Flight Control (#1 paid app) iPhone Game Sales Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://firemintgames.blogspot.com/2009/04/flight-control-sales-numbers.html

<comment><USER2> It says on their site the regular price is $2.99 and "now for a limited time" $0.99. I wonder if it was $2.99 during most of those 700k sales, netting them nearly $1.5M after Apple's cut.

<comment><USER3> They're started selling a lot at $0.99 so I would guess probably at least 70% of the total sales but still that is a great achievement having launched 2 months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This game is awesome, I've purchased a bunch of more 'in-depth' iPhone games but I've had the most fun with this one. I would definitely suggest trying it out.

<comment><USER5> I think that the games that are successful on mobile devices are the ones that best understand the platform. A port of an existing PC/console game will invariably be difficult to use or have compromises. Games that are quick, easy to learn and utilise the platforms features are most likely to succeed.

Flight Control is an excellent example of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice money for a month. Game looks interesting, too.

Is it better marketing or better quality, for an app without obvious universal appeal like this? Guess I'm wondering how the average user discovers apps...

<comment><USER7> The game is actually pretty fun, it's definitely the only game I tend to play at least once a day. It has a good combination of being easy to pick up but still somewhat difficult. Games are also quick, perfect when you're on a bus or taxi and need something to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Flight Control is a simple but great game! I'm only playing Flight Control and PocketGod when I'm have time for gaming on my IPhone.

As an IPhone game developer myself, I really appreciate their openess with their sales figure and that certainly is a motivating factor for us. I've also been collecting a list of sales numbers that other Iphone developers have released. Probably will write out a blog post with those resources when we launch our first game.

Will be interesting to see what PocketGod does.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity is there a "game" to the PocketGod app? Or is it just the island and you knock the tribal guy around a bit?

I have the flight control game and I must say that the developer did a great job on fit and finish. Gameplay is simple but fun and can get pretty hectic. Overall a good showing though.

<comment><USER3> PocketGod developers have been releasing updates frequently, adding additional islands and objects that you can throw at the tribal guys.

If you consider GTA a game, why not pocketgod?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 10% off at Starbucks when you buy with Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://coinforcoffee.com/hn <comment><USER2> At this point with btc volatility being what it is today, you could save or lose 10% just by standing in line.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a Starbucks Gold Card (earned from 30 drinks in 12 months). [https://www.starbucks.com/card/rewards](https://www.starbucks.com/card/rewards)

This gives you every 13th drink free (1 per 12 = 8.3% discount). I think this just crowdsources 1 mega gold card.

I guess if you average out the drink prices... I could use the free drink on the $6 soy latte and use the $2 tall coffee as 1 of 12 drinks to earn that. So I could squeeze out some extra % points that way.

If they're really creative maybe it does geographical hedging as well, using the cheap drinks in Florida to earn free drinks in Manhattan (no idea if Starbucks prices fluctuate geographically.

<comment><USER4> If they are using the same card, they are opening themselves up to a giant world of hurt from cheaters.

<comment><AUTHOR> We aren't.

EDIT: details

Every users gets their own card to prevent tampering and crazy double-spend stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! You might remember our last app, Card for Coin, where we were buying Starbucks for bitcoin. Well, here's the other side- we're looking forward to your feedback.

The websocket stuff is a little touch and go, so please let me know if you have issues. Let me know if anyone has an issue loading a card or getting a refund, and I'll work it out.

<comment><USER5> Did you, and if so, how did you address the legal issues brought up in your previous post? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7157180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7157180)

<comment><USER6> Is it still money laundering now that the IRS has said that Bitcoin is property and not currency?

<comment><USER7> > Is it still money laundering now that the IRS has said that Bitcoin is > property and not currency?

Since that was an interpretation of categories in tax law, which are completely different than those applicable to money laundering, the IRS determination on how bitcoin is taxes probably has no bearing on any analysis of how money laundering laws apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does this work? Where/how are you generating the barcode? Is there some hidden Starbucks API?

<comment><USER9> I don't know anything about this app or Starbucks, but barcodes are basically just graphical encodings of numbers, and there is free barcode generation code out there (eg. in python's Reportlab package). The numbers are purchased in bulk from the retailer.

<comment><USER10> I hope they aren't serialized

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What exchange rate do you get for your bitcoin? Does a user even see the potential exchange rate before the transfer? What margin (if any) are you taking on the currency exchange? Why is the site so lacking in details?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use the current Coinbase exchange rate. No margin on the exchange. We're trying to keep it simple / focused on newer bitcoin users, but I can definitely flesh out the FAQ.

The refund math is also in the user's favor- more about that in other comments.

<comment><USER12> You should use BitPay's BBB (Bitcoin Best Bid) instead, it's looking at all a number of exchange order books and giving your the best price: [https://bitpay.com/api/rates/usd](https://bitpay.com/api/rates/usd)

Disclaimer: I work at BitPay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Are you in the Atlanta office?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also about the service: is the website compliant with AML and KYC regulation? You might be acting as a money transmitter under FinCEN rules. Might want to consult a lawyer.

<comment><AUTHOR> This time, I definitely consulted a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I use the Starbucks app, I get credit towards a free item (it works out to an 8.3% discount if you always buy the same thing).

A 1.7% savings really isn't enough to interest me...

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to hear a real economist's take on this but from my personal opinion Bitcoin will never take off as a transactional currency because of it's inherently limited nature, and here's the reasons contributing to it:

1\. There's a finite amount of them that can ever be mined

2\. There's no central governing body control the rate of inflation/deflation through monetary policy.

By definition this creates a deflationary currency. Meaning as a currency it gains value the more goods and services it can be redeemed for, and the more valuable it is the less likely it is that people will redeem it for goods or services.

Meaning if all of a sudden more merchants started accepting bitcoin then bitcoins will appreciate as it's underlying "value" grows, but people will stop spending bitcoin because that coffee you bought for 3 bucks today might be 30 bucks next year. In turn merchants will spend less money building infrastructure for bitcoins since no one uses it.

Does that make any sense?

<comment><USER16> From my point of view, this is not too unlike what we have without Bitcoin. With USD or CAD, consumers still have to make a decision whether it is worth exchanging a number of dollars a point in time for something else when instead they can use that money to make more money and eventually have "30 bucks next year".

I can see how making more money with Bitcoin is different than with USD or CAD though, if I were to consider only what you've laid out. With the latter two currencies, I would have to learn about different investment strategies and figure out what would actually make me more money, things as a consumer I don't even know about. But with Bitcoin, I could just hold onto them and except to have more money in the future.

What I am trying to say is I don't think what you've laid out is something new, this incentive–to hold onto money so I can more the future–already exists with our currencies today, but Bitcoin happens to give a little spin to that incentivize–which is it'll easier to have more money in the future.

I would love to hear from a real economist too but I don't think it hurts to take our brains out on a little walk.

<comment><USER15> See point #2. Central monetary bodies specifically change monetary policy to prevent deflation, worse case they can just print more money to cause artificial inflating to combat deflation.

Bitcoin doesn't have this defense mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You need to send an email with the barcode and 25 minutes after that sweep the funds back...I've tried to use this twice and not seen my code.

Update: refreshing the page seems to help

Update 2: I just used my code and it worked great! Nice work guys!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for sticking with it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The big question... is this actually useable at Starbucks? If I show a barista a 3rd-party, non-Starbucks affiliated app, and ask them to scan it, will they do it? Or just look at me like I've grown 3 heads? Even if it is a valid barcode (and still not clear on where that's coming from either - I don't understand the 'crowdsourcing a gold card' thing - can someone explain?)

<comment><USER17> I just did it...it was amazing! I'd prefer to keep a balance alive for longer.

<comment><AUTHOR> How long would work, you think? I think today people are loading the BTC at the office, but I'm not sure that'll be the most common case. Maybe a "more time" button would help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://coinforcoffee.com/#how-it-works](https://coinforcoffee.com/#how-it- works)

This design looks strangely familiar... :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, we tweaked it a bit since last time you guys saw it, but not much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm wondering what you have to gain out of promoting bitcoin so much. are you heavily invested in it?

<comment><AUTHOR> If by "heavily" you mean "bought a tiny bit after the January crash" then.. yes!

People should be able to spend their money however they want. That's what we're excited about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The linked page says it takes 25 minutes to get your money back, but the FAQ says it takes only 15 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Those are both wrong. The barcode expires in 25 minutes, but you can hit "I'm done" for a quick refund. I'll fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I assume one has to wait something like 10 minutes to stop double spending.

I want coffee now not in 10 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, you don't have to wait 10 minutes- we've just had issues with the websocket stuff. Refreshing the page works if that doesn't. Unless something broke, you can pay and get a card in under 3 minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The volatility of Bitcoin's exchange rate far out ways the ten percent discount.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does Starbucks have an API for creating gift cards and transferring balances?

<comment><USER25> It would be a big opportunity for money laundering, so I doubt it.

<comment><USER26> Oh please. You cannot "launder money" with Starbucks gift cards unless you use a completely ridiculous definition of the term (which occasionally you find over-enthusiastic regulators doing, but that is no excuse).

<comment><USER27> If someone buys Starbucks gift cards with dirty money, by selling the gift card at a discount, you get laundered money back.

It's could be even more advantageous if you sell the gift cards for bitcoins, which can be sent anywhere in the world and anonymously exchanged for cash in nearly any currency/country through localbitcoins.

<comment><USER26> That's not how money laundering works.

Let's say you start out with drug money. You would like to get this money into the banking system so you can use it to buy a house. This is a standard money laundering problem.

If you turn up at the bank with bags full of cash, the bank will ask where you got that money from, and lots of proof that it was legitimate. They will also file paperwork with the government stating that you made suspicious transactions, or they might just deny you entirely. Obviously, you can't say "I got this money selling drugs" so you need a plausible explanation - this is what money launderers do.

So you take your drug money and buy lots of gift cards. Then you resell them at a discount. What you get back is .... cash (or bitcoins which are essentially digital cash). So the bank asks you the same questions. Your explanation is, "I got this money selling gift cards at a loss". This does not hold water, will not be accepted by the bank and thus does not solve your problem, or even take a step towards solving your problem.

<comment><USER28> Lets say instead that you start out with stolen credit card numbers. The story is the same except now you at least end up with the cash.

<comment><USER26> A legitimate business being abused by carders is not money laundering either. If that was the case every single online store in existence would be guilty of money laundering. I've heard stories of some businesses that have seen 30-40% fraud rates on card transactions at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any plans for branching this out on the retailer side? I can imagine any business that already has a gift card program in place and wants to impliment bitcoin payments would be interested in this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Many, many plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is great. Why is there any limit to the amount of time I have to keep the "bitcoin/dollars" on the barcode? I'd rather load it up and use it when convinient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly, I'm worried about trust. The thought was people might be worried that they paid their BTC for nothing. I'll chat with the guys about this, we definitely need to look into a better time solution.

The other thing is- gift cards are all about vendor lock-in, and that's bullshit. Thus the focus on getting your money back in your pocket.

<comment><USER31> It might be interesting to approximate how remainders work in Google Now: set a time _or place_ to trigger a notification on a pending refund, and permit rescheduling within reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> California (and some other states) allow you to cash out gift cards under $10. I've cashed out eCards at Starbucks before, so it may be possible to exchange residual BTC for cash.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wait a second. Is this the same business that was suspended while they were figuring out legal issues? Anyone know what I'm talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, check out the other comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 6MB bg image is _too big_

Edit: _was_ too big (they fixed it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, thanks! @chris-martin was like "I don't know images!" but then immediately took care of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can you use this service in Mexico or Canada? It doesn't seem to be covered anywhere, or maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

<comment><USER36> Unfortunately we are US only at the moment, but we hope to be able to serve outside the states soon.

<comment><USER37> Is this a concept that can be eventually used with other outlets, such as supermarket chains, or any other reasonably popular services that uses gift cards? Or am I missing something that is specific to Starbucks?

<comment><USER36> Those are some really good ideas.

Starbucks was good for us for a bunch of reasons, and also hopefully there are people in the bitcoin community who like their daily Starbucks.

Edit - sentence structure

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Im interested in exactly how you are handling refunds. Can you describe it for us?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. @chris-martin explained the math in another comment, so I imagine you're wondering how we do refunds in bitcoin? The only easy / customer-friendly way we could see to do that was to request an email address, and send that email bitcoin via Coinbase. We didn't think BIPS-70 or any other solutions would work for this, since most people aren't familiar, and the whole purpose of the refund is to cement trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm sorry to digress, but...

...what's with the 6.3 MiB background image?!?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha sorry that landing page was a little hasty. Optimizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 10% off in what denomination USD or BTC?

<comment> chris-martin Yes! (Both.)

You'll end up spending an amount of BTC that is equivalent to 90% of the cost of your coffee. So, an example: If you choose the $10 option, and $10 is worth 10mBTC (exchange rate made up to simplify the math), then you'd pay 9mBTC and have $10 available to spend at Starbucks. If you then spend $5 of that at Starbucks, you'll end up receiving a refund of 4.5mBTC (the equivalent of the remaining $5).

<comment><USER26> How is that discount funded though? I mean, who is paying the other 10%?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now? Us.

<comment><USER41> So you put USD on Starbucks gift cards, sell the code to be used for a drink and receive the money in BTC. You're amassing BTC from disparate sources but it seems you'd be paying a slight premium, however you wouldn't need to register with any exchange.

You do get a pre-loading bonus of bitcoins to play with and you can use those to generate profits - like 1000 people put $10 worth of BTC on the app, spend $5 on a coffee then you have $5000 in BTC to "play" with, eg to sell on.

This does all look pretty suspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do _not_ trade on any reserves from customers like that. We're not the Gox of gift cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really excited about the new sidechains concept. Can't wait for the first attempt.

<comment><USER42> what's that?

<comment><USER13> The ability to denominate cryptocurrencies in other cryptocurrencies. It's similar to having the dollar back by gold.

[http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/adam-back-sidechains- can...](http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/adam-back-sidechains-can-replace- altcoins-bitcoin-2-0-platforms/2014/04/10)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> US only I assume?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might work outside the States? But the question really is "will US gift cards work" wherever you are. We've got someone testing in Japan who says he'll report back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Major plus for your website to feature a Nexus instead of an iPhone. It instantly gives me a comfortable feeling of professionalism. I like the idea of the app and its well-executed. However, even if I would get a 100% discount I wouldn't take it.

Starbucks equals common denominator hyped hipster coffee charged for at premium rates due to its viral-branding and A-locations. I would rather drink water from a sprinkler at a toilet-venue nearby than mix myself in the crowd which is hanging out at Starbucks and let the you-are-our-special-customer indoctrinated employees serve me a coffee.

[http://bad.coffee](http://bad.coffee)

<comment><USER45> I couldn't agree more. Not to mention, in virtually any reasonably sized metropolitan area there are generally plenty of places that simply make better tasting coffee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. We're still figuring out how to address the smaller shops, since they have a variety of payment systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Could we please bring this to a coffee chain that makes good coffee? Peets or Philz?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we can- and we are. We started with Starbucks for a number of reasons, but I can't wait to get Peets in there. Hell, I'd really love to get some good indie shops- but we've gotta start somewhere.

<comment><USER46> Great to hear. Thank you!

I love how my real question which received and answer from the company was voted down. Sorry but Starbucks is not really good coffee. I am writing this from the Philz in Palo Alto :)

<comment><USER14> Because you're wrong. Starbucks certainly makes 'good' coffee. Can you make better coffee? Absolutely. I'm enough of a coffee snob that I rarely get coffee while I'm out, preferring to make it at home where I can control all the variables.

That being said... claiming that Starbucks isn't 'good' coffee is just hipster silliness... Yes, I realize it's mainstream now, and your fedora fits in better at Philz, but Starbucks coffee is certainly 'good' enough for millions of people every day, and it seems like an obvious first choice for an application like this.

<comment><USER46> 42, not a hipster, no Fedora (well I have a VM running it). I like my coffee in the morning, french press at home (Peet's Garuda). Peet's if I am out and about and once in a great while when I get a chance I love to make it to Philz. I have disliked Starbucks coffee before it was cool thank you very much :)

The comment about Starbuck was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I guess I can see it being taken as Hipster fashion.

<comment><USER47> Hey, can I have some of that nice coffee you're having? I live in Russia. I can send you some of Art. Lebedev's (don't know if it's any good, but they roast their own mix, so you can compare) I can PayPal you the money and you'll ship me the coffee. You can ship to my US-based P.O. box.

I run Ubuntu on my laptop and CentOS on KVM CentOS VM on a server.

Please drop me a line via email (in profile) or any other means (Facebook et el.) [http://about.com/nleschov](http://about.com/nleschov)

<comment><USER48> If you're going to have someone from the US mail you coffee, at least ask for something good, like Intelligentsia or Toby's Estate :)

Peets is a huge chain that's merely less successful than Starbucks. (I like both Starbucks and Peets, FWIW, but I wouldn't pay for someone to ship those to me overseas :)

<comment><USER47> Ah thanks. I'm not that into coffee, just wanted to try something new that someone else likes, at random. Thanks for the suggestion!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Request: Officially oppose TPP Source Code provision - <AUTHOR> http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2015-November/022243.html <comment><USER2> We changed the title from "TPP makes copy left licences illegal". The HN guidelines ask you to _please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait_ , so making a title more misleading and linkbait is right out.

</comment><comment><USER3> A comment I just sent to the list:

"I'm not going to second this request until we get someone slightly more informed to make a comment.

I'm _pretty sure_ that this section does not mean what many people on this list will immediately jump to - I'm inclined to believe that this is about protecting proprietary software vendors from mandatory source code disclosure by states (with the exception of critical infrastructure and regulatory requirements, as it specifies), and will not in any way impact private copyright arrangements such as the GPL.

Any legally minded folk care to comment?"

<comment><USER4> From the text of the TPP: "Party means any State or separate customs territory for which this Agreement is in force;"

So that would seem to not include citizens or corporations of the State itself.

Edit: This is a good general skill to remember in reading/drafting your own contracts. Capitalized terms usually have a definition in the contract that might be different from what you expect.

<comment><USER5> > 1\. No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of > software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, > distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such > software, in its territory.

Could it affect the international enforceability of open source licenses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nonsense. The first three words are important here: "No _Party_ shall...". The Parties to the TPP are the member states, not the persons within those states.

This is entirely about declaring that China can't say "Microsoft can't sell software here unless they give us their source code". (Yes, China isn't part of the TPP. But the TPP is intended to be a model for future trade deals, so there are lots of clauses which have zero effect on the signatories but will affect China.)

<comment><USER7> Exactly. This has long been a contentious issue between US firms and China. IBM recently caved and let Chinese authorities review their source.

[http://fortune.com/2015/10/16/ibm-source-code- china/](http://fortune.com/2015/10/16/ibm-source-code-china/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry, but the headline ("TPP makes copy left licences illegal" until the mods change it as linkbait) is nonsense. The actual affect of this section is appears to be to prevent governments ("Party" here pretty clearly means a party to the treaty - read "signatory" if that helps) from making proprietary software illegal.

We can argue about whether that's a good thing, but it has no effect on copyleft, as section 3(a) makes clear.

<comment><USER9> So, question is, where does a government owned / run entity (say, a university, in some countries sit), wrt being a "Party"? It seems to me this could still bring such entities into play if they are seen as acting on behalf of a "Party".

<comment><USER10> Are there universities that can impose legal restrictions on imports?

<comment><USER9> I don't know, but I'm mostly concerned that "distribution" is included, because Universities certainly can impose restrictions on that, through copyright law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So if I'm not mistaken, "Party" (capital P) refers to a national signatory of the TPP, right? As opposed to "some guy out there." Wouldn't that mean that this would prevent nation-states from requiring copyleft in order to use or distribute that software? Is there even a threat of that? Or is this perhaps relating to potential requirements that you for example share your source code with the Chinese government in order to sell to customers there?

EDIT: As opposed to, for example, GPL requirements that are imposed on individuals by individuals, not TPP Parties.

</comment><comment><USER12> The title is flamebait. The clause in question is:

> 1\. No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of > software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, > distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such > software, in its territory.

The worst interpretation of that I can come up with is that it would be against the treaty to _require_ open sourcing software as a condition of import, which is very far from banning it.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, in the case of the GPL, the exporting person is the one requiring that the source be available, it's not a condition placed on the import by the importing nation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can we get the title un-editorialized? It's pure flamebait. There's some worthy discussion to have about this clause but it's not going to happen with that title.

</comment><comment><USER13> Local governments, putting IT out to tender, should describe the VALUE of each feature. EG can work in local dialect (Exxx), source code is openly available (Exxx), we can modify and rebuild (Exxx), nearby support teams are familiar with and can do source mods (Exxx). The statement "word processor must be open source" might not match TPP.

</comment><comment><USER14> So does this mean a "Party" cannot refuse closed source software used for common features in a business, like email or Desktop OS?</comment>


End at Cambridge Analytica: failed rebrands, fleeing clients and nerf basketball - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/inside-final-days-cambridge-analytica-failed-rebrands-fleeing-clients-nerf-n875321 <comment><USER2> scapegoat.</comment>


A Van, an Excavator and a Slew of ATM Thefts, Northern Ireland Police Need Help - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/712746440/a-van-an-excavator-and-a-slew-of-atm-thefts-northern-ireland-police-plead-for-he <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the killdozer.</comment>


Let's Stop the Unix Time Insanity - <AUTHOR> http://creativepark.net/1408 <comment><USER2> I have no idea what the author is proposing, but I'm just posting to point out that it isn't the unix timestamp that is broken: it's dates in general.

There is simply no algorithm that accounts for their behaviour all the time. The best you can do is have one that works most of the time, and then have a table of exceptions (which has to be locale based).

For example, what date is 15330 days after February 30(!) 1712 in Sweden?[1]

 _In November 1699, Sweden decided that, rather than adopting the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740._

Great.. except:

 _In accordance with the plan, February 29 was omitted in 1700, but due to the Great Northern War no further reductions were made in the following years._

Oops. Oh well:

 _In January 1711, King Charles XII declared that Sweden would abandon the calendar, which was not in use by any other nation and had not achieved its objective, in favour of a return to the older Julian calendar. An extra day was added to February in the leap year of 1712, thus giving it a unique 30-day length_

But the Julian calendar sucks[2], so:

 _In 1753, one year later than England and its colonies, Sweden introduced the Gregorian calendar, whereby the leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with February 17 being followed by March 1_

Once you start doing date work you'll find these crazy cases all the time. Try and tell me today's date on Mount Athos...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calenda...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calendar)

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_reck...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_reckoning)

<comment><USER3> His main beef seems to be that time isn't as simple as i++ and he really wish it were. But that's a lot to do with the fact that time is based on the spin and orbit of Earth around the sun.

I think, that he's seriously suggesting that we find a unit of time that can be guaranteed to just increment and not be subject to leap stuff or calendar adjustments and can go forward and backwards in time as simple increments and decrements.

A de-coupling between the time counter and our perception of time as a human concept.

Maybe use the concept of a second, but not in relation to our calendar. So instead of being "seconds since 1970" it's just "seconds".

I guess the idea being that you'd have a guaranteed increment only counter for seconds that have passed, but without coupling that to an actual calendar.

I'd probably ask what the problem was that created this thought, maybe there's an answer to that instead.

<comment><USER4> _> I'd probably ask what the problem was that created this thought, maybe there's an answer to that instead._

OP here. That article is old and I really wish it wasn't on the front page. If I remember correctly, at the time this was written, there were some pretty big outages and failures that originated from apps assuming time was pretty much a linear monotonic value. So the motivation to write this was not only for myself, but to attempt and find a better solution for timestamps as needed by many apps.

There is no technical reason for the timestamp to jump around, and to convert to and from "human" time we already need libraries (especially if we're looking at points in the past or the future), so the argument that system timestamps _MUST_ map to actual time of day is somewhat moot. As it is, the Unix timestamp attempts to be somewhat in the middle, in the end satisfying neither computer nor human requirements. So the idea was to separate those two timing formats completely.

<comment><USER5> _a linear monotonous value_

I think you mean "monotonic". Though lots of non-geeks would probably say that "monotonous" applies too. :-)

<comment><USER4> You're right. Corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author's proposal, for those who (understandably) did not glean it from the article, is that the UNIX timestamp becomes absolutely monotonic and, in the case of leap seconds, a day becomes 86,401 UNIX seconds long. Right now UNIX days are always exactly 86,400 seconds long, and time goes backwards a second when a leap second is added.

> I know there is a lot of smugness going on in developer circles where people > get high on posting comments such as "of course it is like this. it's the > way we've done it forever, it's the only way."

What the author perceives as "smugness" is a reaction to criticism of the status quo without understanding and addressing the benefits of the status quo.

I'm not preemptively dismissing the author's proposal, but you would have to overcome some fairly serious hurdles. Most notably, you would not be able to reliably construct dates in the future, because it is not generally known when leap seconds will be added. So it is unknowable what the "monotonic timestamp" for Jan 1, 2023 00:00:00 is, for example.

I think a better answer to the problem is the leap second smear that Google has implemented: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology- and-l...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping- seconds.html)

<comment><USER4> OP here. I really wish this hadn't been submitted, but it's here so I might as well...

 _> Most notably, you would not be able to reliably construct dates in the future_

You already need libraries for these functions. The only difference is that right now, those libraries have to calculate against a moving target instead of one that behaves predictably. I wrote this post a long time ago to suggest a strict(er) divide between computer timestamps and human timestamps, because Unix timestamps are in effect neither.

There are countless apps that implicitly assume timestamps are linearly counted upwards. Most people would say those are bugs, but they'd only be right on superficial grounds. What most applications rightly want is a monotonic, predictable way to count the passing of time and to exchange that data with other apps.

My idea was to introduce such a linear counter for apps that want it, not (as some people here obtusely suggested) replacing the Unix timestamp with this no matter the ecosystem breakage.

<comment><USER6> > You already need libraries for these functions.

I'm not sure if you caught my point. Library or no, it is _impossible_ to construct future dates because it is _unknown_ when leap seconds will be inserted until six months or so before it happens.

Leap seconds are based on minute changes in the rotation of the earth, which are unpredictable.

I added this to my comment later, but I think a better way to get a strictly monotonic timestamp is to smear the leap second: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology- and-l...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping- seconds.html)

> There are countless apps that implicitly assume timestamps are linearly > counted upwards.

There are also countless apps that implicitly assume that minutes are 60 seconds, hours are 3600 seconds, days are 86,400 seconds. Your scheme would break these apps.

<comment><USER4> I think we're misunderstanding each other.

      > Library or no, it is impossible to construct future dates because it is unknown
      > when leap seconds will be inserted until six months or so before it happens.

This problem exists whether the Unix timestamp actually jumps or not. At some point, a reference table will have to be updated with the most current leap second data - otherwise you couldn't accurately count seconds between to points in time anyway. If that much precision is actually needed is another thing entirely. Again, the idea is just to make a cleaner separation between the two worlds.

      > Your scheme would break these apps.

Again, and I already said this multiple times now, the idea is not to abolish the Unix timestamp and ignore whatever breaks. Instead I suggested to introduce a linear counter for apps that want it. I might be wrong of course, but I believe using this monotonic counter instead would greatly reduce complexity and potential for bugs in many applications.

<comment><USER6> > This problem exists whether the Unix timestamp actually jumps or not.

No it doesn't. I can tell you authoritatively that the UNIX timestamp for 2023-01-01 00:00 UTC is 1672560000. That value is not dependent on future changes to the rotation of the Earth.

Now it _is_ true that I cannot tell you precisely how many physical seconds there are between now and then, because I do not know how many leap seconds will be added in the meantime. But in practice I think this is less critical. Applications that care about this probably use a more specialized time scale anyway. But it would be strange to put an appointment in your calendar for midnight and find that later on it had flipped to being at 11:59pm the previous day.

> Again, and I already said this multiple times now, the idea is not to > abolish the Unix timestamp and ignore whatever breaks. Instead I suggested > to introduce a linear counter for apps that want it.

I understand what you are saying. I'm just saying that your proposal trades one surprise for another. An app author might think "oh yes, a monotonic time sounds nice" and start using it, only to find that they are broken later because they were surprised that a minute could be 61 seconds long.

<comment><USER7> > I can tell you authoritatively that the UNIX timestamp for 2023-01-01 00:00 > UTC is 1672560000.

That assumes the calendar definition does not change. What if a 10 month calendar with a new year that starts in spring somehow becomes widely popular and adopted as the standard sometime in the next 10 years?

Then suddenly 2023-01-01 is _not_ 1672560000 and is actually 1680332400.

<comment><USER6> UTC is defined in terms of days. UTC calendar dates are presumed to use the Gregorian calendar. 2023-01-01 in the Gregorian calendar maps to a specific day (Julian day 2459946).

If you wanted to use a different calendar, you would need to map it to Julian days also to convert between the two.

The idea that the world would suddenly change to a new calendar is highly unlikely, and if it did happen it is not at all clear what the correct behavior would be for future dates that had been specified before the switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> Unix timestamps are thoroughly and unnecessarily broken. They should be a continuum._

If you assume that system time is a continuum I have some bad news for you: system time is actually a user preference. Users can change it any moment to whatever they feel like, no time machine required. Given that, leap seconds are small potatoes. If you propose we change this and take away user's ability to set system time... well, there might be some merit in this from purely theoretical point of view, but in real world where batteries die, clocks get out of sync, and tons of software already rely on existing behavior - I don't think your proposal is likely to get very far :-)

Now, if you want a continuum, it's already there: look up CLOCK_MONOTONIC.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "a date like this:" > R(I, T, Z) = D > Those four final words...

So yeah. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, or maybe the author is referring to another random set of 4 words?

<comment><USER10> Congratulations! You have won the pedantic comment of the day award!

<comment><USER11> I didn't really get what the author was referring to with "those final four words" either, this hardly seems like pedantry to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meh. Sounds to me like the author recently got burned by not knowing how Unix timestamps work.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't assume anything, but it would be great if the blog post provided any kind of possible alternative. Right now it really just sounds like a misguided rant.

<comment><USER4> The idea is, instead of making the timestamp jump around (leading to both overlap and gaps), to make it a continuous linear counter. What's misguided about it?

I realize we've been stuck with the Unix timestamp for so long it's become somewhat impossible for many to acknowledge the points where it breaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you think that the problem is something called "Unix Time", then you do not actually understand the problem.

The time used for "Unix Time" is actually UTC, which is a standard that is specified in international standards that predate Unix. It is specified in current international standards for everything from aviation to HTTP requests.

If Unix tried to use something else, you'd generate massively more confusion for every Unix developer as they were having to figure out the current conversion to what is actually required for interacting with the rest of the world.

<comment><USER6> > The time used for "Unix Time" is actually UTC

Unix Time is not UTC; it is a linear representation that is surjective onto UTC. It is easy to map between the two but they are not the same. They are not even isomorphic or bijective because leap seconds have no unique representation in Unix Time.

The Unix Time representation gives up full equivalence with UTC in order to provide some useful guarantees (days are always exactly 86,400 seconds long, midnight always satisfies x % 86,400 == 0, etc), but also creates other surprises (time can go backwards when a leap second occurs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What exactly is the call to action here? For kernel developers to change how time works, and probably break thousands of drivers and applications, based on a blog post?

<comment><USER4> No, willful misunderstanding aside, the idea is to provide a single continuous counter to apps that want it. If you look closely at most implementations, that's how many apps actually expect it to work.

<comment><USER16> There already is a continuous monotonic timer available in most operating systems, it just happens to be relative to some internal counter local to that system (and depending on virtualization layer doesn't always provide monotonic guarantees). This value can generally be translated into a fixed (and vice- versa), serialized timestamp for persistence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least on a single system, it's not that hard. You have to get over the fact that you can't compute accurate intervals by recording two human-datetime timestamps. Even aside from the myriad edge cases around date arithmetic, an administrator (or NTP) can always reset the clock between the endpoints of your interval, and your computation may be very wrong.

If you want a human timestamp, use gettimeofday[0] and related functions. If you want something to compute actual elapsed seconds with, use high-resolution timestamps([2] and [3]). You just can't have both, and that's because of the way human dates work, not the way we represent them.

[0] [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/get...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/gettimeofday.html) [1] [http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/cgi-bin/man- cgi?gethrtime+3](http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?gethrtime+3) [2] [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/cl...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/clock_gettime.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the happiest moments for me when starting at my current job was the day I saw that all our servers were set to UTC as the default time zone. Leap seconds may cause some pain every 3 years or so, but a huge number of problems in system time accounting can be avoided by just keeping everything in UTC, and translating into a given timezone representation only at the highest possible level, just before displaying information to end users.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's some great stuff about Unix time on this page:

The Future of Leap Seconds [http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/onlinebib.html](http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/onlinebib.html)

See especially the 'Distinguishing the two different meanings for time' section. It makes a good distinction between _time-of-day_ and _time interval_. Unix time measures the first.

</comment><comment><USER19> Time is relative, right? If anything we need a protocol to describe how the observer views time, not a rigid definition of expression of time as viewed by other people.

Toward that end, unix time is totally usable, as long as you make the assumption that all unix time was created in a specific space and time. Then you just have to calculate what your observation of it is. That way, two bodies sitting next to each other may calculate the time that applies to them, and communicate by simply returning the time to the standard before comparing with other bodies.

(Apparently this already exists; the _Einstein synchronization procedure_ defines a method to establish universally (in the astronomic sense) temporal coordinates, which is in effect both location and time)

<comment><USER6> I think you are missing the point that UNIX time moves backwards by a second whenever a leap second is added. It is discontinuous with respect to the actual passage of time.

<comment><USER19> UNIX time is simply an indicator of where you are in relation to the event of the epoch. Leap seconds are just our immature way of dealing with time dilation. You can always add or remove time as an observer to conform to whatever your view of time is in relation to that older fixed point.

<comment><USER6> > UNIX time is simply an indicator of where you are in relation to the event > of the epoch.

That is true except in the case of leap seconds, in which case UNIX time is not monotonic or continuous.

> Leap seconds are just our immature way of dealing with time dilation.

Leap seconds have nothing to do with time dilation. TAI, on which UTC is based, is defined as the passage of proper time on Earth's geoid. This gives a stable base that is not influenced by the frame of the observer. UTC does not change based on where you observe it from. It is the same on Earth, in space, etc. regardless of your frame. None of this has anything to do with leap seconds.

Leap seconds compensate for the fact that a mean solar day is slightly longer than 86,400 seconds, and can vary slightly due to irregularities in Earth's rotation. Leap seconds are added to keep UTC noon within a second of mean solar noon at the prime meridian.

> You can always add or remove time as an observer to conform to whatever your > view of time is in relation to that older fixed point.

UTC is defined at the geoid, and everybody uses UTC seconds even though they are slightly shorter than seconds as observed by most people on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems that the author thinks that Unix typically shows leap seconds to the application programmer? In fact, there aren't leap seconds there unless you intentionally turn that feature on. The seconds you get with the time() call will increment one by one. You will not have to care that leap second occurred. If you want to see leap seconds, then it is assumed that you know what you are doing. If you don't know the effects of that, please, please don't turn it on and don't write about how it's broken.

If you want to learn more about leap seconds read: [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The obligatory link: [http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- programm...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

</comment><comment><USER22> Use "bignum Planck units since the big bang". That is the ur-clock.

</comment><comment><USER23> "GPS Time" is UTC without the leap seconds. But it only goes back to 1980.</comment>


Achieving super low latency for critical real world internet applications (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.netdevconf.org/0x12/session.html?achieving-super-low-latency-for-critical-real-world-internet-applications <comment><USER2> HFT guy here.

There's problems with using the internet if you want low latency. Not just low latency, but also low jitter, ie consistent latency. You're sharing a bunch of infrastructure with other people, so sometimes your packet will have to wait. Try to ping some internet server a few times and you'll see it changes. I've done this with rented lines, and the number is the same every time.

Not inherent to the internet is the fact that REST seems to be a standard. Probably people will want a REST interface. So that means serializing and deserializing messages, and the messages are always going to be a lot longer than they need to be. It's not that you have to do it this way, though. There's also the fact that internet architectures tend to have a bunch of hops (load balancer / gateway / etc), which isn't going to help, but definitely something you could work around.

The figures he gives are interesting. If you really need under 20ms for AR to work, how is remote surgery going to work? 20ms is close to the time you get to render a frame in real time games at 60fps, seems a bit fast to me. The surgeon can't be far away if this is true.

<comment><USER3> Regarding hardware: I try to not share infrastructure. What I can not fully control can and will dysfunction, even in datacenters. For example, the LAN options are most often VLAN. So for my servers, I have extra NICs and direct connections one-to-one by crossover cable and ARP monitoring. It costs more, but it quickly pays for itself.

For software, everything is done in house. As you said, it doesn't have to be done a way or another.

<comment><USER4> I was under the impression that the most serious HFT doesn't even use _Ethernet_ anymore. At each end, where it meets a common buy/sell platform, yes. But not for the competing HFT data link companies' inter-city messaging.

For the shortwave links in place between NY-Tokyo, for several I'm privy to details of, people have written their own custom dedicated purpose protocols that implement very low bitrate, ultra low latency data messaging with less overhead and ASIC packet processing time.

<comment><USER3> Depends on what you do.

For what I do, Ethernet is acceptable as long as the latency is below 1 ms. Here're some quick stats for what I consider good enough this specific usecase:

rtt min/avg/max/std-dev = 0.069/0.095/0.121/0.016 ms

Generally it is better to keep things simple and use existing stuff whenever possible.

If we are talking about very low latency (say below 30 us) you may need many other things first, like a good timesource.

Then indeed, when you start rolling your own stratum1 NTP servers, rolling your own protocols can be a sensible answer to the problem you have.

<comment><USER5> At a high level, what do you do with HFT? You aren't doing the trading, right? You just manage the systems behind it? So what is? Are there really bots "in production" that are making buying and selling decisions tied to real money so quickly that <1ms is needed?

<comment><USER6> The advantage is being first. If you learn in Tokyo that a stock is going to go up, you can buy all of the available stock in New York, or cancel your order to sell it. It's going to take you 50 ms to get that information to New York, but if your competitor takes 49 ms, you lose money; if he takes 51 ms, you make money. So 1 ms is important, and so is any time difference big enough to outweigh the noise in the exchange's ordering of events. I know people measuring and caring about speed gains of single-digit nanoseconds, roughly equivalent to replacing your two-metre cables with one-metre cables.

The end customer (whoever actually wants to buy stocks) doesn't need the price to update every millisecond. But no one has yet figured out a better way to run an electronic exchange than "first come, first served".

Source: also worked in HFT for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do low latency network architectue for HFTs; I'm not sure there's a real world application for shaving 50us off a latency for a route outside of this industry. That said I've been impressed with Cloudflares consistent global low latency while traveling. It's a habit to ping 184.108.40.206 and see if it goes above 15ms.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's terrifying to hear him mention self-driving cars as a use case for super low latencies. If a few milliseconds of network latency compromises some safety system in a car, that's bad. I'd be engineering a car for worst case scenarios, not for reliance on a fast network. It makes me think of this. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing)

<comment><USER9> It's not clear why some folks are dredging the self-driving cars, vehicle-to- vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure use cases out for 5G but when the rubber hits the road I suspect vehicles will deploy with dedicated short range communications for the bits that must be low latency and 5G for ordinary cellphone use. The wiki page has some starting places for DSRC info. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_short- range_communic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_short- range_communications) . It _is_ terrifying.

<comment><USER10> It turns out car-to-car local networking is not really necessary. The use of 4G/5G networking + simulation based modeling and prediction gives great results. That's what companies like Nexar [0] are doing.

[0] [https://www.getnexar.com](https://www.getnexar.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Then there are mixed reality applications. It won't need HFT levels of low latency, but will demand a lot more bandwidth. Many of the tricks won't work there.

That'll require exploiting edge distribution to its limits, with an entire new level of internet infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> Network Next is a company working on this, not just for critical applications but also games:

[https://networknext.com/concept/](https://networknext.com/concept/)

</comment><comment><USER13> If you are looking for information on low-latency computing, including some real advice how to tune for lower latency, look for info on HFT.

5ms reaction time mentioned on these slides are far cry for what computers can do. trading servers reaction time packet-in packet-out even without fpga can take as little as 20 microseconds.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but they sit right on transatlantic fibre-optic trunk cables. Presumably leased lines? It's a totally different proposition to a public mobile internet.

<comment><USER13> Many trading companies now utilize over-the-horizon radio. Its the fastest, most direct connection available. But even without this:

\- cpu thermal profiles and power governors

\- cpu affinity

\- non-evented io(if you prefer latency over the number of clients served)

\- network interrupt coalescing(actually, disabling coalescing), network msi-x, hardware offloads, 10gb fiber or DAC connections(very cheap nowadays)

\- lock-free and kinda-crdt data structures(between threads)

\- predictable memory allocations(better - no allocations on critical path)

\- specialized logging and tracing(no stdio)

can drive you quite far.

<comment><USER15> What is over the horizon radio? I am familiar with over the horizon radar, but not radio for communications. Do you have any references?

<comment><USER4> Shortwave radio with big-ass yagis and dipoles, aimed at each other in point- to-point links. Very low data rates, carrying custom messaging protocols, but also measurably less latency on critical paths such as NY-Chicago or London- Tokyo.

There is a big crossover in tech with shortwave band military over the horizon communications systems, and also serious ham radio enthusiasts who use big yagis and antenna rotators to talk to each other from opposite sides of the planet.

Things like chained 6 and 11 GHz microwave between NY-Chicago, which was the "hot new thing" in HFT 7-8 years ago to achieve better than fiber latency on that route, seem quaint now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For VR and AR you really don't need these low latencies over the internet. As long as the visual output matches the users head movement the game assets can have noticable lag. Like most existing games, rubberbanding is an annoyance but not disorienting.

For those use cases it would be better to come up with a full 3d (not just stereoscopic) streaming video format that allows for some local camera movement.

<comment><USER17> In 5G circles there is this "vision" of VR/AR servers that reside in "edge datacenters" close to the customer. The user's movements are streamed to such a server which returns the calculated video stream. This doesn't make sense at all, of course. But you can put buzzwords like VR/AR on your shiny 5G slides..

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Could RAMCloud be a candidate for this … at least to tackle the datacenter level, and —isn't the rest more or less out of control?

[https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/docs/doxygen/md_README.html](https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/docs/doxygen/md_README.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> A whole talk about low latency networking and not a single mention about TSN (time sensitive networking)/AVB (audio video bridging) which _actually_ does low-latency?</comment>


Coronavirus ravages California's Central Valley, following a cruel familiar path - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-28/coronavirus-ravages-californias-central-valley-following-a-cruel-and-familiar-path <comment><USER2> Reviewing [https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus- map/](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/) and [https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus- case...](https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases- tracking-outbreak/) I don't see evidence for the thesis of the article.

<comment><USER3> The new infection rate in the Central Valley counties is about 4x the rate of Bay Area counties according to the first link.

<comment><USER2> Bay Area has done exceptionally well. Central Valley is in line with Southern California.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seemed like California took some of the strongest lockdown measures early on, especially compared to Texas and Florida; all three of which are seeing increased fatalities while the rest of the country is plummeting.

I wonder if this a case of lockdowns delaying the inevitable, combined with the fact that many of those affected are in places with high population densities. If we are to learn anything from elderly care facilities in NYC, Sweden and Canada, it's that infected people need to be separated way out away from anyone in their home. The primary vector of infection is still the home, likely due to higher exposure if someone is sick.

<comment><USER5> > _I wonder if this a case of lockdowns delaying the inevitable_

Amazing you just assume it's inevitable.

New Zealand certainly proves it's not.

Aim higher.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's really feasible to compare a continental nation of 300M+ people to a small island nation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This Frontline documentary highlights the poor conditions for farm workers and meat packing workers.

It was really just a matter of time before this started. They aren't supplied masks, have to travel to work in crowded vehicles, etc.

[https://youtu.be/_VXDqhKGBy8](https://youtu.be/_VXDqhKGBy8)

<comment><USER8> This video is not available. Anyone nabbed a youtube-dl?

<comment><USER9> It works here (USA).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anecdote time: I live in San Francisco, almost everyone wears a mask here. My friend just got back from a road trip through the central valley, he said nobody there was wearing masks and a random stranger called him a coward (in more colorful language) for wearing one while at a gas station. His opinion was that the central valley is going to be hit hard.

<comment><USER11> I don't get angry at people wearing masks. I comply with the local mask mandates where I live.

Having said that, I have a question. Why does anybody think that masks actually help? I've basically been under the impression that masks are health theater that allows people to go on with life without being scared, though it doesn't actually do much of anything. Apparently I'm in the minority in thinking that.

But I put on a surgical mask, twist the side ear loop so that air comes out the side instead of the top (right at my eyes), and I ask myself what in the world it is supposed to be accomplishing. It's not like people are wearing properly fitted N95 masks, and even then, the way people are talking about micro droplets seems like they might get through just fine.

<comment><USER12> There are studies pointing to their efficacy [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/)

<comment><USER11> I've read a fair bit now, and I'm left with... questions. I haven't read it all yet, but nothing I've seen so far indicates that masks actually accomplish anything directly.

From the summary of results: "Medical masks were not effective, and cloth masks even less effective." I'm assuming that is referring to in hospital settings, but still... somehow they magically they work "in the community." Has anybody proposed or tested a reason for why they would work in one setting but not the other?

I saw no mention of controlling for how much time the participants (college students) spent with other people. Can we truly assume that wearing a mask had no other effect on the behavior of young people who are incredibly image- conscious and facing intense peer pressure to fit in? If I had to guess, the only thing they proved is that college students asked to wear masks will stay alone in their rooms more often than those not asked to wear masks. Of course, indirect benefits are still benefits. It is possible that something like this could happen when masks are mandated in public today. Meaning, mask mandates lead to people staying home more, which is obviously going to be effective. However, see next paragraph.

Another problem I saw immediately is that they were required to wear masks for long periods when in their dwelling, but not required outside of their dwelling. This, of course, is the opposite of what we are doing. What is the result of inverting the study practices?

They were studies on the flu. Can we assume the same effect on Coronaviruses?

From one study... "Generalizability limited to similar settings and age groups." Ok... so we're ignoring the paper's warnings about what we can learn from it?

In one study they were able to measure a decrease in flu-like-illnesses(ILI) with mask use, but it wasn't statistically significant, and it was only in the second half of the study (weeks 4-6). The summary ends with: "Neither face mask use and hand hygiene nor face mask use alone was associated with a significant reduction in the rate of ILI cumulatively." It then proceeds in the next sentence (the conclusion summary), to say, "These findings suggest that face masks and hand hygiene may reduce respiratory illnesses in shared living settings and mitigate the impact of the influenza A(H1N1) pandemic." Isn't this an example of a study what normally would be lampooned on this site? How exactly does the conclusion follow from the data?

Another study saw statistically significant reductions in ILI, but again, only in the second half of the study, and did not find statistically significant reduction in actual positive flu tests. It is summarized by: "Face masks and hand hygiene combined may reduce the rate of ILI and confirmed influenza in community settings. These non-pharmaceutical measures should be recommended in crowded settings at the start of an influenza pandemic." However, there was no control group that was _just_ hand washing. Doesn't it seem much more reasonable to assume that the benefits are from hand-washing, rather than hand-washing and masks combined, since the mask-only group saw little to no benefit? And if so, why are we using this paper to prove that masks work?

<comment><USER13> Flu transmission and Covid transmission are not identical. Covid seems to be mainly transmitted by relatively large respiratory droplets. The expiration and transmission of those droplets is greatly reduced by a mask, even if some leakage occurs around the edges. Perhaps because the drops are more likely to just drop as a result.

Most of the studies have been done in high risk, high exposure situations. The high concentration and repeated exposure over extended periods of time greatly increase the chance of infection. This does not reflect the lower concentrations and shorter duration of most civilian exposures. It generally takes more than a single virus to actually result in infection.

Since there are indications that wearing masks does give you some protection and does give significant protection to those around you, why not accept the minor inconvenience and wear one?

<comment><USER11> "Since there are indications that wearing masks does give you some protection and does give significant protection to those around you..."

This is precisely what I'm trying to find evidence of. So far, I've clicked through to one summary of the research, followed by three papers linked in there, which supposedly support the claim, and found that there is almost no support for those claims.

And as I already said above, I _do_ wear one.

Edited to add: Also, I've been reading more and more articles questioning the claim that Coronavirus is mostly limited to the larger droplets.

<comment><USER14> You're right, from an evidence-based medicine perspective there is little to no proof that masks work, and some indication that they are counter- productive. There are plenty of people posting links with dozens of papers claiming to prove that they do work, but very few if any of those people seem to have actually read anything on those lists, as none of them claim what the people posting the links claim they claim. (note that I'm not claiming here people should or should not wear them, this is a position-neutral meta observation).

That said, at this point wearing/'believing in' face masks is a political issue, not an evidence based rational choice. It's tribal signaling. Noboby really knows a or b, but choosing to believe a or b has become (yet another) aspect of identity politics. Which is what worries me the most, because now that position has become entrenched, regardless of whether we reach any conclusive findings at some point in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious about lack of mention of home conditions. How many people per household? What is the community / non-work contact?

It might all be the workplace, but we just had a large jump in cases without the single workplace and we might have some of the same demographics as them.

<comment><USER11> FTA: "The surge in Central Valley cases has taken a particular toll on farmworkers, in part because they often live in close quarters, share transportation to job sites and have little access to healthcare."

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that's one line and doesn't tell me a whole lot about the outside life. Are there more than average number of people per household, are there family gatherings, etc. I'm a bit worried they are comparing it to similar population like reservations and concentration a bit too much on the job. Seeing what you want or from the wrong perspective is not good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://archive.is/2op0w](https://archive.is/2op0w)

<comment><USER17> For those with Apple News+, just visit the URL in Safari on iPad or iPhone, hit the "share" icon, and share with News+ to view the story there. LA Times is included in News+.

This also works with the Wall Street Journal.

Note: this only works in mobile News+. It does not work on a Mac. Sometimes you can just open the newspaper in question from News+ on a Mac and simply find the story, but in this case I didn't see the story.

PS: you have to actually visit the URL in Safari. If you long tap on the link on HN to bring up the actions menu there is a share option there, but News+ is missing. News+ is only an option for sharing the URL Safari is actually on.

<comment><USER18> Wow. I didn't know you could do that. Super useful tip. Thanks for mentioning it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is going to be really interesting to read historical accounts of our current times.

<comment><USER20> Seriously makes me wonder if future generations would be able to garner a relatively objective understanding of everything that's happened. 100 years later, what would make one media source from today be considered more reliable than another from today? What first person accounts would be considered more reliable than another? Would you take the words of people on the street over the words of the president? What of all the people who agree that there's a deep state movement to work against the president in secret? How the heck would a historian be able to figure out what really happened?

Suddenly makes me wonder how skeptical I should be of all our understanding of recorded history.

<comment><USER21> I wonder where a historian will even be able to read anything at all from this time. Most of the discourse on this has been online, and who will have archived Reddit and Tik Tok?

<comment><USER22> > who will have archived Reddit and Tik Tok?

I was told the CCP has the list of every video of skateboarding and memes I liked on the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://archive.is/2op0w](https://archive.is/2op0w)

</comment><comment><USER24> "ravages" the central valley, how many deaths in the valley? I couldn't find that in the article. Seems like it would be important to mention? Instead the death total given is for the entire state.

<comment><USER25> Many central valley counties are completely inundated with cases. I'm currently living in San Joaquin, and we hit 100% ICU capacity and are approaching 100% hospital capacity. I'm worried that this will just increase the amount of deaths across the board because help is now much farther away.

<comment><USER26> According to the latest stats, neither hospitalizations nor ICUs are at 100%, hospitalizations have remained stable, and 17 of the 94 ICU beds are open.

Yeah, it's not in great shape, but it's not being 'ravaged'.

[1] [https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus- case...](https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases- tracking-outbreak/san-joaquin-county/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pet peeve of mine: It's really not the Central Valley as a whole being ravaged, it's specifically the poorer southern part - the San Joaquin Valley. Sacramento in particular is somewhere between the Bay Area and coastal So-Cal. The northern extreme (say Redding) is actually doing a bit better than the Bay Area.

All said, even in Sac, you have some pretty dangerous behavior going on ([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/churches-return- corona...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/churches-return-coronavirus- protests.html)), so this isn't entirely surprising.</comment>


Ask HN: How to manage legacy knowledge and experts - <AUTHOR>

I work at an enterprise software house, where we have two old (20+ year) applications that are making us shit-tons of money despite the spaghetti code that has developed over the years.
We have around 5 developers who have been with use for 10+ years who know everything there is to know about it. It's very buggy of course, and we have a substantial 3-layer support team.
The problem is that, although there is lots of documentation, it gets out-of-date quickly and doesn't actually define the system or how to fix problems. So the 5 experts are needed so that he newbies can have a chance of addressing issues within the SLAs. Without these 5, we are screwed.
If they chose, they could hold us to ransom. they are excellent, professional individuals who wouldn't do this .. but there is a risk.
We COULD have those guys spend 6 months documenting the code, and what it's supposed to do. We COULD get them to set out structured training for new recruits .. .but these 5 are developers not trainers.
Are there any companies that provide expert consultancy for this kind of thing? A company who would come in and tell us how to do this effectively? If there aren't any then I'm totally going to set one up. <comment><USER2> I wouldn't call them legacy if they are a money maker of your core business. 1. when you change the code you should be updating the documentation. 2. you should have a system that documents support tickets and the solutions when you have production problems 3. if you know where the buggiest code is by number of production problems you can focus on re-factoring that part of the system. 4. make sure your experts know that part of they're yearly objectives(raises) is training and mentoring. Part of your job descriptions for senior level people should be about sharing knowledge and mentoring.</comment>


Harvard + MIT = edX - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18191589

<comment><USER2> Its nearly a year since Panos put up his blog post on cheating, which was discussed on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254>

With online courses which confer degrees/certification to students from all over the world, there is far too much of a vested interest in optimizing to the shortest path required to get the degree. Its no longer a subject pool of auto didacts, but a subject pool where auto didacts are the minority and degree/certifacte focused individuals are in the majority.

Many students aren't like that - but if they come from a background which doesn't give a damn whether you learned something as long as you got a degree/cert from X uni.

If in the end, if the shortest path is just doing the test, turning in the Homework, and ticking attendance, then someone will be doing it for a price. They already are doing it in colleges.

The scale of it in turn makes peer review, or group work, complex projects which require active scrutiny, hard, if not impossible to execute.

I don't see how this can't end with course material being put out by one group, and standardized testing being done by someone else, a la the CFA or other certification exams.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I absolutely expect there will be test centres where students pay to sit the exam in exam conditions. There's no other way to produce credible results. But the test centre would only need to be a tarted up cybercafe.

Do you envisage the course material and exam being designed by MIT but the exams being administered by some other party, or would the other party also design the exam (as is the case with CFA)?

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the question, I have only my best guess as the answer which is a Pearson vue style system to take all the tests.

I imagine that it will end up being a version of the GRE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whenever anyone defends the current brick and morder model of college education they do a lot of handwaving about the benefits of small classrooms, access to professors, and the "college experience". In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota, one of the biggest colleges in the world both in terms of enrollment and campus size, most of the professors didn't seem passionate about teaching. They were talking "at" these massive auditoriums filled with half-interested kids. I always resented having to physically go to class, especially since I had a long commute to school every day. Rushing back and forth across this massive campus from class to class seemed ridiculous to me as well. I get that some kids need that personal attention from professors and TAs to learn, but I certainly didn't. I learn best on my own, at my own pace, and in the comfort of my own home.

<comment><USER5> _In my college experience which was at the University of Minnesota,_

My two postsecondary degrees are both from the University of Minnesota. As a Chinese major in the 1970s, my typical class size for in-major courses shrank down to three or four students total by the third year of the program. (First- year Chinese had fifty students in three sections in those days; second-year had fifteen in one section.) One of the great things about huge brick-and- mortar state universities over the last century has been having a large enough critical mass of students to offer rarely sought courses like Chinese (in those days) or Attic Greek or Classical Nahuatl (any day) or other courses that my friends took while enrolled. Harvard has enough sheer money from its endowment to offer Sanskrit or other rarely studied courses

[http://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=4137186&whence=item...](http://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=4137186&whence=item%3fid%3d4136069)

even if those courses gain very low enrollments. Most other universities subsidize limited enrollments in rare courses with high enrollments in the commonplace courses.

The great thing about more and more university-level courses going online is that eventually there should be a niche for university-level courses delivered online on almost any subject that has ever been treated in a university-level course. That will allow, I hope, curious learners to shop around and figure out which general statistics course (a HUGE enrollment course) and which Aramaic course (a course with tiny enrollment in the best of times) offers the most return of learning for the investment of time, effort, and some amount of money to take the course.

I think many brick-and-mortar universities, and perhaps approximately one state "flagship" university per state, will still be able to survive the onslaught of competition from online courses for a while because of prior claims to credentialing students and the advantage of in-person interaction with other students (and with some less introverted instructors). But further diversity of provision of courses allows each provider to specialize in what it does best, and should make learning more efficient (in the economist's sense of "efficient") for everyone.

P.S. The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.

AFTER EDIT, responding to a point in another comment:

Yes, independent test centers with good test security will help online credentials gain acceptance, and Udacity has already anticipated this problem. Udacity has announced in a blog post, "Udacity in partnership with Pearson VUE announces testing centers,"

[http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/udacity-in- partnership-w...](http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/udacity-in-partnership- with-pearson-vue.html)

a partnership "to make our classes count towards a credential that is recognized by employers." So this is an example of unbundling the package that is currently offered by degree-granting universities. The universities both teach courses and administer tests, and claim therefore to offer credentials that can be trusted. But one group of organizations could offer a wide selection of courses, while another group of organizations offers a wide selection of credentialing tests, and I expect that to be the wave of the future.

<comment><USER4> > The walk back and forth across the Mississippi River on the University of > Minnesota Twin Cities campus was always pleasant to me. I liked seeing the > university rowing team practicing in the river and the signs of the changes > of seasons as I looked upstream and downstream along the riverbanks.

You mean in the Fall and the Spring, right? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm still unclear what the business model for universities (as opposed to private companies) in this space is. The problem is, they will inevitably be compared to (and in some sense compete against) their non-virtual counterparts. Especially when they've essentially given away all their course materials and lecture videos for free, and considering these classes are not for credit, I just don't see the benefit for the average person over studying what's already freely available. And one can't even make the argument that the free resources aren't meant to be used to learn a subject (as is the case with most free reference material), since these were obviously created with precisely that goal in mind.

When they inevitably move to a tuition based model, the ever present question of "the real MIT or the online one?" may be too much to overcome.

<comment><USER7> They don't need to generate a profit and it would be preferable if there was no profitable business model for it. Donations to both MIT and Harvard are considered charitable; making more of their classes freely available online would justify that.

<comment><USER6> To say it would be preferable if there were no profitable business model is short-sighted. It would mean that the only entities capable of undertaking something like this would be existing universities (and the wave of private companies offering a wide curriculum of online courses would end). Those universities that attempted something similar would at best be able to merely recoup costs. In short, the higher education revolution would amount to existing universities putting classes online. Why in the world is that preferable?

<comment><USER8> New charitable organizations would also be able to enter the market.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meow Attack deletes unsecured databases on the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://androidrookies.com/meow-attack-deletes-unsecured-databases-on-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> This may be a taboo opinion, but I would like to see every PaaS / Server provider implement something similar to this. Maybe don't delete databases, rather disable the public interface unless the owner of the server has double- opted in to making the DB public. Add it to the MSA / AUP so that there is no question as to why the host was removed from the network. At very least, scan your own networks and alert your customers if they have a DB exposed.</comment>


Paramount: "We own the Klingon language" - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/paramount-we-do-own-the-klingon-language-and-warships-160414/ <comment><USER2> I think I read once that two people started their relationship while their only shared language was Klingon.

So, I think that maybe makes a good counterpoint to "no Klingons exist".

<comment><USER3> Klingons are like Vampires in this case. You know the rules for Vampires, right? Whatever rules you want because they aren't real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paramount are just pissed that one guy with $40k made a better film than they could make with $150M.</comment>


Show HN: Paper Planes, mini game on Slack - <AUTHOR> https://paperplanes.work/ <comment><AUTHOR> Developer here. Just something I spent a couple weekends working on to get familiar with Slack API development.

Haven't seen any "game" on the Slack app directory yet. No clue if they accept any games, but I submitted my app and they said it's being reviewed for approval. One of their guidelines say apps must be productive or contribute in some way to work. But then again, there's a host of meme/gifs/cats apps too. We'll see.

I know there's a shameless freemium feature in there, hoping someone buys and helps pay the bills :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Love the idea of Slack games but no screenshots or explanation on the site? Not even a video?

Pass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is actually great feedback.

Since it's a text-based game and it's all in the Slack interface, it didn't occur to me that I should make screenshots. But you're right that it would be helpful to have to give an idea of what it does. I'm going to make some and put it on the site.</comment></comment>


How bad a boss is Linus Torvalds? - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3004387/it-management/how-bad-a-boss-is-linus-torvalds.html <comment><USER2> Call me cynical, but have you noticed that the minute someone becomes unpopular with a certain community, all the press start releasing these articles questioning their work, management skills, etc?

I mean yeah, Linus isn't the most civil person ever. But the timing just seems all too unlikely to be coincidental.

<comment><USER3> Its all about the clicks.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't there a conspiracy theory about the "SJW"s setting him up or something?

<comment><USER5> ESR was worried about his precious bodily fluids. ([http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/this-the-perfect- insane-a...](http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/this-the-perfect-insane-anti- feminist-rumor.html))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is there a new article about the management style of Linus Torvalds daily? Let's stop with this hero worship crap. The guy is mean in emails - we get it. Move on.

</comment><comment><USER7> _> I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes._

So... another Adria Richards? Careful not to make any jokes about forking dongles!

I don't want to work professionally with people who have a stick jammed up their ass - and it seems to me that most people agree. I'm trans. I find this comic [0] hilarious. Others would call it problematic, offensive, and even transphobic. I wouldn't want to work with any of those people.

Asking people to bend over so you can shove a stick up their ass doesn't go well. I can see how this might come as a surprise to people who already have sticks, but I guess _somebody_ needs to tell them... the stick isn't normal. The problem isn't that other people are _missing_ their sticks, but that _you have one_.

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/kFurr3J.png](http://i.imgur.com/kFurr3J.png)

</comment><comment><USER8> >empower community managers or other managers to encourage and enforce civil behavior.

I don't disagree that it can be unpleasant, but you can't just change one thing about a community and expect everything else to stay the same. In reality, enforcing community changes will have unintended consequences. As the article freely admits, the best way to get quality contributions is to let the code speak for itself.

If the named code was objectively bad, as the article suggests, then that programmer was doing his community a disservice by submitting it, and he needed his community to correct his behavior.</comment>


Mobile will be more powerful than PlayStation 4, Xbox One in 2017, ARM forecasts - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/16/mobile-devices-will-be-more-powerful-than-playstation-4-xbox-one-in-2017-arm-forecasts/ <comment><USER2> If it was just a question of hardware performance the PC would have crushed consoles long ago. Form factor matters, in fact it's one of the reasons mobile took off in the first place.. and it's one of the reasons mobile gaming is limited to a subset of genres and games.. at least until we can project it seamlessly onto larger screens or something.</comment>


Better HN: Take HN discussions everywhere - <AUTHOR>

I've recently released a new version of HN Comment Embed, a greasemonkey script that embeds HN discussions into the webpage being discussed.
You simply browse to a posted page, and the HN panel pops up on the side.
This version relies on searchYC as its main source, but also parses HN's newest posts page to attain full coverage.
http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable <http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js>

</comment><comment><USER2> I made a site with bookmarklet quite some time ago that does something similar to that.. <http://www.convotrack.com> (was made more for twitter though)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a pretty clever implementation for cross-browser, cross-community support!

Narrowing down to HN only and greasemonkey allowed me the following improvements:

* While the bookmarklet has to be actively opened by the user, HNCE pops up as a small tab whenever it is relevant.

* The comments in the bookmarklet are sorted chronologically (descending); Directly embedding the page with HNCE allows the hierarchy and ordering to be preserved.

* Another benefit of directly embedding the HN page is the ability to contribute to the conversation and up-rank the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work! To increase adoption, I'd suggest adding a page to your site dedicated to it, with some screenshots of it in action.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool. Now I wish I could get chrome on OS X to enable extensions!

<comment><USER5> Extensions are enabled in recent Chromium Mac builds: [http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel- ma...](http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-mac/)

However, I'm unable to get this particular user script to work in Chromium. Haven't looked at it carefully though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> very cool. thank you.</comment>


Ericsson – How to Reinvent a $38B Company - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/01/ericsson-how-to-radically-reinvent-a-38-billion-company/

<comment><AUTHOR> As Ericsson begins to move downstream and directly compete with tech companies like IBM and HP, the next few years are going to be bloody interesting in that trillion-dollar intersection of telecom, IT and media.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to learn about project management? - <AUTHOR>

I've just started a new job, which involves a lot of project management. This is something new to me, but I understand enough to know there's a lot more to managing a project than software (and to know this doesn't really come naturally to me).<p>Where can I learn about the true art and science of good project management? I'm looking for both practical tips, and also details about learning the processes used by major public and private institutions. <comment><USER2> One good way to learn is to watch others manage a project. I worked at GE for two years, and project management is pretty much built into the culture. I got to improve a lot in my own work by watching how more experienced people managed projects.

Here are some general PM thoughts that I picked up. Managing software has it's own issues of course, but these are a good start:

* Err on the side of over communicating. Don't assume anything.

* Get organized. It's impossible to be too organized.

* Make sure everyone is aware of the project's overall progress.

* If something can go wrong (or be delayed) it will.

* Be a friendly, flexible person to work with. It'll help you when you need favors later. One manager sent the local DHL office a bouquet of flowers at Christmas because shipping things timely was important to his projects.

* Trust the people you work with.

* If something goes wrong, it's probably your fault because you didn't communicate clearly/thoroughly enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the main parts of project management are to take the heat from upper management and remove roadblocks so my people can do their work.

The best information I've found is David Maister's "Managing Professionals" at <http://davidmaister.com/podcasts.archives/3/>

He's more practical than Drucker, Harvey-Jones and Heller. They say what to do; Maister says how to do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Technical-Leader-Problem- Solv...](http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Technical-Leader-Problem-Solving- Approach/dp/0932633021/)

You may want to buy it directly: <http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/btl.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> As far as I know, PMI is the most widely known certification for project management. Even if you don't intend to do their certification, their resources section should still be useful to you.

<http://www.pmi.org/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Lessons from Scott Berkun's Art of project management [http://bighow.com/news/lessons-from-the-art-of-project- manag...](http://bighow.com/news/lessons-from-the-art-of-project-management)</comment>


Lying on the Internet could soon be a federal crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/lying-on-the-internet-could-soon-be-a-federal-crime/

<comment><USER2> No, this is entirely factually incorrect: <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68486.html> and [http://judiciary.edgeboss.net/wmedia/judiciary/crime/crime11...](http://judiciary.edgeboss.net/wmedia/judiciary/crime/crime11152011.wvx)

 _"The DoJ is in no way interested in bringing cases against people who lie about their age on dating sites, or anything of the sort. We don't have the time or resources to do that," Downing said during testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee._

I think this is about as explicit and straightforward a refutation as anyone could possibly want.

 _George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, who also testified before the House subcommittee, said he is not sure that DOJ is going to keep its word, and is confused as to what exactly the current Justice Department position is._

I'll bet he is. It might jeopardize his nice sideline in misinformational op- eds of boogeyman stories for libertarians.</comment>


Tech incubators scramble to egg on startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110522/SMALLBIZ/305229993 <comment><AUTHOR> I have to admit… Part of the reason I shared this was because the headline was trying to cram all the groan-inducing puns in there that it could.</comment>


How to Use an SPF Record to Prevent Spoofing and Improve Email Reliability - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-an-spf-record-to-prevent-spoofing-improve-e-mail-reliability <comment><USER2> Works a treat.

Unless you use mailing lists that aren't careful to regenerate your message as to clearly come from their servers.

Or any of your recipients forward their mail somewhere else and aren't careful how they forward it.

Or your recipients use a domain that mishandles SPF records.

Or ... any number of other problems.</comment>