14,400-year-old flatbread remains that predate known agriculture - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/worlds-oldest-bread <comment><USER2> > "Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread, so the fact > that bread predates agriculture is kind of stunning," says Tobias Richter, a > University of Copenhagen archaeologist who co-authored the paper. "Because > making bread is quite labor-intensive, and you don't necessarily get a huge > return for it. So it doesn't seem like an economical thing to do." That's > because breadmaking doesn't just involve baking: Back then, it would have > also involved kneading, grinding cereals into fine grains, and dehusking > plants.

But why would agriculture have developed, if people were't cooking the stuff? It's true that making bread involves more work than just boiling grain. But bread also serves as ready-to-eat storage. As does beer. And I can imagine how both developed more-or-less accidentally from leftover boiled grain.

<comment><USER3> The bread as described in the article was made from relatively finely ground grain, so unlikely to be accidental, and the article references finds of similar flatbreads from just a few thousand years later at different locations.

<comment><USER4> Someone probably sent their toddler to go rub grain between two rocks to keep the toddler out of their hair while they butchered a goat or something.

<comment><USER5> More likely, there were already thousands of years of experience with boiled grains and related processing of grains to experiment with, and notice the results of, including fermentation, baking, and other heat-related consequences of particulate and processed wheat grain.

Just like the experience of fermented milk / yoghurt / cheese -- thousands of years of experience with the possibilities.

Refrigeration is not comfortable to tent-dwelling nomads.

<comment><USER2> Oatmeal fried with lots of butter, plus fruit and honey or maple syrup, is very tasty.

<comment><USER6> My recipe for oatmeal: take water, raisins, and nuts if I have them, nuts, bring to a boil, then turn off the heat and let cool. Irish oats are awesome this way done overnight. Do it in a crockpot with a large amount and you'll eat for a week (peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old). I'm hungry in the morning. Easy and a little bit sweet works well.

<comment><USER7> I've only ever seen that rhyme as "pease pudding hot, ...". Pease, AIUI, is mixed legumes.

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

<comment><USER8> This is literally the first time I've heard the rhyme as "pudding"... it's always been "pease porridge hot," in our family for at least five generations now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing to do with bread but...

Over the last couple of decades, this 10k-15k ybp period has gotten a lot more interesting. Especially to us romantics, who always want origins to be more ancient and mysterious. The Natufian Culture now has a lot of sites. Everything from proof of a predominantly hunter gatherer diet to a full scale sedentary city, 9,000 year old Jericho. We even know they particularly enjoyed eating cat, and may have domesticated them for food.

Even more remarkable is the progress in southeastern Turkey. Gobleki Tepeh is a find on such a scale that it challenges archeologists to re-narrate the neolithic revolution. Many think that it reverses the old narrative: Agriculture lead to caloric surpluses, permanent settlements, cities, organised religions, kings, advanced art, complex mythology... Maybe an organised religion crowned the first god-kings, designated specialised societal roles, built temples, then cities, and invented agriculture to support them.

Near Gobleki Tepeh is Catal Huyuk, a residential "city" archeologically and temporally similar Jericho. It appears to have been built _after_ Gobleki Tepeh, a more "ritualistic" site. Perhaps archeologists should be looking for ancient temple sites, predating Jericho.

Perhaps the Egyptian pattern is to be expected. First, giant ritualistic projects are undertaken. Politics appears to be simple, the king is a god. People do what he says. Complexity comes later. Maybe this is normal. Maybe modes of production follow from modes of culture, to put it in 19th century terms.

Egypt's old kingdom were the the great builders. Out of "nowhere" they suddenly take on massive works, million man-year projects. The middle & new kingdoms were more advanced politically, agriculturally, economically & militarily. But, the scale of ritualistic sites declined. They still had great temples, and fine art keeps progressing. Literature proliferates. Law advances. But, the amount of labour dedicated to pure ritual seems to peak near the "beginning."

It is a fascinating period. The middle east definitely has its roots here. Keep up the good work archeologists. We appreciate it, us spectators.

<comment><USER10> Why would anyone write ybp instead of ago?

Edit: OK, you'd need to say years ago but still, is this another part of the dropping the AD and BC tendency?

<comment><USER9> erm... IDK... AFAIK, YBP is used commonly in articles talking about this period. I guess having a 0 point 2018 years in the past is clunkier, and we're used to marking years with an acronym.

We use a lot more acronyms these days, generally. The better ones can be guessed from context. I personally don't mind the BC/AD, for iron age and later. It's actually convenient that year 0 corresponds roughly to the beginning of Rome's height.

<comment><USER10> >YBP is used commonly in articles talking about this period.

OK, I'd never it before (had to google it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OMFG BREAD IS PALEO NOW! My life just got better

<comment><USER12> This was my thought too -- at least about Paleo diet proponents rejecting grains.

IMHO these early people were smart enough to work out ways to eat things that were available to them. They probably had cooking with heat, boiling in water, grinding with stone, and probably worked out using salted water for preservation, and kept the spoiled food that had random yeast that tasted good and used it for culture.

Rice is a soft grain and can be eaten whole. Grains like wheat are HARD and need grinding to be edible. The hard grains keep well, so there was a big incentive to work out how to use them. A tribe that got it right probably had quite an advantage.

The movie "10,000" works on this idea.

<comment><USER13> "Grains like wheat are HARD "

But wheat did not existed back then. And the wild grains I know, are edible with your teeth ...

<comment><USER9> They're edible with your teeth when young/fresh....

The quality of grains that made them staples is that they _could_ be dried/hardened. That way they keep all winter, can be traded, etc.

For an everyday example, think of beans. We sometimes eat them fresh/soft as vegetables (green beans or edamame). More often they're dried, stored, traded on commodity markets and then re-softened to be eaten as soy cheese or chili con carne.

<comment><USER13> "They're edible with your teeth when young/fresh..."

No, I do mean the ripe ones. I am a bit into survival food and know the differences - but as I said, only of the grains I tried so far. I could chew them with no big problems.

With the rest you said, I agree ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> *predate known agricultural settlements.

<comment><USER15> It seems pretty clear that a rigid binary classification of societies in to settled/agricultural and nomadic/hunter-gatherer is false.

For example: What constitutes a settlement anyway? Just how long does it need to be in use before it's a settlement instead of a camp? Does regular seasonal use constitute permanence? In many hunter gatherer societies agriculture is documented. What about if shelter is natural (rock shelter), mobile (yurts or boats) or unnecessary (good weather)?

This is all part of a general ancient history rethink that I think it's fair to say is going on. We've figured out that ancient history is far more nuanced than many 20th century Western history scholars gave it credit for, and modern archaeology and genetics in particular are only now showing us the scale of our misconceptions.

Example areas of complete rethink: peopling of the Americas, continued diversity (and interbreeding with) non-homo-sapiens, speed and breadth of human diffusion, speed and breadth of technology invention and diffusion in pre-historic peoples.

<comment><USER14> >It seems pretty clear that a rigid binary classification of societies in to settled/agricultural and nomadic/hunter-gatherer is false.

Here's the problem, there's an established 'story' and if someone tries to go against that established 'story' about human history, they will find themselves unemployable. They will not be permitted to be a part of digs, they will not be able to find grant money, they will not be able to find a university that will take them in.

If someone finds something that even adds doubt it's immediately labeled a misinterpretation, a fake, some natural process that resembles human activity etc.

Add to that if you go back to Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago you wipe out most of the human population at the time with some estimates getting you into a few thousand humans across the entire planet which obviously could have ended societies that did exist at the time and were not nomadic, if they were using largely grass and wood for their construction, a supervolcano erupting could have quickly led to using construction materials for heat source, as a source of food for any animals that were struggling to find food etc. Even small settlements spread out might go undiscovered by archaeologists for centuries.

If you look at Kenya's Olorgesailie Basin there's potentially evidence of tool building 320,000 years ago. That right there kinda takes everything and goes "yeahhhhhhhhhh we're probably wrong" [https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a194478...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a19447825/olorgesailie- kenya-tools-archaeology/)

Telling me we had tools 320k years ago but we didn't figure out agriculture until 12-14k years ago? Heh. Ssssssure.

I urge anyone to go read about the history of archaeology, it's only until extremely recently (the mid 1900's) that it even started to become a proper science and even then most of the labor was untrained volunteer and many an important site were discovered by people native to the area before properly trained people were notified and brought in.

Even recorded history is extremely suspect until very modern times. Some will argue it didn't become reliable until the 11th-12th century but we still see instances of stuff unreliable past that. Some firmly believe Joan of Arc is a fabrication for example, which calls 15th century 'history' into question... when someone questions her existence with logic they are quickly called a 'revisionist' and considered a nutjob though.

The fact that 'revisionist' and 'historical revisionism' exist as concepts are troubling because they are often used disparagingly of anyone that questions the 'official story' where in other disciplines it would be considered healthy skepticism.

<comment><USER16> Have any good reads on this? Sounds like granting agencies and science funding in general are favouring a specific story about human history, but would like to read more.

<comment><USER14> Here's a brief little crash course on archaeology [https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/archae...](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/archaeology/archaeology.htm)

Here's a decent timeline of archaeology, see how it only goes back to 1780 [https://www.ancient.eu/timeline/Archaeology/](https://www.ancient.eu/timeline/Archaeology/)

There are some common historical inaccuracies in this article, like the fact we were taught Columbus discovered America as recently as the early 90's in my case (class of '13) despite them knowing damn well he didn't, Newton and gravity, how slavery is conveniently never mentioned in the North, etc [https://www.thisisinsider.com/myths-lies-learned-in- school-w...](https://www.thisisinsider.com/myths-lies-learned-in-school-wrong- facts-2017-5)

For Columbus in-particular the Oatmeal did a decent, but over the top, write up some years back [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day) I was literally taught in the early 90's that they believed the earth was flat and that Columbus was brave enough to attempt to sail to India and that everyone thought he was crazy and would fall off the side of the world. This was in a public school, 20 something years ago. Yet we know there were colonies, that were eventually abandoned, and one was found in the 1960's in Newfoundland.

Hell look to certain countries in the middle-east and there are millions that flat out think the holocaust never happened, people the world around that think the moon landings were on a sound stage, people trying to currently change history with the 'Mandela Effect' (Berenstein or Berenstain Bears?).

The history of paleontology is a good rabbit hole too, start with the wiki [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/History_of_paleontology](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/History_of_paleontology)

As far as people being blackballed, that's mostly just people coming forward after they allege it has happened or refusing to be part of something for fear of it although you can go read a lot about Zahi Hawass [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Zahi_Hawass](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Zahi_Hawass) and see where he was pretty damn nutty about creating his own narrative of Egyptian history for example

"Hawass has been accused of domineering behaviour, forbidding archaeologists to announce their own findings, and courting the media for his own gain after they were denied access to archaeological sites because, according to Hawass, they were too amateurish."

Zahi also strongly fought against any western archaeologists that wanted to question the timeline for the great pyramid and the Sphinx, flat out refusing their entry into the country in some instances and like when they drilled through the 'hidden door' in the great pyramid after jumping through all kinds of hoops and finding another door not farther up he flat out refused to let them drill through it.

I also recall Zahi having hieroglyphics at one site, that there are black and white photos of, covered in plaster but I can't seem to find what site it was. I distinctly remember seeing side by side photos, the period black and white next to a modern photo showing extensive plasterwork having been added, allegedly to 'protect' the site (bit weird, no other archaeologists seem to do that at ancient sites).

There are also anomalies like these

[https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ancient-roman-coins- japan/...](https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ancient-roman-coins- japan/index.html)

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2117117/myst...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2117117/mystery- over-tonnes-ancient-coins-found-buried-chinese-village)

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kensington_Runestone](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kensington_Runestone)

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Maine_penny](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Maine_penny)

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Beardmore_Relics](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Beardmore_Relics)

Etc. Out of place artifacts are interesting when not blatantly fakes [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Out-of- place_artifact](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Out-of-place_artifact)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the insightful answer and many leads to follow up on.

Just goes to show you what people will do to frame the narrative (& how valuable that narrative is!).

It's like that ol' 1984 quote "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

<comment><USER14> >You do realize this was simply bad teaching, right?

It was in the history textbooks.

<comment><USER17> I suspect you are misremembering.

Update: to be clear, absolutely there would have been people who thought they'd fall off the edge of the earth. There are always uneducated people, presumably large numbers in the 15th century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps the assumption that bread is a product of agriculture is the wrong way around? If bread was already being consumed then it would make sense to want a more centralized and reliable source of grain.

</comment><comment><USER19> <"Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread, so the fact that bread predates agriculture is kind of stunning," says Tobias Richter>

Australian Aboriginies where making bread from native grasses for many thousands years, finely ground with stones, toxins washed out and cooked on hot coals and stones

.. not a Seeminly well informed professor

</comment><comment><USER20> One thing that fascinates me about archeology is how they would come up with new conclusions based on a single observation. Quite the smallest sample size of any natural science I can think of, only thing I can compare to is the case study in medicine and psychoanalysis. One case, but very intensely studied.

</comment><comment><USER21> How accurate can these dating be? Can you really pin down burnt bread to 14.5k years? Maybe this was ritualistic. I don't know if you can infer that they regularly ate bread. Maybe some peganistic ritual or burial ritual had bread involved.

Grain yield pre agriculture is supposed to be really low. So low that there are hypothesis claiming that it was used to brew beer and eating the grain directly wouldn't be viable for the tribe. I guess we'll wait and see as more researchers chimes into this.

<comment><USER22> This is a classic use case for carbon 14 dating, so they probably used that. A quick glance at Wikipedia says that it's pretty reliable for organic substances up to 50k years ago. Dating older rocks will often require lead uranium dating or other interesting radioactive elements.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "That predate the prevalent half-assed educated guesses about when agriculture started, similar to many other assumptions about the ancient and pre-historic world that we have to revise every few years with new discoveries" would be a better title...

Edit: Downvotes as if the comment is controversial? Here is some food for thought:

[https://www.techtimes.com/articles/71133/20150722/discovery-...](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/71133/20150722/discovery- shows-origins-of-agriculture-twice-as-old-as-previously-thought.htm)

[http://thedailyjournalist.com/scientia/the-origins-of- chines...](http://thedailyjournalist.com/scientia/the-origins-of-chinese- agriculture-date-older-than-previously-thought/)

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/15/485722228/wh...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/15/485722228/where- did-agriculture-begin-oh-boy-its-complicated)

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722144709.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722144709.htm)

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/evidence-that- humans...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/evidence-that-humans-had- farms-30000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought/)

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422)

[http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rice-farming-in-india- muc...](http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rice-farming-in-india-much-older- than-thought-used-as-summer-crop-by-indus-civilisation)

<comment><USER24> They're "half-assed" guesses in the same sense that every scientific discipline has been proven inaccurate as understanding of it evolved. Give us a few hundred more years of digging in the sand and we'll have some better theories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Send them to this guy, he'll eat them:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/fea...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/featured)

<comment><USER14> Heh, I just spent a month watching all of Steve's videos. He's... he's brave. In one he has 50-60-year-old open can of jam and he eats some "I hope I don't get botulism, I don't have insurance". and then takes a few more bites...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In other words, everybody really does like pizza.

<comment><USER2> Cheese, you say they had _cheese_! Damn.

<comment><USER27> Quite probably. Cheese and milk products are nutritionally dense. On Food and Cooking documents milk producing 'Bos primigenius' (cow) at 6ft tall 8000 years BCE, with sheep and goats also used for milk and cheese production at that time.

Cheese would have probably been easier than bread!

<comment><USER2> OK, I'm convinced. They had pizza. Maybe with some wild oregano.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is bread paleo now?

</comment><comment><USER29> Slightly past the 5 second rule :(

</comment><comment><USER30> That's how the earliest bread winners brought home the dough.

</comment><comment><USER31> it was invented by the elon musk of bread, after he sold enough bread he made a mega factory to produce enough grain for his operation.

</comment><comment><USER32> Since this doesn't conform to the pre-existing theory of the development of agriculture I expect it to go _poof_ and disappear in a puff of logic any minute now.</comment>


Show HN: Bar chart race component for React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Mckinsey666/chart-race-react <comment><USER2> Great work! Very nice integrable UI design.</comment>


Valve Makes More Money Per Employee Than Google Or Apple - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/15/valve-makes-more-money-per-employee-than-google-or-apple/ <comment><AUTHOR> Forbes article on the subject: [http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe- newel...](http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0228/technology-gabe-newell- videogames-valve-online-mayhem.html)

<comment><USER2> That was strange indeed, this link to Techcrunch was a teaser for an article that was on Crunchgear that was a snippet of the actual full article on Forbes. It was a good read though.

<comment><USER3> My friends and I have actually been noticing this. There's been a deluge of TC links to articles with barely any content, and/or content that simply links to another article.

This is _not_ a good trend. People: please submit original sources.

<comment><USER4> An opportunity to make a techcrunch url unshortener!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Revenue per employee is one of my favorite metrics. I work on B2B software & services and when we ask our customers for testimonials we ask them to figure out what their revenue per employee was prior to using our system and then compare it with current numbers.

Since part of our value proposition is that we teach companies how to do more with less, it becomes a very powerful marketing tool. (We usually see an increase of 200% to 300% revenue per employee after 5 years; ordinary growth in our industry is 10% to 20% growth over 5 years.)

<comment><USER6> Wow, may I ask what kind of software creates such an astounding change?

<comment><USER5> Heh, it's a boring industry - Insurance sales. But other than a few small players that are focused on the wrong things, we mostly compete with home- grown systems and excel worksheets over email.

We made a choice to focus on this metric a few years ago and it's been a tremendous boon for us (and our customers). Now we consider every change with the lens of "Will this help our customers do their jobs better?"

<comment><USER7> When I used to sign up for insurance face to face through a local broker, their system was logging into a ISDN line, then connecting to a VMWare session that opened up a hosted desktop that they then used to open a TN3270 emulator to the insurance (in this case, Allstate) text-based interface.

I have a feeling independent resellers of services, brokers of any kind, and management companies of all verticals are seeing this type of abysmal computing and are crying out for someone building that next Quora knock-off to give their industry some love, likely at _any_ price (because they're probably paying a fortune for their kludge solutions anyway).

<comment><USER5> Rating systems are part of our offering ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Aside from the Valve's revenues per employee, what I find interesting about Valve is their Steam platform.

Steam (and other platforms for downloading and streaming videogame content) are a disruptive threat to Gamestop and the videogame sales of other retailers, such as Wal-Mart.

Given that online distribution has now disrupted music, newspapers, books, movies/video, and now tv/broadcast, I'm surprised that investors think Gamestop is worth $3b.

<comment><USER9> One thing Gamestop still has going for it is used game buyback and resell, which IIRC is where they make the vast majority of their money. Considering this market is completely unserved by Steam and other online delivery platforms, I can see why Gamestop would still be valued pretty highly, for now.

Of course, over time I suspect console makers will move more and more towards digital distribution for all games, but that won't happen overnight or even any time soon.

<comment><USER10> >Of course, over time I suspect console makers will move more and more towards digital distribution for all games, but that won't happen overnight or even any time soon.

This is why Gamestop should be finding support (ie, EFF, ACLU, legislators) to safeguard First Sale doctrine for digital purchases: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine>

<comment><USER11> Is there any reason to believe that Gamestop will get any of the business from digital resale?

I could see eBay trying to find that support, but Gamestop's just a dinosaur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Showing up is 90% of winning a battle. Other companies didn't bother with digital distribution and left the field wide open to Valve. All for the better, perhaps, it would be terrible if EA or Activision had the market all to themselves.

But even though they are not purely a game company, Valve are among the dwindling developers that actually embrace modders and giving players choice. In the console-centered world, the idea of free custom maps or player-run servers is fading from memory.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not surprised - Valve's business model with Steam is really smart and it's a great way to PC game publishers to sell older inventory (like my beloved Lucas Arts classics) without having to take any real risks. They're going to become the Amazon of PC games if they aren't already.

</comment><comment><USER14> Measuring any "Random Tech Company" versus Apple on the metric of Revenue Per Employee is always going to be skewed in Apple's disfavor. Everyone always forgets the thousands of retail employees at Apple Stores which are obviously going to generate much less revenue than say Johnny Ive or the programmer's writing the next version of OSX.

<comment><USER15> Valve is also really small compared to Apple (250 employees versus 50,000). If we're willing to compare among that level of size difference, then Mojang (of Minecraft fame) has better revenue per employee than Valve.

<comment><USER16> Does it? "High Hundreds of Millions"/250 could be greater than or equal to $10M-$15M/7 employees.

<comment><USER17> True, but Mojang grew 7x after most of that revenue ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even aside from their Steam distribution system I think Valve probably does better than most game companies at producing hit games while keeping their teams small. If you look at titles such as Left 4 Dead and Portal it's clear that there's not a whole lot of feature bullet points. These hit games are short, well crafted, tight experiences. In contrast many other AAA titles out there offer a massive array of features and options to the player. Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect, Fallout, and Halo are all massive games that require massive teams to create.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is not a news story, it's a marketing story promoting the company. The reason is that the claims are not remarkable at all, but the story promotes them as if they were, which is misleading.

Per-employee profit and revenue is larger in general at small successful tech companies than big successful ones.

For example, I make far more per employee than Valve, Microsoft, Google or Apple and you don't see Forbes writing about me, nor should they.

</comment><comment><USER20> So their profit is somewhere north of $70 million if I did my maths right and Wikipedia is reliable.

Not at Activison level yet I think.

</comment><comment><USER21> Didn't know Newell was a Harvard dropout. What's it with Harvard C.S. students dropping out and making it rich?

<comment><USER22> Survivorship bias, selection bias etc

<comment><USER21> I agree with the survivorship bias, maybe there are other dropouts who I never heard of.

But on the selection bias, I can't really think off the top of my head many other major founders from top C.S. schools that dropped out and were successful. Is Harvard even a "top" C.S. school?

<comment><USER23> According to US News [1], it's ranked 17th which is decent, but not great. On the other hand that ranking is for graduate schools though, which takes into account things like citations of research published, which is less important at the undergraduate level.

I'd say at the undergraduate level, Harvard is a top CS school if only because the competition is so fierce to get into it at that level, the students will be among the top. And, in my opinion, the quality of the students is of more importance than the quality of the teaching at the undergraduate level, when you start talking about the top 20 schools anyways.

[1]: [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best- gradu...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate- schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings/page+1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> that's a fun metric, but is it useful? i ask in seriousness. granted i'm no economist, but i'm not sure it's actually telling us much. Google and Apple, unless i'm mistaken, have way more product diversity in much larger markets; that Valve should have lower overhead per employee doesn't come as a surprise to me.

is there some non-obvious (or perhaps it is obvious, but not to the lay- person) reason why this is an impressive or telling metric?

</comment><comment><USER25> Don't forget engine licenses.

<comment><USER26> Does Valve make much off of those? Looking at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Source_engine_games>, there don't seem to be too many "other" games.

<comment><USER27> Valve don't release pricing information for the Source Engine, but they say it's competitive[1]. One of their competitors is id, who charge $250k plus 5% of wholesale[2] for id Tech 3. I'd say it's probably nice side income. Epic charge $350k plus 3% of wholesale[3].

For 18 games (if I counted that wikipedia list correctly), that should be a fair take, but it would seem like more of a side income when compared with Steam :)

[1] <http://source.valvesoftware.com/SourceBrochure.pdf>

[2] <http://www.idsoftware.com/business/technology/printdoc.html>

[3] <http://udn.epicgames.com/Main/Licensing.html>

<comment><USER28> Well, $350k is UE2's price but that's an outdated engine. A license for the current generation engine, UE3, will cost you around $1MM for a flat deal, less with back-end royalties.

Epic makes significantly more from their games than from their licensing. Here's the math. The Gears of War games had sold 12 million copies as of April last year. Most were sold close to release at $60 but some sold later at a discounted price. Let's say the average sales price across the 12 million copies was $50. A top-tier developer like Epic can command a 40% or higher royalty of wholesale minus cost of goods. GameStop's profit margin on a new game is 20% and cost of goods is a few bucks. That's around $15 per copy into Epic's pockets. Multiply by 12 million and you get $180MM. When Gears of War 3 lands in half a year, it will sell more than 7 million copies and make Epic another $100MM.

That's a fuckton of money.

Valve's revenue from sales of their own games and cuts from Steam is stratospheric compared to Epic's. If Gabe snapped his fleshy fingers and instantly absorbed all of UE3's marketshare with Source, it would still constitute a small portion of Valve's revenues. That's probably why Valve hasn't been more aggressive about engine licensing. They already have a massive and diversified revenue stream.

<comment><USER27> At what margin? There's more revenue in gaming than engine licensing, but once you have the engine, I can't imagine it costing much to license it.

<comment><USER28> > At what margin? There's more revenue in gaming than engine licensing, but > once you have the engine, I can't imagine it costing much to license it.

When you license UE3, you receive technical support from the programmers who implemented the engine. That's part of the sales pitch. Epic's marginal expense cannot be covered by just hiring more random hackers; it's mainly an opportunity cost. The engine is also in continual development, so you can't think of marginal revenue after the initial R&D investment as pure profit.

An alternative licensing model was followed by id Software back when they were still in that business. You sign the contract, pay the license fee, get a full day of face-time with Carmack, and then you're all on your own. There were other reasons that id's licensing business collapsed but the non-support was a contributing factor.

But there are also strategic technical issues that discourage Valve from chasing Epic's engine marketshare. Building an engine that's fit for many genres and platforms takes longer and is fraught with compromises compared to catering solely to your own needs.

It's a good business but there are reasons Valve focuses their attention elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> And still no Episode 3.</comment>


Stuff is Hard - <AUTHOR> http://thelinell.com/2014/03/27/stuff-is-hard/

<comment><USER2> I could have written this article so much better in so much less time. ;)

Seriously, great explanation of complexity. This is a good read for software engineers and product managers. The number of times I see folks ask for something and expect that it is simple b/c they don't understand the nuance in some things.

You've also uncovered one of the reasons that a great project manager is a patient person, and often will have experience writing code. These are the folks who understand that small changes can require large changes under the hood. The _really_ great ones understand how to take this into account and make requests that consider the risk and complexity, along with the utility of a feature.

I hope you make the front page. Upvoted.</comment>


Run Android APKs on Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk

<comment><USER2> The Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) beta is available for Linux/OSX/Windows too: [http://dfiles.eu/files/i565k9sv8](http://dfiles.eu/files/i565k9sv8) (CRX file)</comment>


Why movies are moving from 24 to 48 fps - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128113-why-movies-are-moving-from-24-to-48-fps <comment><USER2> So now if I opt out of the OnSwipe crap, it just goes into an infinite redirect loop. Why again do sites continue using this?

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128113-why-movies-are- mov...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128113-why-movies-are-moving- from-24-to-48-fps?onswipe_redirect=no?onswipe_redirect=yes?onswipe_redirect=yes?onswipe_redirect=yes?onswipe_redirect=yes?onswipe_redirect=yes?onswipe_redirect=yes)

Also, 24 fps is extremely low, and I don't know how the movie industry hasn't moved past it already. Bright panning scenes at the movies sometimes make me nauseated because the flickering is so strong.</comment>


'Today, Hong Kong; Tomorrow, Taiwan:' Resistance to China Spreads - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cover-Story/Today-Hong-Kong-tomorrow-Taiwan-Resistance-to-China-spreads <comment><USER2> Tech/media related issue here is that

1.) There are many media companies in Taiwan that have taken subsidies/investments from the Chinese government. For example, the richest Taiwanese, Tsai eng-meng, currently lives in Shanghai, and owns many tv stations and newspapers in Taiwan. Many of these tv stations are watched by the older generations, and a lot of the channels are politics focused. Thus these channels usually have a pro-China angle on them: how well China is doing economically, and ignores any sort of xinjiang/Hong Kong/trade war problems/economic slowdowns/human rights issues China has. I shuddered when an older relative told me that the tv show had told him that concentration camps for Uighurs are ok because it keeps the peace.

And don't think this is restricted to Taiwan. China has spread its media influence to other democratic countries in the world as well.

2.) hacking politicians. The pro-China presidential candidate, Han-Kuo-yu, was a literal unknown 6 months before the election for city of kaoshung. However, thanks to a (purported) digital influence campaign by Chinese hackers, he won the election. Then he declared to run for president, without having accomplished much of anything for the city. This sort of thing could also happen to US, in that China could interfere in the 2020 election.

<comment><USER3> how arrogant do you have to be to attribute Han's success to Chinese hackers?

<comment><USER2> Careful there with the personal attack.

I put purported there for a reason. Han promised riches for citizens of kaoshung, went to visit China right after the election, and yet haven't done a single thing yet to improve the city, before running for president.

<comment><USER4> This is not a valid argument to support your speculations though. With the same logic, almost every politician is questionable.

<comment><USER5> > This is not a valid argument to support your speculations though

This was not speculation, it was a claim. Though I'd agree he did not provide links to support his claim.

> With the same logic, almost every politician is questionable

True, if every politician was indeed "a literal unknown 6 months before the election". But at least in the west this is rather unusual, so I can't accept your claim.

<comment><USER4> I was replying to the previous comment and refer to the exact comment.

The previous comment did not mention this, instead, it is "Han promised riches for citizens of kaoshung, went to visit China right after the election, and yet haven't done a single thing yet to improve the city, before running for president.".

What I was saying is that this is not a valid argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I expected the Beijing government would (a) continuously improve its image in Hong Kong, and (b) monitor HK public opinion to ensure they don't push its agenda to the point where it would risk instability.

How in the world did they mess up so badly? It looks like a completely unforced error: prior to the extradition proposal, there was no social unrest, and barely any political activism. The time was on the Beijing side.

It seems that someone is terrible at their job. If I was Xi, I would fire Carrie Lam, and appoint someone more capable in her place. Someone who can understand and relate to the public, who can earn the respect of the population, who recognizes the long term interests of Beijing and yet knows how to trade them off against the need for stability.

I know it's easy to criticize, but I think it's reasonable to have high expectations from HK Chief Executive. And it's very sad to watch a great city threatened by the leader's incompetence.

<comment><USER7> One of the problems with power is that the more power you have, the less truth you hear. Xi has grabbed total control of power in China, and one of the results is that people almost certainly tell him what they think he wants to hear, rather than what he _needs_ to hear.

<comment><USER6> If that's the case, hopefully, he can learn from the clear screwups like this that his team fails at keeping him informed. And hopefully he can still find people who can do more than flatter and kowtow, and get them to advise him.

I do think though that things are not as bad as in ancient China. I think people are trying to inform him, they are just not very good at it.

<comment><USER8> So you want him to succeed?

<comment><USER9> why not?

<comment><USER10> Why do you want him to? Why do you support the CCP? Why the new account?

<comment><USER6> (Answering a parent post)

> So you want him to succeed?

Xi pursues many different objectives, and I don't know what most of them are. I suspect I would support some but not all of his objectives, and some but not all of the methods he's using to achieve those objectives. (I would say the same if you asked about almost any other world leader or political movement.) Therefore, I cannot answer your question with a simple yes or no.

However, the relevant question is much simpler: do I want Xi to follow policies that endanger stability and prosperity across Asia? The answer is a very clear no. So I really hope that his advisors will help him avoid such policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something something golden goose.

I understand that HK is an asset and I presume china wishes to keep it an asset but they must, at some level anyway, realise that they will choke it if they grab it, but grab it apparently they must.

ISTM china can either have some of what it wants, or try for all and eventually get none, and they seem to be heading for the latter. I don't understand the thinking. So can anyone enlighten me as to the economic and political theory behind it?

Edit: I may be plain wrong and they genuinely can have it all, I just don't see how.

<comment><USER10> HK economically is not significant to China. It wants to control it for ideological reasons. If it destroys the economy, that's a price it will be willing to pay.

<comment><USER11> What they are really scared about is that Hong Kong and Taiwan demonstrate that other systems than an authoritarian one party dictatorship can work well in a "Chinese" society. The mainland party line is that democracy wouldn't work for "Chinese" because whatever culture thousands years of history blah blah bs and that sounds a bit stupid if there are flourishing democracies in HK and TW. It's all about keeping the lid on the mainland.

<comment><USER9> China cares about Unity. American coins are minted with a Latin saying "e pluribus unum", which means "Out of many, one". It's a reminder that there were 13 colonies that united to become one. Hence the name the "United States of America".

China and America are alike in that they value unity. The difference is that America has never lost a territory whereas China lost two: Taiwan to Japan and Hong Kong to Britain. In the process the people in Taiwan and Hong Kong who valued Chinese culture were killed by the Japanese and British and the ones who remain went along with the new regime to survive.

China is trying to reclaim their land and people. But unlike the Japanese and British, they don't want to reclaim it with force/violence because the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong are Chinese. Instead they are looking for a more agreeable path towards re-integration.

But honestly, it would be easier to do what Japan did to Taiwan b/c then the protests would end quickly and all you'd be left with are people who are outwardly compliant. It's a tricky situation and the western world is really playing it up to make China look like the bad guy while ignoring how Taiwan and HK were taken over to begin with.

Reminds me of how foreign powers split up Korea and Vietnam into North and South. After dividing these countries up they became weak.

Hence the importance of unity. China doesn't want to make the same mistake.

<comment><USER10> Whataboutism and glossing over the huge sacrifices in freedom of expression and democracy that both countries would lose if they were to be taken over, well Taiwan at least. HK is already lost mostly. The people of both countries do not want it.

And you're entirely wrong about China being unwilling to use violence. 30 years ago they committed an atrocity in order to silence protest. They just don't think the risk-reward is worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This fight in Hong Kong is larger than just fighting over democracy. It's about preserving traditional Chinese culture and the Cantonese language. Who wants to be forcefully extradite and sent to camps to be re-educated about what the party believe is the correct value system?</comment>


IPhone Auto Shutdown Problems Plaguing Owners - <AUTHOR> http://www.techieinsider.com/news/13080 <comment><USER2> The problems with the iPhone are getting to be crazy with the battery drain and now this!</comment>


John Hennessy and David Patterson 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts <comment><USER2> "Guys, we've been giving you a free ride for 30 years while you write your crummy software and we made it faster. That's over!" \-- John Hennessy

"Our job is to tell them: it's over. The free ride is over. There's no magic. The cavalry is not coming over the hill." \-- David Patterson</comment>


American Airlines International 'Economy' Class - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/american-airlines-international-economy-class-2013-1?op=1#ixzz2JIlmxu88 <comment><USER2> This person clearly hasn't traveled international in a long time and therefore had very low expectations.

International flights over a certain distance have to serve food.

The only international flight I've been on in the last 3 years which did not have in-seat entertainment was American Airlines flights.

What surprises me most is that we have been unable to find a seating configuration which provides a better use of space than just rows of seats.

Seeing as most people would likely be more comfortable lying down, wouldn't it in some way make more sense to stack people in little pods vertically?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never been in an international flight without at least one meal, and these days many long-haul routes have new aircraft with adequate in-flight entertainment -- yes, even on US carriers. It really depends on the specific aircraft. I know from experience that some international American 777s do have power ports in economy (as well as personal monitors). 767s are being retired or upgraded, and Zurich-New York is not a 'core' route for most airlines so it makes sense that the equipment was a little dated.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use as network diagram software? - <AUTHOR> I start to have a lot of services and servers running in my company, and I hardly remember every programs which runs on each server.
Also I would like to indicate dependencies and responsibilities of each server, can you recommend such tool except Google Draw ?
Thanks <comment><USER2> For over a decade, I've used Omnigraffle on macOS.

[https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle](https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle)

They have an excellent stencil repository:

[https://stenciltown.omnigroup.com/](https://stenciltown.omnigroup.com/)

... including stuff like Cisco stencils, if that's your thing.

[https://stenciltown.omnigroup.com/search?q=cisco](https://stenciltown.omnigroup.com/search?q=cisco)

</comment><comment><USER3> Though this in no way addresses your question, I hope it may still be of use.

I regularly create extremely information-dense graphs for highly distributed, stateful systems. The result is effectively a high-level specification for effecting some critical set of global behaviors. Lower-level details may then be represented in subsequent diagrams, but these rarely convey much insight beyond what tabular data can. Indeed, tabular data is readily amenable to computation, allowing relationships to be queried without manually consulting a diagram.

For distributed services, simple (name, URI) tuples can be associated with their respective dependencies in a database or document. This flat, non- overlapping structure ensures dependencies always remain easy to identify, no matter how complex they become. IPC dependencies can be documented in a similar way, and even indirect dependencies, such as when one program writes some data which another program must read, are easily obtained from lists of adjacencies.

Crucially, storing dependencies as data does not preclude visualization but makes it possible to generate a wealth of visualizations without manual intervention. Consider that even an intermediate graph representation, such as dot, does not force you to use GraphViz, and the simple adjacency list format is easily parsed and reformatted for use with other tools.

All that said, I do use Visio for the aforesaid design specification style of diagrams. I find every other program out there to be endlessly frustrating for my use case. But if I need to document some system in full, I do so with data to ensure it can be monitored, verified, or simply queried.

Best of luck to you!

</comment><comment><USER4> yEd Graph Editor

[https://www.yworks.com/products/yed](https://www.yworks.com/products/yed) [https://www.yworks.com/products/yed/download](https://www.yworks.com/products/yed/download)

</comment><comment><USER5> I discovered draw.io few days ago, and used it, looks promising

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhabs stating the obvious but Visio?</comment>


Surfer's CT prediction models - <AUTHOR> http://fantasysurfingtips.com/calculation-updates.html <comment><AUTHOR> This year I started predicting professional surfers CT based on the WSL Fantasy Game. That is how far I got, there is still one event ahead. My best model could be in 30th position in a game played by more than 100k users.</comment>


Want to attract and retain Gen Y? Better rethink everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2008/09/16/20080916bizaz-geny0908-ON.html <comment><USER2> This isn't Hacker News, but I do have an opinion on this, so I'll let it slide since it's vaguely business related.

I'm going to take the unpopular option and say that no, business doesn't have to re-think everything because of gen-y.

This generation of young know-it-alls has had the fortunate experience of never having to understand what life is like in an economic downturn. That's clearly evident in most of the y'ers I meet everyday (I'm "x" myself). This is about to change in a big way. Because of that, the days of having companies begging for you to come work for them are soon going to be a thing of the past, at least temporarily.

That, coupled with the natural process of maturity, will give enough of a dose of reality to gen-y'ers that at least some of them will start to reduce the level of demands they would make on corporations.

Some things are changing, like companies allowing for flex-hours, but that has little if anything to do with gen y exclusively.

<comment><USER3> I think an economic downturn is only going to temporarily suppress our ideals and actually make them stronger. There would be no reason for us to jump ship for greener pastures when the economy comes around again. I don't think maturity is the same as making peace with your dreams, it should only strengthen your determination.</comment></comment>


Does your copy of Office 2013 die with your computer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/does-your-copy-of-office-2013-die-with-your-computer-20130208-2e3a1.html

<comment><AUTHOR> What seems bizarre about this is that the licensed software market seems to be moving full-speed towards app stores with one-off fees, perpetual licenses and broad usage rights across a customer's devices. But with Office 2013 Microsoft seems to be stuck with a strategy from about 5 years ago.

Interesting data point that illustrates their confusion. On iOS the operating system can render Office documents for you with no additional software. On a clean install of Linux you can usually render and edit Office documents (using Libreoffice or OpenOffice). I imagine the situation is similar on Mac OS X and Android.

On a clean install of Windows 8 there is no software pre-installed that will render Office documents. Worse, if you click on a .doc file the operating system helpfully suggests that you can look for an app to open the file in the Store. The top match for opening .doc files in the Windows 8 app Store at the moment? Corel Office!

<comment><USER2> Microsoft make the lion's share of their money from businesses, not consumers. And the _B2B_ software market--you know, the one Patrick Mackenzie says you should target if at all possible--is pretty much exactly aligned with Microsoft right now: per-seat SaaS subscription models.

Your point about "confusion" comes apart when you realize that there is almost nobody who wants to _use_ Office, who then purchases a computer _with_ Windows, but _without_ Office. Computers bought from big-box stores already have Office on them. Computers bought in tech refreshes by Big Corporations have Office imaged onto them as part of the deployment. Office is a "separate product", but Windows isn't built to expect you to _not have_ an office suite. The only reason it's optional at all is so you have the option to use a _competitor_.

<comment><USER3> Actually, I've hardly ever seen a new computer come with a full licensed copy of Office. A trial of Office, yes, but not a full-featured edition.

Office 2007/2010's 3-seat family editions, though, did get a ton more normal users buying Office than anyone could have predicted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only thing holding me back from going completely to Google Docs is the spreadsheet. For anything real, the Google Spreadsheet is simply not usable. It's a great proof of concept, and it works for small, unuseful spreadsheets, but for doing anything substantive, Excel is several orders of magnitude better.

I don't care if I need to install a separate, native executable/plugin in order to get better performance. If Google offers something that is usable, I would gladly switch to Google Docs.

<comment><USER5> I tend to agree - particularly on interactivity/performance - Is there something else that you're missing though?

That said, every time I use Google Spreadsheets I'm surprised at much it's rapidly improving.

<comment><USER4> Mainly speed, usability, etc. If you have a large spreadsheet with tens of thousands of rows, trying to scroll back and forth makes it unusable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you define device? The CPU? The storage? The specific instance of the install?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus>

<comment><USER7> I imagine it will be like some forms of DRM. If you change even a hard disk, the entire copy is invalidated, as it's a 'different' computer.

<comment><USER8> I've had the unpleasent experience of within 1 week having my mother board replaced twice, and my wireless chip and keyboard replaced once. (And my bios service tag not properly reset after one of the motherboards). Through all of this, Windows somehow got the idea that I was pirating it (okay, pretty clear where it got this idea from). The license key that came with the CD did not work. After several boot cycles and re-tries at activating windows, I decided to try again, and when it failed that time I would use the activate by phone option. Somehow, when I ran the activation executable that time it activated without any further prompts. Not entirely sure what this story says about MS's computer fingerprinting.

Also, I left out of the story that: After the last hardware change windows booted several times without issue. After the first time it complained it was invalid the computer would fail to boot until I re-installed GRUB from a live cd. Between the GRUB incident and windows activating I identically let windows install updates (which I thought couldn't be done from an unactivated install). After these updates, when you try to log on, you get a fatal error in its attempt to launch 'your copy of windows might not be genuine' program, followed by a failure to launch explorer, followed by a black screen. I looked up the error, and it seems to be a result of the update unrelated to the activation issue. Booting into safemode and installing the update solved that. Several failed activation attempts later and my computer was good as new.)

One of the many reasons I use GNU/Linux as my primary OS.

<comment><USER9> Yet another case of DRM harming legitimate customers more than pirates. Meanwhile some guy in China is selling Windows DVDs with that stuff patched out and a full version of Office already installed.

There's absolutely no way I'd pay for an abusive experience like that, so I'll stick with GNU/Linux as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why I hate DRM. I want to be able to use my software forever.

If it's technically and culturally capable of doing so, the manufacturer has an economic incentive to _want_ the software to die with your computer: That'll put you in the market for either another copy, or one of their newer products, every few years. Even if you were perfectly happy with the old version and upgraded your computer for other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is stupid. There is a deactivate button on their website. It literally took me a minute to find it the first time I as looking for it. I've been able to deactivate and reactivate on more than two computers. The author should have done some research before spreading FUD.

<http://i.imgur.com/Ei5wx1V.png>

<comment><USER12> The article focused on the license terms, not what you can get away with. If you run a small business and don't want to worry about BSA license audits, this stuff matters.

It also appears that you're using a student version of Office, the licensing terms are most likely different for that version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will say that Office 2010 OEM licenses were a pretty good deal IMHO. Yes, you could only install them once... but they were close to half the price of a retail version. At least for me, it worked out to be cheaper to just bite the bullet and buy another license in the case of catastrophic hardware failure or major hardware upgrade.

Looks like the pricing is more confusing (and higher) for 2013 though.

</comment><comment><USER14> What if you install Office on a VM? Can you run the VM from multiple machines? Can you move the VM from your old computer to your newer computer?

<comment><USER15> You 'Can'. The issue is Microsoft doesn't think you should (I believe you have to use a VL).

As for Windows VMs, I've found if you keep what is presented to Windows stable, it doesn't know the difference. Keep the MAC address on the network card static (this means you can't run two copies on the same network at the same time, which by the license you shouldn't anyway). After running on a number of different processors Windows may want to reauthorize though.

It would not be surprising if they put code that detected a VM in Win8 and Office 2013 some time in the future (or it's already hidden there)

<comment><USER16> >It would not be surprising if they put code that detected a VM in Win8 and Office 2013 some time in the future.

That would be really unfortunate. I run Windows 8 Pro in a VM with a valid license, mostly for the purpose of using Office 2013, which is also a valid license.

<comment><USER7> I realise that software like VMWare present their virtual devices as their own brand ('VMWare Network Adaptor' and alike), but isn't one of the points of virtualisation that the client doesn't know it's being run in a VM? At least I presume you could make the VM completely transparent, short of running timing tests on the virtual devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love reading tech stories from sites that recommend I next read a story about "Killer Vaginas".

</comment><comment><USER18> I suppose its a vaguely interesting technical point regarding terms and conditions, but in reality people will just go ahead and reinstall it anyway - with no penalty. I don't really see how this EULA change actually changes anything in practice.

<comment><USER13> Is that possible? I'm not the software will allow it. The OEM version phones home with your license key during install.

<comment><USER18> I've done it before with Office 2010, but I must admit I've not tried the latest 2013.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That said, I subscribed to the online MS Office suite (w/ SkyDrive and some other goodies) a few days ago and I'm impressed. The Microsoft user experience is pretty slick nowadays.

I've even switched from Google to Bing and Chrome to Internet Explorer for a month. At first the "newness" of it all was a bit jarring, like navagating an alien landscape, but after only a few days I don't think I'm ever going back.

Do yourself a solid and give it a test drive.

<comment><USER20> I tried this too and found the experience sucked. Microsoft just can't get its head out of the 90's. They still don't get the Internet. I think they never recovered after that.</comment></comment>


StarCharter – CLI tool for producing vector-graphics charts of the night sky - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dcf21/star-charter <comment><USER2> This looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

From time to time I've looked around for good charts of the night sky, suitable for printing and browsing. These are the best I've found so far; they might be helpful to users of this program as a guide for how to design charts:

[https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/](https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dude: not only great idea, well executed: practical, direct, to the point

</comment><comment><USER4> What, exactly, are "constellation boundaries" good for? They seem to just be weird visual noise that doesn't really help with anything.

<comment><USER5> The night sky is big. These boundaries just help define an area of the sky that is easily communicated between other people. They help define physical locations. It's like discussing New York City, but then breaking that down into the boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Bronx. It just makes discussing a large area much more manageable. With constellation boundaries, you not only describe a physcial location in the sky, but potentially also a time of year (even night) as certain parts of the sky are only visible at certain times.

For a much more wordy read: [http://www.ianridpath.com/boundaries.htm](http://www.ianridpath.com/boundaries.htm)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I still see the value. The boundaries shown on modern maps are very strange and complicated shapes, and seem extremely arbitrary. Does it really help me in any way to know inside which convoluted an non-intuitive shape a star is?

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry the concept of boundaries being used to define specific areas are beyond you. Not sure how else I can help. If you look at the boundaries of any modern map of the geography of the earth, nothing is in straight lines. The borders of countries are very complicated shapes, yet you pretty much know if you are in a country or not. Cities are the same way, yet you probably know when you leave your city. Breaking into smaller neighborhoods it gets even more confusing, but yet again, you probably know when you're in your neighborhood or you're in the one next door. Knowing those boundaries comes from experience traveling around the areas. It'll happen the same way if you actually study astronomy versus just being obtuse about a subject on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does my location factor into it? I usually have to set time and location on apps and sites and dont see any mention of lat/long here...

<comment><USER7> This isn't really creating a "what's in the sky right now" chart (which requires your location & time) so much as a map of the sky based on standard astronomical coordinates. These are the sorts of charts you'd see printed in sky atlases, for example, which don't have any relationship to your location or current time.

<comment><USER6> Ah I see. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Might be useful with ITelescope as the parameter per telescope and time and location could be parameter.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really cool, gonna give it a try tomorrow!</comment>


Free BlackBerry PlayBook for App Devs - <AUTHOR> http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/playbook_offer.jsp <comment><USER2> When do submissions have to be in by?</comment>


Write a mind-blowing sudoku solver, the thread will drift on webservers. Sh*t. - <AUTHOR> http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2005/11/3b2cd69d79484a1bc2c5f9aea4214836.en.html

<comment><USER2> People will take any opportunity to talk about what they know. Software engineers are like athletes, they need their ego's stroked more often than they should. And if no else will do it, well they might as well do it themselves. At least peacocks are more honest and upfront when they do it.

Speaking of which, who want to talk about incredibly fast methods of protein folding, just re- this comment... kiddin'. Please don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the point of the story? Don't get it. Do you agree with Oliver's statement, or do you think people should have talked more about sudoku solvers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, both.

I think that we need mind-blowing sudoku solvers where Alonzo-Church-oriented minds shows the more Turing-Machine-inclined fellas what kind of terseness you can achieve with functional programmming (simple problems are the best to explain features of a programming paradigm), and I also believe that we need webservers that go beyond 10k simultaneous connections while still being simple and maintanable and modular (i.e., real life functional programming).

I just find that that thread shows perfectly how the functional programming folks perceive themselves as not having a real killer application for what they believe is a paradigm that suits a certain class of problems like a glove. "Haskell is the language that everybody talks about [like I am doing here :-)], but nobody uses" said Simon Peyton-Jones. There are only a few industrial applications of FP, I am thinking of the trading firm Jane Street and the security company galois.com . It didn't take off yet, I'd say.

But I don't want this thread to replicate that troll -- i.e. becaming an Emacs Vs Vim kind of discussion. I just believe that the thread linked above well reflects a situation deeply rooted in the programming community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, the thread did not shift to "webservers", it shifted on the topic "well, Sudoku solvers are nice, but were are the real world _Alonzo-Church_ style programs, and why are we functional types living off of C and the like for most of real world use?</comment>


[TED Talk] Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html

<comment><USER2> A very brilliant TED talk after a long time. Chinese communist party is just a namesake communist party. In fact they have been doing the most pragmatic thing to do in the name of communism.

It is true that an ordinary Chinese has lesser freedom than say an average American but in the end, average Chinse also have much bigger problems to deal with. With the passage of time I am sure China will give more freedom to it's citizens.

Also, with the news related to PRISM and all, we know that freedom in USA is nothing but an illusion and the government is turning more and more to be a modern soviet russia where anyone who begs to differ with government is either jailed or harassed.

In long run I would rather like to see meritocratic people ruling a country rather than the popular ones.</comment>


Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup - <AUTHOR> http://fredandrandall.com/blog/2012/04/01/why-im-working-for-the-man-and-not-doing-a-startup/ <comment><USER3> After working for several years in a similar environment to the one the author is in right now, I had the exact opposite experience.

Wrote soulless boring enterprise software for a customer I never met, using some of the most ancient development techniques, while having the department boast about innovation and "spearheading engineering excellence" every other day.

Shared buildings with hundreds of other ninetofivers who couldn't care less about the quality of their work, all they wanted was the great health insurance, the chance to get a green card in a decade or two, and the option to buy a nice home in the area for their 2-3 kids. Clock in, clock out, occasionally play office politics for that sweet principal position in 10-15 years. Experienced every agile aberration known to man, including predicting down to the hour every single thing I would be working on, and then have the boss breathe down your neck when you're off. The best part is when he tells you that he cannot "trust you" anymore due to the latest estimate being off by several hours, and you should multi-task more to get things done quicker. How about keeping your reported work hours purposefully low, even if you're working weekends? Your boss will think that you were good enough to get it done in a couple of days, and will promote you over the guy who's honest with his hours. Happened ALL THE TIME.

When I left, the few good friends I had while there asked me what my best memories were after half a decade. Not a single one, everything I enjoyed (including software projects) was outside of work.

If I never have to hold a lowly corporate job again, I'll die a happy man. I'd rather make a third of what I was making there, but at least I'll be proud of the work I'm doing and I will look forward to doing more of that every time I wake up.

Randall, you're in your mid 20s, brother, what is this comfort you are talking about? What do you have to lose? Go fuck up a couple of businesses, give it your best shot, get a few battle scars, and then maybe we'll talk about wanting comfort. You're way too young to settle down, it's sad to see someone like you waste his talents.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that.

I have been questioning myself for deciding to never work for the man again and your words reassured me.

No amount of money is enough for mediocrity to be forced upon you.

<comment><USER3> I try to be very conscious and grateful of the fact that mine is a privileged position. I do not (yet?) have severe pre-existing conditions, children, or a sick spouse that would pretty much force me to have to find a corporate job with the right kind of health insurance. There are some things that were under my control, such as making sure my partner was on the same page with not wanting to have children and was ok with having a very humble lifestyle, but there are thousands of other variables which are pure luck.

There are plenty of people out there for whom to drop out, stay afloat on savings for a few years, while rolling the startup dice, is simply not conceivable. If I were in that situation and had to take a soul-crushing enterprise job just to be able to afford the right medications, I would probably not enjoy people telling me that "I could do more with my life". If that's the author's situation, then I'm sorry, mine was an inappropriate conclusion. I digress, however, don't think this thread is the correct place to discuss US policy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Stability is a huge benefit of a regular full time job"

That's a myth. While being an employee, there's no stability whatsoever. You can get fired any time - get laid off, become a victim of corporate politics, or get fired for whatever other reason. Just last month, someone I know got fired on the spot after 15 years at a company for not reporting some personal stuff between other employees.. something he wasn't involved with, at all. I'm sure everyone else heard stories of people being thrown out after 10-20-30 years of loyal service to the company for bullshit reasons.

At the same time, when you run a business, you can't ever get fired, and everything depends on you. Whether you make money, or lose money - it's for the most part, your doing (market circumstances nonwithstanding).

That's why running a business is a lot more of a stable job than working for the man.

<comment><USER6> "When you run a business, you can never get fired"

This is objectively untrue for anyone who takes money from others.

A significant portion of my income as a business owner can get pink slipped at the decision of any one of seven people, and they wouldn't even endure the minimal social awkwardness of pink-slipping me! All they have to do is not respond "Yes" to an email asking for something that I have no socially durable expectation of "yes" from.

<comment><USER7> If you also run an online startup, chances are you rely on SEO or search engine marketing. If Google bans your Adwords account, or penalizes you to oblivion, I'll say that's pretty much the equivalent of getting fired.

<comment><USER8> True story, although once you're spending enough on AdWords you'd have to do some pretty egregious stuff to get your AdWords account banned (and to some extent you're much less likely to get a major, lasting ban in organic search).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn't that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. If I forgot to pay my companies electric bill the consequences are a little more severe."

Huh.

Maybe this is just a difference in outlook, but if I were forced to log my hours it would probably either send me into a fury or the depths of despair. Actually, more likely, I'd quit. Or be fired. It's happened before.

Yet I have basically no problem having no safety net, and taking responsibility for my employees, millions of dollars, and the fate of the planet.

Weird.

The only discriminating factor I can see is that being forced to log hours makes me feel like a kid unworthy of trust. Any others?

I feel like I've learned something about myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was talking about doing estimations for tasks. It's a pretty normal "agile" thing to do. There's no trust issues, it's just a project management thing.

<comment><USER10> It's still a ridiculous waste of time. It makes work about gaming the system and your boss (is it better to underestimate so he lets you do what you want, or overestimate so you don't get yelled at later?) rather than moving forward and getting shit done. It's inane, stupid stuff designed to make unimportant people feel important.

A programmer who can't be trusted to control his own time shouldn't be hired in the first place.

<comment><USER11> I personally would not want a builder to home build a home with my money without a time and cost estimate. This is not about startups or established companies. If you don;t know what needs to happen for your vision to come to fruition and how much it is going to cost then you are leaving a lot chance.

I just don't get why people are always complaining about estimates.

<comment><USER12> Because they don't work.

Even if you are out to build your home, the estimates given out to you are only going to good enough to win the contract from you. Nothing more.

If you have ever built a home, you would have realized that the project generally went way out of budget and time. You can go back and look at what you had planned and estimated. You will also see that your execution was pretty close to the plan. But a lot of other things went wrong. It rained and all the sand got washed away. The cement company suddenly increased their prices. Something new came in, and suddenly you though a new bath fit was better than the old one. Things slip out of your hand one thing at a time.

Workers get sick, attrition happens and all other sort things go wrong. And this is with things like construction, where not much thinking effort is required.

Programming is more harder, The iterations of analyse, build, test, feedback, analyse... Take time, mistakes happen, you need to read, research etc.

Unless you are a robot and work without any intelligent inputs and outside dependencies. No estimate ever has made sense.

<comment><USER11> I think your point lends itself more to a general misunderstanding of the purpose of planning and estimation rather a lack of value in the process.

There is a reason it is called a plan and an estimate instead of a fact-sheet and a contract.

I am in a position now where I provide architectural review and software delivery estimation on a full time basis. If we did not provided these estimates the VPs and directors would not have any way of justifying where and when to spend the investors' money to achieve the best return for the company.

IMO, spending someone else's money (read investment) without a plan and estimate should be considered irresponsible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You say that you know if you worked on someone else's idea you wouldn't be able to find the passion to sustain you. I would challenge you on that - <USER2> can you be so sure? I joined Twilio very early and it wasn't my idea. However, I took my passion for making software developers happy (and my even more fundamental professional passion for helping people be productive) and connected it with their specific idea. I never would have thought of Twilio, but I'm so happy to be part of making it exist.

Don't ever stop prospecting for other people and ideas that you could get behind, because when you find them it is magical.

</comment><comment><USER14> _If_ you can find a good company and a day job where you have lots of freedom and control, potential to build something great, minimum corporate politics, and the ability to concentrate on building interesting stuff, that does indeed sound fantastic and in some ways more tempting than a startup.

However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing. It sounds like it would be a pretty small jump.

<comment><USER15> _However, I think that if you are operating in an environment like that, with that level of independence and creativity, you almost may as well go a step further and grab at least some element of ownership in what you are doing._

You mean climb the technical ladder? Because if you're already in a great company environment, that's exactly what the technical ladder is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I often hear people complaining about "corporate politics". What do people think that really means? As if you won't have politics in your startup, with your V.Cs, clients, partners and competitors.

Everything in business is politics if you cannot handle your co-worker jockeying for position prior to performance reviews, good luck dealing with a partner or investor who wants to edge you out of your startup.

One more note, working for a corporation can provide a technical person with a lot opportunity not available at a startup and vice-versa. For instance, at a startup you will not likely get the valuable and lucrative experience removing and replacing a mainframe application that has been a core business system for 30 years. There are hundreds of companies out there at this very minute who are spending hundreds of millions attempting (and struggling with) this very feat. So while RoR and Django developers are a dime a dozen, others are building a skill that commands a premium at fortune 1000 companies across the nation and builds relationships with Sr. Architects, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs to boot.

</comment><comment><USER16> Eh - I know there are an endless number of conversations on here about startups vs. corporate jobs but I'd say the conversation is way too generic to be at all meaningful. Ive flip-flopped from startups to corps and places in between. There is the same shit (or potential for shit) everywhere just in different packages.

\- Startups can have just as much politics as corps - it really just depends on the actual folks you interact with

\- Big corps can have incredibly interesting problems due to their scale and impact while startup work can be exciting because of the progressiveness of it - and in actual practice about 90% of what both groups do is usually pretty boring.

\- Soulless work - I've found writing enterprise business software to be pretty much equivalent to building VC-powered social/local image-sharing flavor of the month apps in terms of being personally exciting. Mileage will vary.

Etc. - I could go on. Point being that if you take averages Id say startups are similar to big corps - the problems are just disquised in different packages. The real trick is trying to find unique scenarios/jobs that minimize the crap.

</comment><comment><USER17> Did we ever stop to think this is just one person's point of view that's completely influenced by his personality, and that you could be 100% the opposite, before passing summary judgments for and against the poor guy?

I've had mixed experiences in both sectors, and it doesn't make sense to generalize here.

I've worked in a small-ish department in a large company where we had lots of flexibility with the backing of a large corporate. I've worked in startups with zero creativity and the momentum of a third-world government org. I've also worked in a startup that was run by a maniacal CEO who was so out of touch with engineering that even after 6 years of development the company was unable to scale volumes or make good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER18> Minified:

      Why I'm working for the man and not doing a startup?
      Stability and lack of passion.

\---

Two good reasons, however, not too insightful (subjective).

<comment><USER11> lack of passion...

IMO, That is a narrow view. What is the goal here, start-up or business? If the goal is startup you may find that it never stops trying to start.

There are great established companies to work for and great startups to work for.

There are also terrible established companies to work for and terrible startups to work for.

I would also like to note that at good, established corporations there are two kinds of technical staff. The passionate kind with a decent mix of technical skills, business acumen and communication skills who work hard,are presented with interesting opportunities and are rewarded for their hard work, and the other kind who seam to always be complaining about the corporate environment and how it is holding them back. Often the "other kind" possesses adequate technical skills but has not taken the time to develop the business acumen and communication skills necessary to be proficient in a high-stakes business.

The first type will strive at any business whether established or start-up. The second type will likewise exhibit similar performance no matter the established date stamped on the business's letterhead.

<comment><USER18> Are you replying to me or the article?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It really all depends on what you feel happy doing. There's no one-size-fits all. Some people are meant for startups, some aren't.

I think it's best to always see yourself as self-employed. You yourself are your product. You can sell your product to a company for 40 hours a week, or you can run a startup (where you still have a boss btw -- they're called "clients" or "users"). Or a mix of both, which is what I do.

</comment><comment><USER20> Microsoft was a startup once. When does a startup transition in to being "the man"?

<comment><USER21> I don't know at what point you become "the man" but it's an interesting question at what point you are no longer considered a startup.

There's probably several paths that lead to loss of your "startup" status. Being bought out, going IPO, becoming profitable, being in business 3+ years, etc.

<comment><USER22> > being in business 3+ years

And if you're been in business for 3+ years, but change direction (like from consulting to products as many in the industry do), are you considered a startup again?

<comment><USER21> Good question. 3 years was an arbitrary number. Maybe you could say that you're a startup as long as you're still relying on venture capital?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can also start without an idea, if what you really want is creating a startup. <http://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html>

Yet, I think you might want to develop more abilities before that so you have better resources and a wider perspective.

</comment><comment><USER24> The real sweet spot I think is a company of about 200-300 people. It's big enough to provide real stability but not big enough to develop a lot of the pathologies of bigger companies.

<comment><USER25> That's actually the worst size. There are all the pathologies of a startup combined with all the pathologies of a bigger company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn't that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email._

People actually work for companies where they "log [...] task estimation hours"? I'm afraid of what throwing up in my mouth on a regular basis will do to my throat. I'll pass.

Here's why your job in a TPS labyrinth _isn't_ stable: your boss might only be sending you the email because his boss made a point of it. It might be a one- off that he thinks about once and never again. Or he might actually care. You just don't know. He might fire you when you stop doing that shit (either because you forget, or get sick of it). He might consider you not to have done any work unless you log it in the system, and you might be too busy actually _doing_ work to log that shit. Or, you might get along great with him and be just fine. If you have decent social skills, you can get a 90% guess at which way things are going to go, but that's far from certainty, and the boss who won't throw you under the bus for his own benefit is very rare.

Big companies are only a better option than any other job (in terms of job security) if they subvert manager-as-SPOF and that's really hard to do. What seems to work (perversely) is bureaucracy and obfuscation: if you make it very, very hard for a manager to bad-mouth reports to the managers they want to transfer under (in large part, this requires transfer talks occurring without the original manager's knowledge) you can actually create a culture in which managers don't hold all the cards.

Big-company vs. startup is a hard question. There are really great _parts_ of big companies, and there are shitty startups. There are even startups that have those kinds of inane processes. The whole gamut exists. But I would rather be eating clay than work at a company where people are micromanaged down to "task estimation hours".

<comment><AUTHOR> By task estimation hours I simply meant estimating how long tasks will take. It's a pretty normal part of most software development practices. I don't work at a TPS labyrinth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Most unsubstantial article ever, with 69 upvotes and counting.

</comment><comment><USER27> Cool shit? Working for Microsoft? I must have missed something.</comment>


LeakedIn - Stories About Data Leaks and Related Stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.leakedin.com/

<comment><USER2> What is the significance of the "E-Mail Headers", such as [http://www.leakedin.com/2012/03/17/potential-leak-of- data-e-...](http://www.leakedin.com/2012/03/17/potential-leak-of-data-e-mail- headers-8/) ?

</comment><comment><USER2> I would think "leakedBin" would have been a better name, given its source of data. ;-)</comment>


Congratulations to the Meteor Summer Hackathon 2013 teams - <AUTHOR> http://www.meteor.com/blog/2013/07/09/congratulations-to-the-meteor-summer-hackathon-2013-teams

<comment><USER2> Awarded projects, direct links:

[https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/z-mongo- admin](https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/z-mongo-admin)

[http://stage.peerlibrary.org/](http://stage.peerlibrary.org/)

[http://bittank.meteor.com/](http://bittank.meteor.com/)

[http://gitdashboard.com/](http://gitdashboard.com/)

[http://hackerchat.meteor.com/](http://hackerchat.meteor.com/)

[http://moveswithfriends.meteor.com/](http://moveswithfriends.meteor.com/)

[http://synematic.meteor.com/](http://synematic.meteor.com/)

<comment><USER3> For those who wonder how to access gitdashboard, there is a demo url: [http://gitdashboard.com/rAZLYiov4oqE2Apyu](http://gitdashboard.com/rAZLYiov4oqE2Apyu) .

<comment><USER4> this is awesome. if i could enter arbitrary repositories i'd use this every day</comment></comment></comment>


How do I know if this idea is good enough? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitetailsoftware.com/2011/11/how-to-tell-if-this-idea-is-a-good-idea/

<comment><USER2> I only ever work on something I would personally want to use.

There is no guarantee that anything you make will take off but chances are you're not alone and some people are enough like you to buy your product.

Unless you're Homer Simpson and are thinking of making a new car that is.

</comment><comment><USER3> We did an MVP as well, but we also learned a lot from a quick 5 questions survey. We got 60 answers from our target market, identified and confirmed pain points and got our initial beta testers this way. We just asked people to fill it out and spread the word on FB and Twitter.

<comment><USER4> Would be great if you could share the outline of the survey (or the survey directly) - I've been having a hard time nailing the right type of questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have the same problem, I have shit tons of ideas yet I don't know how to begin. I am a programmer btw.

All I know is that my preferred domain is skill acquisition / coaching / e-learning / personal development.

Free ideas 'r' us: <http://ideashower.posterous.com>

<comment><USER6> I'm just the opposite. I know how to start, just I don't have any ideas :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You did some research and concluded that your idea is promising. But do you trust your idea? If so, build your product, and stick with it, and push it for as long as you can. It may not take off right away, so you need to have a great deal of optimism to keep things moving. Maybe your product will eventually become successful, or maybe it will bring you other profitable opportunities. So, do you trust your idea, or you need others to convince you to trust it? My point is that if you don't fully believe in the potential of your product or idea you're gonna have a hard time.

</comment><comment><USER8> Find one paying customer.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was facing the same question with my website. I decided the best way is to put a minimum viable product out there with minimum investment to see if it is getting any traction.

<comment><USER10> I'm watching a startup right now that is doing the opposite. They are marketing vaporware while trying to build the entire feature set for launch. We'll see how it works out, though history says that this is normally the wrong way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> people don't know what they want until you give it to them.</comment>