Why the Wingdings font exists (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/8/25/9200801/wingdings-font-history <comment><USER2> To understand Wingdings you first need to understand Letraset dry transfers and to fully understand Letraset you first need to understand 'Decals'.

Letraset was the only way to get professional typography in the 1970s (and most of the 1980s) without resorting to a professional typesetter. The whole technical design and architectural design world was consumed by Letraset and any home or office that, say, owned a set of Rotring pens and a few french curves would also have sheets of Letraset and a Letraset catalogue (or three).

As well as sheets of all moder typefaces, Letraset had sheets of icons and useful decals including all the things in the Dingbats font (plus much more). You could buy sheets of pointing hands, trees, traffic, washing label icons, stars, ornaments, hatching, ... Google images has a lot of examples of these kinds of Letraset.

As a child of the 1970s I was obsessed with Letraset. My friends and I would pour over the catalogues like we would a Lego catalogue or a Littlewoods (postal shopping catalogue). Letraset was expensive.

As a young adult I was simultaneously wowed by the freedom (and cheap price) of Dingbat fonts and clipart disks while being appalled at the low quality of the artwork. I wondered why Letraset hadn't immediately jumped into the computerised world, like, say Pantone managed to. Did Letraset enforce copyrights to keep clip art so poor?

I suspect there is a much more interesting story here somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is a clipart font! This article is a bit like these linkbait things, where young people are presented with a audio cassette and a pencil

<comment><USER4> They do hint at, but don't examine from a technical perspective some of the strangeness associated with dingbats. For example, 'n' in an Office application was/is mapped to a picture of a skull, even though a skull has a true Unicode value. Bullets and other symbols aren't just 'clipart', they're used to structure documents, and a lot of problems in document creation/management--especially cross platform--are related to how these situations are handled. Modern emoji where :) maps to a Unicode value of a smiley face add another layer. Perhaps this wasn't the best article, but I think knowing a bit about the pre-computer history, and the early computer history is important to understanding some of the difficult problems that emerge in application development.

<comment><USER5> Dingbat fonts precede unicode, if I'm reading your post correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Because we needed to share ideas over a medium where images depictions coded in BMP, JPG or GIF were probably slow and by setting a set of "most probable images" and mapping them to a letter we can always perform the transmission using old loved ASCII to concepts... precached on your HDD in every windows install....

Did the penguin had it?

<comment><USER7> That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article? Physical printing-press typefaces have always contained all sorts of symbols, or "dingbats". So it's completely natural to add these to a font. Especially as you want your symbols to be represented just like any other glyph: using vectors, not bitmaps, and with the ability to use hinting.

Modern fonts now include their own dingbats, as the limit of 256 characters has long since been lifted. So there's no need for a separate font like windings.

<comment><USER6> >That's not the reason at all. Did you read the entire article?

From the Article:

>Today it's easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be a lot harder. There were few ways to get images, files were way too large for puny hard drives, and they were of poor quality. Even worse, it was tough to get pictures to play nicely with text. Fonts like Wingdings provided a workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that didn't clog up their hard drives.

<comment><USER8> Every week I receive emails with random letter J's inserted in the text. Took me a while to realise that Outlook is auto-converting them to the Wingdings smiley which corresponds to J in other fonts. The problem is that none of the email clients I use renders it correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Still a thing, even in Windows 10. See the "Segoe MDL2 Assets" font.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do you remember the conspiracy theories like this one: [http://gizmodo.com/wingdings-predicted-9-11-a-truthers- tale-...](http://gizmodo.com/wingdings-predicted-9-11-a-truthers- tale-1679759324) :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Dingbat is an ancient slang term for a crazy person (someone with "bats in their belfry, striking the bell")

In the context of type, ornamentations were thus called dingbats because they were essentially pointless, of no substance.

</comment><comment><USER12> No mention of Cairo. :-(

<comment><USER13> Or Taliesin/Mobile, or Kare Biology! Literally art work.</comment></comment>


David Heinemeier Hansson, 37 Signals - Unlearn Your MBA (Audio) - <AUTHOR> http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2334 <comment><USER2> Uh-oh...MBA in the title. Cue edw519 popping in to tell the tale of how all he remembers from b-school is his professor telling him that a degree in business is a degree in nothing :)

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%22...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%22a+degree+in+business+is+a+degree+in+nothing%22)

<comment><USER3> Actually, I remember 2 things from business school. Thanks, ryanwaggoner, for reminding me of the other.

<comment><USER2> Oh, don't be stuffy. I'm just giving you a hard time :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _This recording contains explicit language and is not appropriate for all viewers._ Sometimes you've just got to go with the brand, you know? ;)

Edited to add: This talk is very, very good -- much of it is what you've heard from 37Signals before, but it is well delivered and there are unique insights too. (In particular I like how people are socialized into maladaption to the preferences of professors. Oh, and I agree with this: "Our most important competitive advantage is good human writing" -- it is probably my most important skill that I talk the least about.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I attended this talk in person, and have to say it was easily the most entertaining of the series I've seen all year.

The most interesting take-away was that DHH wants to build scalable companies in the sense that profits grow non-correlated to the workforce, ie. you don't hire 2 more people for $500million more in profits. Someone asked, wouldn't it good to employ 100k of people and create 100k jobs to which DHH said, no it's better for my personal wealth (which is the point of all good business) if I keep the profits to the smallest number of people possible - those 100k people should actually go out and make shit instead (his words). Food for thought.

<comment><USER6> It is interesting to consider how many jobs (globally) have been created, or shall we say, how many people's professional life has been shaped, by the software framework that DHH released to the world. So in a way, he has created jobs. Without ever diluting his revenue from 37signals. (comments?)

Personally I really enjoyed this talk. As a business school grad who taught himself to programme and now works for a bootstrapped web startup, I still value what I learned at business school. I think DHH is a bit harsh with the 'unlearn' label. I consider the core principles learned at b-school to be very important to shaping my everyday thinking. It is the specifics (DHH's example of Porter's five forces applies here) that can be forgotten. But those specifics were a great tool for developing the overall business mindset that he also describes. I don't regret my time there whatsoever.

<comment><USER7> "how many people's professional life has been shaped, by the software framework that DHH released to the world. So in a way, he has created jobs."

This suggests that were someone not using Rail they'd be unemployed. But, really, if there were no Rails then people would have been using (say) Nitro, or sticking to some Java or PHP framework.

<comment><USER8> Or like lots of people who are/were new to programing an exiting, creative and forward thinking framework to allow anyone to learn and create functional web apps inspired them to learn and to create when they were not programming before.

<comment><USER7> That was part of my point. Rails got massive attention, but it wasn't unique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The talk was done at 5:30, in the following four hours it was trimmed down, intro voice & music added, uploaded w/ a photo taken at the event, found by someone here, and posted to HN. Got to love the internet.

<comment><USER10> yep! DHH thought the same too :) <http://twitter.com/dhh/status/8015012471>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Definately a good talk, and really inspires me to try and finally get something built and released in my spare 10 hours a week. I have been messing around with various projects over the last year or two, but it takes a long time to get anything decent done in 10 hours a week with one person before the motivation runs out.

One thing that just occurred to me, is that while DHH was working 10 hours per week on Basecamp, I'd bet that Jason Freid was putting in at least 10 hours on the design side too. For me, the programming side of things isn't the big time sink - its getting the application to look and flow correctly. I would guess that for every 10 hours I spend coding, I spend at least that trying to get the UI to look even half professional.

Thats not to take anything away from the achievement of building Basecamp in spare time, more an observation of how much more productive I would be if I had someone doing the UI elements along side me.

<comment><USER12> I've got to point out too that wrapped up in those 10 hours per week were 1000 lines of a little web framework in Ruby.

<comment><USER11> Yea, well Rails was born out of Basecamp - certainly an impressive achievement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Only after this talk did I fully understand the difference the company he is trying to make / building (37 Signals) and the path that so many others follow.

Great advice that should be considered before any company brings on VC money.

</comment><comment><USER14> My take-away: 1) Goal: "Make a dent on the universe" 2) Don't take VC money, which is a "time-bomb" 3) Don't be a workaholic. "Greatness comes from well- rested minds". Constraints force you to do less and different things. 4) No overnight success. It takes time.

</comment><comment><USER15> For those that wish to see a video of roughly the same talk given by DHH at Startup School '08:

[http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier- hans...](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at- startup-school-08)

</comment><comment><USER16> I found this really inspiring. It reminded me why I put myself on my MicroISV path. I've heard him say many of the same things before, but this was a nicely distilled 20-minute version.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's funny that he referenced Domino's pizza CEO as an example of a lame MBA. Because just within the last week he resigned to coach college football at Michigan. Bizarre.

<http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=4797284>

</comment><comment><USER17> David was great as usual. I found Steve Blank's questions/demeanor toward him to be a little condescending.

</comment><comment><USER18> "this audio contains explicit language" haha, funny dave.</comment>


The Trendy Perks Employees Don't Want - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190215-three-trendy-workplace-perks-and-three-boring-ones-that-work <comment><USER2> Instead of unlimited leave, I think companies should have mandatory leave. If you require every employee to take a few weeks off in a year, it removes any sort of pressure to avoid taking a day off, while unlimited leave does the opposite, in my opinion. And it benefits the company too - it makes sure that there isn't a single person who is so critical to operations that they can't take a day off (reducing the "bus factor").

<comment><USER3> Some companies already do have obligatory "compliance" leave, especially in the finance field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is my experience that the more perks a company has, the worse the culture. Too many perks now act as a large red flag, as it suggests that the company cannot retain staff without them.

<comment><USER5> To a point. A company with zero perks feels like wage-slaving, but too many feels like a frathouse. There seems to be a sweet spot depending on average age of employee. Older companies do better with parent friendly perks, while younger orgs benefit from 'being mom' and taking care of laundry, food, etc. While I agree that too many perks is usually a smokescreen _ahemgoogleahem_ , having none usually reflects badly too in my view.</comment></comment>


Rowing across the Atlantic in 48 days - <AUTHOR> https://clem.travelmap.net <comment><USER3> Congrats Clément and team! Just spent 45 minutes reading the blogs!

Two random comments I liked:

"Last night we saw a meteorite land a couple miles away from us - it was only small but it had a big blue trail"

"For example, one weekend, go out saturday morning on your bike and don't come home until Sunday evening. Or maybe take the whole family out, bring a tent and go for a hike that takes longer than a day. Or even just sleep in your garden one night with the kids"

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats! If you like the story, here's something that may interest you: a website of 71-year-old man who kayaked alone across the Atlantic three times in the last few years [http://www.aleksanderdoba.pl/en/](http://www.aleksanderdoba.pl/en/)

<comment><USER5> And there's Katie Spotz who rowed it solo in 3 months in 2010, for a clean water charity.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazing accomplishment!

Strange thought: A future where we have VR world records, crossing a virtual realtime ocean. Sitting for days in a chair, rowing and rowing.

<comment><USER7> there are already WR for indoor rowing. We are getting there!

<comment><USER8> As a friend at a rowing club said, ergs don't float.

It's good exercise, but it's not at all the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lets us all remember Alain Bombard ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard) ) who taught us the most important lesson: if shit happens you will survive a very long time at sea.

<comment><USER10> I was under the impression his claims were discredited and he was sneaking supplies (including fresh water).

<comment><USER9> I don't know that, but his impact is on the psychology of the victims: the idea that they will survive for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whenever I hear of someone crossing the Atlantic, be it in a boat or a barrel, my immediate concern is the huge waves, how would they deal with them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we had a storm at the end of the first week. 6m high waves. We dropped the para-anchor, locked ourselves in the cabins and waited 36 hours.

<comment><USER12> I had never heard of a para-anchor[1] before, so I just looked it up - they're really cool! It's a brand of sea-anchor[2] that looks like a big parachute that goes underwater, effectively anchoring the boat where it is without having to reach the sea floor.

1: [http://para-anchor.com/](http://para-anchor.com/)

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

<comment><USER8> More significantly, a sea anchor orients a craft parallel (and leeward) of the wind, and hence, prevailing swell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In case nobody noticed but the author of the blog and the record breaking rower also wrote the software to do the blogging. Very clever!!!

I liked the entry concerning Red Nose day:

"We are team 4 nations and one of us is English. He brought us all today a red nose because today is red nose day in England and you have to wear the thing all day so that you can't hardly breath during rowing but that's all ok because it is for charity! Colin explained us that today that they collect money to support poor English who don't have a penny left to buy enough booze to get drunk which results in a nice little red nose. As team 4 nations we support that kind of causes so to everybody out there who reaches this tune in this evening to the BBC and make your donation!"

I imagine banter on expeditions goes like this, it reminds me of some of Shackleton's journals and the things the men did for amusement.

I do think that one thing that is forgotten is how brave seafarers have to be. I get on the water to kayak the mile or two to work, just on the Thames which has to be the easiest water to be on. Nonetheless the terror of the water is real. If it is slightly too cold, too windy, too rainy or the tide is not right then I go by bicycle instead. Having read about 6 metre high waves, the mind boggles as to how Team 4 Nations coped. Congrats.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me a bit of Thor Heyerdahl's Ra expedition: [http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/heyerdahl- sails-p...](http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/heyerdahl-sails- papyrus-boat)

</comment><comment><USER15> How long does it take without rowing, just relying on winds and currents?

Are there good examples of a 'control' crossing of a (perhaps unmanned) drifting boat?

<comment><USER16> In 1970 a guy named Thor had a reed raft built matching stuff found in an Egyptian tomb. He then rode it with friends from Morocco (Africa) to Barbados (Caribbean). The book is great if you can find it.

Travel time 59 days, but the rowers covered a longer distance - <USER2> Europe to mainland Americas.

<comment><USER15> The Algarve is close to Morocco, even if they left from Agadir, so not much difference in distance. The total drifting distance Agadir-Barbados is about 5500km, compared to nearly 6000km for rowing Algarve-Guiana.

In 48 days they could have drifted up to 4500km (75%), leaving over 1500km (25%) due to rowing, which is an average rowing speed of at least 1.3kph.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where can you start? Wouldn't starting from West Sahara shave of some days? Or would you drift too far south?

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't know, but looking at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds), that should be an option. It may be unpopular because of logistic and security concerns, though (the Canary Islands are regular departure points, but that may be cheating for this record)

The (I am sure) bestselling book "How To Row An Ocean" ([http://thenextchallenge.org/books/row- ocean/](http://thenextchallenge.org/books/row-ocean/)) probably has an answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's also organized, annual race for rowing across the Atlantic: [https://www.atlanticcampaigns.com/the- challenge/](https://www.atlanticcampaigns.com/the-challenge/)

</comment><comment><USER20> so for 48 days they were on a 2-hour-row-2-hour-sleep schedule with no breaks? wow

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the 2 hours on / 2 hours off non-stop for 48 days was the toughest. After eating and cleaning ourselves, there wasn't a lot of time left to sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The map is neat but I want to hear the story and see the photos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Photos are on the blog. You can read more about the expedition on the blog of another team member: [http://atlanticrowblog.blogspot.com](http://atlanticrowblog.blogspot.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How does one prove they did that officially?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Ocean Rowing Society keeps track of the expeditions: [http://www.oceanrowing.com/ORS_Archive/ORS_archive2017.htm](http://www.oceanrowing.com/ORS_Archive/ORS_archive2017.htm)</comment></comment>


Writing pesky account management e-mails for your site - <AUTHOR>

I'm going through the process of writing all the various e-mails our site sends out to users, e.g. "Welcome!", "Reset Password," "Confirm E-mail Address," "You have received a private message."
1.  Is there a template for these things somewhere?  All the little decisions about the best language to use are driving me nuts.
2.  Is it wrong to (more or less) plagurize the "reset password" kind of e-mail from facebook, myspace, yahoo, or other popular sites?  How have you guys gone about this? <comment><USER2> I actually think this area is very important, and you shouldn't just grab a generic template. This is one of the only areas where you will interact with your users outside of your site, and it can really make a difference in how users interact with your site.

The diction of the emails can give people drastically different impressions about your service. Also, the specific way you layout the messages can have significant impact on what people do with them (delete immediately, click on the right link, etc.). I have been in the position of having huge sample sizes on these account management emails so that I could test different messages. I can tell you from experience, changing one word here or there, link placement, color, fonts, etc. can all have a huge impact. Unfortunately, most people aren't in a position to do useful experiments.

Because of that, I don't think it is wrong to essentially start with a copy of a site you particularly like in this area. I wouldn't just pick any site though--I would pick one that is similar to what you want in terms of style and one you believe has tried to optimize these processes. Technically, if an email was really long and you copied it all verbatim, that could be copyright infringement. However, it is doubtful anyone is going to care. And it is more likely that you will change the emails and they will be short so that the copying really won't constitute infringement anyway.</comment>


Learnings from the 2008 Great Recession - <AUTHOR> https://shan.io/writing/learnings-from-the-2008-great-recession/ <comment><USER2> Or stick your money in an index fund if you're not a professional investor?

<comment><USER3> > Or stick your money in an index fund

Yes, the market grows over a long horizon.

Know this though - that long horizon might exceed your horizon when you definitely need the money.

Index funds can often perform worse than cash in a 3% bank checking account if the timing's off. There are a few of those 3% bank checking accounts right here in the U.S.</comment></comment>


Post-hoc Analysis of InstaWifi's Launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.jessechen.net/blog/post-hoc-analysis-of-instawifis-launch/

<comment><USER2> This rocks. Thanks for sharing all the details.

I was a little mislead by the title being "the average person donated 7.66$" rather than "of people who donated, the average donation was $7.66," i.e. the average user did not actually donate money. Nevertheless, this was a high price to pay in a day and age when people avoid paying $0.99 for the most entertaining and useful apps.

I have not yet downloaded the app (I am about to), but I am very appreciative of the decision to not put ads in the app. I am a strong believer that the ad- supported model must be broken, and I believe the way this will happen will be via true usefulness and content depth (with which money can come from in-app purchases, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi rrbrambley, yes you're correct and thanks to the mod who changed the title.

When I found out that the average donation from the people who donated was ~7$, I was pretty surprised because like you said, most people are hesitant to even pay $0.99 for a high quality app.

In my opinion, ads makes the quality of the app suffer and it gives me a negative perception of the app. There will be some people who are willing to pay to remove the ads, but if you think about the use case for InstaWifi, the # of minutes spent _in_ the app is not that high so its not worthwhile to put ads anyway. I think ads only work on apps that are extremely popular with high # of downloads. Otherwise, in general, I recommend against ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome write up. Inspiring/Interesting statistics. Much love my fellow indie developer</comment>


Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-gains-from-economic-growth-c96d93101f9c <comment><USER2> This is a new level of one-up-pizzaship and i admit i wasnt prepared for it</comment>


Wikipedia:Unsolicited redesigns - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AUnsolicited%20redesigns

<comment><USER2> Wow, I really love the new Media Viewer they have there! Or perhaps it's not new, I've not been contributing to Wikipedia for a very, very long time now.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is new :-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: WiFi calling using your own phone number for free - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youroam-free-calls-texts-using/id896835381?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> Is this really free? When I look in the google play store it says that "Premium" feature is to be able to call any numbers in the US, but under Free is says I can call any other users of this app?

T-Mobile branded android phones have had Wi-Fi calling for years built in and it's great. I was bummed when I bought my nexus 5 on T-Mobile to find that I couldn't use it. Have looked on xda and it looks fairly complicated to implement this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly enough, T-Mobile US customers are our biggest downloads. It's free to call and text anyone that has the YR app. We give you $.25 credit which is enough for 25 mins of calls to the US from anywhere in the world or 25 text messages to people that don't have the app. Incoming calls are currently for a daily/weekly/monthly subscription but will be switched to $.03/min from anywhere in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't actually have any use for this app at all (sorry) but if you ever make squishy foam promo items for your logo I will send you all of my money.

<comment><AUTHOR> hahaha. Will let you know when the foam promo logo comes out. Why do you think it's not helpful for you? If you ever travel outside the US, you will love paying 1c/min to call people using your own caller ID from anywhere in the world and seeing who called you from anywhere in the world without paying outrageous roaming bills. Also works great on ipod touch, ipads, and in places where you have poor cell signal and wifi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool. Is there an Android version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, download for Android here: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onePhone](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onePhone)</comment></comment>


Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America's Night Skies - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/nightclouds/

<comment><USER2> _Non-mysterious Glowing Clouds Appear Across America's Night Skies_

Fixed that for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean? That's not the article title and as far as I can tell from it, there is not a clear explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice photo of a firework on the Eiffel tower in Paris...

</comment><comment><USER4> strange glowing clouds floating in the sky? mysterious organic blobs floating in the ocean?

lots of unusual natural things in the headlines today.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget the sewers: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcKpx2DxGwY>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTA: "It's not hard to see how a warming Earth could change those dynamics: as the globe heats up, the top of the atmosphere should get colder."

But if that were the case, noctilucent clouds would normally be an equatorial -- not a polar -- phenomenon.</comment>


Show HN: Keigen – A Kotlin/Android lib for matrix math using C++ Eigen - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paramsen/Keigen <comment><AUTHOR> I created this library first and foremost because I couldn't find a simple arbitrary matrix math implementation for Android to use in a work related project (well, one fitting my requirements). I kind of drifted along and expanded the library to support all numeric types in Kotlin - it's quite simple to extend the supported matrix operations to whatever functionality in Eigen one wants :)

I'm still learning C++, so comments on the .cpp stuff are appreciated.</comment>


Two more talks pulled from Black Hat hacking conference - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0G419O20140804?irpc=932 <comment><USER2> :-)</comment>


Tesla wants to replace traditional windshield wipers with laser beams - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7728851/Tesla-wants-replace-windshield-wipers-LASER-BEAMS-target-zap-debris-automatically.html <comment><USER2> Won't use LIDAR for FSD because it's too expensive, but will implement laser beams to clean a windshield. Makes total sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> What could go wrong?

This seems quite excessive, and it really is not a replacement, more of an augmentation:

>The solution can be integrated with other cleaning solutions that use wipers

Ahem

<comment><USER4> Sounds like RGB lighting in wipers with extra steps.

<comment><AUTHOR> This somehow reminds me of Rick and Morty (Zeep Xanflorp)</comment></comment></comment>


I was wondering why there was secret service at Stanford on Sunday - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/17/memorial-service-for-steve-jobs-brings-tributes-from-family-and-friends/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/10/17/steve-jobs's-family-gave-moving-words-at-sunday-memorial/<p>May be the link that was submitted before or: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576635921007047738.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RightMostPopular <comment><AUTHOR> [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/10/17/steve- jobs's-family-g...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/10/17/steve- jobs's-family-gave-moving-words-at-sunday-memorial/)

May be the link that was submitted:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020447950457663...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576635921007047738.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_RightMostPopular)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm confused, none of the mentioned invitees were ex-presidents, why would the secret service be there?

</comment><comment><USER3> What am I missing; the name of the SS protectee or some odd sort humor of humor?</comment>


World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34857015 <comment><USER2> "Bacteria becoming completely resistant to treatment - also known as the antibiotic apocalypse - could plunge medicine back into the dark ages."

Probably not, for a number of reasons. The arms-race strategy of antibiotics vs drug resistance was doomed to fail from the start, as many know. The solution is counter intuitive: stop the arms race of stronger and stronger antibiotics completely, and the bacterial resistance to weaker antibiotics will be reduced over time. It's expensive for bacteria to keep antimicrobial genes around, and once the selective pressure of an antibiotic environment decreases, they'll lose the traits that confer resistance. It may even be possible to phase out one drug resistance trait at a time in multiple-drug- resistant populations. The horizontal gene transfer that the article mentions is really cool, but ultimately a non-sequitor when it comes to population- level infection control.

This solution means temporarily accepting uncontrolled drug-resistant bacteria in some narrow cases, which is unpalatable, but this strat works in the petri dish.

<comment><USER3> Does "this strat" work when your father/mother/son/daughter is in the hospital?

Or are you (and I include in "you" any human being with the choice) going to want every antibiotic available for your loved one?

Maybe I miss the point of your comment, but if not, I doubt it is a viable strategy.

<comment><USER4> This is one of the few fairly clear cases in real life where you could make a utilitarian argument, though. Sacrifice a few lives now to save more in the long run. I wouldn't want to be the government that has to dictate this policy, though. The guilt would be too much.

<comment><USER2> Yep, that's my angle. Utilitarianism is king in epidemiology. We can pretend otherwise, but frequently our hand will be forced anyway.

I don't know if we're going to need to "sacrifice" people who have poly-drug resistant bacteria, but I'm guessing it won't be in our control anyway, if the option is between doing nothing and the patients dying versus doing everything we can and still having the patient die. Damage control is critical, and sentimentality can't get in the way.

FWIW, I wrote an in depth report on controlling poly drug resistant tuberculosis in poor countries when I was in college... the conclusion was that quarantine was not only necessary, it was the only effective course of action for people with full spectrum drug resistant TB. Of course, TB is far more infectious and lethal than garden variety "bacteria".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort - > colistin - in patients and livestock in China.

…

> It is likely resistance emerged after colistin was overused in farm animals.

What the heck? Shouldn't the antibiotic of last resort be used only as … a last resort? I can't believe that any farm animal would be worth the use of such a drug (although I suppose it's possible, were it the last of its breed or something).

<comment><USER6> It seems like antibiotics like Colistin are uncontrolled in China, and perhaps very cheap? It seems like madness to use these last resort drugs on farm animals.

<comment><USER7> The whole problem here (as with many other things) is that actions which are "madness" when looking at the big picture come from perfectly rational actions by individuals.

<comment><USER8> Nah I hate that kind of thinking. Someone or some group of people have to be deemed responsible. Here's my thought process with this:

So in China, and every country there are a few relevant players. Farmers, farm owners, politicians, and scientists.

Farmers (laborers) have to survive and most work wages so they arent accountable. Farm owners have to compete and if they dont they go out of business and someone will take their place so they're not really accountable. But its the law that makes the rules of the game and so it is the responsibility of the political class to avoid designing "tragedy of the commons" scenarios.

There are at least SOME good-willed politicians who dont want things like antibiotic-apocolypse. The problem is that they have a ton of scientists whispering different things in their ears so they dont know what issues are big threats and which are scientists trying to get funding into their own field of study. Its therefore also the responsibility of the scientific community to effectively communicate with the political class.

See? At least some people out there arent perfectly rational!

<comment><USER9> No, it's a closed loop of externalized costs. Workers have to try to eat, businesses have to try to compete, voters have to promote their economic interests, politicians have to stay elected. Climate change and antibiotic resistance et al don't cost any of these people anything -- individually. If nobody has to pay for them, and everybody has to compete to take advantage of whatever they can to live and prosper, the rational thing is to fuck everything up. It's a massive scale prisoner's dilemma with high stakes.

Government is ostensibly the system that prevents external costs, and imposes rules that skew what's rational for individuals today to be closer to what's rational for society tomorrow, but in practice it fails to do so much of the time.

<comment><USER10> Exactly.

Also, per tradition, let me post a handy reference on coordination problems:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what this will do to the short term evolution of our species.

It's terribly morbid and I really don't think it will come to this but if many people start dying due to once easily treatable infections then it could rapidly (within a dozen generations or so) change how our immune system works.

A mass dieoff of a species due to a single catastrophic event is unlikely to intensely select for certain traits.

A flood amonsgst a non-swimming species is as likely to select for resillience or sleeping late in your tree or some other unpredicable attribute as it is for the "swimming" gene

But constant intense pressure could easily single out favorable attributes and I wonder what those will be and what the side effects or emergent traits of those genes will be.

Of course we are evolving via technology and society more rapidly than genetically so that could change everything.

<comment><USER12> You mean a return to the wold before antiobiotics? The world that existed when my grandparents were born? I doubt the few generations of people born during the "antibiotic era" have any meaningful genetic traits connected with the use of antibiotics

<comment><USER13> Just to put things into perspective, the world population was around 2 billion when penicillin was discovered in 1928. Even without antibiotics we still know about things like sanitation and the importance of clean drinking water, so it's not exactly going back to the dark ages as the article suggests.

<comment><USER14> It's going to be pretty bad.

[https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2015/11/02/i-need- an...](https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2015/11/02/i-need-antibiotics- that-work-7-health-profs-share-their-antibiotic-resistance-fears/)

> If we can't stop the infection, however, we can't stop the sepsis. A world > without effective antibiotics will mean that every one of the 100,000 people > who develop sepsis each year in the UK - every one of the 18 million people > with sepsis each year worldwide - could certainly die from simple infections > like chest and water infections. A human could die from infection every > second.

> When I started treating people with bacterial infections it was rare that I > didn't have tablet antibiotics that I could treat them with; rare that I > needed to keep people in hospital to treat their infections. Now every week, > I treat young women with last resort antibiotics for urinary tract > infections. Rather than given them a simple 7-day tablet course, they have > to stay in hospital for a week or more, or come to the hospital every day > for an injection.

[https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2014/11/18/10-reason...](https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2014/11/18/10-reasons- you-should-be-worried-about-antibiotic-resistance)

> When we discuss antibiotic resistance we talk about a frightening future and > rightly ask for action to stop the problem from getting worse. But this > doesn't mean it's all just an issue for future generations. It's estimated > that 25,000 people already die every year in Europe because of infections > resistant to antibiotics and in the USA the figure is 23,000 people, every > year.

[https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2015/11/18/7-more- re...](https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2015/11/18/7-more-reasons-you- should-be-worried-about-antibiotic-resistance/)

> In 2013 there were 480,000 recorded cases of multi drug-resistant TB (TB > that can't be treated by our usual medicines). TB is a bacterial infection > that can spread through the lymph nodes and blood stream to any organ in > your body. It commonly affects the lungs and while a lot of people might not > consider it to be an issue in the UK, or think it couldn't affect them, this > isn't true. 37 million lives worldwide have been saved by antibiotic > treatment for TB since 2000. In some countries, it is becoming increasingly > difficult to treat MDR-TB. Treatment options are limited, recommended > medicines are not always available, and patients experience many adverse > effects from the drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Radiolab did a great podcast on this recently

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/best- medicine/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-medicine/)

</comment><comment><USER16> While this does sound terrifying I believe the next step in combating these viruses will be precision immunotherapeutics. What I mean by this is that we do have the ability to create custom antibodies for a specific person for a specific virus or bodily activity. There are several companies working on this and are having great results using this to treat cancer, first among them is Imagen Biopharma, Inc.

<comment><USER17> Cancer kills in months; sepsis kills in days. Do these techniques work on those timescales?

<comment><USER16> My understanding is that it would be use as an immunization ahead of time.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't really fit with "custom antibodies for a specific person for a specific virus or bodily activity".

<comment><USER19> Well, try this: You go to the doctor's office. They take a blood sample or a throat swab or whatever. They DNA sequence the bacteria they find. Then they give you antibiotics that will kill what _you_ have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it possible for us to invent/discover new antibiotics?

<comment><USER21> The value of which skyrockets as each older antibiotic becomes increasingly useless. That's being entirely ignored, seemingly in every article that talks about this problem.

A recent example of a new antibiotic:

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new- antibiotic-...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-antibiotic- dirt-soil-can-kill-drug-resistant-bacteria-180953828/)

Or how about this: a break-through that goes beyond classic antibiotics. Something that hasn't been thought of yet. Not like humans have a history of accomplishing such feats, right? Not like the entire last century of medicine falls into that category.

I can't think of a single example in modern history, in which our species has failed to think its way out of a major problem. X Y Z bad thing was supposed to take us down, or impede our progress, and we thought our way out of it. We'll continue to do that, and the overly dramatic forecasters of doom will continue to be wrong as they always are.

<comment><USER22> One problem is bacteria develop resistance to the new drugs very quickly. Usually within 2-3 years.

It's difficult to recoup your investment costs for a drug that has an effective use window that small.

<comment><USER23> I think if you have a disease that is curable with an antibiotic that gets really out of control you will find that government funding will become much more of a factor.

Been the government that threw a few billion bucks and saved thousands of (electorate) lives is a good vote winner.

The cost of developing antibiotics is large (in the billions) but US defence spending is 600bn dollars, UK defence spending is 60-odd bn dollars.

Governments should already be funding this stuff (imo) since the defence of the realm is theoretically their first goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is a natural way to kill every single bacteria out there. They are called phages.

For every bacteria, there is a phage that will kill it.

Back in the Soviet Union they used this medical technology extensively to cure all sorts of things, and the hospitals in Georgia and surrounding areas would be sprayed down with phage to kill bacteria within the hospital corridors and rooms to prevent the hospitals themselves from becoming breeding grounds for bacteria.

If you're interested in learning more I would recommend the 1997 BBC four documentary called 'The Virus that Cures'

<comment><USER25> Quack flags: "natural", silver bullet, forgotten techniques from the past, citation is a documentary

<comment><USER11> Agreed about the flags. However in this case it may be a false positive.

[http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(...](http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736\(05\)66759-1.pdf)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400130/pdf/fmi...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400130/pdf/fmicb-03-00238.pdf)

[http://aac.asm.org/content/51/6/2156.long](http://aac.asm.org/content/51/6/2156.long)

<comment><USER26> A long comment on MetaFilter by someone doing their Ph.D. research on phage biology.

[http://metatalk.metafilter.com/21925/Interesting- Profiles#10...](http://metatalk.metafilter.com/21925/Interesting- Profiles#1012599)

Excerpt:

> _Over the last fifteen years or so, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and > the exponentially growing crisis of antibiotic resistance, phage therapy is > looking very exciting again. Unlike the '30s, we now have a decent > understanding of phage biology as well as the infrastructure to keep phages > cold until use, effective diagnostic tools, and most importantly, regulatory > structures that shut out hucksters. The need is also dire, for example > multi-drug resistant Staph infections kill more people in the United States > than AIDS does._

> _Basic phage biology has also been undergoing a resurgence as we discover > just how important phages are to the global ecosystem, they are indeed the > dominant organism on Earth outnumbering anything else by two orders of > magnitude. Indeed, despite being just ~125 nm tall (check this out for > scale), if one were to stack the 1031 phages on the planet end to end you > would get a tower that would stand 200 million lightyears tall. Our oceans > are remarkably free of cellular life and the reason is phages, as well as > the other the viruses of microbes. For example the growth and death of algae > blooms are centrally mediated by viral dynamics. Meta-genomics studies of > the oceans pull out more predicted phage proteins than anything else without > some fancy filtering, and even then they get a bunch. Phages are also > teaching us a lot about the primordial origins of life, they are after all > proto-cellular organisms._

> _These days are exciting times to be interested in phages._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder: The arms race between bacteria and other organisms has gone on for a long long time, is there a defense mechanism against every bacteria? Because otherwise bacteria would be the only organism to inhabit this planet? Or is the only thing that historically prevented world domination by bacteria the lack of transportation to remote places? If that's the case then has the proliferation of mass transport ultimately shifted the odds in favor of bacteria?

And are antibiotics a catalyst for the evolution of bacteria or its demise?

<comment><USER28> In terms of Biomass Bacteria are the dominate life form on the earth. The average person has over 1lb of Bacteria living in there body and vastly more bacterial cells than human cells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This might be the influence of playing too much metal gear solid, but how far ahead is nanomachine research? I know some people use nanowires coated with certain human-compatible proteins to make them more appealing to osteosarcoma (bone cancer cells) so the cancer cells take in these nanowires. However implementation of a mechanism to target something like a bacterial infection is not something I've heard of.

<comment><USER10> The thing you want to look at is biotech. Life is nothing but nanotechnology that we didn't build and we can't control _yet_.

The hottest thing right now in fighting bacteria seems to be bacteriophages[0]. I've heard Russians had some success in R&D there, but I don't know much more. Maybe some knowledgable HNer could elaborate.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anybody know if there's any progress with ADEP4? [http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/13/killing-s...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/13/killing- sleeper-cells-and-superbugs-with-assassin-janitors)</comment>


moonlighting: do you get something in writing from your employer? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> California at least has quite reasonable laws on this stuff. As long as you're not doing anything shifty and you are strictly using own resources and time there's not much to worry about.

Whether you should talk to your employer mostly depends on the company you work for and the laws in your area.

</comment><comment><USER3> it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission!

on a more serious note, (i'm not a lawyer). I would look to see if you're competing with your employer, if you are not than there's not much to worry about, if you think you might be, check with an attorney.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well you don't have to be competing directly. If you work as a software developer, you could be working on a product thats really different from your employers but its still software that you are developing in your free time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good "starter" GitHub foss projects to contribute to - <AUTHOR>

Personally, although I have decent development capabilities in a fair amount of languages, despite wanting to, I've never contributed to an open source project. The task of finding one suitable is somewhat daunting.
I imagine it's like going to the gym for the first time, daunting for the first week or so before you get into the swing of things and realise everybody wants you to succeed.
So, what are some good projects for diving into? <comment><USER2> Browse the list of Google's Summer Of Code projects (e.g. 2014 list: [https://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gso...](https://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2014)), pick the one that interest you the most and contribute to that.

Those are all projects that explicitly want someone to help them with something.

There's also [http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/](http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/) and [https://help.github.com/articles/where-can-i-find-open- sourc...](https://help.github.com/articles/where-can-i-find-open-source- projects-to-work-on) and I'm sure if you Google around, you'll find more lists like that.

<comment><USER3> In this category, there is also BountySource. It's informative to see the "stream" of the bounties given a project (amounts, paid or not, since when...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use this one, which appears to have potential for further development & could probably use someone working on improving it. For example while it works well at the command line, it could use a GUI, and some functional additions that would be helpful to use it.

It's basically a bulk-namecoin domain processor using the RPC interface. The dev is friendly enough, maybe strike up a conversation if you find it interesting.

[https://gitorious.org/libnmcrpc/libnmcrpc/source/8f4e83de7f1...](https://gitorious.org/libnmcrpc/libnmcrpc/source/8f4e83de7f1afcabfcc9c8a05b2f4aba8bdf1d44:README)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not an application project but I list engineering blog of startup companies. You can add blog(s) that is not already listed there

[http://github.com/sumodirjo/engineering- blogs](http://github.com/sumodirjo/engineering-blogs)

</comment><comment><USER3> Right now my favorites are Emscripten and Firefox.</comment>


An Overview of the Web - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dweek.ly/an-overview-of-the-web/ I wrote an overview of web technologies up for my friend Kate. :) Let me know what you guys think! <comment><USER2> This is awesome, a long time ago I had a series of conversations with a friend who took the time to help me connect the dots all the way from "why are magnets bad for computers?" to the Internet, mapping everything in between. Very nice of you to share your gift with the rest of this, I definitely have some family members who will enjoy it.

<comment><AUTHOR> So glad you enjoyed it! :) Would love to know any parts you'd like to see further expanded or ways this could be improved.

<comment><USER3> This is really well done. :) Textbook hierarchical explanation.

I had a conversation with some family members recently in which I explained (in much less detail) how the web works, and I found that they were having trouble grasping exactly what web pages are.

After some hemming and hawing, I was finally able to construct a simple analogy that rang true with them: web pages are files a lot like Microsoft Word documents, the major difference being that you usually use one particular kind of program to read them (browsers) and another kind of program to create them, whereas with Word, the reader and viewer are the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been creating web sites since 1994, but still I learned some new things from this short piece.

<comment><USER5> Well frankly - shame on you. I _haven't_ been creating web sites since 1998, and I didn't learn anything new. I read the article based on your comment, and sadly it was a waste of my time.

<comment><USER4> I am now standing in a corner, bowing my head in shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi David, this is a beautiful piece of work. I remember the first time you told me this would be a good interview question. Ever since, I've been far more interested in the long chain of tiered technologies that make possible every single every small action on the web.

Thanks for sharing :)

<comment><AUTHOR> <3 Thanks, Cesar!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks! I learned some and the parts I knew already I couldn't have put it any better

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand who this article is for. It's written in a condescending _Internet for Dummies_ tone, but goes into far to much technical detail for someone who isn't technically lieterate, yet doesn't add anything for someone who is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love constructive feedback about how it could be better structured or revised for tone to make it more approachable, as well as what areas would be helpful to go into in more detail.</comment></comment>


The Vocoder [video] - <AUTHOR> http://video.newyorker.com/watch/object-of-interest-the-vocoder

<comment><USER2> And presenting the Voder, a vocoder _manually operated in real time_ : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyI_dM5cGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyI_dM5cGo) [http://120years.net/the-voder-vocoderhomer- dudleyusa1940/](http://120years.net/the-voder-vocoderhomer-dudleyusa1940/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've grown weary of these "here's a thing you haven't heard of, and now here's some misinformation!" articles. (Shame on you Gawker, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed!)

But this is how it should be done. It's brilliant. Take 11.5 minutes and enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems not working on iDevices.

</comment><comment><USER5> "By your command!"</comment>


The Mojave Desert's Airplane Graveyard - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/33186.html <comment><USER2> [Pointing it out because it's way towards the end]: Second-to-last image hints at the Virgin Galactic planes being in the same area - great contrast between past and future parts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is another one near Tucson: [http://maps.google.com/maps?q=marana+air+park,+arizona&h...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=marana+air+park,+arizona&hl=en&ll=32.507228,-111.325042&spn=0.010116,0.019205&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=40.460237,78.662109&vpsrc=6&hq=marana+air+park,&hnear=Arizona&t=h&z=16)

</comment><comment><USER4> Lovely pictures, but I was disappointed not to see huge panoramas of hundreds of the same model of plane lined up in a row!

<comment><USER5> Here you have: [http://www.michaeljohngrist.com/2009/10/airplane-boneyard- in...](http://www.michaeljohngrist.com/2009/10/airplane-boneyard-in-the- mojave-desert/)</comment></comment>


Harley-Davidson's first all-electric motorcycle is coming August 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172421/harley-davidson-livewire-electric-motorcycle-price-ces-2019 <comment><USER2> Is it? I swear I hear about its imminent release every year. There are already some really good electric motorcycles out there, zero comes to mind, but newer ones too. Its gotta be a tall order recconciling the harley image/branding with an ebike. I don't envy their designers. Electrics fit perfectly with how 60% of riders use their harleys (in the USA, barhopping middle age professionals cosplaying in leather). The actual touring crowd will continue to be unimpressed, and are already leaving for victory and goldwings.

<comment><USER3> Is Victory still in business? I thought Polaris shut it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure this is going to be a huge seller for them as I don't think it fits with their target market. Harley is all about loud not quiet.

What they need badly is an adventure bike along the lines of BMW's 1200GS.</comment>


New Texas laws: Illegal to send unsolicited nude photos - ga-vu http://www.fox4news.com/news/texas/new-texas-laws-illegal-to-send-unsolicited-nude-photos <comment><AUTHOR> This law sounds overbroad, and nothing but trouble. It'll make sending nudes carry a huge legal risk. I'd expect to see someone use this against their ex (or illicit lover) within a year of taking effect.

From all the teens punished for child porn for having pictures of themselves, it should be painfully clear prosecutorial discretion cannot be relied upon.

<comment><USER2> Sending nudes or porn to someone to whom physical flashing would have been untoward (an unwitting stranger, the general public, a child, a student, your taxi driver, etc), or images of someone else who would not have wanted the images shared (revenge porn), is the kind of action that one should be able to take to court. They share nearly identical mens rea (flashing vs unexpected unwanted dick pics), so it doesn't make sense one is criminal but the other is not.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have chosen very clear cut examples, but the law will not be limited to those.

For example, a boy and girl start dating. Eventually, she sends him nudes - maybe they discussed it offline, so there's no written record of consent, or maybe she correctly guessed he'd like them. But then they meet, and he pushes her to have sex, saying he'll claim the nudes were unsolicited otherwise. Or maybe he's white, she's black, and the boy's racist family push him to claim they were unsolicited, to hide the affair, or to get rid of her.

> or images of someone else who would not have wanted the images shared > (revenge porn)

That is an entirely different matter, that this law will do nothing to help. There are sites devoted to revenge porn, so those pictures _are_ solicited.

<comment><USER3> Have you read the law? What's the link of the version that you've read please?

<comment><USER4> The relevant Act appears to have been HB 2789[1][2]. I don't see the text in the Texas Penal Code yet.

[1] [https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=86...](https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=86R&Bill=HB2789)

[2] [https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/86R/billtext/pdf/HB02789F....](https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/86R/billtext/pdf/HB02789F.pdf#navpanes=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Countdown until the "nudes are free speech" defense

</comment><comment><USER6> Because just deleting the nudes and moving on with your life is too difficult?

The human body doesn't upset me enough to worry if some man or woman spams their junk at me. But there are images that I find emotionally hurtful, and I do accept that some people include nudity in this category. It still seems a bit dubious that this has become a big enough problem to warrant more laws.

<comment><USER4> And just because you personally haven't been robbed, and would in fact be just fine with being robbed, doesn't mean we should go without laws against robbery.

<comment><USER6> The kinda conflates two very different events. I never made a case against something as serious as robbery. The real point is that unlike robbery, nothing very serious has happened when you see a picture of a naked body.

<comment><USER4> The real point is that you are assuming that your preferences are a universal moral measurement of harm.

<comment><USER6> No more than people who are saying the opposite is true.

We should use objective measures. There are tangible real world ramifications for the effects of robbery. People who get offended at nudity suffer some mild discomfort at best.

We should be basing our legal system accordingly.

For instance, what about people who delight in receiving unsolicited nudes? This law is imposing its universal moral pronouncements on them.

<comment><USER4> > _We should use objective measures._

What constitutes guilt, in a criminal sense? And what's the objective measurement?

Spoiler: while I am not a lawyer, I studied law, so my views may be coloured by knowing what the hell I am talking about.

<comment><USER6> That's dodging the point. Your assertion that my point of view was purely subjective while the opposing views were not.

What constitutes guilt is simple, being convicted of transgressing a law.

The objective measure in my book, is that of real world harm balanced against unintended side effects and limitations on freedom.

* ps. your not so subtle implication that only you know what you're talking about and other people don't is not arguing in good faith.

<comment><USER4> > _What constitutes guilt is simple, being convicted of transgressing a law._

"How was he convicted?" -> "He was found guilty".

"How is he guilty?" -> "He was convicted".

This is a circular argument. What is the standard that quantifies that a conviction should occur?

> _The objective measure in my book, is that of real world harm balanced > against unintended side effects and limitations on freedom._

I see. How is real world harm measured objectively? How are unintended side effects measured objectively? How are limitations on freedom measured objectively?

ps. My implication wasn't meant to be subtle. That's my fault.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Guide to scaling engineering organizations - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/scaling-eng <comment><USER2> I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this.

Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers.

I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of how to evaluate and grow leadership and people management skills. Ironically, I see a lot of that from MBA programs.

Actually getting good management in place is extremely hard to do and does more for talent retention than almost everything else. For every company blog post I've read that talks about scaling the organization, including Stripe, I also hear corresponding horror stories from friends and acquaintances who are leaving because they hate their manager and because their company isn't doing anything about it.

Sure, it's relative, on the grand scale of managerial quality I'd wager that Stripe is on the right side of average, but I'd really like to see more focus on scaling leadership.

<comment> amw-zero What does a "good manager" look like?

<comment><USER2> There are several common things to look at, just off the top of my head. These all take practice.

1\. Organization skills/project management skills: ability to pull together internal/external resources, ability to create clear plans, ability to build relationships with other teams to make cross-team collaboration easier

2\. Communication skills: ability to deescalate and mediate conflicts fairly, ability to give both positive and negative feedback regularly, ability to create psychological safety, ability to deliver bad news while maintaining psychological safety, ability to run efficient meetings, ability to make unpopular decisions while still commanding the team's respect, ability to engage with different personality types and communication styles

3\. Delegation skills: ability to translate ambiguous directives from above into actionable tasks for the team, ability to arrange tasks so that individuals have the creative freedom to figure out how to do it, predictability in decision-making, ability to shield team from external pressure, ability to give negative feedback immediately, ability to fire low performers _before_ they fester into team morale and culture problems

4\. Coaching skills: ability to give targeted advice, ability to match employee's own aspirations and growth objectives to projects, enough technical expertise to point people in the right direction, ability to evaluate skills and hire for them

<comment><USER3> > these all take practice

They also often take theory. If you're reading this and trying to learn more about management, don't shy away from taking some time to read good books which teach about the theory of, say, how to be good at feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These are all great points and there are some good nuggets in this article but I feel like it misses the main issue with recruiting. The shortcoming in my experience, is hardly ever in the process, it's in the people who work in recruiting. When setting up pipelines, most of the people I worked with knew what we had to do - the points in this article are pretty obvious.

What isn't obvious is how to find the right people to help us do that, or how to avoid the wrong people. Because the wrong people on the recruiting side of things can easily drag down the entire organization very quickly. I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth anything - I'd like to see more about how to find them, what qualities to look for, and how to vet them.

Building a process that doesn't suck is like bread and butter for day-to-day for a lot of engineers. A lot of us have been part of working recruiting pipelines and we've seen how it's supposed to work. It's usually pretty straightforward - what wee don't know is how to kickstart it with the right people. I'd love more information on the softer part of it, and the part that is often invisible to people iterating on the process - the specific contributions of individuals to get it up and running.

<comment><USER5> > I've only worked with a handful of recruiters that were actually worth > anything

I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!

<comment><USER6> A technical résumé, to a non-technical recruiter, is just technobabble; they have no way of knowing whether the information contained in the résumé is generally good, or just someone BS'ing, or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Discerning whether a writer actually understands what they're talking about (particularly in the terse format of a résumé) generally requires a deeper understanding of the lexicon at hand.

They can be told to look for certain keywords, sure, but that doesn't, IME, seem to be sufficient to screen; obviously bad résumé use the right words (but in the wrong ways / in ways that to an expert clearly indicate a lack of understanding) so they pass the filter.

Brief technical screens can be done, but again, without technical knowledge, the recruiter can't know if the answer given by the candidate matches the answer they have in an answer key, if they are provided with one. Even relatively simple technical questions might have more than one right answer, or the answer might just be phrased in a way that a recruiter doing a human version of lexical edit distance isn't going to think passes, but any engineer would say would.

The problem in all of these is the lack of technical knowledge. Tech recruiters, on the whole IME, are trying to recruiter for a role that might as well be "town wizard". Any theoretical recruiter _with_ technical knowledge would never work in recruiting — they'd fetch more in pretty much any real technical role, like an engineering role.¹

The other problem, again IME, is that there is a wide pool of candidates with very little actual _experience_ , though they may have worked any number of years. Finding someone with actual knowledge and understanding of software engineering requires sifting through a lot of chaff.

¹One might see this as people aren't willing to sufficiently pay enough for recruiters / if you want a recruiter with technical knowledge, you need to compensate them adequately enough that other opportunities are not worth their time. I would agree here.

<comment><USER5> Ah, I can see what you mean. I had good luck with making actually resume screening part if inter process for hiring recruiters.

Here's basically how I did it:

\- pick one job to focus on, where it's near impossible for a non-technical person to tell if someone is likely to be a fit, such as a full stack web developer with experience in a JavaScript and a backend language

\- get 5 resumes, 1 obvious fit, 3 maybes, and 1 obvious no, all of which look great based on keyword soup, so an automated QA person and webmaster might look like a full stack developer, and the waiter who took a programming course 10 years ago has no shot

\- provide any additional filtering criteria

\- in a verbal conversation, ask the recruiters to rate, and explain, each rating

Try that. It's not perfect, and it's better for positions you can describe discrete hiring criteria. The bar for the recruiter is not filtering out the no and maybes, it's screening in the maybes and yesses into a guesstimate sorted list. You can focus in 3 & 4 list. Then you can start with obvious matches, keep going until the list starts feeling pretty thin, and draw a line based on your judgement call & supply of applicants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some additional great resources related to hiring:

How to hire your first engineer - [https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire- your-first-engineer...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first- engineer/)

Convincing Engineer to join your team and a basic structure for the process - [https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join- yo...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team/)

General thoughts about hiring - [http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to- hire](http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire)

The book "Who" gives a good idea about a good process. Hard to apply when you are not looking for a "generalist" \- [https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff- Smart/dp/0345504194/](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194/)

Some of the manager tools podcasts episodes - [https://www.manager- tools.com/map-universe/hiring-0](https://www.manager-tools.com/map- universe/hiring-0)

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER8> How to run a solid, basic technical interview: [https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz](https://slides.com/scottconnerly/2questioncodequiz)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Judging by the article, you need to go through a _lot_ of interviews before Stripe makes you an offer.

I wonder if they miss out on whole groups of job candidates because those candidates have good job prospects that don't involve this gruelling slog.

Of course, Stripe does seem to have an excellent team.

<comment><USER10> I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

<comment><USER11> That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.

<comment><USER12> Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money.

I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.

<comment><USER13> Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create.

Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?

<comment><USER14> I could substitute "the business" for "lemons" above and describe many (most?) companies. In that case, what effect are these lemons really having?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice post, guys.

Would you mind saying what you mean by 'lurking'? In all my life on the Internet, it's a positive thing when joining a community. You're invisible to everyone and just read. Why should people not do this? It seems harmless to be in read-only mode.

<comment><USER16> I understood the use of "lurking" as "commenting unproductively in a channel". Although I may be mistaken, it makes a lot of sense to avoid such toxic behavior.

<comment><USER17> Weird, it's always meant reading and not posting to me, such as the parent suggested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <rant>

Some time ago I went to the Dublin open house because they were opening news teams here and one of the positions was backed api engineer. Considering that I've been doing the same for almost 10 years and that I got personally invited to the event I decided to apply to the role.

They rejected me even before having a personal interview. I wonder what is happening behind the scenes but it was very demoralizing. Was anything wrong about my CV? About me? Am I too old? Right now, I prefer to stick with smaller companies, they have clearer intentions when contacting you and they are much more easier to approach.

</rant>

<comment><USER19> In my experience, it's incredibly difficult to get a strong positive signal from a CV. You can definitely find red flags (my favorite example: people describing themselves as experts deep learning with 1 year of experience and zero publications) - but, after removing the obviously unqualified, the next steps have very low accuracy.

Honestly, it might have just been a sourcer/recruiter fuck up. If you can at all, ask a friend (or even a friend of a friend) if you can get an internal referal and bypass the broken resume filtering step.

<comment><USER20> Even worse, at some big companies, recruiters will ignore direct referrals and ask you to submit the resume internally through their req system. But then resumes get lost anyway.

Good recruiters accept internal referrals directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Probably the most important these days: don't blindly follow the interview process of big tech companies. They have an almost endless queue of very good candidates. Any other company has the exact opposite problem. They treat their candidates poorly (ridiculous whiteboard algorithm questions) and don't really care about losing good candidates. Other companies can't do this, they are lucky to even get good candidates applying.

</comment><comment><USER22> I did not read the article to the end (I plan to). It's mostly good and I agree with the point it's making.

However, I think we need to flip it on its head. From my point of view as an engineer, your pipeline doesn't really matter, no matter how smart and well thought out it is.

The weakest link in the pipeline is what isn't mentioned here, how do you get candidates into the pipeline.

I get 5-10 recruiting emails a week and about the same number of linked-in messages, none of them ever even come to a phone call. (and yes, I have gotten a few from Stripe as well).

How do you email/call/text candidates? How do you define them? Do you have the same email for all or you distinguish between levels?

A lof of companies have a good pipeline and they say "we don't do whiteboards" but their recruiters are doing a disgusting job at finding people, just absolutely shameful.

<comment><USER23> Is that because you're not responding to the recruiting emails or they don't get back to you after you respond? How would you imorove that process?

<comment><USER24> One idea would be standardized questionnaires. Rather than job sites being collections of buzzwords and tools, if they presented questionnaires that matched a variety of similar job titles, employers could simply fill out the questionnaire and be matched with candidates who answer similarly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Please no recruiter phone screens. It's just a choreographed dance where everybody knows what's goin to happen. The recruiter sells you the company about x, y, z values that nobody cares about. The candidate says something about looking for bigger opportunities and challenges.

<comment><USER26> If it's rote for you, you probably aren't using those calls effectively to filter based on your dealbreakers.

<comment><USER27> mind sharing how you use these calls to filter companies?

<comment><USER26> Company size, team size, role functions, salary range, culture...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Re "Don't mistake productivity for engagement": The story is quite similar to my recent departure from a robotics startup. Even though the company had the suggested survey system in place, management made me feel like an engineering resource to be allocated rather than a person with career ambitions. The survey was one of several facades the CEO had in place.

</comment><comment><USER29> >> In addition to building clear rubrics, we began unconscious bias training to maintain consistency and objectivity.

Is that still valid? I thought the tests to support this concept had failed to be replicated?

[http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior- problem....](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior- problem.html?gtm=top&gtm=bottom)

[https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism- measuring-...](https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring- tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html)

<comment><USER30> Unconscious bias is not implicit association. Unconscious bias is rationalizing decisions based on the candidate's personal characteristics as something else. Studies about unconscious bias readily replicate, i.e. [https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job- resumes...](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get- more-interviews)

Most training to overcome unconscious bias is about defining criteria before you see a candidate. If, before you view resumes, you've written down "We want someone with a master's degree and 4 years of experience in field X," you're much less likely to pass over a qualified resume, regardless of the candidate's personal characteristics.

<comment><USER31> There is no evidence that unconcious bias can be effectively mitigated by "training".

<comment><USER30> Training to pre-select criteria before viewing candidates is well supported as a mitigation by literature such as: [https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/uhlmann_et_2005....](https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/uhlmann_et_2005.pdf)

From the abstract: Commitment to hiring criteria prior to disclosure of the applicant's gender eliminated discrimination

I'm sure there are many sitautions where training is less effective, but the hiring example is well supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I fear that earlier stage companies will read posts like this and implement it blindly without considering the big picture, which is:

\- Stripe is a large and resourceful company with a relatively large engineering team. They can afford to have people focused only on things like this.

\- The demand to work at Stripe is high. Therefore they can afford to have a long, grueling interview process. Most engineers will not want to go through a 7 step hiring process at a low prestige company.

</comment><comment><USER33> The article seems to me to have lots of information on hiring and very little on scaling. In my experience hiring is one of the smaller problems in scaling, the largest by far is how you avoid massive drops in individual productivity that if unchecked come with large teams delivering complex functionality. It's a technical problem for engineers to solve more than it's an HR or management problem.

<comment><USER34> if you hire people that won't do bullshit job over and over, you end up with a organization that doesn't have that kind of problem.

You can see this happen in places that have layoffs every now and then, or that hires a dozen contractors for each fulltime employee. When that happens, you have people doing automation job while hoarding knowledge of which button to press, then you get to the point you describe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the same process as with many other millennial-focused companies in SF.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really enjoy reading Stripe's posts. I remember they posted one about APIs and it was super fun to read [1]. Though to be honest, I think a title of "Guide to scaling software engineering organizations" seems more appropriate. I dread of a day where it's the norm for foundational engineers to have a similar interview structure as software engineers now.

[1] [https://stripe.com/blog/api-versioning](https://stripe.com/blog/api- versioning)

<comment><USER36> What is a "foundational engineer"?

<comment><USER35> The old four main branches of engineering (mechanical, electric, chemical, and civil)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I really enjoyed this post, but, I would've liked to see more information about engineering team size when these things happened.

For instance, the idea of "rotations" doesn't make as much sense when there are 5 engineers versus 100. There were several instances where I would've liked to have known team size as a benchmark.

<comment><USER38> Rotations also don't make sense for product or domain specialists, or people with career aspirations to focus on one specialization. As an ML engineer, I would quit immediately if I had to go through a rotation doing web development. But if you ask me to do occasional web development to deliver my ML product to customers, I'll do it whole heartedly and solve it very fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> TLDR; An article by high level exec at stripe. Its long low-information VP- style article with mostly things you already know like you need to define a recruiting plan, you should survey candidates for experience, your onboarding plan should provide overview of your products etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> What are the top reasons for candidates rejecting offers at Stripe?

</comment><comment><USER41> The criteria for candidate communication ability in the "example rubric" _sounds_ right, but is any of this backed by actual data?

</comment><comment><USER34> The good point of the article is bringing people up to speed as soon as they are hired.

Yet everyone here will only see the bad points of the article, which is pretty much a recipe for bro-culture and hiring fluent english speakers exclusively.

<comment><USER42> Not to mention how expensive that flow chart looks.

<comment><USER43> It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person.

As you iterate, your win percentage (AKA how many people you bring in and actually hire) goes up. We got to a point where we hired 75% of the people we brought in to the office.

<comment><USER14> > It is not as expensive as hiring the wrong person.

Do you have numbers to back that up?

<comment><USER43> Having built & led many teams, the time and energy that goes into managing an underperformer or a poor culture fit far outweighs the cost of thorough interviewing.

Even worse, you have to go through the hiring process again! So we can at least say it costs twice as much.

As mentioned, this kind of investment in the hiring process requires you to actually iterate it and continuously improve your win percentage. If not, you might be throwing money away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> More like scaling _software_ engineering organizations.</comment>


Observations on iTunes 11 - <AUTHOR> http://kray.me/blog/observations-itunes11-remote3/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but making a desktop app look like a phone app doesn't really "improve the user experience" by default. I've been using itunes for 6 or 7 years now, and i literally stood there for 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell i was looking at when it first started up.

<comment><USER3> It looks and works nothing like the sucky Music app on iOS. I wish that app would work that way!</comment></comment>


Rust in Large Organizations - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/rylev/0e3c3895dcb40b6a1c1cf8c427c01b5e <comment><USER2> Here is some context for the event at which these notes were taken, and a summary writeup:

[https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-in-large-organizations- me...](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-in-large-organizations- meeting/32059?u=dtolnay)

This was a meeting between a few employees of large organizations using Rust (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) at RustConf two weeks ago to discuss the common needs of enterprise users and how to collaborate effectively on the language and ecosystem going forward.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting how many organizations had problems with build.rs. Other build systems like Make, scons, or autotools have the ability to run arbitrary things in any step in the process compared to Rust which has a clear separation.

There is a proposed RFC to reduce the need for build.rs scripts in many cases [1], will likely be merged within the next 2 weeks.

[1]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2523](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/2523)

<comment><USER4> > It's interesting how many organizations had problems with build.rs. Other > build systems like Make, scons, or autotools have the ability to run > arbitrary things in any step in the process compared to Rust which has a > clear separation.

I think the history behind this is that Cargo was built with only Rust in mind; when your world is 100% Rust, you generally don't need much extensibility in your build process. Make, scons, and autotools all seem like they were designed to be more language agnostic from the start. It'll be interesting to see how cargo needs to evolve to be able to support interior with other ecosystems at the level that larger companies need.

<comment><USER5> The way I heard it was that Cargo was intentionally avoiding being a complete build system. The idea being that Make et al would still be used when necessary so build.rs (and cargo in general) could be free to concentrate on managing the Rust parts exclusively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Glad to see some thinking going on in this area. We're using Rust at FullStory and it's about 1/3 source-wise for one of our projects. A few of these concerns echo conversations that teammates have had on Slack.

FullStory itself is somewhat polyglot (Go on the server, TypeScript/react in the browser, Java/ObjJ/Rust on native mobile) and we've felt some of the pain around having a consistent and reliable build environment. We've also had internal discussions along these lines - ie: which deps can we trust from various package managers (npm has interesting arbitrary code execution as well!).

Building tooling to manage all these languages in a common system is a _huge_ commitment. We're actively hiring for the role of productivity engineers which is something that I see becoming more important in orgs as they scale up, the same way that devops/SRE split out in the 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER7> Super interesting read. The geometric growth of deps problem seems like a natural consequence of having a good package manager. In languages like C/C++, libraries often include all their code - there are no transitive dependencies.

<comment><USER8> My reading of that isn't that the problem is the large set of transitive deps but that it's opaque to the native build system at these companies (Buck/blaze) which means rebuilding one requires rebuilding all which is time- consuming. I infer this from the discussion about being able to query inputs/outputs of the build so that integration can be done more meaningfully into these systems to rebuild just changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was entertained by this exchange:

 _ms: would like to know how to control use of unsafe in codebase

google: grep_

<comment><USER10> As I got to that point I started laughing and then explained it to a non- programmer that was with me.

My fumbled metaphor of "Find in page across a lot of pages" didn't really land...

<comment><USER11> So what do you do if "unsafe" is in a string or a comment? How do you automate the linting of it?

I believe that's what MS is speaking about. Google probably simply puts this on the shoulders of the developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The build system issue isn't inherent to Rust or to large organizations. Even in a startup, we have a polyglot development with a separate build tool in addition to the language-specific build tool. We ended up doing much of the same things: use the language-specific build tool to generate artifacts which are then consumed by the normal build tool.

<comment><USER13> A slight difference is that Rust really wants to be the top level compiler. More than a lot of languages, even C++, it really relies on link time optimization to get the perf you'd expect.

<comment> hope-striker How this is more true of Rust than modern C++?

<comment><USER14> Most "modern" C++ involves template metaprogramming of a sort that is in header file, so the modern aspect doesn't stand to increase the need for LTO that much.

I would imagine that Rust programs benefit from LTO by removing static assertions necessary for memory safety that C++ programs simply omit, and by unraveling functional style code that Rust programs often get shoehorned into. Or maybe not, but that's one non-LTO that's needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can any rust experts tell me that unsafe rust is powerful and expressive enough to let me do anything?

I have a use case where I have two iterators on a linked list in nested loops and the second iterators deletes some elements as it goes. Is this something I can express in unsafe rust?

<comment><USER16> I'm no expert but yes, you can do anything in unsafe as in C can do anything. Unsafe Rust provides you access to raw pointers.

<comment><USER15> I'll add more details to see if it helps-

C:

``` node _prime= list.head;

while () { node _probe = prime.next;

      while()
      {

        if () //condition on prime.data and probe.data {
          probe.next = probe.next.next; //& drop stuff
      }

} ```

<comment><USER17> You need to use four space indent to create code blocks, triple-ticks don't work here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried to learn those languages, my IQ level can handle java/golang/python/c just fine, but c++ and rust is beyond my comfort zone for sure, for c++, getting familiar with it is OK, but getting good at it is hard, really hard, mastering it is impossible for me. similar can be said to rust as far as I can tell.

even python has some "tricks", try "x=256; y=256; x is y" and "x=257, y=257, x is y" under python, or 'x=[], y=[], x is y; x=y=[], x is y' you will know what I mean, you actually need know some internal designs to use python properly.

At the moment I feel golang has the right trade off for programmers, be it beginners or senior developers.

<comment><USER19> I don't think that's a great example for Python; that's just knowing what "is" is for. The fact that it works the same as == for small integers in CPython is an optimisation showing through, but only in a place where it doesn't really matter.

You still need to have a grasp on the difference between reference equality and value equality without getting into anything anyone would call tricks or implementation details (eg, after `x = []; y = []; x.append(1)`, how many elements does y have?).

<comment><USER20> > _I don 't think that's a great example for Python; that's just knowing what > "is" is for. The fact that it works the same as == for small integers in > CPython is an optimisation showing through, but only in a place where it > doesn't really matter._

Python should have prevented checking primitives with is though -- only let object pointers...

<comment><USER19> I believe they're still object pointers in CPython, they're just ordinary singletons; in other implementations, they aren't even singletons. Python's object model doesn't have primitives. Adding special rules around them would significantly complicate the language as well as limit the implementors' ability to fiddle with the ranges of pre-allocated instances, for minimal benefit.

<comment><USER20> > _in other implementations, they aren 't even singletons_

That would have been less surprising (since for < 256 the singleton-ness means all same valued instances have the same "address" (id), so behave in equality check as if they were plain numbers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some sort of "how-to" for Rust in large organizations would be very nice.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have to learn Rust for my new job starting next month. Any recommendations?

<comment><USER23> How did you get hired into a place that uses Rust when you don't know any? Also where do you work because I want that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd really like to engage in a job or project that uses Rust.

<comment><USER25> Try asking in the r/rust weekly status update thread, in the Rust discord, or going to a local meeting! (Here is pretty off-topic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh good lord. Reading that made me happy that (1) I am no longer in a large organisation, and (2) I program in Go. Good luck guys, you'll need it. You've got interesting problems.</comment>


Pacific Rim of Fire Earthquake and Volcano Map - <AUTHOR> http://www.zentu.net/beta/yahack

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting topic, earthquakes and all; are there any earth-science types among us? Anybody who can talk some Canadians into sharing their geological data? :)

I think there was some "inadvertently deleted" action on this submission yesterday.</comment>