Cambridge/Boston Thinking Society - <AUTHOR> http://voxmens.org/cambridge-society/

<comment><AUTHOR> If any Hacker News readers are in the Boston/Cambridge area and like to discuss intellectual topics in person, this could be a great meetup. Sign up so that we can get it going.

</comment><comment><USER2> Signed up! I would be away at school most likely, but keen to be in the loop.</comment>


Don't Make Your Customers Steal - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Thierry-Blancpain/Posts/Don%E2%80%99t-Make-Your-Customers-Steal

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't realize you need a damn Quora account to read on there now. What a horrible move. Sorry. The post for easy reading:

Don't Make Your Customers Steal \--- Nearly three years ago, I founded a small type foundry, Grilli Type [<http://grillitype.com>]. A type foundry designs and releases typefaces, which you may know as fonts.

Given that I'm both an avid internet and media user, I always think a lot about content piracy and what to do about it. As a content consumer that means I was easily swayed by Spotify's offer for unlimited music for a tiny sum each month.

As a content producer, I was very unsure what I should do. Designers need to be able to show typefaces in use in their designs for their clients to sign off on those purchases. Because of this and font files' tiny file sizes, digital font piracy is and has always been rampant. Most designers have thousands of illegally downloaded fonts on their computers.

A little over a year ago, we decided to do something about this. We started offering one of our typefaces as a free trial version, allowing our prospective customer to download and use it – with a limited character set – in their native design applications. The sales of that typeface roughly tripled after we started offering it as a trial version. Definitely a commercial success.

So from today on, we are offering free trial versions [<http://grillitype.com/free-trial-fonts>] of all of our typefaces. A demo version of our fonts, so to say. We're only the second foundry [<http://swisstypefaces.com>] to do so, and it's hard for me to understand why.

What I learned from this is that it pays off not to treat your audience as pirates even if most of them usually are. It validates my belief that if you give your audience a great path to pay for your products, your audience will pay. Give them a chance to do the right thing and those who would have ever paid for your product will do it even more gladly now.

Even the sometimes slow to adapt type industry can change. So let's have some hope for the movie and music industry, too.</comment>


Hacking a foosball table - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.talis.com/articles/hackday-foosball/ <comment><USER2> There's been some other great table mashups too: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/instant-replay-table- footba...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/instant-replay-table-football/)</comment>


ISP (Comcast) takes over television and movie studio (NBC Universal) - <AUTHOR> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2011/01/the_federal_communications_com_8.html

<comment><USER2> Calling Comcast an ISP is a bit strange. They are still primarily a cable service. They are also quite experienced with running tv studios, they own E, Style, Golf, G4 and quite a few more.

That being said I've worked for 2 companies that Comcast bought, the first was TechTV which got absorbed into G4 and tanked. I'm not looking for the takeover of NBC to go much smoother. Comcast has installed a lot of their broadcast heads over their NBC counterparts. I understand they want to drive the direction, but putting people in charge of severely underperforming networks over people in only marginally underperforming networks makes no sense to me.

This merger is going to be ugly and have a lot of nasty fallout.

<comment><USER3> At home, Comcast is my one choice for "high speed" Internet. That -- for the most part -- works ok, although in the past some months it's started to drop for one or several hours at a time, which has me worried. (I've heard and read that others are not so lucky.)

The pricing they offer means it's about the same to get Internet alone or to purchased it bundled with basic cable, so I have basic cable from them as well. I turn it on, once in a while, and the quality I've observed has decreased _markedly_ in the last couple of years. It seems that very frequently, one or another channel has a major technical glitch. These will -- when I check -- persist for hours or even days.

In addition, with the transition to digital, sometimes programs flip mid-scene between different display modes and ratios. A lot of digital artifacting from overly constrained bandwidth, particularly on the "less desirable", i.e. Hispanic, channels -- also at times PBS (gee, I wonder why). Keep in mind that, being basic cable, the final leg is still analog and so is not the problem.

What I gather from the programming is that all the channels are more or less under combined control, anyway. The same 5 movies are on different channels, in slightly different timeframes/rotations. A lot else seems the same: "That 70's Show" and "Men" seem to be on every channel.

Even though I'm "paying" for it, Comcast displays no interest in even technically maintaining, much less programming, the basic channels. This has left me with no confidence in their being a corporate "good citizen". If you aren't the fattest part of their revenue stream, they couldn't care less.</comment></comment>


Huge: Google maps navigation feature - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/10/29/google-maps-navigation-huge/

<comment><USER2> The market is overreacting. Standalone units are just much more accessible to a larger mainstream audience that doesn't have a $200 SmartPhone and a $30/month data plan. The hardware isn't rugged enough to replace many applications of standalone GPS units. The reliance on cellular data is completely unrealistic in a fleet environment for example where you might have hundreds or thousands of units deployed. It's fundamentally limited by SmartPhone hardware -- screen size & battery life. I suspect it will be popular among a certain group of people who already have SmartPhones, car chargers, data plans, etc but that's a fraction of the total GPS market.</comment>


Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went Off the Rails - <AUTHOR> https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/ <comment><AUTHOR> Reply by Kahneman in the comments: [https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction- of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/#comment-1454)

Further discussion on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5u7fb3/a_pi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5u7fb3/a_piece_about_how_priming_research_went_off_the/)</comment>


Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-store-robot-program-expands-2017-10?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29 <comment><USER2> The immediate take away i get from this is that it really isn't about taking over human jobs. humans don't do this job nearly as frequently as the robots would do it, because in a standard retail environment like wal-mart, it doesn't really matter all that much if the reported in-stock quantity is slightly off for an item. that is to say, it matters, but not so much that the big-box retail environments i've worked in would dedicate more than one full- time staff to do this. if the robot is working 24hrs, it's doing the hours of three full-time staff and probably the work of six. That's a huge jump in the amount of stock checking that's happening at a store.

So i wonder why wal-mart is investing in robots to fill _this_ role, when there are so many other important jobs that they could automate instead. and the answer i land on is that the quantity-on-hand _is_ critically important if you're using the store as a warehouse for a local delivery operation. If you've advertised something as in-stock for same-day delivery on your website, and then you let customers in to browse around your warehouse and move things around, having roaming scanners checking for mis-homed items is suddenly a lot more important.

<comment><USER3> It's probably because stock checking is a simple repetitive task that humans tend to fail at due to boredom and mental fatigue while robots would accel at it because of the fact that it's simple, well defined and boring.

<comment><USER4> It's traditional to spend 45-180 seconds in the back room, staring at your phone or talking to a coworker, before returning to the sales floor to tell the customer that you're sold out. It's like the Hello World of stocking product.

<comment><USER5> In my experience about a 10-15 years ago when I worked in a super-market there was no "back room" really - it was just a staging-post for getting stuff off the truck, putting it onto trolleys, then taking it out onto the shop floor to put on the shelves as quickly as possible.

I dunno if people expect there to be this huge warehouse of stock "out the back" of every supermarket with loads of shelves holding tins of beans or loaves of bread or whatever just sitting there. The shop floor _was_ the "back room"!

I used to just tell folks that what they see is everything we had, so if they cant see it then we dont have it.

Even with fancy modelling and "just-in-time" delivery stock-outs still happen - I remember one year working on the last weekend before Christmas. We "sold out" of turkeys - in reality it was just that people had them in their trolleys and hadn't checked-out yet so people were stealing them out of other customer's trolleys when they weren't looking! Happy Xmas! :-)

<comment><USER6> The exception to this is milk and bread. There's always more bread and milk in the back.

<comment><USER7> Or somewhere else. Some stores have the same item at multiple locations which one may not know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The robots are designed to free up store employees' time so they can use it > to help customers.

...which is bullshit; Walmart just doesn't want the "robots taking our jobs" angle here. If they consider the current level at which employees help customers in the aisles sufficient, then they'll be cutting jobs to match that level rather than "freeing up" employees to do more of it.

<comment><USER9> For the foreseable future, robots and chatbots will be poorer UX than speaking to a human. Since it's not adding value to their product it's obviously being done for cost cutting and scale reasons.

<comment><USER10> I rarely get useful assistance in large chain stores. Asking "where is the pesto?" usually gets an answer like "I dunno, somewhere in aisle 7 maybe" with an indifferent shrug. I'd happily make three attempts at using a clunky voice interface if I got the answer "Aisle 7, bay 11, shelves 3 and 4. We have 18 different kinds of pesto currently in stock. Would you like me to take you there?"

It almost seems too obvious to say, but computers have different strengths and weaknesses to humans.

There are also social factors involved that may be advantageous to machines. Self-checkout machines offer an objectively worse experience most of the time, but a lot of shoppers prefer them. Some customers don't want to interact with a human cashier. Some will be buying embarrassing items and prefer the apparent anonymity of self-checkout. There's also a subtlety in how the self- checkout machines are arranged - because there's usually a common queue for several machines, customers don't feel pressured to finish their transaction quickly.

Shoppers may prefer being assisted by a robot for a variety of reasons, even if the robot isn't quite as good as the average human worker.

<comment><USER11> Trader Joe's is excellent about this. I'm not sure if it's explicit policy but every single time I've asked an employee where something is they dropped what they were doing, walked over to the exact spot and literally handed me the item I was looking for. I guess that's only possible in a small store though.

<comment><USER12> This is absolutely standard in the UK in all the supermarkets I'm aware of. If a member of staff doesn't know where the item is, they'll go and find someone who does.

<comment><USER13> I've found that too. TBH I just want them to tell me which aisle it is, and will ask "which aisle are eggs on, please?" or whatever. But they insist on walking you there and done are seemingly instructed to hand you a product too (which usually I replace).

Mind you, if they didn't insist on moving everything to increase customer circulation ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > the robots are 50% more efficient than a human doing the same task. They can > also scan shelves three times more quickly and are a lot more accurate. > Human employees can only scan shelves about twice a week.

Personally, I want to see up-to-date retail stock mapping (that I can search)

Walmart is testing a robot from Bossa Nova (Pittsburgh and SF)

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

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bossa-nova- robotics-...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bossa-nova-robotics- inc/timeline/timeline)

<comment><USER15> Why does it have to be a robot riding around? Couldn't the same thing be done from a camera on the ceiling?

<comment><USER16> It would probably mean that the camera would either have to hang down pretty low in the isles or the isles would need to be super wide so that the camera could get a good view angle of the entire shelf, including bottom rows. But sure I suppose they probably could have something that rides around on a track on the ceiling and raises and lowers to get into position in each isle.

<comment><USER13> Like Oto (sp?) from Wall-E?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how many more jobs you would restore by taking away the original retail robot: the cash register. If you just made employees record all sales by hand in a ledger, companies like Walmart would have to hire thousands or millions more people to check out customers. Think of all those beautiful jobs! That would surely make America great again.

<comment><USER18> You jest, but I actually wonder sometimes if this type of thing would be better for society. The dream of automation and technology was always to "let the machines do the work so we're free to enjoy life and pursue our dreams" but in a capitalist economy it ends up benefiting the owners of the machines primarily, like Walmart and Amazon, not necessarily society at large (though obviously they enable people to buy things cheaper and thus improve quality of life too, at least if people still have some source of income to afford it).

I'd like to think anybody out of a job can just be smart and entrepreneurial and create some other new value people are willing to pay for, but I'm not sure everyone's cut out for that, or how much interest markets have for most of that kind of stuff. Many more small business fail than succeed. Maybe keeping some dumb, honest jobs around would help keep the balance.

<comment><USER19> Anyone can own machines. Go buy one. Automate some stuff. Make some money. Stop being a stick in the mud and get with it.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't have to be automated, even. Lots of people start out by owning one snowplow. Or one power washer or one lawn mower.

<comment><USER21> Try opening a landscaping business. You'll see why this fails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The robots are designed to free up store employees' time so they can use it > to help customers.

This is probably the most textbook spin I've ever seen. It's as if their PR firm didn't even try.

These robots are obviously being deployed to increase margins.

Personally I would have went for the "adding more value" angle, either by suggesting to the customer that "Your favourite product is more likely to be on shelves", or positioning these robots as "helpers" to shelf-stackers.

<comment><USER23> > Personally I would have went for the "adding more value" angle, either by > suggesting to the customer that "Your favourite product is more likely to be > on shelves", or positioning these robots as "helpers" to shelf-stackers.

That's exactly the spin the company that makes the robot is using: [http://www.bossanova.com](http://www.bossanova.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Judging from the pictures they'll still use paper price labels.

Why? It seems extremely arcane to still use paper price labels in 2017, especially for stores as big and centrally run as Walmart.

With digital price labels you can update prices centrally across the whole country within seconds, and it costs basically nothing to implement too, when the labor cost of manually updating paper price labels are factored in.

<comment><USER25> >it costs basically nothing to implement too,

Eh. Don't be so sure of this.

Yes, this technology exists. No, it's typically not feasible to implement. The ROI simply doesn't make sense.

Each store houses about 250,000 unique products. That means you'll need that many digital price tags. If they're $4 a peice (highly unlikely), thats 1M per store - and that's only in the new hardware.

You also need to test different environments - will it work in freezers, coolers, and under heated lamps (150F temperatures)? Do those places have wifi access?

Then you need to test and update the wireless infrastructure. Adding 250k devices to a network is not a small task.

Then update whatever software exists to send out price updates. This is honestly the cheapest part, all things considered. And it can be applied to the whole chain / store by store, depends on the roll out strategy.

All in all, it's at least 1 million per store. A brand new store costs the same amount. So you'd also be paying for the opportunity cost of not opening a new store. So you'd also lose out on the potential revenue of that new store.

There's other factors to consider, but the math never shakes out positively. There are bigger fish to fry than price tags.

<comment><USER26> > Each store houses about 250,000 unique products.

[https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news- archive/2005/01/07...](https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news- archive/2005/01/07/our-retail-divisions)

"Supercenters average 187,000 square feet, employ 350 or more associates on average and offer 142,000 different items."

> If they're $4 a peice (highly unlikely)

looks like they're maybe $10 per on alibaba, in lowish volumes.

> You also need to test different environments - will it work in freezers, > coolers, and under heated lamps (150F temperatures)?

they can just go check out any of the many places that already use such tags, and note that they work fine.

> Do those places have wifi access?

> Adding 250k devices to a network is not a small task.

they use 433MHz ISM, and don't screw around with IP networking. here's an example device on alibaba

[https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wireless-digital- pric...](https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wireless-digital-price-tags- lcd-display_60338580763.html)

> There's other factors to consider, but the math never shakes out positively. > There are bigger fish to fry than price tags.

they're used in hazel's in boulder, co. pretty sure i've seen them used in some other stores, though names aren't coming to mind at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You guys think there will be a backlash to this? Some sort of modern luddite movement? Whenever I shop I refuse to use the self-checkout, you think that sort of thing might spread?

<comment><USER28> Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?

<comment><USER29> Can't answer for GP, but I use human checkout to provide epsilon demand for cashiers who need the job. Efficiency isn't everything.

<comment><USER30> I used to feel that way about bank tellers (having been a former bank teller a long time ago...) then I realized I was wasting 20 minutes in line for a simple deposit that the machine could do in under two minutes without a queue.

<comment><USER27> Don't you feel a tinge of guilt when you walk in one day and now there's only two tellers instead of three? Maybe I'm just weird but I was at target yesterday and there were only three aisles open with lots of people going to self checkout. I said fuck it and waited in line for a person.

<comment><USER31> Do you go down this rabbit hole?

How do you pick between buying wheat and taking it to the miller (preserving his job) and buying flour from the grocer?

Do you seek out gas stations that still pump gas for you?

Do you worry that buying a fuel efficient vehicle or insulated building can have a negative impact on people working for energy producers?

<comment><USER27> >Do you go down this rabbit hole?

What requires me to go all the way down the rabbit hole? Everybody has moral beliefs that they don't follow to their extremist conclusions. I see people getting laid off or turnover being allowed to happen - I see that the replacement job for a cashier gig is sometimes even worse - I do my little part to make society a little less bad. I also don't feel that pure individualism is really the way to live so I do sacrifice a bit of a wait in line and hopefully it helps the girl that checked me out keep that gig for a little bit longer.

<comment><USER32> Nobody _wants_ to be a cashier for 8 hours a day though. The only reason we see losing your job to automation as a negative is because our welfare and education systems are broken.

All you're really doing is creating more pointless work to treat the symptoms.

<comment><USER27> >All you're really doing is creating more pointless work to treat the symptoms.

If pointless work is the best we've got that's fine by me just as long as someone's getting paid on the other end.

Besides if you're sick and know you won't be cured for quite a while you might treat the symptoms as well. Treating the symptoms isn't bad as long as we don't forget to _also_ treat the cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > The robots are designed to free up store employees' time so they can use it > to help customers.

If you've ever been to a Walmart at 2am, you know that this isn't true. A lot of people will lose jobs over this.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if these robots will suffer from the "roomba dog mess" problem. Meaning if a jar of something gets dropped in the aisle, will the robot happily drive through it and then leave tracks of it throughout the store?

I'd also be interested in learning about the false positives. For example a product get turned around on the shelf or returned askew does that trigger an alert? And is that a good or bad thing?

I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If these are still in use two or three years from now then we know they were a success.

From a personal perspective I'd love these to improve me locate products within a store. Many stores still fail to tell you which shelf a product is on on their mobile app, and the few that day don't give you a map of the store showing you the literal location of it. I'd love to have a "Google Maps"-like experience with locating an item.

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems interesting to me, that computers seem to be taking on managerial roles and humans are left with manual labor. The robot knows how to tell a human to fix a problem but doesn't know how to restock the shelves itself. Similarly, in warehouses, computers tell humans what to do, and the human's job is basically just to grab things.

In the end, the robot is already higher on the ladder than the humans.

<comment><USER36> Reminds me of this story: [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

I always thought it was amusing when people said it would replace burger flippers and the like. Why? They're cheap, and that's relatively expensive/difficult to automate. The slightly higher paid manager though? Ripe for automation.

<comment><USER35> "The girls liked it because Manna didn't hit on them either."

Interesting story. I'll be sure to read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I suspect this has to do with how Walmart has been ramping up there internet game over the past 1-2 years. They have an API similar to Amazon's for pulling product info and placing orders (it's still in beta last I checked).

Walmart has already started doing the 2 day delivery thing a while ago for free (no "prime" needed) for orders above the purchase threshold. They then started allowing you to order online and pick up in stored (including groceries).

I think we are going to see Walmart start competing with Amazon even harder. And here's the thing most people don't even realize - Amazon's main business unit dealing with retail sales loses a metric shit ton of money. Amazon just released it's latest quarterly report and somehow people thought it was a good report. It wasn't. Sure, Cloud services are doing well. But Amazon as an entire company makes only a 1.3% profit margin. That includes the high margin cloud business. The actual retail business? It loses 18%!!! That loss is up from 15% the previous quarter. In 2013 those losses were 2-4%! Amazon is getting absolutely ravaged in their retail sales business. Walmart, on the other hand, has margins of about 2.35% and pretty much all they do is retail business. And let's not forget that Walmart has massive brick and mortar stores all around the country and they can still turn a profit. Amazon, who has at this time nearly 0 physical retail spaces (other than a few test/trial stores) manages to piss away nearly 1 in every 5 dollars it takes in from their retail unit.

I sincerely think that Walmart is going to figure out a way in the next 5-10 years to utterly decimate Amazon's main line of business.

</comment><comment><USER38> Doug Mcmillon said Wal-Mart reached total maximum employment (sry cant find quote) as in no net increase in associates.

He also points out when a "job goes away." often referring to improved convenience for the customer. (i.e. pick up towers)

Robots will always be experimented with..

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder why they settled on putting the cameras in robots that are on the floor. Why not use cameras attached to the ceiling? If the cameras need to move to get a good angle, they could move up and down the aisle on tracks or Walmart could simply install more cameras. If the ceiling is a bad angle, they could put them on the floor under the shelving, or on top of the shelves, or in several other places.

None of those solutions need navigation, their presences is more persistent, and the persistent visual could be used for other purposes: 'Are we out of produce bags? Check camera 5b.' 'What is on the floor in aisle 8?'

<comment><USER40> The Walmart nearest me moves aisles around periodically. Aisle 8 this week has halloween costumes, but two weeks from now aisle 8 will be gone and a large open area will be created for plastic Christmas trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://i.imgur.com/bVSKmXD.png](https://i.imgur.com/bVSKmXD.png)

<comment><USER42> disable javascript and you stop getting those messages

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > The robots are much more efficient than a human at the task of scanning > store shelves.

Oh, my. This sentence gave me a real chuckle. But, then, I reflected. We're in for some interesting times. If the heuristic is whether not a robot is "more efficient" than a human then human's are going to be in short demand.

</comment><comment><USER44> "The robots are designed to free up store employees' time so they can use it to help customers."

HA-HA... right.

Any time I ask for help finding something in Wal-mart the person feigns ignorance. They're not compensated well enough to actually be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder what their reaction will be when people start attaching stickers to them

<comment><USER46> Walmart has eyes in the sky covering every part of the consumer area of the building. I imagine they'll regard it as property vandalism (stickers being the least of what people will do to them).

<comment><USER47> Dropping gum in front of their wheels...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> But can they do the cheer?

</comment><comment><USER49> I went to a presentation in SF about three years ago where someone was demoing an inventory robot like that. Same company?

<comment><USER50> Either them or tally ([http://www.simberobotics.com/](http://www.simberobotics.com/))

<comment><USER49> It was Tally. Did they ever ship? The web site has nothing but a promotional video and press releases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> These robots are from Bossa Nova Robotics

</comment><comment><USER52> They'll probably be more effective to be honest. Anecdotally, I've encountered nothing but incompetence when it comes to getting help from Walmart store employees. When asked where I can find something their response is usually "somewhere in that area" while pointing broadly.

<comment><USER53> There's an old saying, "pay peanuts, get monkeys."

This isn't an attack on Walmart employees. Humans deserve higher compensation for their complete effort than Walmart is willing to pay. If someone is giving something their all, they deserve at least a living wage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is it just me... or is the movie "Wall-E" one of the premiere sci-fi movies of our time? This walmart robot could easily be in that movie along with all of the other little robots doing menial tasks for fat humans.

</comment><comment><USER55> In the pic it scans all the shelves with camera. Does this mean Walmart has to change where they place the price/SKU tags, so it can be easily scanned? Or is OCR+location good enough to determine the products.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is letting them reduce theft. Shrinkage as its called in industry parlance is mostly caused by employees. Now you can make sure no inventory is mishandled. Walmart loses BILLIONS every year from just employee theft.

<comment><USER57> how does scanning aisles reduce employee theft?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> With Amazon chocking the air out of Walmart, i think automation in this sector is majorly done to improve customers experience. Whatever it is i think its more of a bold business tactic than simply automation.

</comment><comment><USER59> Lets start an open robot cooperative where each co adopting robots to replace human labor donates to high tech or other education. This idea is open source so take it and run with it :)

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd love to know who makes those critters. Does walmart have a full-fledged robotics team working on it? Did they acquire someone? Or are they buying them from someone else?

</comment><comment><USER61> That's a pretty ugly robot no? Looks like it's built to follow old people around: "Are you sure you don't want me to check your blood pressure?!"

</comment><comment><USER62> Yet another web site that thinks I am using an ad blocker.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think in coming future, human will revolt again this robot bullshit. Human probably won't use items which are fully automated or done by robot.

<comment><USER64> As an intellectual exercise, please define "robot", especially as opposed to "machine" and "tool".

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> As cheap as cameras are these days, it would almost seem more cost effective and reliable to just put a camera every few feet on the opposite shelf.

<comment><USER66> Sure, but that doesn't help you get closer to a fully automated customer service bot. Probably this is just an initial step, the simplest thing that can still be useful, while gathering data and building expertise in the development team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does it have the Three Laws in its programming?

</comment><comment><USER67> If you have ever worked at walmart before you know they already have walmarts. Work there long enough and you become like one.

</comment><comment><USER68> Walmarts are already overcrowded as it is. Adding robots is going to clog the aisles even more. It could still work I guess

<comment><USER69> It is implied in the article, yes, but i dont see a reason why these robots shoudl not operate at closing hours or if it is a 24/7 then at a time when the number of visitors is lowest, say 3 or 4 am.

<comment><USER47> Worked on an automatic lawn mower. They wanted to sell them (in part) to golf courses, where they could do the mowing at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Somebody ask Trump to build a wall and deport these robots! They are taking our jobs :P

</comment><comment><USER71> What will the People of Walmart make of this? Personally, I think store robots like these don't really help much. A novelty at first, I think the image of Walmart as a cheapskate on all things human, will give the robot a negative reputation.

<comment><USER72> Some of them will probably be hired to walk around and greet customers, I noticed that on my last visit to Australia and NZ.

A lot of major chains down there, since implementing self-service checkouts etc, now just employ people to be friendly and give the brand and store some kind of face. It was interesting.

Kind of like hiring some warmth and personality for an otherwise cold and desolate warehouse.

<comment><USER46> Walmart re-instituted its greeter system [1] in part for that reason. They're using a lot of elderly workers for it. Walmart found that just having greeters out front reduced their theft numbers meaningfully.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2016/05/04/walmart-brings-back- greeters-t...](http://fortune.com/2016/05/04/walmart-brings-back-greeters-to- improve-service-and-fight-theft/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Feels weird watching a Jetsons episode about to land in reality

</comment><comment><USER74> WHy not also let them answer questions from customers?

<comment><USER75> Maybe some future version. Baby steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Serious question - why didn't they make it blue?

<comment><USER77> Made by a different company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> and the race is on to squat on [https://www.robotsofwalmart.com](https://www.robotsofwalmart.com)

<comment><USER79> still available

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Why would you raise minimum wage and not expect this? In my opinion, this does more good than bad. At least it frees up people to do something other than the deadbeat Walmart job.

</comment><comment><USER81> That is sooner than expected.

</comment><comment><USER82> Weird, when I click the artlicle's link:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-store-robot- program-e...](http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-store-robot-program- expands-2017-10?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29)

I end up here:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/(null)/(null)/(null)/(null)/(...](http://www.businessinsider.com/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/\(null\)/walmart- store-robot-program-expands-2017-10&r=US&IR=T?IR=T)

With a page that says "Header overflow"

No kidding!

</comment><comment><USER83> Robot9000</comment>


Counting Inversions via Rank Queries - <AUTHOR> https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2019/12/18/counting-inversions-via-rank-queries/ <comment><USER2> _counting the number of inversions of a sequence in O(n \lg n) time_

Counting inversions is equivalent to sorting. That's why it's 0(n log n). Any sorting algorithm can become an inversion counting algorithm by incrementing a counter instead of rearranging the input values. Inversions are the first topic in _The Art of Computer Programming_ Chapter 5. Very much worth reading if you dig this stuff.

<comment><USER3> Does this apply to integer keys in the computational models that can do operations other than simple comparisons? In the transdichotomous model, I thought the best known sorting algorithms were O(n lg lg n) worst case, while the best known inversion counting models were Ω(n √ lg n), following "Counting Inversions, Offline Orthogonal Range Counting, and Related Problems".

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I didn't think about it. I was only thinking of the general case of sorting.

Integer sorting seems like a case where there's meaningful metadata (maximum integer) and the algorithm is written only for that case (and assumes suitable hardware). These aren't radical assumptions and the optimization may have a lot of practical applications. But once I get to _specify_ the inputs, then O(1) sorting is trivial. Specify the input as sorted lists. To me, it only seems a matter of degree. But admittedly, what can be represented as an integer is a much more reasonable degree of specification.</comment></comment></comment>


The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060

<comment><USER2> _After 1900, when so-called artificial ice became generally accepted as safe, mass quantities were produced at ice plants and delivered to homes._

That's so bizarre. I would have thought people in the past preferred man-made ice as soon as it was invented. Who would want ice from a frozen lake? Lakes are full of all kinds of gross stuff.

I guess I'll have to remember that fact when people argue about the superiority of naturally-derived products.

</comment><comment><USER3> The idea of a typist pool intrigues me. It reminds me of the concept of a thread pool or connection pool, the idea being that one has many instances of a certain resource to share distribute over requests. Rudimentary parallelism and task scheduling seem to have existed since the dawn of history, when humans congregated in sufficient numbers to organize labor en masse.

</comment><comment><USER4> soon to be added...

data entry specialist - at the dawn of modern computing in the late 20th century, data integration was so difficult that companies often employed entire teams of people to type in hardcopy of output from other computer systems.</comment>


Ask HN: What is so great about Lisp that makes Emacs powerful? - <AUTHOR> I'm new to Emacs and I've read at several places that Emacs is a lisp machine and that Lisp is the main reason behind its power. There are several other text editors which are scriptable, then what is so special about Lisp and Emacs.<p>P.S: I'm a avid Vim user and I have written couple of extensions for it. It may be easier to understand if the answer provides analogies to Vim and Vim script. <comment><USER2> Emacs is an open/unsafe architecture. Whatever I write in Lisp in my .emacs file becomes part of my implementation. It's on the exact same level as the Lisp code rms writes which is bundled with the releases.

Vim scripts like Chromium and Firefox plugins are inferior to their host processes. They can only modify the application behavior through a set of (supposedly) safe api calls. Since Elisp packages aren't second class citizens, like Vim scripts, it changes everything.

</comment><comment><USER3> Extensibility is the reason for Emacs' power. Lisp is just an implementation detail. You could make an equivalently powerful editor in any high-level language.

There are other extensible editors, but the line between Emacs' kernel and its extensions is drawn at a different place in Emacs than in any other popular editor. It is more likely that any given feature you're interacting with in Emacs is provided by its extension code than it would be in another editor.

Probably more important is the benefit Emacs gets from being one of the two major Unix editor projects. It has an immense community and user base.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lisp is a great dynamic programming language.

One particular feature that makes it really great for emacs (and a lot of other applications), is that you can define and COMPILE new functions, or even REDEFINE old functions.

Nowadays a lot of dynamic languages have followed the lisp model. They didn't exist when GNU emacs development started.

In the context of emacs, it allows you to edit a new command, and have the lisp in emacs evaluate it (define it) and compile it, hence integrating into emacs code, and making it available for further use. Or indeed, since most of emacs is also implemented in lisp, you can redefine any emacs function the same way, and have it taken into account immediately.

So basically, you are not "extending" emacs so much as you are just modifying it.

Also, lisp has alot of nice and fun features, like lisp macros, first class functions (and now closures), allowing for high order functions, which let you create abstractions easily when programming. Contrarily to most other custom application specific scripting language, lisp is a real algorithmic programming language without artificial limitations.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion, it's not Lisp that makes Emacs powerful. It's a pluggable architecture evolved over about four decades that makes it powerful. Lisp is an implementation detail. Eclipse has a similar architecture and a somewhat similar trajectory.

Emacs and Eclipse have an architecture that allows the creation of applications on top of them that have little to do with what one would call "their base configurations". They allow vertical adaptation to new purposes. Vim is more or less limited to extension horizontally and that's in keeping with it's philosophy of trying to do only one thing and a lightweight footprint.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. The architecture of Emacs has a dependency on eLisp and my understanding is the dependency is one of the things that has inhibited a move to multi-threading. That processor power has mostly kept the issue at bay, speaks to Emacs philosophy and these days for all its bloat, Emacs would have to be classified as relatively lightweight: the Windows install for 24.5 is a 50mb zip.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is no ending in customizing emacs because of Lisp.

For me, org-mode inside emacs makes it more powerful. Org-mode and other extensions are written in Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER7> GNU Emacs is not a Lisp Machine. It's an editor written in C/Lisp and extensible in Lisp, that's all.</comment>


Is it better to do all your reading for the year in 2 weeks? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bakadesuyo.com/is-it-better-to-do-all-your-reading-for-the-y <comment><USER2> If it were possible to read ~15 books and hundreds of articles. But not even then, because the written word is part of my life and I am not obsessed with clever ideas and "lifehacks".

"You can immerse yourself in a single author's perspective, but then it's harder to create serendipitous collisions between the ideas of multiple authors."

When I read Tolstoy, how can Nietzsche _not_ interject at the usual Deus ex machina? When I read Nabokov, how can Kafka _not_ laugh with him?</comment>


Safari Crashing for Both iOS and Mac Users, Fixes Identified - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/27/safari-crashing-how-to-fix/ <comment><USER2> Clearing history and website data resolved this problem as well. However all open tabs will be closed.

<comment> J-dawg That didn't fix it for me, every time I tap the address bar it crashes</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Interview at Startup -- What to expect? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I'm a 20 year-old web developer with a wife and a baby on the way. I have an interview at a startup on Monday, Dec 17, and have a few questions for the startup community.
First, the position is for a PHP developer. While I started out in PHP and worked in it for several years, I haven't touched it since March when I switched to Python, and I've grown a bit rusty. Can you recommend any specific area that I should brush up on?
Secondly, what sort of questions should I expect to be thrown at me? I'm not really expecting too much about programming in general, as they're going to have me write some code, but what other kinds of questions might I get asked?
Finally, what questions should I throw back at them? I've read that interviews are just as much for the potential employee as the company, and there's the obvious asking about salary, benefits, programming environment, desktop setup... But is there anything I should make sure to ask?
A bit about the company: "Galaxy IT, Inc. is working on a web application that will take your current addiction of wasting time online, and your real-world need to get things done, and make it possible for you to do both at once."
Their website is http://www.galaxyit.com
I apologize for the short time-frame between this post and my interview date. They asked me to interview on Tuesday, and since then I've frantically been trying to get things prepared. I only just now thought about asking news.YC. If you can't tell, I'm quite nervous about the interview. What they're working on sounds really neat, and the pay is much more than I'm making now (and with the baby coming, it'll really help). I really want to make a good impression on them.
Thank you. <comment><USER3> This past summer I did a couple interviews for a position that sounds similar to this one. If the interviewer is like me, these tips will be helpful:

-Do some of the Project Euler problems: <http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems> . Think about how you could optimize your solutions. -Read/skim through the 'language reference' section (<http://www.php.net/manual/en/langref.php>) of the PHP manual, paying particular attention to the PHP5 section on classes/objects.

-Familiarize yourself with a couple of the popular PHP5 frameworks (cake, symfony, codeigniter), just do get a general idea of how object-oriented web applications are done. If you have time, play around with one of the sample apps or build something simple (i.e. a blog).

-Make sure you're comfortable with all the relevant PHP and SQL vocabulary--not just the definition, but also the application.

Specifically, here are some questions from my usual set of technical questions: -Explain the difference between private, public, and protected, and give an example where each is useful. -Explain the difference between an abstract class and an interface, and when each is useful. -Explain the difference between an inner join and an outer join. -What is the difference between GET and POST? -In as much detail as you can, explain what happens between the time when you type "<http://www.google.com>" into your address bar and press enter, and the time when Google's homepage appears on your screen. (Looking for basic knowledge of DNS, routing, TCP/IP, and more specific knowledge about the HTTP protocol)

-(Given a small db written on the whiteboard,) write a handful of SQL queries (testing knowledge of joins, group by, having, subselects)

-Two PHP coding questions, one solved by writing a recursive function and one to write a basic class for string-processing.

I'd also ask a few questions about HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> (Wow, I think I wrote a comment too long for news.YC to process. I'm going to break it up and post it as replies to itself.)

It varies a lot depending on your hiring circumstances. I was hired on the spot, before the interview, because it was for an internship and I came highly recommended by a friend of the chief architect. Then when I applied to the same company for a full-time position, I had an offer on-the-spot based on my internship. OTOH, when we hired a more senior guy, he went through about 6 rounds of interviews over 3-4 months, including programming tests and full interviews with the rest of the staff.

Here's what I looked for when I was interviewing candidates who had no prior relationship with the company. (And keep in mind that I'm far from the best interviewer, and more experienced interviewers may have more creative questions):

Expect questions about each prior project that you've listed on your resume. The resume tells me what you've been involved with; during the interview, I'm going to want to find out:

1.) What precisely was your involvement? Did you write small submodules while someone else stitched them together, or did you come up with the whole architecture? Maintenance or new development? Did you have "people yell at you" responsibility?

2.) What technologies did you use (if not listed on your resume)? This includes things like your IDE, source code management system, and bugtracker. This actually wouldn't affect my "hire or don't hire" decision much (though I want to see that you at least know what IDEs, source control, and bugtracking are), but I want to know the information so that if you are hired you can get up to speed as quickly as possible.

3.) What challenges and dead-ends did you face, and how did you resolve them?

4.) Did it enter production, and how did customers respond to it?

5.) Was it a team or individual project? Many interviewees assume that the right answer is "team" and try to make some of their solo efforts sound like team projects ("Well, I had my friend helping, and there were these classmates..."), but really I like to see _both_. There are aspects to solo projects that are in some ways harder than group efforts. (And of course, the point is to see what you've really done and not what you think the interviewer wants to hear you've done...)

<comment><USER4> I always have applicants write code on a whiteboard. I usually pick a simple coding problem, like something that'd be an intro computer science problem or code kata. (I tried using psykotic's Left Factoring Regular Expressions problem off programming Reddit once, but it was wildly inappropriate for the caliber of applicants we were getting.) If you're hiring for a database design position, I might have you design a database schema instead. I'm looking for:

1.) I don't care about syntax errors. It's trivially easy to forget a semicolon or parentheses on a whiteboard and doesn't reflect poorly on you if you do (usually I'll just write them in at the end).

2.) I do care about how fast you can remember language keywords and commonly used library functions. This is usually a good proxy for experience with the language, because after any significant development these tend to get "burned in" and you can write them out instinctively. Someone who doesn't remember the syntax for a foreach loop in PHP probably hasn't programmed PHP in a while.

3.) You can make all the mistakes you want, but I'm looking at how quickly you realize they are mistakes. It's a very bad habit to write something out, look at it, realize it's wrong, and then rewrite the whole thing. (Okay, that's basically what I've been doing with my startup for the last month, but at least it's wrong on an architectural level, in ways that we couldn't have foreseen a month ago.) It's a good habit to write things down and immediately correct them if they're wrong.

4.) If you come up with the textbook algorithm immediately, it shows me that you've had this problem in class and actually remember what you learned there (I may have you do another problem then). If you come up with the textbook algorithm eventually, it shows me that you're good at thinking things through and analyzing a problem. This is probably the best situation hiring-wise. If you come up with a completely out-of-the-box solution that works and doesn't have any obvious fencepost or performance problems, it shows you're a creative thinker. This is also speaks well about you as a candidate. If you struggle and come up with something completely wrong, I'll probably prod you with questions about its behavior; this is not a good situation, but I'll look more favorably upon someone who finishes and gets the correct answer eventually than someone who gives up and says "I don't know."

5.) I like it when people use library functions rather than reinventing the wheel (particularly if they are library functions I don't know myself; though I will check and learn them myself after the interview to make sure you aren't bullshitting me ;-)). If I ask someone to write a sorting algorithm and they put down "sort()", they get points for their cheekiness, though I'll have them do another problem or add some specific requirement that makes the library useless.

6.) It's good to talk through what you're doing, for the same reasons teachers ask you to show your work. It lets you get partial credit for right-thinking but wrong-writing. And if your thinking is off but you say it aloud, I'm more likely to ask prodding questions to make you rethink; I look at this more favorably than if you got to the end, pronounced it done, and it was wrong. You're also more likely to catch the error yourself, and correcting yourself is actually a net positive.

<comment><USER4> My first few interviews, I asked "language trivia" questions, usually about simple standard library calls or concurrency issues (I assume they know the basic syntax, and if they don't I can catch it when they write code). I moved away from these in my later interviews, though, because I found they didn't really tell me anything interesting. The standard libs in most languages are too big for anyone to know them all, so this is really testing how well their experience matches up with yours, and that's not often that relevant for the job.

I'm going to ask why you want the job. The reason for this is that I've found passion is the best predictor of job performance (remember the senior software engineer who went through 3-4 months of interviews? he turned out to be a much better programmer than me, at least at this particular job, because he cared about the project so much more). Don't bullshit me with vague answers; you're not really doing yourself any favors if you apply for a job you don't really want. But if you really want to work at a company because you believe in what they're doing, say that - your passion comes through how you speak and not necessarily what you say.

I don't ask this myself, but many people who have interviewed me have: "How comfortable are you playing many different roles?" In startups, you'll be doing this a lot - the job you're hired for is probably not what you'll be doing in six months. Be sure you're comfortable with this before applying.

I also look for evidence that the candidate has done some research about us in their answers (and questions!) throughout the interview. It's a big plus if you don't just want _a_ job, but want _this_ job.

<comment><USER4> As for questions you should ask of the employer:

1.) Be sure to ask what specific tasks you will be doing. If it's a startup, they're going to say "We can't know that, because there's lots of things to do and we all play multiple roles." Acknowledge that and press them on what you'll be doing within the first month of hiring (or start with that version of the question).

The reason for this (aside from it speaking well about your engagement, and weeding out companies where the daily work will suck) is that an inability to figure out what a new employee should be doing is a _huge_ negative predictor of management skill. I took a job like this; it worked out great for the first 8 months or so, when I took his lack of direction as a signal to pick out tasks that would be good for the organization and do them. It turned bad when he decided to actually tell me to do something and then couldn't provide clear direction about what it was I was supposed to do, nor discretion to let me make the decision myself.

2.) Ask about the business model, growth rates, sources of revenue, and profitability of the startup. You'll want to know this, but it's somewhat difficult to interpret it. When I first started looking for startup jobs, I cared mostly about profitability, which was a mistake.

Basically, a "startup" as it's normally discussed on this site is a business that's growing really fast. Like, a few hundred % a year (in other words, it has to be more than doubling each year). Very few early-stage small businesses actually meet this criteria; I've never worked at one, though I've been at one or two where the market could've supported that if we'd gotten our act together and shipped product.

Profitability basically only has a bearing on whether you are likely to lose your job through no fault of your own. If the company is profitable and you are productive, you're very unlikely to get laid off. If the company is not profitable, everything is a race against running out of money. If you join an unprofitable company, be sure you find out their burn rate, runway, and expected break-even point. Make sure there's an adequate safety margin between the break-even point and runway; things tend to go wrong in startups, and everything takes twice as long as you expect. Otherwise, expect your job to be toast at the end of the runway.

On a similar note, find out where the revenue is coming from. A company that gets $4M in revenue from 100,000 customers is a lot a more stable than one that gets $4M from 4 customers. Consulting companies are even less stable: consulting revenues tend to shrink dramatically in recessions. A profitable consulting company is not a startup in the sense of this site: it can't scale at the growth rates of a typical startup, and if it wants to turn into a product company, it'll basically have to start from square one.

3.) Make sure you meet all your prospective coworkers. You'll be working with these people a lot; make sure they are people you can work with. Many startups have an employee-veto hiring policy anyway; if any employee doesn't like the new candidate, it's a no-hire. (This is why I was doing interviews, BTW.)

4.) Ask if any employees have left recently, and why. Some turnover - <USER2> 10%/year, or one employee in a firm of 10 - is natural. However, if the whole project team quit, that's a bad sign.

5.) Ask about exit strategies and where the founders see the company going over the years. There's no right answer here, but there are things to be aware of. For example, option-holding employees tend get screwed in an acquisition. Many companies will either convert options to options in the acquirer or let employees buy in before the acquisition, but there's no requirement that they do so. And in many cases, your stock grants are small enough that it doesn't matter much anyway. The only early employee I know of that got rich off a startup was a VP in a company that went IPO; most made between $3k-10k. (This is under Massachusetts culture/laws; things may be different in California or other states.)

If the founder intends to keep the company private and grow the business organically, stock grants are effectively worthless. There's no liquidity; you can't sell them. Go for a fat salary in that case.

6.) At the very end, ask about salary/benefits/stock. These things do matter, you just don't want to seem too eager about them. Companies will expect you to ask at some point, they just don't expect it to be the first thing you care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Might be useful to check out some of the PHP code your interviewer has written himself.

<http://code.google.com/u/irma.olguin.jr/>

<http://bookbuster.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/>

<http://ridiculouspysch.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/>

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.google.com/search?q=questions+ask+joining+startup>

there are a bunch of useful "top N questions" blog posts from VCs and entrepreneurs that should give you a good start.

</comment><comment><USER7> Consider putting together a list of all the "Google Interview Questions", give yourself an hour to write a brief solution to as many as you can and then ask someone you respect to review your answers. You could start with these

<http://tinyurl.com/3xtxa3>

<http://tinyurl.com/hpg7v>

<http://tinyurl.com/2fpl6y>

<http://tinyurl.com/2jqtgh>

I had a high school math teacher who gave tests with more questions then anyone could ever answer. The top score for the class on a 100 point test would often be around 8 and the average around 4. Everyone in the class learned how to deal with situations where you couldn't possibly answer all the questions perfectly. The high scorers were often people who provided partial solutions to many questions instead of perfect ones to a few.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ask about how much money is in the bank and what the burn rate is. What you want to know is "When will you go broke if you don't get revenue or more funding?"

If you care about equity, you should read up on options... But you should really treat options as worthless unless you believe there is a chance for a HUGE win.

</comment><comment><USER9> From the perspective of what you would want to ask them (you'll need to phrase more politely than my thoughts here):

Founder(s) background(s) / prior wins

Competitors

Market for product / growth potential / expected scale

How many other developers

Release schedule (ie: when is the first Beta, etc)

Founder(s) reason for starting the company (get rich, get famous, have fun, etc)

How far is the Angel or First/current funding expected to take them? Then what?

Pricing model.

<comment><USER10> I always tend to ask a question like:

In every company, there are issues and problems that everyone seems to be concerned with. For example, at my last job, there seemed to be a division between the "old timers" and the new wave of recent hires. What kinds of things do most of your employees tend to be concerned with or worry about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> follow 'brk's advice on asking questions. just thought i'd mention. you should avoid asking about salary, benefits, etc. gives the image you care more about getting paid than the actual project. and besides, if you get an offer, those questions are easily answered in a page or two of an offer letter.

just ask about their project and business. but nothing you could have easily found out on your own.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I forgot to mention,don't ask anything that is already answered on their page/blog.

Also don't ask about pay details until after they bring it up.

However, as far as options are concerned, you SHOULD (IMO) ask:

What is the size of the total pool?

What is the size of the employee pool? How are the shares distributed in terms of preferred/common?

Under the current terms, what point do the preferred shares need to hit before the employee/common options participate?

Extreme and simple example: They could grant you 5 million common options out of a total pool of 100 million with an employee pool of 25 million. Which would sound like 5% of the company and a HUGE chunk of the employee pool. The investors and founders might have 50 million preferred shares between them, but if the terms say that the preferreds split the first $500M in an equity event before the common shares participate, your 5 million shares are never likely to see any value.

I wouldn't get too far down a rat-hole with this, but asking some good questions will usually help show that you're not option-drunk and easily bought off with big, but meaningless, numbers :)

<comment><USER12> Don't do this until you have an offer.

The rule is: (s)he who says the first number, loses.

Don't be a loser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I highly doubt that anyone will revisit this thread, but I wanted to post a follow up for archiving sake, and in case anyone decides they want to know how everything ended up.

So, I felt the interview on the 17th went great. I didn't have much trouble coming up with answers to questions they asked me, and my interviewers had fairly easy-going personalities, which helped me relax a bit.

That Thursday, December 20, they asked me to return for a second interview on the following day. I got to meet the entire team (all three of them :o), see the office, and see a bit of the product. They said they'd get back to me by the end of the day and, long story short, I spent most of the weekend checking my email every 15 minutes.

Then came Christmas Eve Day: I got an email from the head honcho saying I'd been given the position, outlining my duties, and asking when I could start.

Thank you everyone who replied to this thread, your advice was invaluable!

</comment><comment><USER13> Here is the dirty little secret about evaluating the code you write in the interview:

What is on the piece of paper (or editor) doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

What happens when you and I talk about what you wrote tells me almost everything I need to know.

Less than one percent of interview code I've ever seen even compiled. What I was really looking for was:

\- Did he understand the problem?

\- How did he approach the problem?

\- Does he appear as if he has any idea what he's doing?

\- Can he explain what he has done?

\- Can he defend what he has done?

\- Does he understand the concepts of order, cleanness, iteration, branching, recursion, etc., etc., etc...

\- Based on this small sample, do I think he can do the work we need done?

\- Do I like him? Will he fit in and be a good team member?

So assuming they interview like I did (a big assumption), here's the good news...whether or not you'll do well has already been determined. So don't bother to "cram" between now and Tuesday. Relax. And have fun. Be yourself and it will all work out OK (one way or the other).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, excellent advice. Only problem is, I don't know if they'll interview like you or not.

<comment><USER13> Even if they don't, I wouldn't lose sleep about your code being perfect. As long as you can have an intelligent conversation about it (you ARE passionate about it, aren't you?), you'll be fine. Best wishes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=717800></comment>


Difficulties in Saving Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/06/24/alchemy-cant-save-moores-law/ <comment><USER2> No Mention of moving to 3D ?

I am assuming that having RAM and CPU (and other functions such as GPU or other hardware accelerators) on same die on different levels (physically close ie nano or micrometers apart) would cut latency by orders of magnitude.

3D is already done with NAND flash so I am assuming it is heat that is the problem.

Just my 10c

<comment> T-A Average distance from points in a unit circle to center is 2/3; average distance from points in a unit sphere to center is 3/4\. Or if you prefer squares and cubes, you are essentially replacing a sqrt(2) diagonal with a sqrt(3) triagonal.

Even worse, surface area available for heat dissipation grows quadratically, while volume and therefore heat generated grows cubically. That's why 3D memory is a thing (most memory cells are not active at any given time), but seriously 3D processors (trigate notwithstanding) are not.

<comment><USER3> Well, biological brains are 3D processors, and have been a thing for billions of years..

<comment> T-A You might be surprised how little 3D they are. Look at the top line model: the human cortex is only about 3 mm thick, and comprised of only six layers of neurons. It may look like a big lump of meat, but that's because it's folded to fit more area into the limited volume available in the skull. If you unfold it, you get this very thin sheet with a whopping area of 2500 cm^2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that a guy from Intel says cache coherence doesn't scale; I kinda thought it scales pretty well, especially if actual data sharing is the exceptional case that must be made to work correctly, and non-shared data is the rule and must be made fast.

<comment><USER5> > especially if actual data sharing is the exceptional case

The problem is that cache coherence does not scale, _given_ (note emphasis) that a certain amount of data is shared among CPUs.

You cannot circumvent the problem by choosing to not share much data between cores, because then you have changed the problem!

<comment><USER4> What example workload cannot be implemented efficiently if your cores communicate using coherent caches, but can be implemented efficiently if they work in some other way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real question is - can we really know that there is nothing better than CMOS?

Imagine an old star that is undergoing a collapse - the matter infalls under it's own gravity, accelerating faster and faster. At some point, the matter runs out of density - the neutrons slam into each other and the whole mass of the star going inwards at a good fraction of c tries to undergo an abrupt stop.

The leisurely free fall turns into the violence of inertia. Then, either that violence is enough, and the collapse continues towards a black hole, or it's not enough, and all we get is a boring neutron star.

Will the economical inertia behind the Moore's Law push it past each technology's clang of limits all the way towards some sort of singularity, or will it one day come to an abrupt halt against an immovable wall of the structure of the universe?

The latter, obviously.

Would that wall be CMOS? We can't really know until we hit it.

<comment><USER7> There are quite a few options besides CMOS all with desirable properties and some of those with potential feature sizes smaller than Silicon. The problem is that none of these are economical at scale and that is where the problem lies, it's an economical issue, not so much a technical issue.

Bismuth, Gallium-Arsenide and other variations on that theme, various superconductors used for processing elements all have the potential or have already surpassed Silicon for various parameters. But none have done so in a way that would allow massive adoption.

So for now the 'economical inertia' as you put it so eloquently seems to be exactly where the problem is, inertia is only useful to get you past a hump when you're still moving forward, when you're already stuck it is a hindrance.

<comment><USER8> Any new technology will have a really hard time competing economically with an industrial process that has been refined for five decades. The question is whether there are people willing to pay a hefty premium for the new technology to finance its development.

<comment><USER7> It's a bit like the combustion engine. A completely different tech (such as optical) may be a better bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So time to write efficient code and start working hard on easy multi- threading? Cause if we hit "the wall", all consumers can do is buy the fastest CPU with the most cores they can get, and then never in his live again will he be able to upgrade. So those resources is what we will need to do it with.

<comment><USER10> I think when we actually hit The Wall, we'll keep on improving (at a slowed pace) for a while afterwards based on the not-so-low-hanging fruit we've ignored up til then.

<comment><USER11> Frankly, I'm kind of interested in the prospect of specialized hardware coming back.

The trend since the mid-1980s, when the Intel 80386 was introduced, has been for specialized chips to be replaced due to commodity chips beating them comprehensively in single-core speed; problems which once required specialized hardware and core designs were either solved or obviated by massive improvements in scalar hardware.

Now that this brute force method is starting to peter out, we might see a rise of new, specialized designs once again, to solve specific problems which gain substantial speedups from very specific kinds of parallelism. Systolic arrays are one example. We're already doing something like this by pressing GPUs into service as computational hardware, but it can go farther.

<comment><USER12> This is definitely already starting to happen.

Modern server CPUs have FPGAs in them. I was able to speed up Blockchain transaction signing and verification by 2 order of magnitude by utilizing the Intel in-build FPGAs.

Mobile phone SoCs already have semi-specialized processors in them. Microsoft's Hololens has something what they call "HPU" Holographic Processing Unit. Google just made public that they have a TensorFlow ASIC. Google's phone radar thingy has it's own ASIC if I'm not mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have been wondering for a long time if it would be possible to make a computational device out of subatomic particles. But i guess if possible that would take hundreds of years.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if hardware restraints might actually improve software. Instead of "what the hardware giveth, the software taketh away," the industry will instead begin to say, "well, this is all the performance we've got so let's make the code half the size it is right now and eliminate 50% of the bugs."

</comment><comment><USER15> The Singularitarians aren't going to be too happy about that. They've been spending all their time getting ready for the Strong AI future built on the inevitability of Moore's law and now it may never come.

Maybe biotech will lead the next tech revolution. I can see people doing all sorts of unholy stuff with CRISPR. It's a technology though that, at least in the U.S, I can't see the regulatory agencies really supporting development of. It's almost too powerful of a technology.

It's sort of how not much has happened in the way of nuclear power design lately. So much can go wrong with that technology that the regulatory agencies never approve anything.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where all the socially acceptable technologies have been developed and technologies like advanced nuclear or radical CRISPR biotech that could take things to the next level are permanently forbidden because they are too powerful and dangerous.

<comment><USER16> Speaking as a singularitarian: The only thing that has stopped is free scaling of photolithography.

Our most advanced computing systems fill the equivalent volume of a large snowflake. Scaling down is over; the future is scaling up and sideways. (Power consumption, price...)

The only unit that ever _really_ mattered is amortized flops per inflation adjusted dollar.</comment></comment>


If you make at least $34,000/yr after tax, you are in the global 1%  - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1--You-need-34k-income-global-elite--half-worlds-richest-live-U-S.html <comment><USER2> Beware of the angle of counter-attack by the rich, trying to make us identify with /our/ 1%, in the face of the /world's/ 99%.</comment>