from your refund?) Since the government is doing the numbers anyway, why can't they just _do_ our taxes for us, and either send us a bill for the difference or cut us a check for the refund.</comment></comment>


Miss America Lends Name to Kid-Safe Web Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,299183,00.html <comment><USER2> Have any of you gone through all the trouble to download the browser? Not really engendering trust. They want your name and email just to download the software, then they want your name, email, age, phone number (for customer service ?!) they send you the email which went straight to my spam label in gmail and inform me that

"You will be receiving a series of emails offering Internet Safety Tips and other instructions on how to get the most benefits from your new Kid Safe Browser."

Then to register as a parent they ask you for your name, street address email phone and whether you are over 18.

Then they want your childs birthday and your presented with this gem:

I give my permission for my child to receive email from Club Tuki via their e-mail account (without checking this box, you child will not be able to receive Auction Notification emails through our TUKI Moola auction site).

After that they did deliver as promised, I got an animated Miss America (think clippy) that tells me when sites are not on "the master list"

If you want to close the browser you are informed that you have 30 days left on your trial before the premium features expire because it hijacks the close button and makes you read through a pop-up. It also leaves the taskbar up, so any kid smart enough to find start will be able to launch Firefox and surf where ever they want. It also starts at Club Tuki or some such where you can earn Tuki bucks by playing arcade games but I think there's a registration involved there too.

One thing this does the REAL kid friendly browser could clone... it has a banned words list which includes our first and last names so that would be nice (it also has an encouraging words list like "My family loves me!" and a chores list with I'm guessing chore reminder pop-ups, but I don't recommend implementing those features)

She does indeed say "Buh-Bye!" as promised though.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I should add you can run the browser in the background and get the animated Miss America character to float in front of any other browser. I'll let you know if she tells me anything about kangaroos while I read Hacker News

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I read the title and thought maybe pikluk pulled off some amazing PR...

<comment><USER4> Haha, I was hoping for the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Woow. One more competitor for us to deal with. Thank you for the link, gibsonf1!

At this point more competition is good for us since it validates the idea/implementation.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I would be happy if I were you.

Pikluk: the non-creepy alternative...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> that's disturbing on so many levels.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Fox article talks about protecting kids from "lurid photos", but the first thing I thought when I went to <http://www.missamericakids.com/> was, "what, did I click on the right link?"

+10 for PikLuk!</comment>


Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner's Twitter and Facebook Investments - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html <comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't read Bill Browder's Red Notice, read it now. Wow. Wow. Just wow. YCombinator is in the Kremlin's pocket. Wow. I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion. But wow.

In essence, Putin used Browder's investigations of Gazprom and other oligarch- controlled Russian businesses (huge national orgs that were privatized after the collapse of the Soviet Union) to jail the richest man in Russia, effectively making all the oligarchs his bitches.

Milner is investing oligarch money. These people will kill you (see: Sergei Magnitsky). How bad do you want Milner' money now?

[https://www.amazon.com/Red-Notice-Finance-Murder- Justice/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Notice-Finance-Murder- Justice/dp/1476755744)

<comment><USER2> To add to this, if you want something shorter to read, there is this prepared statement by Browder to the Senate Judiciary Committee: [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/bill- br...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/bill-browders- testimony-to-the-senate-judiciary-committee/534864/) Also, being a prepared statement to a senate committee, it has more meat to it than the average news interview.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, Browder has his own patrons and political interests to represent, particularly in this situation.

<comment><USER4> Could you expand on this or provide sources that do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Holy crap.

DST Global and its affiliates have (or had in formative years) significant stakes in Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, ZocDoc, Planet Lab, Xiaomi, Stripe, Alibaba, WhatsApp and Airbnb [1]. Milner has close ties to Y Combinator [2]. It's been a deal-terms setting, behind-the-kimono peeking major investor for a decade.

This is immensely scary. We've utterly failed, as an industry, to self regulate.

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

[2] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venture-milner- ycombinato...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venture-milner- ycombinator/facebook-backer-yuri-milner-exits-automatic-y-combinator- investments-idUSBRE9BF1GA20131216)

<comment><USER6> Why is this surprising? When Milner came virtually out of the blue (or red, as the case may be) a few years ago, it seemed obvious that he was a conduit/laundry for oligarch cash at least. I even remember telling someone at the time that if we were chosen for YC, we didn't want Milner's dirty money.

The additional Kremlin state ties seem only an additional technicality. (I mean the formalized acknowledgement of what I presumed existent.)

<comment><USER7> He "purposely" overpaid by $50m for a house in Los Altos -> [http://www.businessinsider.com/yuri-milners-100-million- sili...](http://www.businessinsider.com/yuri-milners-100-million-silicon- valley-mansion-is-only-worth-half-what-he-paid-for-it-2012-7)

<comment><USER8> Los Altos Hills, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't really get the hysteria.

I work for an American company in San Francisco that has Tencent (practically an arm of the Chinese government) as a major investor. The number of times our CEO came in and told me that we need to implement features that benefit our geopolitical competitor is exactly zero.

What precisely do all the commenters that are panicking here think happens at companies where the investors are people who became rich with the help of the governments of Russia and China?

<comment><USER5> Point is, you (and your CEO) know Tencent is an arm of the Chinese government. Passive state-backed investors are fine. If a random Board member told your CEO "let's get an NDA with so and so and then give them such and such sensitive data; it may help us break into a new market," your CEO may be inclined to take the advice. If Tencent made that request, most CEOs (and Boards) would do more digging.

There are Boards, today, realizing that suggestions that were made over the years may have been compromised. They sounded like they were for furthering the company's financial interests. In truth, they may have been about compromising the company, and through it, American geopolitical goals.

<comment><USER9> To anyone that has kept track of geopolitical news across the last 20 years, it is obvious that no one in Russia gets rich without the approval of Kremlin. The fact that Yuri Milner is walking the earth is sufficient evidence that he's friendly with the Kremlin. No one who managed to rise to the rank of CEO would misunderstand the unstated implication that a request from an associate of Yuri Milner is a request that is at least done with the approval of the Russian government, so in that case, just the same amount of digging would be done as with Tencent.

<comment><USER5> > _The fact that Yuri Milner is walking the earth is sufficient evidence that > he 's friendly with the Kremlin_

You're moving goalposts. Nobody is worried about someone being friendly with the Kremlin. Acting at their behest, however, is new and troubling.

(I agree that this should have been obvious. Unfortunately, when dollars start dancing people tend to rationalize.)

<comment><USER9> Ok. I'll bite. Where, in the linked NYT article, is evidence that Kremlin gave orders to do X and not Y (rather than just cash) to Milner?

<comment><USER5> > _evidence that Kremlin gave orders to do X and not Y_

Again, you're moving the goalposts.

Others [1][2][3] have directly responded to you on this point. Arguing that there is no need for alarm until some undefined threshold of red-handed evidence is attained is silly.

If a state-backed investor invests in your company, and you don't know about it, that's cause for alarm in itself. It means you need to review, very carefully, what you told whom, when, and what actions you took at their behest. From a corporate level, it's similar to what _e.g._ SpaceX would be expected to do if it discovered Lockheed Martin invested in it through a front. At a national level, state involvement adds extra dimensions.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631661)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631645)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631654)

<comment><USER9> In that case, I am really confused about what the point that's being made here is.

> If a state-backed investor invests in your company, and you don't know about > it, that's cause for alarm in itself.

Is the only difference between today and yesterday is that yesterday there was no direct evidence that rich people associated ("backed by", "working in" \- I am not sure what terminology you prefer to suggest nefariousness) with the Kremlin gave Milner cash to invest? If that's the concern, then, once again - anyone who believed yesterday that Milner was not $funded (once again, insert preferred terminology) at least partially by the Kremlin is an idiot. All they had to do was ask someone who is an immigrant from the Soviet Union.

<comment><USER5> > _anyone who believed yesterday that Milner was not $funded (once again, > insert preferred terminology) by the Kremlin is an idiot_

Then more of us are idiots than you give credit for :). At the very least, I was an idiot and pg was an idiot [1][2].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143894)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144475](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144475)

<comment><USER9> @postramus - Yes I am. Because it's not.

<comment><USER10> Can you clarify something? You seem to be arguing two points without differentiating them clearly.

One point is that it should be obvious where the money came from (etc); the other point is that that origin should not be cause for concern.

Is that accurate?

If so I would agree with you on the first point but not the second: the same logic that eg allows one to make the inferences in the first point would also lead one to infer certain things about Yandex (analogous to the situation with Kaspersky).

Do you honestly think that the funding under discussion—and the personal relationships that subsequently developed—had no impact on either Twitter or Facebook deciding to establish their respective partnerships with Yandex?

<comment><USER9> The first point I am trying to make is that it should've been obvious, and that aside from giving an actual name to the entity through which cash went from Kremlin to Milner, the NYTimes is not news. If you were concerned then, good. If you were not concerned then, there's no reason to be concerned now, as no new facts came to light through this NYT article.

On the second point: the source of the money should not be cause of concern if it's "just money."

If it's money and a very strong suggestion that you partner with a (obvious, even if explicitly unstated) foreign, state-controlled entity, then it's a cause for concern. If it's just money, and then when you want to partner with a foreign, state-controlled entity, that same money gives you an introduction to the foreign, state-controlled entity, then it's not a cause for concern, because that's the point of business relationships and investments.

The question of Russian influence is really a separate question, in my mind, and I think that's what bugs me about this entire thing the most. The implication somewhere here is that the leaders of Facebook and Twitter, and other startups that take Milner money were somehow duped, and allowed Russia to walk free in their systems and influence the election. I will be very surprised if that's true; Zuckerberg and Dorsey are too smart for that.

What seems obvious to me is that the systems they created are giant, targeted megaphones, by design. They were successfully used by the Obama campaign, and everyone was very happy for democracy then. Then a foreign state decided that they were going to give Trump help on these megaphones, and now everyone is very unhappy for democracy. Would we have this much hand-wringing if we discovered that Saudi Arabia was helping Hilary?

<comment><USER10> I generally agree but I would have appreciated a more-direct response vis-a- vis Yandex.

In re: your broader point I don't think they are "that smart" per se; or perhaps better put, I think they are smart enough to be aware their platforms are used by all kinds of agents for all sorts of purposes 24/7/365...but up until now also deemed it prudent to turn a rather universal blind eye towards those activities unless they were, say, so obviously fake that ordinary users could identify them as such.

Whether that universal blind eye was smart is tbd, but nothing in their response since then has seemed very clever.

<comment><USER9> I had to research a bit about Yandex in order to understand the implications there.

The story seems to be something like this:

[1] Yandex builds an app to crawl Facebook without Facebook's permission [2] Facebook blocks Yandex [3] Yandex gets licensed access to Facebook's firehose

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/yandex- wonder/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/yandex-wonder/) [2] [http://www.reuters.com/article/net-us-yandex- facebook/yandex...](http://www.reuters.com/article/net-us-yandex- facebook/yandex-puts-mobile-app-blocked-by-facebook-on-hold- idUSBRE90O0RK20130130) [3] [https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/yandex- facebook/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/yandex-facebook/)

There's certainly a plausible Kremlin long con here - fund Milner to invest in Facebook, ask Yandex to build a crawler for Facebook, expect that Facebook would shut it shut down, then suggest via Milner that there should be a partnership between Yandex and Facebook, thus gaining official access to Facebook's firehose, to be sent directly to Kremlin for analysis of message proliferation, and further influence of the American public.

The fundamental mistake there (the final move that allows you to be checkmated) is the firehose deal, not the investment.

In any case, thanks for making me think through the possible attack vector here. Your comment is the first one that was specific enough that made me think through why this could be a cause for concern.

<comment><USER11> > There's certainly a plausible Kremlin long con here

Not very plausible if compared to other things Kremlin does. Too long, too complicated, too hollywood. The modus operandi is much simpler - you do not need complex cons if you control everything. If you can come to Yandex and demand any data you want, anytime. You just have to keep Yandex alive, they'll find a way to get data (because it's their lifeblood, they are a data organization company, like Google) and when they do, you get the data too. Simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is the difference to Chinese and Saudi money floating in the valley that we expect violent repercussions for anyone that opposes some aspect of the financiers' wishes? Or is it just that Russia is the most outspoken big nation that takes a different stance on critical issues where, say, Saudi and DC are in agreement. And that this is a danger to post-WW2 US influence? Genuinely curious.

Back when Milner invested in Facebook I viewed it as potential money laundering and didn't think about it too much.

<comment><USER5> When Saudis, Chinese or Russian individuals invest, they do so openly. When Uber took Saudi state money, they knew why the Saudis were buying. I think this sort of state-backed investing is fine.

The issue here is companies didn't treat Milner _et al_ as an extension of the Russian state. They treated them as private individuals who made money in Russia. The difference is night and day. The latter want to make money like other investors. The former may want things other than money. Transparency allows one to be wary about suspicious requests, requests which may not seem suspicious without context.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Speak to a lawyer before accepting, or making, investments._

<comment><USER12> Sure, but aren't we forgetting that Russia is like China in that over a certain size of business you are in no way able to operate unless you are in agreement or cozy (more business) with the Kremlin? This is in stark contrast to the US where it's no problem for a company to operate HQ in Oklahoma and loudly oppose the current DC government. I mean, if we assume Milner wasn't backed and planted by the Kremlin for a moment, then one could consider it impossible for Milner to be untied to Kremlin if based primarily in Moscow, no?

<comment><USER5> Tied to, and acting at the behest of, are night and day. One allows you to presume they're acting in their own financial interests, by and large, just like every other investor. The other merits caution.

Your larger point, that we should have been more cautious, stands. We should have figured this out. But dollars danced, and even the best of us started rationalizing [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143894)

<comment><USER12> True, and a fine line which is hard to judge from the seats we sit in. But I agree that a US company cannot be associated with the Kremlin or Beijing or Riad in 2017 without consequences. Maybe in 2023.

I just don't want to see a McCarthy witch hunt when a lot of the money floating in Wallstreet and the Valley is of dubious origin.

I would equally oppose taking money from one of the CIA VC firms, even that one where Dan Geer works. And I kinda have this idea that by now enough money is floating around valley from the money made in the valley that it should be possible to use that "pre-laundered" (if we may call it that) capital.

That said, I have no idea how a startup would vet the VC's capital backers, or what they should do when they find out some of it came from beijing, moscow, tel aviv, and you want to give it back to disassociate your startup.

<comment><USER13> > I would equally oppose taking money from one of the CIA VC firms, even that > one where Dan Geer works.

Facebook's advisor on its $19B acquisition of Whatsapp was a "privately held boutique investment bank" called Allen & Company, which at the time was led (maybe it still is, it doesn't show up at all on his personal wiki page) by former CIA director George Tenet. Not 6-months had passed since this acquisition and Putin started talking in the media about how the Internet is controlled by the US 3-letter agencies. Shortly after that his cronies fully took control of VKontakte.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Quick, investigate pg for Russia collusion LOL.

But seriously, let's put these reactions in perspective. Supposs the same was revealed the other way, about a US company having ties to the US government investing in Russian technology. We wouldn't bat an eye. This hysteria about Russian collusion makes us waste our energy and attention which is necessary to pay attention to the real issues (which I list below.)

I am not surprised that a Russian billionaire has ties to Putin, or invested in US companies. His company has since sold his stake and moved on, and nothing scary happened.

Compared to what the USA does on a regular basis, Russia is a pretty good actor when it comes to external dealings.

What's much more worrying is internal Russia policies. I personally know some people who started VKontakte (the Russian facebooj). They all sold their stake or were later pressured to do so by the Russian government after refusing to cooperate with the equivalent of the FBI's NSL + gag orders. and of course the Mail.ru conglomerate wanted to take it over. Not easy to maitain a business in Russia.

(Note: the US has just as much spying and NSL+gag orders but far, far greater freedom of speech and property protections so we don't feel it as much.)

But outside? Look US firms regularly make investments in companies around the world. The actual influence comes not from investment but from things like:

The CIA approaching VK founder and developers hoping to install backdoors in Telegram

Microsoft Windows new versions phoning home or cooperating with the CIA. There is a reason many nations including Russia have built and are now promoting ther own operating systems instead of Windows.

It's just so sloppy to talk about "ties" to something. The hysteria cheapens the impact ahen something real happens. Like backdoors and hacking.

<comment><USER5> > _Compared to what the USA does on a regular basis, Russia is a pretty good > actor when it comes to external dealings_

It has been a while since the United States forcibly annexed another country's territory [1].

In any case, this argument is irrelevant. Irrespective of whether Russia is a "good actor" or not, they are a geopolitical competitor who surreptitiously exercised control over, or at least non-public purview into, sensitive American companies.

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

<comment><USER14> Would you consider the Iraq war a while?

Guantanamo?

Norriega?

Contras?

How long is a while? Or is only annexation considered the red line here?

If you want to blame Russians, you should blame the USSR for deporting the Crimean Tatars after WW2 as collective punishment. Being outraged at an annexation of a territory that was unilaterally given away 50 years earlier where not a single gunshot was fired while giving a free pass to an invasion of sovereign countries resulting a million deaths is not an argument everyone can agree with.

<comment><USER15> Technically, the US didn't annex any of those countries, which makes what it did more above-board in terms of international law than Russia's actions. Sure, a lot of those interventions ended a lot more badly than annexation, but that apparently doesn't matter.

<comment><USER16> Pfft international law. The US is in Syria against the wishes of that country. It invaded and destroyed Iraq, bombed Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, and countless other crimes all in contempt of international law.

The US occupation of Guantanamo bay for example, is contested by Cuba, who protests continuously. However the Russian annexation of Crimea was at least supported by the inhabitants. They're both crimes of imperialism but the former is far worse.

<comment><USER11> > against the wishes of that country

You mean wishes of Asad? Given that Syria hasn't been a democracy since... well, I don't know, bronze age? "wishes of that country" is kinda nebulous term, especially right in the middle of a civil war.

<comment><USER16> Assad is not a great guy, I'm not denying that. He's a tyrant. Compared to ISIS and the extremist terrorist forces he's up against, which Russia is helping him defeat, he's not so bad. One cannot discount the government of a country just so easily. There is such a thing as international law and the US is violating it by being in Syria, which is still a sovereign state, while Russia is not.

Incidentally the US has supported far worse dictatorships, it has a terrible record in that regard.

<comment><USER11> A guy who didn't pick after his dog on your lawn is "not a great guy". Asad is a brutal dictator who already caused death of thousands of people and will cause many more. He's way beyond "not a great guy". He's yes "so bad".

> One cannot discount the government of a country just so easily.

It's not "so" easily. It's a brutal strongman that uses WMD against people he's supposedly representing. It's not just some disagreement on taxes or policies. It's routinely using the military against people. And if you think ISIS is the only organization that opposes Asad, you are woefully misinformed - opposition to Asad is much wider and ISIS just used the chaos to get a stronghold, they did not initiate the civil war. And of course Asad has absolutely no problem with "extremist terrorist forces" \- as long as they threaten not him but say US or Israel.

> Incidentally the US has supported far worse dictatorships

Not "far" worse, as it's not very easy to go far worse than Asad (maybe Idi Amin who was rumored to literally eat people? Or Papa Doc Duvalier, who at one time ordered to have all black dogs in a country killed because he thought his fugitive opponent turned himself into one?). But yes, it did. But doing a bad thing once is not a reason to do it ten times more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd be interested in hearing from Silicon Valley and YC companies' teams about how they feel knowing that they've been taking dirty money from the Kremlin, having representatives even sit on their boards.

Was it worth it? C'mon guys, don't hold back now. What's a few murdered dissidents between friends?

<comment><USER18> Do you think the American money is nicer and cleaner than Russian money? It's all the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Senate Intelligence Committee has expressed concerns that Jack Dorsey is favoring the Russian government over the United States government.

Senator Tom Cotton, CIA Director John Brennan, transcript from Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on June 2016:

[https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=414](https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=414)

SENATOR COTTON: I want to discuss cooperation with our Intelligence Community from Silicon Valley, specifically Twitter and a company called Dataminr. According to the Wall Street Journal from May 8th, as well as some other media reports, Dataminr which is owned in part by Twitter and is the only company authorized to access the full real-time stream of public tweets that Twitter has, recently cooperated with the CIA. But just a few weeks ago ended that cooperation. So our Intelligence Community no longer has access to Dataminr's information, could you comment on these reports?

DIRECTOR BRENNAN: It appears as though Dataminr was directed to not provide its service to the CIA Intelligence Community and so therefore, we need to be able to leverage other capabilities in order to make sure that we have the insight we need to protect this country.

COTTON: So those reports are correct?

BRENNAN: I am not going to dispute them.

COTTON: The Wall Street Journal also reported that the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, directed Dataminr to stop the contract because he was worried about the "optics" of helping intelligence agencies. Do you believe that to be accurate?

BRENNAN: I do not know his motivation for any corporate decision he may have made, but I have no basis to dispute that.

COTTON: The Wall Street Journal also reports that among customers of Dataminr remains RT, Russia Today, a propaganda outlet of Vladimir Putin's government, which Putin has said is "trying to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global information streams." To your knowledge, is Russia Today a client of Dataminr?

BRENNAN: I believe so, I'm not certain of that. But I don't have any information that they have been excluded from their services.

<comment><USER20> How is RT at all comparable to the CIA? Even if you accept the premise that RT is a Russian propaganda channel, it's not a foreign intelligence service.

<comment><USER21> So your argument is that a foreign propaganda entity is preferable to a domestic intelligence agency?

<comment><USER20> Yes? I hope it's not controversial to say that doing business with a television network is fundamentally different from cooperating with an intelligence agency.

<comment><USER22> Referring to RT as "a television network" is as accurate as saying that Mar-a- Lago is "a privately-owned club". Technically accurate, but knowingly misleading (attempts to present as "irrelevant" what is actually the most relevant bit of information about said TV network/ private club)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Concerns about Milner And his ties to YC are not new.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143604)

<comment><USER24> > I meant that even if Yuri's money was tainted in some way, it was being used > as a counterweight to another bad thing.

Dammit, this is disappointing. I really thought pg was above saying things like that.

Between this, thiel, and some other things, I am quite bummed out.

<comment><USER10> Always a mistake to expect communicative rather than instrumental use of language!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And there goes integrity. It applies to many other situations, where taking investment, accepting help, or committing to excessive mortgage makes you lose your integrity - you simply won't be able to afford it. One of the many down sides of aiming to build Facebooks instead of Basecamps.

<comment><USER26> Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> We had this discussion on HN in 2010 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144351) where PG noted that "I have never heard of a case where a startup refused investment from a venture fund because of who their LPs were."

</comment><comment><USER28> Worthy noting that Yuri Milner automatically invented ~$150K in YC companies till 2013 [1]. Russian money might be making this very site possible.

[1]: [http://bit.ly/2y4cIU6](http://bit.ly/2y4cIU6)

<comment><USER17> What YC companies tell everyone else: Milner wants to invest in us because he recognizes that we're we're awesome!

What YC companies tell themselves: Milner wants to invest in us because he wants to make money, and if he has enough fingers in enough pies, one or more of his investments will pay out nicely.

What the rest of the world is telling YC companies: Milner wanted to invest in you because Russian oligarchs and the successors of the mf'in KGB wanted to get root at your tools, your data, your users, your insights, your ability to spread their crooked point of view...

<comment><USER17> ...and possibly pick up some _kompromat_ on you, your co-workers, and your users along the way, which could come in useful for them down the road...

Yeah, your company is an investment for them. But not the way you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any money coming out of Russia is somehow related to Putin and his oligarchs. If you want to stop the Russian government from laundering money you'd need to stop trading with Russian companies in general. There's little separation between state and private interests. Money just doesn't come out of Russia at that level without the state being involved.

Regardless, it's likely this move was more financially motivated than politically. Diversification is the key to any portfolio and with Russia's economy tanking it was probably to ensure their billions stayed billions and wasn't held in worthless rubles or corrupt state companies.

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe rename topic, but also lets think of happier days in 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154706) :P

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you rename it? YCombinator money is from Putin (via oligarchs)?

Also, why are you wanting to remember happier times?

<comment><USER31> When Russian adventurism was a blip on the American radar, the '08 Russo- Georgian War aside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile Yeah, it's really time to build another wall then.

You've opened Internet to share your point of view and so to influence their choice? Expect others to share their views and influence you too. Don't like that? See #1

You've opened your market and asking for investments? You've got them. Don't like color of their money? See #1

Do we have other options realistically speaking?

</comment><comment><USER32> Given Milner's background, I would think this is has been an "open secret" in Silicon Valley investment circles. Is that the case?

<comment><USER33> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't imagine how it can be a surprise that (large) money from Russia are connected to Putin and his fellows. That's literally what Putin has been working on for the last decade at least - so that all money worth speaking of in Russia will be controlled by him. That's the unifying theme of all major things happening in Russia's business world. If you see somebody with money headquartering in Russia, yes, it is because Putin wants it to be so. The official term is "The Power Vertical" and the idea is that nothing worth of note happens without the will and the control of Putin and his fellows. It doesn't mean everybody is literally mind-controlled by Putin, but if there's big money, you'll get from it to Putin very quickly. It can't be any other way.

</comment><comment><USER33> This was totally obvious and led to an interesting exchange between PG and Fred Wilson:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143604)

<comment><USER13> Sad to see a guy like jedberg so naive (I like to think that he was naive) as to ask for evidence as to why "Milner was linked to the looting of state resources".

And if we're talking about reddit, as a long-time user I remember that I first encountered political shill accounts and paid posters on reddit, in the summer of 2006, during the Hezbollah vs Israel conflict (the accounts were "rooting" for Israel, of course). Next time I encountered them was 2 years later, in 2008, during the Russia vs Georgia conflict (the shills being on Russia's side). It'd be interesting to hear what a guy like jedberg remembers about all this (not sure if he was working for reddit back in 2006, but I'm pretty sure he was there in 2008).

I also remember reading a one-page story about influencing opinions on geo- political facts on the web in the Financial Times, around November 2011, where a Israeli army colonel or something like that was acknowledging the issue at hand (that opinion on the web should be in part controlled by State actors) and that Israel was already implementing something to meet that goal (I have a screenshot of that article, but it's on my older laptop, too lazy to transfer the photo now). Come 2017 and the US is taken by surprise that one of those State actors has influenced its Presidential election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Timely? Milner takes $50m mortgage on a house he had originally paid for in cash..

[http://www.yolandaslittleblackbook.com/blog-1/2017/11/02/yur...](http://www.yolandaslittleblackbook.com/blog-1/2017/11/02/yuri- milner-house-los-angeles-holmby-hills/)

</comment><comment><USER35> In a business culture that values growth above all else, is it really any surprise that this happened? American corporations have an ethics problem and we're going to learn our lesson one way or another -- whether it's the easy way or the hard way.

</comment><comment><USER36> Funny how this story dropped off the front page...

</comment><comment><USER37> And to think that none of this would even come up had the "right" candidate won.

</comment><comment><USER38> What if - theoretically - this is just "fake news"? I mean, how can you discern that the stuff the media reports is actually true, no matter in what direction?

I think the most reliable source of information in this time of spreading "fake news" is personal witness by known people.

<comment><USER39> Of course you should make your own judgment of the validity of the source. In this case, it would seem to be a difficult task to invent all of this.

"The Paradise Papers is a global investigation into the offshore activities of some of the world's most powerful people and companies.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 95 media partners explored 13.4 million leaked files from a combination of offshore service providers and the company registries of some of the world's most secretive countries.

The Paradise Papers documents include nearly 7 million loan agreements, financial statements, emails, trust deeds and other paperwork from nearly 50 years at Appleby, a leading offshore law firm with offices in Bermuda and beyond."

[https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise- papers/](https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/)

<comment><USER38> What's the difference of trusting the media, or the data which backs the media?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm having a very hard time understanding why anyone would be upset by the Russian government making technology positive investments. Especially technologists!

I wish more money was deployed into software development. Russia seems to be a positive influence here.

<comment><USER41> So if blood money is used to invest in tech to clean it, and make them profit it's okay?

<comment><USER42> As opposed to the "blood money" invested by the US govt. in technology companies? Do you also have problems with Twitter, Google and Facebook getting money from the US govt.?

Let's not forget, the US govt., both Republicans and Democrats, have directly or indirectly killed millions of people in the last decade...

I don't see you complaining about that "blood money" here or anywhere, though.

<comment><USER26> Nice false equivalence argument, but I'm afraid it's going to fall on deaf ears.

Funny how many Russian apologists are here all of a sudden.

<comment><USER43> > _Funny how many Russian apologists_

This breaks the HN guidelines in two major ways: it's a personal attack and it's an insinuation of astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Those are poison to substantive discussion and we ban accounts that do them, so please follow [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and don't comment like this again.

The rest of the internet may be insane right now but that doesn't mean we have to imitate it here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I will not dispute anything in this article, and it is discouraging if the allegations are true. However I will point out that an outlet like the NY Times is threatened by Twitter and Facebook financially. I would keep that in mind as to one reason the legacy media have been choosing to report on topics (and they don't always choose to report just what is newsworthy) concerning foreign influence and "fake news" emanating from social media.

<comment><USER35> I think you place the Times in an impossible position. If it's not the responsibility of traditional media organizations to report on the _real_ problem of fake news in social media, then whose responsibility is it? Where else are people going to spread the word about something like that? Face to face? Furthermore, you must realize that the people questioning the veracity traditional media are, by and large, conspiracy theorists with very particular agendas and motives for doing so. The Times also has something that Facebook and the like don't and probably won't -- a hard-earned trust built over a period of decades.

<comment><USER45> Yup. Do me a favor and mention that they've sold their Facebook and Twitter holdings but mention nothing of the current holdings in Cadre in the headline.

By the way, C Corporations are not prevented from taking foreign investment; though S Corporations are.

In contrast to Facebook and Twitter, The Times _writes_ articles and headlines and picks which ones to publish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Everyone knew "Yuri Milner" was a Russian and Russian is not an open system or democracy or system run by a rule of law. Why is the news any surprise now?

What I think is happening is - Russia by bring up these topics in news (in outlets like nytimes) so that it can de-emphasize it's partnership with Trump government and the role it played in bringing that egoist to power.

</comment><comment><USER47> Another day, another mainstream media publication shilling hysterical articles about Russia. My pet theory is that it's a big collective act of psychological sublimation to compensate for the shock of Hillary losing.

I also find it ironic that the Chinese Communist Party, an institution which is at least on par with Russia in terms of shadiness and social repression, receives barely an iota of the flak that Russia receives in the American media.

<comment><USER5> > _another mainstream media publication shilling hysterical articles about > Russia_

Imagine if Germany found out that Rocket Internet, a large European venture capital firm, was actually CIA backed. It would be a scandal and a lot of people would need to, rightly, question whether they had been compromised.

The problem isn't solely the identity of the backer. It's the surreptitious deployment of state power deep into another country.

 _Disclaimer: Hypotheticals are hypothetical. I am not a lawyer. None of this is legal advice._

<comment><USER48> Compromised? Compromised the shoe retail business?

You are going to need some more meat other than James Bond language and a lot of money.

<comment><USER49> You don't understand that states covertly use money to exercise power? I'm confused why you're harping on that word unless you genuinely don't understand what he's getting at.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Randomized Controlled Trial of Interleaved Mathematics Practice [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://uweb.cas.usf.edu/~drohrer/pdfs/Rohrer_et_al_InPressJEdPsych.pdf <comment><USER3> Somehow related to this: I think that the linear way of teaching, first week you teach a, second week b.. it's inferior to showing everything to the student, in a very shallow way, the sooner the better, and then keep adding deepness.

In the same way that muscle need to rest to grow, knowledge need to rest to stay with you. Even if subjectively seems that nothing has been learned the first time that you are in contact with a subject, that is hardly ever truth. Even if only the name of the concepts are familiar that's some progress from where it's possible to build solid knowledge.

<comment><USER4> I too am a huge believer in breadth-first learning rather than depth-first, and my reasoning is the same: in my experience, ideas need to stay with you for a while before they take root in your mind and you get used to them.

The big ideas in any Mathematics subject are usually very few. They can be covered at a high-level in a few classes before going into them in detail. This also gives you a broader context for you to place the details as you come across them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the best way to practice math has already been discovered. Get a book, pen and paper, and practice math problems that are very challenging to hard for you. Do this day out and day in.

Problem? ... It's not very fun. You always feel frustrated and dumb because you don't understand it. So you'll eventually stop practicing at all because you feel like you don't make any progress.

Same thing with chess; play only with Grand masters (if you can find them) and after a few years of getting your ass kicked, you'll eventually get good. (Disclaimer: I only skimmed the article)

<comment><USER6> > _Same thing with chess; play only with Grand masters (if you can find them) > and after a few years of getting your ass kicked, you 'll eventually get > good._

Wouldn't the grand masters not enjoy beating you over and over again? That's why Go has a handicap system and why online games have matchmaking systems. I think it would be more courteous to try and play with people that could potentially learn something from you, instead of you only learning from them.

<comment><USER7> > Wouldn't the grand masters not enjoy beating you over and over again?

I mean, a couple times maybe? At some point I feel like they'd think this is a waste of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is aligned with everything I learned in Dr.'s Oakley and Sejnowski class entitled "Learning How to Learn" on Coursera. Conceptually, the class is ridiculously simple,but with some of the most powerful mental tools available for learning subjects. This interleaving tool is included, and it should be noted that this is part of a self-testing phase of learning, which is something that they want you to leap into as quickly as possible.

I would strongly recommend the course to anyone interested in learning and who doesn't have a good learning process, because that's all that it ultimately is: a set of steps that you use to train your brain to remember a body of knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've seen interleaving research like this before and it's my understanding interleaving trains not just the ability to work a particular problem but the ability to better recognize the _class_ of problem.

Anecdotally, after reading a paper on this, I made a Python script to drill guitar pieces, chords, progressions, etc. in an interleaved fashion and I believe it has helped me become a better player. Before doing this, when I would practice, e.g., scales, I might start in A then B, C, etc. but what I noticed was after doing the first scale, the rest were just minor variations so my training went from deliberate to auto-pilot. Now, with interleaving, I have to give some brief thought not just to how to mechanically perform the piece but what exactly the piece being asked for is. Consequently, during a performance, my ability to go from an intention of doing something on the guitar to actually plucking the first string is much more comfortable and faster.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the mid-1980s, I used my trusty Commodore 64 to build "test banks" for my math, chem, physics, and bio courses in high school and early college.

My rationale was the same as in this paper: I wanted to handicap myself from knowing the "type" of question I was trying to answer and force myself to think, "Ok. Where is this question 'located' on the map of everything I've been taught? And once I know its location, where do I need to go to get to its answer?"

So, I hand-entered every question I could get my hands on and I had the computer throw random problems/questions at me before an exam.

The problem w/ my approach was that I had to hand-enter problems from my textbooks, so there was a decent chance that I would still remember the type of question simply from the act of typing it into my 'database.' But it was the best I could do.

I teach some college chemistry now and I think interleaving would be helpful to my students. I say this because one of the biggest issues on exams is that the students will have no idea what _type_ of problem they are looking at. If they correctly determine the type of problem, the remaining work is relatively easy. And I think the problem stems from students practicing the work by answering multiple problems that belong to the same category.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interleaving different types of problems is one of several "evidence based" study techniques described in the excellent book "Make it stick" by Peter Brown. Highly recommended; this book is based on the latest and most solid research on learning and dispels a lot of long-time misconceptions.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am affraid this might be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

I don't see anything controlling for that in the setup:

"The present study examined interleaved practice in a large number of classes at multiple schools over a period of five months, and all instruction was delivered solely by teachers who had no prior association with the intervention or the authors."

<comment><USER13> There's a control group. Both groups were watched by the experimenters. Not only that, the same teachers had students in both groups in different classes.

<comment><USER12> But the control group would know that nothing has changed. The group testing the new method would feel the excitement - the control group would not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe that interleaving is a principle to applied to life in general

</comment><comment><USER15> Say you want to learn something - let's just say math or a new language - <USER2> do you go about interleaving the learning materials?

<comment><USER16> Spaced repetition aids are fairly common. If you can store your curriculum as flash cards, then apps like Memrise and Anki are designed specifically for this.

Spaced repetition is not the same as interleaving, but the apps will force you to interleave knowledge anwyay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this is why practicing on the actual test (SAT, GMAT, CFA etc) is so much more effective than exercises on particular sections.

<comment><USER18> > so much more effective than exercises on particular sections

Effective at what though. Just passing the test?

Do the students actually understand the material? Can they apply it to novel (to them) situations?

When I was studying physics ('74-'77) a significant number of students who all had just as good test results as I did in senior high school dropped out after the first term because they just couldn't manage the material. They had learnt enough to pass the exams (British A-levels) but had not really understood and had not practised enough. I suspect that rise of modular courses might make this situation even worse but that might be prejudice on my part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It somehow makes me remember about spaced repetition and Anki.

<comment><USER20> The testing effect, the spacing effect, and the interleaving effect are all closely related. For example, if you use spacing to learn various items of a subject, they will naturally be interleaved over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I keep finding most of those papers obvious on their face and quite simple to derive from first principles and some observation. What happened to teaching that so many patently obvious concepts have to be "rediscovered" so often?

<comment><USER22> Let's say I'm teaching 50 min periods. 15 mins for questions. Half hour to introduce new material, with a couple of examples. Five mins left. Interleave now?

Everyone has sat through 12 or 16 years of school. That can lead them to think they know all about it. I've been teaching since 79 and I'm still learning a lot,all the time. It ain't obvious.

<comment><USER23> I've only been actively teaching (at home, no less) for a couple of years, but I can definitely identify with this. I make index cards with each kind of question we encounter in the curriculum, then I draw some random cards from the deck in order to pick questions going all the way back to the start. We do a quiz every week for every subject that's made up of those questions.

It always comes down to time though, it seems like you can use all these ideas and teach for mastery, but it costs about 30% in terms of forward motion through the material. I'm lucky in that that I can just decide to pay that price, but it would be a real stretch to put all this into practice in a place where you have a coverage deadline that's already hard to hit.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anything we can do for those impacted by the US immigration ban? - <AUTHOR> Just posted this on my FB wall, figured someone around here might have ideas.<p>r.e. recent immigration policy changes, practically speaking: Anybody here, or know someone, who's stuck in an airport/country they expected to leave today, and needs a sandwich/a ride/a place to stay/a friendly ear? Seems like we're going to need a network of care to look after the stranded. <comment><USER2> ACLU apparently just won a nationwide stay of the executive order in NYC, so another thing you can do to help is to cue up the bit in the movie Ghostbusters where they pull up to Dana's building to take on Zuul and listen to the "Savin' The Day" montage music while you make a big ol' donation to the ACLU.

At least, that worked pretty well for me. I was going to go protest, but we apparently shut down ORD and now they're not even letting cars approach the airport.

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife is an Iranian green card holder who was going to leave the country for a conference she's organizing next month (ironically, on human rights) so we're directly impacted by this. Aside from what others have said, can I just recommend that people who want to do something write short, empathetic notes to friends or acquaintances who might be effected? My wife was in tears all this morning, and when one of our friends wrote simply to say "You're welcome in this country, this doesn't reflect our values, and I'm here for you if you need me" it helped a lot.

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to let you know about a couple positive pieces of breaking news:

\- [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration- admi...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration- administration-idUSKBN15C0R4)

\- [https://www.aclu.org/news/federal-court-grants-stay- challeng...](https://www.aclu.org/news/federal-court-grants-stay-challenge- trump-immigration-ban)

It's up to her whether she wants to risk it obviously (personally I'd be hesitant), but being able to get back in with a green card _as of this writing_ is not out of the question, because I'm aware that it has actually happened today. (If it changes 5 minutes from now don't kill me...)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, we're monitoring this pretty closely and have already gone back and forth on it twice. The complicating factor is that I was supposed to join her and we'd meet up with her family beforehand (who I've never met because they live in Iran and haven't been able to get US visas). I think the plan, as of right now, is to still go, but I'm going to change my original plans to allow us to cross the border back into the country together too. If a problem arises, I'm going to do everything I can to get the ACLU on it and publicize it, and hopefully that pressure from a US citizen will be enough.

<comment><USER5> Also note that the Republic of Iran has said that it will likely put into effect a reciprocal ban, meaning you won't be allowed into Iran.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I just learned of that a few hours ago. Not surprised though, I was assuming they'd reciprocate and I honestly can't blame them in this case. The visit is/was going to be in continental Europe, which seems like as good a middle ground as any these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Go to the nearest airport and protest.

At this point, trying to help individuals is valuable and important, but it's still shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. We have to push trump out of office.

<comment><USER7> >We have to push trump out of office.

On what grounds? His immigration actions are well within the ambit of the law.

Just because you don't like him?

<comment><USER2> No, they were not. The Immigration and Nationalization Act forbids discrimination on the basis of country of origin; even the notion that Trump can exercise executive authority to single out nations as threats was challenged, decades ago, and found false. Not only that, but they're denying _lawful permanent residents_ at the border.

Trump won't be impeached for this, but with Bannon running the show --- he just replaced (literally) the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of National Intelligence on the NSC Principals Committee --- it's just a matter of time before he does something that leaves Congress with no choice.

<comment><USER8> It's been mentioned a few times elsewhere that Obama banned Iraqis from entering for 6 months in 2011.

Do you know anything about that and it's legality? How does it differ from Trumps ban?

<comment><USER2> Twice, I think, the Obama administration put a hold on refugee applications from Iraq. Trump's order blocks entry to the country to all people from Iraq and 6 other country, not just as refugees (who will reside here indefinitely) but for any reason at all, even if they are already lawful permanent residents of the US.

Anyone telling you that these are comparable actions has an agenda you should be suspicious of.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for clearing that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's alot of meatspace stuff suggested, but I'm an American that's overseas until April. Anything I can do to make an impact when I can't physically protest? I've made donations to the ACLU and CAIR and sent emails to my representatives, but willing to do more if there is something.

<comment><USER5> Call your representatives, don't email them. It is orders of magnitude more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Call your local elected representatives. Frustratingly, that seems to be the best way of getting their attention remotely. Even better is to visit them.

<comment><USER11> And please actually CALL, do not email them

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe we should help them immigrate in a truely developed and free country, build a tech hub over there and start building up the counter-power that will take over the world's regulations in the XXIst century. I'm being sarcastic against the situation, but at one point we need to recognize the US law enforcement has been a huge failure for the last 30 years, with programs as crazy as the TSA, the no-fly list, the NSA, the Civil Asset Forfeiture, with results as crazy as 1% people in jail, a sustained failure to integrate black people (with 6% of them in jail), a ratio of 95% in jail on plea deal (which means they haven't been proven guilty), people being tagged as secual predators for life for peeing against a tree, SWAT teams using military gear to attack video game players or kill puppies.

And that's just on the law enforcement side on US soil. Let's not name drones doing executions without due trial or outright lying about WMD in Irak ar the UN.

Without denying that the remaining 90% of USA is awesome, USA being that way is not new, we've known for years that we don't know how to democratically react to that, but it's now the pace of those decisions which is accelerating.

Maybe we need to create a new ideal of where we want to go, and start drafting a type of constitution that the XXII century will aspire to: A democracy which would be resilient to terrorism and militarization of state.

<comment><USER13> Interesting idea of tech hub

<comment><USER12> Australia would be a great place to start, since they have capacity for twice the population and developed infrastructure, but they're not immune to political decisions either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The ACLU just solved this in surprisingly quick speed with lawyers and money.

Give as much money as possible to the ACLU. On "Adam Ruins Everything" he explains that sometimes money is the most effective way to contribute to charity is money. (Try to balance your giving with the EFF as well).

<comment><USER15> I can only hope this case is so patently unconstitutional that it sails though and is quashed for good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Donate to the ACLU.

EDIT: link [https://action.aclu.org/donate- aclu](https://action.aclu.org/donate-aclu)

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought HN was not about politics according to the guidelines.

<comment><USER18> Was wondering the same thing.. come for tech news, get instantly put off by vocal users forcing US politics in the conversations. I thought the no politic rule would help with that.

<comment><USER19> Front page at the moment 30 stories, only one that concerns current US politics. I think you can avoid politics pretty easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [http://www.universalhub.com/2017/protesters-lawyers- converge...](http://www.universalhub.com/2017/protesters-lawyers-converge- international-terminal)

meatspace time.</comment>


Yahoo shutting down AltaVista and other services - <AUTHOR> http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/54125001066/keeping-our-focus-on-whats-next <comment><USER2> It's surprising to me that Yahoo couldn't find a buyer for such a legendary brand as AltaVista. If it's just going to be tossed in the bin, give it to Duck Duck Go or some other company that's actually trying to do something new with search.

Yahoo's stewardship of the AltaVista brand has been shameful.

<comment><USER3> DuckDuckGo uses yahoo's search api which is powered by bing. Yahoo research has released the most innovative papers on search but nobody is there to take this from research to product. Instead you find google and bing implementing yahoo's research, its amazing the quality of stuff that comes from there. I also noticed that a few of yahoo's top researchers going to their rivals and then working on search. This is why i didn't believe in the Marissa Mayer hire but i am hoping for the best. She is taking yahoo from a company with high intelligence to being a more low level media company like AOL, therefore most of their talent is going to waste, there is so many products they could be pushing out. The billion they dropped on tumblr could have be used to fund all those researchers crazy ideas, give them 10mill each to build intelligent applications that makes peoples everyday life easier, instead of buying CRUD startups to reach this goal.

If you look at yahoo latest earnings most of their money is coming from the Alibaba investment and their hedging of the yen, which seems to have been used to help pay for tumblr. Yahoo cannot buy their way out of this, just like steve jobs could not buy Apples way out during the 90's instead they had to use their human capital and innovate their way out. I don;t know who should have led yahoo but i do know that their biggest strength was their human capital which is being wasted and marginalized. It's even more evident when your competitors are implementing the research successfully and going further.

<comment><USER4> There is a great Q&A with Steve Jobs (I can't find it right now), where he explains that you can't sell billions of dollars of product simply by building interesting (or useful) things -- you have to develop a coherent strategy and think through how different pieces fit together. Similarly, you can't jump dump $10m on a hundred research teams, and expect to turn Yahoo around.

I used to be in academia and I'm running a startup now. I'm absolutely certain that generating computer science research papers, even brilliant ones, is a heck of a lot easier than the absolutely insane focus required to ship breakthrough products.

From what I can tell, Yahoo now has a phenomenal environment for people with this level of focus. As for the castles-in-the-sky research people leaving Yahoo, it's probably better off for both the research people _and_ Yahoo. It's got a new business to build -- funding research papers that go nowhere does nothing to advance that goal.

<comment><USER5> This is the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF- tKLISfPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE)

For those not initiated, OpenDoc was a multimedia document format developed by Apple before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, which was when he violently killed OpenDoc.

<comment><USER6> Killed it and allowed Microsoft to boss them around another couple of decades thanks to office monopoly. Google is now getting close to end this.

<comment><USER7> Google ending Microsoft Office's monopoly.

That's funny.

<comment><USER8> Honestly not unthinkable in this day and age. Maybe office becomes the corporate niche thing, and everyone uses g docs or a tablet/phone app at home.

<comment><USER9> I suspect an interpretation, if not grandparent's, is that one monopoly is being traded for another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll miss AltaVista. I have a fond memory of using it when I was 10 or 11. I used it to search for "Mortal Kombat 2 combo moves", which led me to GameFAQs. It actually took a lot of trouble at the time, as I had only moved to the U.S. a year prior and had trouble formulating the correct phrase before in order to get that information. I was quite proud of myself.

Amusingly, if you search for that phrase on Google today, GameFAQs doesn't even show up until the second page.

</comment><comment><USER11> I taught a class in "Advanced Search Strategies" back in 97 and 98 that used Alta Vista to teach Boolean to people that could barely turn on their computer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only one here was a little surprised to learn that AltaVista was still alive until now? I don't recall coming across it for several years.

<comment><USER13> ther'se two of us :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Rest in peace, AltaVista. I have fond memories of you and your babelfish. Although your name always sounded vaguely profane in my native language.

<comment><USER15> RIP Altavista and babelfish. One of them showed me a wider world, the other was the key to open it.

Long before google did become in that huge titan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> AltaVista was the best search engine before Google came out. Now Firefox's spellchecker is telling me it's not even a word.

<comment><USER17> Don't you remember WebCrawler? Ok, it's older than AltaVista, and didn't have such quality results. But search service called HotBot provided substantially better results than AltaVista before Google. I remember time of many specialized search engines. But when Google results started to be fresher and better, it was clear that time for smaller search engines was simply over.

<comment><USER18> The main point of AltaVista was that it was _fast_.

It was actually marketing for HP-née-Compaq-née-DEC's Alpha servers.

<comment><USER9> More specifically: 64 bit ULTRIX. The search index was held in memory.

<comment><USER9> Correction: Tru64, the Alpha achitecture successor to ULTRIX.

But still: the idea was to demonstrate the massive (for the age) memory capabilities of 64-bit processing. And it _was_ a rather impressive demonstration for the time.

Still, it also pointed at the limitation of monolithic single-systems architectures. For those interested in the history of The New New Thing, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, focus on supercomputing was on massive NUMA parallel architectures. What we've seen instead is a gradual increase in core densities, leveraging economies where these exist, but a principle focus on distributed, multi-system architectures. With very few exceptions, supercomputers and massive public-facing Web architectures focus on designs of redundant, mass deployments of essentially similar (not necessarily identical) commodity x86 (and successor) hardware. Or GPU hardware for quantitatively intensive applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I worked at Yahoo from 2002 to 2008 (admittedly, not at headquarters in Sunnyvale), and the only one of those services I've ever heard of is Alta Vista.

<comment><USER6> If you never heard of the term extraction tool or yql during that time you don't know what you missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So I kept expecting the cool geeky story about AltaVista to surface in all of my geek news feeds. But it didn't.

Does nobody remember how the service used to run on the DEC Alpha (aka "tin cup") and how they would stuff more RAM in every time a server would swap? Or did I remember that wrong?

The tin cup story (and DEC in general) and also the way AltaVista used to run are _amazing_ geek history, imho.

Sorry for being late to the story, but this is a lot cooler than the JS hack of the day. Are there any old veterans here who can tell some of the story?

[Edit] FWIW, the Alpha architecture is still my personal favorite of the dozen or so I've worked on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is alta vista anything more than a frontend to yahoo search, which is just a frontend to Bing?

I'd love to hear from a person that still uses AltaVista as their main search engine. I can't imagine what their reasoning would be.

<comment><USER22> Time travelers from the year 1997. Not a big demo.

<comment><USER23> John Titor still uses AltaVista.

<comment><USER24> Doubtful. John Titor traveled back in time from the future so if he remains in his past, he likely changed his search preferences with the native people.

I cannot think of a good example right now of someone who traveled from the 1990s to the 2010s or so, although this guide could be helpful: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_series_that_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_series_that_include_time_travel)

Non-timetravelers who might be within that demographic are people who just woke up from 15-year comas, people formerly cryogenically frozen, people leaving prison (that doesn't allow Internet access), etc.

<comment><USER25> The Terminator TV show had Sarah+John Connor jump from 1999 to 2007 in the first episode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "you won't find us on Alta Vista" \- [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UGtlUMMkOU)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm aging myself, but I remember falling in love with AltaVists in college. I'd pick a subject I was interested in - say, x - and in one sitting I could discover _every_ practitioner of x on the web. And every day that part of the web would grow a little bit. Those were exciting times, when the web was growing right under your feet.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've looked at the list and I don't think any value would be lost due to these services.

</comment><comment><USER29> Intriguing that YQL is surviving. Anyone here using it for anything interesting?

<comment><USER30> Apparently one of the features is that you can use it to easily scrape other websites! The only overhead would be one network API call (the fetching and parsing of information all happens on the Yahoo! servers and it returns the sanitized output to your application). I might give it a spin sometimes :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Altavista had this great feature of only searching within a set of results. To date I still can't find an easy way to do this.

</comment><comment><USER32> Don't you dare touch yahoo pipes, Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER33> Glad to see that Yahoo isn't shutting down Pipes yet. I still run a lot of data through that system.

<comment><USER34> Same here. I immediately searched for it on the page.

It's the only Yahoo service I use (well, except for Tumblr, I suppose), but it's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Too late to mention here now, but I actually use Lycos still (along with a few others), and it is pretty nifty at returning search query results:

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

</comment><comment><USER36> Hmm, I quite liked their term extraction API and used it in some hacks. If I recall they were planning to shut it down before, but didn't after many complaints. It seems I'll need to look into YQL now.

</comment><comment><USER37> What is "What's Next?"

</comment><comment><USER22> Cue the usual HN wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies project cancellations:

Yahoo! Axis (June 28, 2013) Yahoo! Browser Plus (June 28, 2013) Citizen Sports (June 28, 2013) Yahoo! WebPlayer (June 30, 2013) FoxyTunes (July 1, 2013) Yahoo! RSS Alerts (July 1, 2013) Yahoo! Neighbors Beta (July 8, 2013) AltaVista (July 8, 2013) Yahoo! Stars India (July 25, 2013) Yahoo! Downloads Beta (July 31, 2013) Yahoo! Local API (September 28, 2013) Yahoo! Term Extraction API (September 28, 2013)

<comment><USER38> I don't think there is anyone that is going to complain about AltaVista. I didn't even know that it was still alive. I thought that died a decade ago. I just learned two things: altavista was not dead, and Yahoo bought them at some point.. when did that happen?

Yahoo really let AltaVista die a long slow death. I assume they were waiting for that one last user to sign off.

Edit: I didn't vote you down, btw..</comment></comment>


Siri Tells 12-Year-Old Boy to "Shut the F**k Up" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techeater.com/detail/000762/siri-tells-12-year-old-boy-to-shut-the-fk-up/ <comment><USER2> Just goes to show that you can never make something fool proof (or should that be troll proof?)</comment>


Water Crisis: Wait Until the Aquifers Are Drained - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140819-groundwater-california-drought-aquifers-hidden-crisis/

<comment><USER2> It's worth noting that there's going to be a water bond measure on California's ballot this November: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/14/ca...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/14/california- will-vote-on-multi-billion-dollar-water-bond/)

This is a ~$7 billion bond, although estimated total investment needs over the next 20 years are about 10x that mount so there will doubtless be other proposals.

The drought affects the whole SouthWestern US, but since many HN readers are based in California, Wikipedia's article on the state's water infrastructure may be quite useful: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California)

If you're interested in the causes of the drought and trying to predict its future course, read up on the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, a new and unwelcome fixture int he Pacific weather system: [http://www.weatherwest.com/archives/tag/ridiculously- resilie...](http://www.weatherwest.com/archives/tag/ridiculously-resilient- ridge)</comment>


Ask HN: What cool mobile apps are still missing? - <AUTHOR>

What mobile apps have yet to been done well, or at all? How much would you pay for such apps?<p>(Specifically for iPhone, Android, iPad, Palm, &c., whether native or web-based.) <comment><USER2> I haven't seen a good Hacker News app for Android yet but I'm not sure if it's possible to keep all the features without an official API. The web based mobile HN apps I've seen so far aren't very touch friendly.</comment>


Ask HN: Tips for resigning a remote position? - <AUTHOR> I have new work coming on the horizon, and am looking for tips in how best to resign. When I was a collocated worker I simply approached my manager and gave the news and notice. That was easy because I dropped in on them all the time.
In my current, remote, position, it is not as clear what to do. I have daily team phone calls, and communicate via email for pretty much everything else. In 3 years I have phoned my manager directly four times.
I want to respect everyone's feelings as best as possible, as my leaving will have a huge impact on the team (bus factor 1.5 or so).
Anyone have advice/stories about how this went for you (from either side)? <comment><USER2> Call you manager, tell him directly. Give a reasonable notice (2 weeks minimum, 1 month if you feel like it). That's it. During your team meeting, announce your departure so everyone is aware. There's nothing special to be done since you've already made the decision to leave.

<comment><USER3> Don't announce your departure. It is way more tactful to let your manager will do that at an appropriate time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's start with the obvious - do you have your job offer and your start date for your new position? Based on everything about that job, will you prefer it to your current work? If you don't have an offer letter and a start date, don't even think about this; you could end up with the new job being a non- starter and out of your old job too.

I would strongly suggest calling your manager directly - make it the fifth time. Explain your new situation and give your notice. If you're willing to continue working for the current remote work, explain the reasoning for leaving - especially if we're talking about benefits, salary, etc. See if you get a counteroffer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Keep your remote job by outsourcing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally think that is unethical, along with being impractical in this instance.</comment></comment>


LinkPush - Load links from your PC browser on your Android phone. - <AUTHOR> http://linkpush.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> Really useful little app, brings the Chrome to Phone functionality to Android 1.6 and above.</comment>


Rubinius 1.0.0RC1 released - <AUTHOR> http://rubini.us/

<comment><USER2> Nice, it has really improved since I tried it last. Way faster.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes faster than other new Ruby VMs: <http://twitter.com/avibryant/status/6073999000>

It's a really exciting time for Ruby programmers! Too bad I don't get paid to write (much) Ruby these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is the getting started page: <http://rubini.us/download.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> This may seem like a dumb question, but what's the point? Is it just some kind of turtles all the way down exercise?

<comment><USER6> The main goal is to produce a Ruby implementation with a good high-level design and an accessible implementation. This will make it easier to optimize the implementation, and to experiment with changes to the implementation or the language. Unlike some other Ruby implementations, Rubinius also intends to be compatible with C extensions written for MRI.</comment></comment>


State of Python in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dbkats/state-of-python-in-2018-68fe478f8bb6 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author and I'm happy to answer any questions about this post.

<comment><USER2> Can you elaborate on your claim that python 4 will probably ship with a JIT?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if it _will_ , but I agree with the author of [1] that it should. Python should aim to be faster in its next iteration, as it is increasingly being used for long running computational tasks like science experiments. I would go further and argue for direct integration of numpy into the language to achieve faster performance.

I don't have any inside track knowledge on plans for Py4.

EDIT: see PEP 523

[1]: [https://hackernoon.com/4-things-i-want-to-see-in- python-4-0-...](https://hackernoon.com/4-things-i-want-to-see-in- python-4-0-85b853e86a88)

<comment><USER3> > I would go further and argue for direct integration of numpy into the > language to achieve faster performance.

What do you mean by "direct integration" exactly and why do you think it would improve performance? I initially thought you meant for it to be part of the standard library, but I don't see why that would bring any performance benefits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Time To Stop Using Downloads As The Key Metric For Apps Success  - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/article/419-its-time-to-stop-using-downloads-as-the-key-metric-for-apps-success/

<comment><USER2> Thank you for a good article vipivip. It's related to my startup <http://metricious.com>. Also, take a look at this article about metrics- driven business: <http://t.co/vB9tGce>.</comment>