Hiring Is Broken and Isn't Worth Fixing - <AUTHOR> http://www.daedtech.com/hiring-is-broken/ <comment><USER3> > Start by telling recruiters, up front, that you don't do trivia interviews > and the like. Be firm and explicit about this, as in, "if they start asking > me to describe merge sort, I'm going to thank them for their time and tell > them I need to go."

Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn't actually want a job, or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a shot?

>"Hmm… you know what? I'm really sorry, but I think maybe we got our wires crossed somewhere here. I've had experience on the hiring side of this sort of interview style in the past, and I've seen it result in some really sub- optimal matches, so I've adopted a policy of having certain deal breaker cues in the interviewing process. So at this point I can safely say I'd be unlikely to accept an offer, and I really wouldn't want to waste any more of your time."

Expected response: "Well........ Bye."

I appreciate the effort put into wording that nicely, but really all you're saying is, "Company, you need me more than I need you, and I expect YOU to jump through MY hoops." This is only true when you're a one-in-a-million talent. It's not going to work for the other 999,999 people.

<comment><USER4> _Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn 't actually want a job, or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a shot._

The thing is, not all companies do this. And there a LOT of other companies besides Google and The Usual Suspects. Heck, there are a lot of companies that aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers. And they are probably less likely to do the whole "grill you on Data Structures 101" thing than Google. It's something to consider...

<comment><USER5> I'm at one such company. I'm one of a 4-person dev team in the marketing department of a major lawfirm. My interview consisted of a conversation with another developer about code, both my github/portfolio and how we see development in general.

I had an offer an hour later and this is a fantastic place to work.

I actively avoided places with broken processes and it paid off in spades.

<comment><USER6> Is the compensation competitive? I've gotten the general impression that sometimes hiring is more broken than other parts of the company, and that the more competitive positions can sometimes have more frustrating interviews.

<comment><USER5> Not really, but I also put in a sub-40 week and the only thing that matters is that I get my work done.

I'll make the Work-Life Balance > Compensation choice every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The message I get out of this post is: "Know what you want, and be uncompromising in your search for it." If a company is interviewing you wrong, then the company is disqualified from your list of places you'd like to work. You can draw up a similar list of criteria (e.g. has an open source presence, has a remote-first culture, uses JIRA, doesn't use JIRA, has low technical debt, has high unit test coverage) with which you can assess culture/role fit.

If you find the companies you're interviewing with consistently fail your test, then bring your pattern-identifying skills to bear and figure out why. Maybe all of the companies you're interviewing at have something in common (they're all startups, they're all Fortune 500s, the CEO isn't technical, the roles are too senior/junior). In which case you should break the pattern and apply for work at different types of companies.

Or possibly the pattern lies within yourself. Do you consistently fail the same kind of technical tests? Does your answer to a specific question ("Can you show us a large codebase you've worked on? Oh, you can't?") tend to elicit the same negative answer? Then maybe you should focus on strengthening those weaknesses.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?"

So...make tech even more of an old-boys club than it already is? Because that's what people will be complaining about if the only way to get a job is to know someone or be known.

Really, there isn't a solution here. Any system you use to allocate desirable jobs to an oversupply of applicants will result in folks who believe they were unjustly excluded. What _would_ fix the problem is for people to define "desirable" in different ways, with a bias toward "the place that I actually ended up at". Love what you do, don't do what you love.

<comment><USER9> I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You'd lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe _part of your operations would be getting to know college kids_." (Emphasis mine.) What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form relationships with the people who build and maintain it?

When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable' in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.

<comment><USER10> While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it that way.

<comment><USER8> Also, some companies _do_ do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else.

Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is. They usually do so through _other_ markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are _other_ people, they cry foul.

(Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly" approach tends to work better.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently interviewed at Google and one coding interview had the most adversarial interviewer that I've ever encountered. It started with the interviewer complaining that he was busy. Everything from the language I chose to each line I wrote received complaints. By time we got past the first question, I thought maybe this was actually a behavioral interview in disguise to see how I'd deal with adversarial coworkers.

I got an offer from them, but I declined without hesitation. I interviewed at Facebook and that process was great. At least one of my coding interviewers _did_ read/skim my github code beforehand. Woo, keep it up!

<comment><USER12> A big part of dealing with adversarial co-workers is team structure and managerial support, how does a 1 on 1 conversation with someone you've never met even really test your ability to work with "difficult" people? It seems more like seeing how much bullshit you can put up with at that point (this is NOT the same to me as "dealing with an adversarial co-worker").

There's already a baseline of bullshit to deal with everywhere anyway, it's part of almost any job. If a company thinks there's so much bullshit and/or difficult people to deal with that they need to screen for it during interviews, that seems like a HUGE turnoff to me wanting to work there.

<comment><USER13> It's the same as companies that purposely make interviews more stressful than they need to be "to see how you work under pressure". They fail to realize that not all stress is the same and that interview stress is different, in some cases very different, from on-the-job stress.

<comment><USER14> I am very fed up with the whole "ability to work under pressure" expectation. Companies that emphasize this almost always have a totally broken work organization process.

At the end of the day, programmers are not emergency workers and need some rest and calmness to do their work efficiently.

<comment><USER15> That + the fact that no matter how strong the candidate is unless we're talking some well-known genius, the personal dynamics of the interview is the candidate wants something (the job) the interviewer "has" so it's skewed from the get go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So many "hiring is broken" stories lately. I sympathize. Interviewing is typically not fun.

However, I'd like y'all to consider the problem from the other side of the table. I conduct a lot of technical interviews. I desperately want to avoid bad hires. How do I avoid the bad hires? It's a really hard problem and there are consequences from both false positive and false negative signals.

Google asks "big-O" type questions not because they're shibboleths or useless trivia. It's practical knowledge in an environment where things often have to scale up to absurd degrees. Most candidates haven't had experience in that kind of environment, so interviewers are looking for signs of aptitude. Knowing which kinds of algorithms can scale up is a sign of that aptitude for those kinds of problems.

Lately, I've been asking more questions from the domain of what I call "programming in the small" \-- the kinds of things that crop up when actually writing or reviewing or debugging code. I do this because I've learned that the ability to construct an airtight Boolean predicate expression to test for a well-defined condition is a survival skill for good programmers.

If you're a good candidate, then I'm sincerely sorry that I waste some time (for both of us!) talking with you about some basic stuff rather than having a more interesting technical conversation.

<comment><USER14> Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless.

If I have provided a GitHub account with some interesting code, then sure as hell I have demonstrated that I am able to compose "airtight" boolean expressions.

Just like I have to be informed about your company before interviewing, take your time to inform yourself about me.

<comment><USER17> _Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless._

The amusing thing about this is, from what I can tell, Google actually only needs a small number of people with the deep knowledge. Much of the work there still involves things like "developing CRUD apps", just on top of the platforms and infrastructure the smaller group developed for it.

Which led to a characterization I once heard from an ex-Googler of the company as a place where "they hire top CS Ph.Ds to do incredibly boring code-monkey work".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Like standardized testing, interviewing is a bullshit measure of what you really know.

Like standardized testing, the way to win is to get good at taking the tests. Even if you disapprove, this is how you get a job. I've accepted this.

<comment><USER19> I think it's worth noting that the reason you have the degree isn't to show knowledge, it's to show you're willing to complete a process that's out of your control, but you do it anyway because that's what is expected.

The ideals are always nice to have, but if I have to fight with a new hire over every built-in process because he doesn't immediately see the value in it, I'm going to get irritated at him.

<comment><USER20> What if that built-in process is counter productive, obsolete, or doesn't have the value you really thought it did anymore, like that of many college degrees? Mindless adherence to group think and legacy processes in the long run is a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER19> I'm all for constructive criticism, and if a process is burning more money than it is generating I'd speak my mind too. But many of our new fish (at least around here) don't like how much of a stickler I can be for proper documentation, good naming conventions, using the bug tracking system etc. They see it as pointless bureaucracy because they don't report to our boss, who when he asks "how are things going" likes to hear and see more than me just saying "good."

While there are plenty of processes out there that likely don't need to be, there are I'd venture a lot more where the value generated isn't necessarily obvious to the guys in the trenches. I'm happy to explain this to anyone who asks (and have) and we occasionally even have an issue crop up where hey, look how useful this "busywork" you did earlier is right now, but the point is to a certain degree you should expect to simply obey the stated rules even if you don't IMMEDIATELY see their value. It's just respectful.

I'd also say it's far too easy to conflate "mindless obedience" and "respectful behavior" these days.

<comment><USER21> If they think proper documentation, good naming conventions, and using a bug tracking system are 'pointless bureacracy', then they're too green or belong in a more fast-paced environment, like a startup, because all of those are perfectly reasonable and should be considered a bare minimum for a team of more than a handful of people (and proper naming conventions should be done even with just one person).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of something a former co-worker told an incoming revolving-door CTO. He said there are only three things an employer can offer to recruit great technical talent - a great work environment, really interesting work, or lots of money. (Our former employer had a crap environment and dull work)

If you need to recruit, you need to offer at least one, preferably all three.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization > that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?

Excellent. As we all know, the tech industry's biggest problem is a lack of insularity and out-of-control diversity and this strategy is sure to help.

</comment><comment><USER24> One thing that I think is commonly missing from these discussions about hiring is the fact that most hiring processes (especially at these large companies) are not designed around letting all qualified applicants in. They are designed to ensure that unqualified applicants don't get in, even at the cost of passing up good candidates.

The negative cost associated with one bad hire can often outway the gain from one great higher. So if a company has to pass up on some great candidates in order to maintain quality they are going to do it.

Are there better ways than trivia questions and whiteboard coding to prevent bad hires? Of Course. One of my co-workers brings up the hiring practice at his old job. They would fly all potential candidates out to their office and have them work (paid) with the team for one day. From there, they would take their top picks and have them work (paid) for a week. From that group they would choose who to hire. My co-worker always remarks about how great of a process it was. However they were also only ever hiring for one or two positions a year. When you're trying to hire as many qualified applicants as possible, these kinds of in depth interviews just aren't efficient enough.

So the negative cost of hiring a bad applicant, in addition to the problem of trying to hire as many people as possible with minimal cost leaves us with interview techniques that don't cater to everyone. But they do do a good job of weeding out bad applicants, even if that does mean passing on good applicants.

Now I'm not saying this is the right way to interview, I just think this aspect is commonly left out of these discussions.

</comment><comment><USER25> Spot on, I've independently decided that I won't submit to brain-teasers and white-board coding (diagramming yes) any longer.

A company can look at my online work, read my written communication, have a nice chat on the phone, and then perhaps can hire me for a short contract to write a component to see how things work out. If they don't they don't have to pay.

I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also, and will experiment with that. For the last five years I haven't gotten any work from startups (even though I specialize in python and javascript) and wonder if it is due to the fact that I don't dress like a lumberjack and am not as young as I used to be.

<comment><USER26> >I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also

I've never considered live video of me a requirement in any professional or technical context a requirement unless I was actually doing something visual that explicitly requires it. When on the job I've never even bothered asking if it was ok to not have my camera on, and in interviews I've never thought twice about letting the interviewer know that I won't have a video stream up. Sometimes its because I genuinely can't (either poor internet or the fact that I don't have a webcam for my desktop) or I just don't feel like it. It's not about some high-minded principle regarding discrimination or a tactical decision or anything, I just don't think that video conferences add anything to audio in any situation except visual presentations or personal/emotional contacts (GF or family). I've been in a LOT of live calls in a lot of contexts and I've never noticed the other party having any issue with this, no interviewer has detectably taken it negatively.

I'd also like to add that I don't always have my camera off, just that I don't feel any pressure to justify myself when it is turned off, which is most of the time.

<comment><USER25> On about 75% of my recent Skype sessions the interviewers turned on their cameras immediately and requested that I do the same. Thought nothing of it until reading claims of ageism here, only noting that I have personally received zero offers from those companies. I'm not out-of-shape or unprofessional-looking either if it matters.

Coincidence? I don't know.

<comment><USER26> I mean, I'm young, fit (sorta), white, and male, so I suspect as far as biases go they are all pretty much in my favor. I just don't like dealing with a camera on me. It also took me a while to get an offer, even though I'm (not to sound arrogant or something) statistically extremely hireable given my background. (I did end up getting good offers in a reasonable timeframe though)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe filtering out people who won't play the game is better for both sides. After all, the company will be asking you to do other things you disagree with. Getting things done often means compromising on stuff that doesn't matter in order to do the stuff that does. It's an important job skill.

This is a clearer signal than "cultural fit" (whatever that means).

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking at a github profile would take about the same amount of time as walking to the conference room to conduct the interview. So I'm not buying the "you're wasting interviewers time with that stuff" line.

Can also serve as a good source of questions - can the candidate answer questions about his/her own code? Much more meaningful then some riddles or BST traversal.

<comment><USER28> It cuts two ways - if the hiring company expects me to waste, sorry, invest, my time reading their corp pages to make sure I have learnt all about them pre-interview, they can damn well take the time to read my profile and code snippets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The current state of hiring reflects two facts:

1\. A single bad hire can do immense damage to a team and organization. I never fully appreciated this until I saw the consequences of bad hires, and as a hiring manager it's one of my biggest fears.

2\. Labor laws and HR exist. You can't just willy-nilly fire people, there's a process in any well-functioning company to protect employees from management and vise versa. As a hiring manager this will generally reflect poorly on you.

This has caused interviewers, who are in the position of power, to make the process thorough and straining to protect themselves.

In many ways my philosophy has been shifting to the article's, which is to grow much more slowly and carefully. I don't think this scales well, but it leads to a personal process I can feel good about. I've been networking to meet people within the community, and I hope my future hires either come through personal knowledge of them or vetted referrals.

Google is actually capable of this kind of interview, but it's rare. I was referred to a manager a few years ago by an ex-coworker, and the whole process was great. I met the whole team, I went to lunch with the manager, he told me I could contact him if I had any questions, etc. I didn't end up joining, but I left with a very positive opinion of the manager and team.

<comment><USER25> Some percentage of bad hires are inevitable. I think a better solution is to fire them quickly rather than torture all candidates.

Most dev jobs are at-will, no?

<comment><USER30> The problem is that pissed off ex-employees are able to file lawsuits claiming that they were fired for any of a number of reasons that you can't fire them for. (Race, gender, religion, ...) Defending these lawsuits, even when they are without merit, is an expensive PITA. And the process can turn up all sorts of stuff in public that is a PR disaster.

This happens sufficiently often that HR has responded with policies to carefully document exactly why people are being fired. Furthermore they often try to get fired employees to sign contracts saying that they won't sue. These policies make it considerably more difficult to fire people.

<comment><USER25> To both respondents:

Does this happen often enough to worry about? Moreover, how do google-style brainteasers filter out litigious individuals?

<comment><USER30> According to every HR person I've talked about it with, it does happen often enough.

The brainteasers won't reduce what fraction of hires would be litigious. But they will reduce how many people you need to fire right away, which reduces your exposure to that kind of litigation.

Also note that company's unwillingness to tell you WHY they didn't hire you is another HR recommendation for avoiding lawsuits. The problem is that the more you say, the easier it is for it to be quoted out of context and made to look like you're biased against people based on age/gender/religion/etc, which could be grounds for a lawsuit. A lawsuit that doesn't even have to be winnable if it would cost more to win than to settle out of court...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem I see with his solution is on the other side. Alot of very good/creative developers and technical people tend to be of a non-social sort. As a result, restricting yourself to known people will inherently miss the people who don't move into the "scene" (whatever that happens to be). This just leads to a different set of problems and ultimately results in a "broken" process as well, just a different kind of broken.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hiring is broken because people follow what google does.

Once google stops asking whiteboard, big o questions hiring will be "fixed". As simple as that. This is the _only_ to fix it, we don't need endless discussions every week about this.

<comment><USER33> That will never happen. Google is obsessed with their academic, whiteboard coding procedure to a scary degree. It's a point of pride for recruiters to mention how intense it is. I'm going onsite to interview with them next week and they bombard you with training brochures, invitation to live interview training exercises, links to books etc. It's part of their brand now.

Anecdata, but all the people I know who work at Google tell me the interview is the hardest part. One of them spends their time fixing low-hanging bugs in Python

<comment><USER32> >That will never happen.

Interviews will never be fixed. case closed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't think I have a problem with organizations like google that need to filter candidates. For all I care roll dice. It's companies that have positions open for 6 months waiting on the "one."

Great advice for hiring the first 50-100 hires after that your hurting your self. You just need meat that point.

What do you think of our trash guy he has 4 phds and we pay him 400k a year.

<comment><USER35> I bet he's got a lot to say about the organization's waste management practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you have no time, automate it.

If reading/skimming github repositories is too long, maybe developing visualisation tools, machine learning tools would help for that.

I wonder why Google has not already done that, although they are known to automate their system administration heavily, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER37> The funny thing is, when people say things like "hiring is broken", they usually mean different things. Hiring is very different in different markets and parts of the world.

I'm desperately looking for competent developers right now. I don't ask HR for help, and I don't really filter by CV: anyone who considers himself a "senior" is going to get a skype call from me. But the first thing I give them is an assignment, 4-8 hours of work for a candidate of desired skill level. I tell candidates this estimate right away, and after sending it out several dozens times already I haven't met a single one who would say "sorry, I'm to busy to work on that for free". Before starting this process, I was sure this will going to be a problem, and I was sincerely surprised that it didn't happen once.

<comment><USER38> That's because pushing back against a potential employer like that is the HN version of Internet Toughguy Syndrome. You might also be surprised how few people respond to a mugging attempt with a well-placed roundhouse kick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why interviewers are NOT formally trained to conduct interviews?

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU Ugh, just let people choose their tech interview.

\- If they have public code, talk about that. Maybe ask them to add a feature onto THEIR code.

\- If they have no code, give them the option of take-home work or a whiteboard test or a live coding session.

\- If they have no code and don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live coding session, and you are both senior level, then just talk about work. It should be pretty clear whether they'll be a fit.

\- If they have no code, don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live coding session, and are NOT senior level, you should probably pass.

People will probably feel better and do better in the interview when they feel they can have a choice in how they are examined because they can plan to show their strengths.

The only downside is that with this is it becomes a bit more difficult to track how well your interviews go with a grading rubric or something.

<comment><USER40> Often I ask myself, why do employers set up the interview?

I mean, both parties want something.

The best interviews I had (now I'm freelancing so I don't have to do them anymore) were when the employer had no idea how to interview.

They asked me what I did and what they do and told me what they want from me.

I asked them how they work and what they have to offer.

The moment they tried to set up some interviewing process, with special questions asked by people with no technical skills and strange tests, everything went downhill...

<comment><USER14> I've been to some of the most honest interviews when a small tech team needs a new member with a slightly different expertise to theirs. Like, "we implemented a major part of our system, but we need someone to help us in this or that regard". It makes a ton of a difference in terms of mutual respect and friendliness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This was a good article.

I do think that the data structures and algorithms whiteboard exams amount to more than "trivia" and I do think there is value in them (my problem with them as I've posted on this board, is that because our industry lacks a proper exam respected widely by our peers, we have to re-take this exam over and over. It would be like an actuary having to demonstrate a knowledge of calculus and linear algebra on the whiteboard over and over, throughout a career - <USER2> wonder developers are eventually fatigued by it and stop wanting to play the game).

That said, I like his solution. Just don't do it. I'll still take the algorithm exam, but I won't do take-homes anymore, and I may have missed out on some good opportunities because of it. I just won't do this, largely because it's too large a time investment on my part without a comparable investment from the company in evaluating my application.

Here's the problem - we don't work in a free labor market. I've done my 12 rounds on HN with people about this, but here it is again - we work in a field where silicon valley employers have convinced congress that there is a "shortage" of programmers. This has led to legislation that allows employers to bestow the right to live and work in the US on employees, and the employer retains that right for the duration of the employee's tenure. It is possible to move from one job to another under limited circumstances, but by and large, the visa terms don't really allow the worker to change fields, quit and start a company, or pursue a different career path entirely.

Because it is generally difficult to immigrate to the US without family reunification or a few other insider tracks, tech visas provide one path to do this. As a result, high tech employers are in a position of amazing power over their workforce. They really can say "we will allow you into the US if you study what we say you should study, interview how we say you should interview, work on the projects we say you should work on, live where we say you should live, and accept the salary we say you should receive". Yes, there are a few requirements on salary, but without the right to quit and leave (including with no job lined up), the employee's bargaining power is greatly reduced.

Now, some of us are indeed free agents as individuals, but until _all_ of are free to choose our own path in life, as long as substantial numbers of us are not allowed to do this by law, employers will not have to make the adjustments the market demands when all workers are free.

This is why I support general skilled immigration, but I oppose putting corporations in control over a worker's right live in the US, including determining the circumstances under which the worker is allowed to arrive initially.

Nobody owes me a job under my conditions, and I accept that when I refuse to participate in certain types of interview processes. But nobody owes a corporation a worker under their conditions, and they really seem to be having trouble with this idea.

</comment><comment><USER28> This actually does work. If you do a little homework, there are employers who eschew the googly-algo-cs-wanna-job bullshit, they talk to you as a person, want to know about your experience, drives, values, and they are usually great places to work.

The last two jobs I took were with companies that treat people with respect, and I would now never go back to a big American megacorps HR drone hiring tech test filter rubbish again.

<comment><USER9> Second this. I'm in my 30s now, and I've realized that companies that treat people with respect don't hire this way and that's the kind of place I'm happy at. If that limits me to work for companies under a certain size, I'm OK with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The point about turning the tables in a bad interview is an interesting one, but this is mostly "Stop wanting to work for Google ya dummies!" OK, but the problem isn't just how Google hires.</comment>


New approach to data - <AUTHOR> https://www.delphix.com/the-new-approach-to-data <comment><USER2> What are the challenges companies usually face when dealing with data? Does Delphix solve them?</comment>


Distributed system development - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm developing a distributed system in C language but it's quite complicated to deal.
Is Erlang a better choice?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Erlang should certainly be a consideration in a distributed system, but there are usually many factors that go in to a technology choice. For instance, you may lose some raw speed in Erlang over C, so that could swing the decision back the other way depending on the application.</comment>


The Shadowy World Of Wikipedia's Editing Bots - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/524751/the-shadowy-world-of-wikipedias-editing-bots/ <comment><USER2> One reason I stopped editing wikipedia was because I had some good faith edits immediately reverted by bots.</comment>


Power pioneer Hideaki Horie invents new battery 90% cheaper than lithium-ion - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/07/09/business/tech/hideaki-horie-invents-new-battery/ <comment><USER2> No mention of the energy density, which is probably a decent amount lower.</comment>


Massive Loophole in Google Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.lockergnome.com/web/2011/02/01/google-apps-domains-loophole/

<comment><USER2> This...doesn't seem massive. From the article:

>I don't have access to DNS settings to point MX records to Google Apps or set up CNAME forwarding for things like calendaring. But my claim means that when SeattleTimes.com decides to switch to Google Apps in the future, it will have to jump through extra hoops to get there.

So...no harm done, just a bit more annoying if and when SeattleTimes.com decides to set up Google Apps? If you can't actually do anything, or prevent SeattleTimes.com from doing something, this isn't a massive loophole. Should it be changed? Sure, why not. Is it a giant problem? No.</comment>


Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon - <AUTHOR> You cannot install the WOT addon anymore in Firefox. This is due to WOT selling all your browsing data to firms - easily de-anonymizable (containing e-mail addresses, usernames or identifying parts of URLs in cleartext). Reporters of German broadcast NDR found out about this by inspecting a test dataset they acquired disguised as a company asking around to buy personal data. <comment><USER2> Web of Trust is a browser extension that claims 140 million installs. The marketing language on the home page [1] is all about how the extension will help users decide which websites to trust.

Their privacy statement [2] includes a section that describes "Browsing usage, including visited web pages, clickstream data or web address accessed;" as one of the categories of "non-personal information" that they may disclose or share with 3rd parties.

I'd imagine most users installing an extension to make their browsing safer would not be happy to know they were also making their entire browsing history available to 3rd party data brokers at the same time.

Unscrupulous business practices are definitely made easier when no one actually reads Privacy Policies...

[1] [https://www.mywot.com/](https://www.mywot.com/)

[2] [https://www.mywot.com/en/privacy/privacy_policy](https://www.mywot.com/en/privacy/privacy_policy)

<comment><USER3> Do you know what would be a great way to prevent this?

 _Every data_ send by an extension should be user viewable.

Here's the json file (or maybe something better) that we are posting, press Agree to send it

<comment><USER4> They would just start obfuscating the data (with ciphers, word replacements, encoding, minification, etc.)

They'd then claim it was for your security/privacy/protection. You know, like how Microsoft encrypts your Windows 10 usage data it sends them.

At least you could use the presence of such obfuscation as a sign there's probably something bad afoot. Presuming only a tiny number of extensions try to encode the data they send.

<comment><USER5> > _... you could use the presence of such obfuscation as a sign there 's > probably something bad afoot._

So, that "if you have nothing to hide..." argument, basically?

<comment><USER6> Similar but not the same, one thing is hiding your own information, but another very different is you taking my information and hiding it from me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is the blog entry of the Journalist Mike Kuketz, explaining in detail how he uncovered the fraud, unfortunately only in German. This includes samples of the questionable GET and POST Requests, as well as a link to a commit to the WOT sources on GitHub, which introduced the necessary changes ...

[https://www.kuketz-blog.de/wot-addon-wie-ein-browser- addon-s...](https://www.kuketz-blog.de/wot-addon-wie-ein-browser-addon-seine- nutzer-ausspaeht/)

The commit referenced in the blog:

[https://github.com/mywot/firefox- xul/commit/0df107cae8ac1890...](https://github.com/mywot/firefox- xul/commit/0df107cae8ac18901bd665acace4b369c244a3f9)

<comment><USER7> And by the way, he also suggests in his blog post that Ghostery and Adblock Plus might as well sell browser histories as WOT does. There might be even more.

<comment><USER8> Ghostery allows you to _OPT IN_ to sending your browsing data [1], which may be sold as part of services offered by their parent company to improve ad ROI for their customers. They also tell you that they're collecting the request data [2].

I think knowingly sharing your data (with a positive affirmation) is significantly different than having your data collected and sold without your knowledge

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/ugglB](http://imgur.com/a/ugglB)

[2] [https://www.ghostery.com/support/faq/ghostery-add-on/What- da...](https://www.ghostery.com/support/faq/ghostery-add-on/What-data-does- Ghostery-collect/)

<comment><USER9> The problem is not the selling of browsing data. WOT tells you openly that they do it.

The problem is that the data is _not anonymized enough_. The question is, if this is actually possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to say: And Google did not removed it. But actually it is also gone in Google extension store. Google also seriously needs to think about security in their Chrome extension store. I've seen more than once ads injected by extensions by the auto update (no real security there). Maybe I've been also tracked in the past. Google needs to actively monitor all extensions for ad injection and tracking code (where are their AI experts on that?) and also it should react faster to reports. In the past, weeks and months go by before a report has consequences for a extension. So the discovery of WOT is only thanks to German reporters.... but it was longer known that WOT tracks you.

<comment><USER11> There is nothing that can be done. Any moderation can be easily bypassed (for example, obfuscated code, code loaded from external servers etc.). You just should not install software that you don't trust.

For example I don't use any browser extensions because I don't have time to inspect their code after every update.

I wonder why both Google and Mozilla don't write this at the front page of their extension stores?

<comment><USER12> Serious question: do you audit code changes in browser updates?

EDIT: I realize there are (probably) fewer authors involved there.

<comment><USER11> Browsers are made by reputable organizations like Mozilla Foundation or (not so reputable) Google. And extensions are usually written by some anonymous person from Internet (or sold to anonymous person after gaining popularity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did not find any english versions of this news yet, so here a translated heise site: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2FAbgegriffene- Browserdaten-WOT-Anbieter-will-Datenschutz-Vorwuerfe- pruefen-3455466.html&edit-text=&act=url)

<comment><USER2> In the article you posted the WOT spokesperson appears to say that they'll be making sure that data is better anonymized in future - not that they will stop selling it. I don't think this type of response is going to work out well for them...

"When there are cases where information has not been anonymized and protected, we will, of course, review this and, if necessary, take steps to ensure adequate protection for our users."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bug report: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1314332](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1314332)

</comment><comment><USER14> What's interesting is how the story completely failed to make the news in the English-speaking net for several days. The story broke on Tuesday (CET), outside Germany it was only picked up by ghacks until now...

<comment><USER15> Ghacks is shadowbanned on HN for some reason. I vouched for this particular story, but it didn't get traction :(

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12850214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12850214)

<comment><USER16> Could be because of the title: "Your browsing history may have been sold already"

It's not remotely comparable to the situation. "WOT addon is banned from browsers after selling users history to the highest bidder."

<comment><USER17> Please don't use the word "retarded" as a casual adjective. It's a pejorative term historically used for people with intellectual disabilities. Thanks for understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is a shame that Mozilla did not explain why they removed the addon on the addon page, instead we just find a boring 404 page: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wot-safe- brow...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wot-safe-browsing- tool/)

They could have taken the opportunity to show that they care about user privacy and denounce WoT at the same time

<comment><USER19> This is a breaking story, and currently mozilla is reacting.

I am confident they will release a public statement and maybe even an actual post mortem for the tech crowd

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Such innovation .. pure evil.

What's the takeaway? Not to install any browser add-on?

On a serious note, I guess that it might be safer to to run a browser in a Docker container and use one instance to browser only site. The question is that how feasible it would be?

<comment><USER21> You can use Chrome profiles to create private "sandbox" for certain extensions. Put for example webdev related to extensions in separate profile, which you don't use for daily surfing.

<comment><USER22> You can also use Lynx if you want to go Full Stallman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came to the conclusion that one should use only addons which are widely used by netsec experts, because audit is a fairly rare thing these days and one has to rely on when somebody sees something suspicious.

</comment><comment><USER23> Good riddance, a vile site full of self appointed internet police with handpainted badges with a sense of importance

They falsely flagged a a website I ran a while back (social media management tools via approved APIs) as: pharmacy, scam and spam. Due to this mails from our server were not getting through.

I tried contacting saying they are all false. They updated saying we sold facebook likes and fake followers. We did nothing of the sort and did nothing at all with facebook anyways. I tried contacting again to which I was told we were a scam because the domain has privacy enabled nor had my personal name and address on the site. I value my privacy and do not have my full name and certainly not my address anywhere online.

I asked our customers via a support forum post if they could post an honest review of our site and service which did nothing to the score - it seems a couple of users have all the power. We then got branded as spammers for trying to manipulate our rating (with actual reviews, but as it was against the power users (who had never used our product) we were in the wrong.

<comment><USER5> I "want to believe you" and I always try to extend the benefit of the doubt whenever possible but it'd be interesting to hear the other side of the story as well.

Among other things, I manage a bunch of mail servers and I keep a close eye on them. I "blacklist" IP addresses of "misbehaving senders" pretty often and the rejection messages provide a way for the sender to get in touch with us. This way, we can work with them to rectify whatever problem caused them to be blacklisted by us -- many times it's that an e-mail account was compromised and used to send out spam.

I can't even begin to count how many times I've had administrators of other mail servers swear to me that they have _NEVER_ sent out any spam whatsoever (or similar statements) and that blacklisting them is a mistake and absolutely 100% our fault.

Except that, in every case, I, personally, have looked at every single message, determined it was spam, tracked down where it came from (verifying Received: headers against Postfix logs), and manually added the IP address to our list. In addition, the first time it happens they don't even get prevented from sending mail to us; only upon the second incident are messages rejected.

Thus, for someone to say that they know absolutely positively 100% without a doubt that their server never sent us spam just makes me laugh because I know that not only did they send us spam but, as a matter of fact, they've done it _at least twice_!

So, like I said, I _want_ to believe you but I'd want to hear it from the other side before making a conclusion. There's _always_ another version of events and experience has shown me that it's usually drastically different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here is a brief (and compared to the german sources not so great) english language version of what happened:

[http://techdows.com/2016/11/web-of-trust-add-on- removed.html](http://techdows.com/2016/11/web-of-trust-add-on-removed.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is more or less the same way SimilarWeb collects its data, so I wonder when will they start being treated the same. They operate a number of inhouse extensions and partner with other extension developers to collect the entire click trail of the users. Internal links in your intranet, localhost, "private" google drive links, all is collected and sold. It's beyond me how this shady business is treated as legitimate, including major web and tech publications citing their data reports.

</comment><comment><USER26> Details in the Debian bug report:

[https://bugs.debian.org/842939](https://bugs.debian.org/842939)

</comment><comment><USER27> WOT = Web of Trust

<comment><USER28> It should be rebranded as WAT

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So basically I should uninstall it, correct? Does anyone know of anything to replace it?

<comment><USER15> I think you can use their bookmarklet, but personally I don't see any benefits as somewhat similar Google Safe Browsing service is internally used by all major browsers.

<comment><USER30> it was decently accurate at judging whether a random website contained "legal" downloads of books

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it is true that WOT is useful for some rare use cases, where it is important whether some unknown website is a scam or not, but I don't think I need it for casual browsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All the other addons are completely trustable, of course.

It also really helps that Firefox never deletes cookies by default and never tells you about this. We 'respect' your privacy, yes, we do! Really! Look, you will have only one google cookie when you start a very new firefox.

We _really_ respect your privacy, yes! We will reiterate that until you believe it, but never change our privacy destroying default settings, because we 'respect' you!

<comment><USER32> Do you really think being logged out of every website every time you start your browser would be an acceptable default?

<comment><USER5> I only browse in (incognito|private) windows. My browsers are configured to startup that way automatically.

It "works for me" and it'd probably work for a lot of (perhaps even most) other users so maybe it would be an acceptable default. I don't know.

I think there's a happy medium somewhere between these two extremes that absolutely _would_ be an acceptable default, though. Firefox could certainly come with better defaults if Mozilla truly valued privacy that high.

(FWIW, my mozilla.cfg -- pointed to by _general.config.filename_ \-- currently has 127 settings in it. It's been added to over the years, though, so some of those are certainly deprecated by now.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Those stories about Adblockers selling browsing history and private data, is just a lame intent to make people stop using adblockers and make us digest all that advertising crap.... Watch an ad is our choice....

<comment><USER22> While advertisers would benefit if people are afraid to use adblockers, it doesn't necessarily mean that they did it themselves.

There was clearly a market for user browsing data (since WOT was able to find customers), so if WOT is shut down, more will pop up. And the apps that mine user data don't need to be adblockers, that's just the reason they give users to install the extension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> on android i used to go pretty extreme and edit hosts file on a rooted phone. you can find maintained lists for it they just zero out the address. for security i would also make all the edits i wanted for different things and then unroot.

for firefox there is also script blocker with the ability to white list adresses also remove history on close.</comment>


EFF is at a public hacking conference, publicly shaming individuals - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/pwnsdx/status/1192459212611342336 <comment><USER2> Late last year, the EFF sent out a mailer to its donors, myself among them, grossly misconstruing H.R.1695 - Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017. Worse, the mailer contained obvious lies and FUD, among other things saying that it would undermine the authority of the Library of Congress.

I sent a kindly worded mailer back to the EFF stating my long-standing support and how I was concerned about their chosen tactic and abuse of the facts. I made it clear that my donation and public support was at stake. They blew me off and I haven't given them money since.

Every time they send me something asking for money, I send a kindly worded email back summarizing the situation, which they also do not respond to, but still ask me for money.

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm not surprised.

<comment><USER3> The Register of Copyrights is currently appointed by the Librarian of Congress. Should H.R.1695 become law, the Register of Copyrights would no longer be appointed by the Librarian of Congress, who is the head of Library of Congress.

This does undermine the current authority of the Library of Congress.

EDIT: Adding reference to H.R.1695 which passed the House, but stalled in Senate.

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house- bill/1695](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1695)

<comment><USER2> The Register of Copyrights becomes a presidential appointee. A president also has the authority to remove the librarian of congress (and this has happened before), so no, not really. This bill has overwhelming bipartisan support.

[https://judiciary.house.gov/news/press-releases/fact- sheet-h...](https://judiciary.house.gov/news/press-releases/fact-sheet- hr-1695-register-copyrights-selection-and-accountability-act)

The house judiciary clarified this point saying how it removes presidential authority to replace the librarian of congress at whim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h So a quick skim of that thread isn't giving me the really important detail here: Was it stated that he developed the piece of software that ended up being problematic (even if he did later realize that it was a bad idea), or was he called a terrible person for developing the software? "Shaming" implies a value judgment that might well be there, but I'd like to know that that's exactly what's happening before I draw any conclusions.

<comment><USER4> For this case I think it is important to understand the environment and context surrounding the software, and what makes it different from other security tools such as metasploit. The author had a presence on several forums where he posted updates and I guess provided people with support. These forums catered mainly to the "bad guys", and the author was posting updates and providing support on the same forum where banking trojans, and stolen information was sold. While writing malware might be protected by free in France, the author was probably walking on a thin line with his choice of communication channels.

Metasploit targets security researchers over channels where there is no overtly illegal activity, and would likely refuse to support people if it is obvious that it is being used for something illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen this talk, the person in question wrote stalkerware and acknowledged it would be used for abusing women. The title is misleading, the EFF isn't "publicly shaming individuals", they're talking about one case where someone wrote highly unethical software.

<comment><USER6> > and acknowledged it would be used for abusing women

There is a tweet a few down in the linked thread of the author asking where he said that with no response.

<comment><USER7> Actually there is a response.

      Yes Sr's. In "Hack me if you can" "Hackeame si puedes"
      Documentary @DarkCoderSc says that he think Darkcomet can
      used for script kiddies (hackers) for spy friends and
      GIRLFRIENDS for fun and not for cyberwarfare or spy.

[https://twitter.com/JosueOrtizNovoa/status/11924879575270563...](https://twitter.com/JosueOrtizNovoa/status/1192487957527056384)

* formatting the quote correctly

<comment><USER8> What did he say in that documentary?

He asked "where did you saw / heard me saying "I knew DarkComet would be used for spying on girlfriends and that's fine"?"

Does he say "an that's fine" (or equivalent) in the documentary? Or just aknowledge that it's possible?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, I'm getting a sense that we're in the throes of an interesting revival of some long overdue reaction against software.

I'm torn in many ways; I don't believe constraining what people can build in their own time or for personal use is just, or grounds for moral censure as long as the process of doing so causes no substantial harm.

What I have issue with is applications of a tool with intent to harm. I can get behind some censure if the guy is providing support for users one can reasonably suspect of employing the tool to cause harm, like the Syria use case.

I don't buy that his production of a R.A.T. fundamentally makes him a horrible person just because he made it. Then again, I'm also in a way excusing the people who made industrial scale production of poison gas possible; but, as of late, I'm learning more and more that truly standing up for one's ideals, and everyone else's freedoms/Liberty often makes for rather uncomfortable bed mates.

So I guess in the end, I'm willing to accept that no matter what is made, there are people who will find ways to use something to cause harm; demonizing the maker as if that will "unmake" what you disagree with only serves to chain the development of humankind in very real ways. Sometimes, we have to face horrible things to develop the cultural mores to cope with a world in which a thing is possible.

So in conclusion, I suppose I'm throwing up my hands and saying it'll be what it's going to be, and there but for the Grace of God go I.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the context?

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm still going to donate every month. I wish everyone would.

They do important work, and they're human.

<comment><USER11> ha ha I got downvoted. whatever guys. I guess charitable giving is dumb and I should stop.

<comment><USER8> "because charitable giving is dumb" is one of many possible reasons you were downvoted, but not the most likely.</comment></comment></comment>


DHH's Keynote From RailsConf 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3171-keynote-by-david-from-railsconf-2012-on-progress

<comment><USER2> I had to turn it off after he somehow incorporated Kanye West into his presentation.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that part was out of place (as well as the easy bake oven skit) he does make some good points and does well at defending the more upsetting/progressive changes in rails.</comment></comment>


Obama proposes no capital gains tax on qualified small business stock - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2009/05/13/obama-proposes-no-capital-gains-tax-on-qualified-small-business-stock/

<comment><USER2> In Canada, capital gains are 50% taxable and the first $750k of capital gains on small business stock (subject to fairly reasonable definitions) is exempt.

I'm curious to know how this compares to other countries; could HNers from elsewhere please reply to this with the details from where they are?

<comment><USER3> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United_States

and, more generally en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax

Briefly, in the US cap gains are taxed at a special rate separate from regular income; if you hold the associated asset for at least 6 months, this rate only applies to half the capital gains, and if you fall into a low enough income bracket, your rate is significantly reduced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is cool, but we incorporated in January. If this passes, do we redo it now?

<comment><USER5> If I read the article correctly, you can issue new stock and sell it to investors, and those investors would get the benefit of the new law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are they defining small business? There are quite a few definitions that exclude startups.

Still, since I've spent the last few months hearing rumors about a bill allowing the president to seize any business that "threatens the economy," this is welcome news indeed.

<comment><USER7> "..the corporation must be engaged in a trade or business other than: one involving the performance of services in the fields of health, law, engineering, architecture, accounting, actuarial science, performing arts, consulting, athletics, financial services, brokerage services or any other trade or business where the principal asset of the trade or business is the reputation or skill of one or more employees; a banking, insurance, financing, leasing, investing or similar business, ..."

Looks like we're out, guys..

<comment><USER8> I don't see that as exclusionary; I read it as intending to exclude professional corporations, i.e. where you bill for _time_ (performance of services) as opposed to charging for a _product_.

I imagine if they didn't exclude such, you'd have a rash of LLPs turning into C-Corps; not sure what other negative consequences they're hoping to prevent.

<comment><USER9> they should state that more clearly then, if that is their intention.. like this it seems to me as if an engineer who designs some important technological invention and starts a startup around it, would be excluded... Also, would it be that bad if a significant amount of companies changed their formal structure in order to take advantage of this? It would mean an across-the- board incentive to create (and grow) companies, does it really matter that much what sector they're in?

<comment><USER10> Yes, it matters. Most smaller companies tend to be service companies, because they don't have huge economies of scale. Most product companies tend to be larger -- it's easy to moonlight as a designer who figures out what box you should sell a lightbulb in, but you can't moonlight as the guy building the lightbulbs, because you need tens of millions of dollars to manufacture them profitably.

A subsidy to small businesses that didn't exclude service businesses would have the effect of making more people want to work for service companies. Which is fine, except that they produce negligible exports. If you're selling lightbulbs, you make money in India by selling them there; if you're a lawyer, the way you make money in India is by hiring an Indian lawyer in India, and somehow convincing this lawyer to give you a fraction of his billings (so most of the money stays behind).

Given the potential trade deficit problems, I suspect Obama wants to focus on subsidizing businesses that can export.

<comment><USER5> Good point.

Also, the income of a service company is mostly going into the pockets of the service providers, and if those service providers are well-paid then they're more likely to save their marginal dollar instead of spending it. So from a Keynesian point of view, this is not the kind of business you want to throw money at during a recession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks pretty good -- I'm not sure what kind of event I'd want in 5 years to exit from a bootstrapped company, but having more options is always great.

The cynic in me thinks that Obama recognizes startups and small businesses will be the only bright points in the economy, so he wants to do something to make it appear he helped them, or possibly even was the primary reason for their success, by the time 2012 rolls around. However, wanting to be on the winning team isn't a bad thing in public policy.

</comment><comment><USER12> so let me get this right...

currently you pay capital gains (28%) on 50% of the worth of sold stock. this proposal would eliminate that if the stock is held for 5 years?

correct?

<comment><USER13> no, people pay capital gains (15%) on 100% worth of sold stock.

if you qualify for small business stock + 5 years discount currently, you could pay capital gains (15%) on 50% of the stock, and AMT (28%) on the remaining 50%, giving an average tax rate of 21.5%, worse than existing capital gains, which clearly doesn't make sense, so no one does it.

under the new proposed system, if qualified, there would be NO capital gains on 100% of the stock, AND it would not be subject to AMT, meaning that the gain is completely tax free (minus state tax, of course).

the only restriction would be that you have to acquire stock in the company when it is worth less than $40M (easy) and hold it for 5 years (harder).

<comment><USER14> > the only restriction would be that you have to acquire stock in the company > when it is worth less than $40M (easy)

Not really.

Most of us aren't accredited investors, so we can't buy stock in small companies without starting them, working for them, or being related to the founders.

Reduced taxation on small biz stock will make successful small biz more profitable, so it's a big deal for angels, VCs, and their limited partners, but because it doesn't increase the size of the investor pool, it just helps their returns.

This may have a modest effect on the number of funded small biz, but it won't help most of us.

You'd think that the super-genius' in the Obama administration would know about the accredited investor stuff.

<comment><USER15> _Most of us aren't accredited investors, so we can't buy stock in small companies without starting them, working for them, or being related to the founders._

What is the reasoning behind preventing people from investing into companies? Is it just to keep people from being swindled? It seems off to me.

<comment><USER14> > Is it just to keep people from being swindled?

That's the stated reason. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it's a real reason or even the only reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Won't this just lead to businesses changing their organizational structure, then carrying on as before? For example, instead of creating departments in a big company, one could split it into several smaller companies. (I don't really know the tax law in question, but it sounds like a potential loophole).

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't think so, because this applies only to capital gains tax, i.e. only becomes relevant when the company is sold. I don't think there would be any advantage in transforming departments into separate companies, and then cayying on as before..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So if you own a small biz(with or without partners), the gains you realise from it are tax exempted, if you put the gains back into the company and take it after 5 years. Is that right?

</comment><comment><USER18> too little too late mister president. I agree with winterspeak in that what we need is severely reduced payroll taxes to stimulate aggregate demand.

<comment><USER19> This makes no sense to me, even when I've seen it before.

I'm the classic saver. I'm the individual who they want to spend more right now.

I'm saving because it's not a certainty that my contract will be renewed right now. I could very well end up living off the savings I'm accumulating right now.

If you reduce my payroll tax, I won't spend more. I'll save more. ___

If someone is unemployed, reducing the payroll tax is not going to change anything.

If someone is insecurely employed, they aren't going to change their spending habits, they will change their savings habits. There is no gain. That's most everyone right now!

Further, why is it going to help for me to buy more Saudi, Mexican, and Venezuelan gas, or buy more Chinese goods? It seems to me that providing a sales tax break for goods and services originated in the United States would provide a much better economic lift. (I don't know if this would be legal, however.)

<comment><USER20> A sales tax break for goods originating from US is, in all ways, a trade barrier. You can expect global mutual treatment. That means decreased foreign demand for US products.

So you end up sponsoring US companies that were not capable to compete with more efficient foreign companies. Which is in itself a more interesting problem. Most European countries have as high, or higher, standard in working conditions (and TAXES!) and they do have positive trade balance.

Does it really seem like a wise decision to make US produced products less attractive on the global market, for the hope that tax cuts on domestic products will match up, and then some, with increased income tax from the new jobs?

An alternative is to instead use taxes to set up better public transport, so the time-and-cost-to-get-to-work radius around companies increase. Making it both easier to find the right competence (larger area, more people to chose from) and making more real estate close (time-wise) to the city, making the cost of living lower.

<comment><USER19> I agree with all these points, but the point I had been trying to make is that increasing spending in the face of a trade deficit means that we are doing more to spur China's economy than our own.

I'm not sure that the public transport makes a difference with our car culture and low population densities. I can't really think of a good way to do a subway in LA, for example, though they tried.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Google+ deliberately crippling Opera? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.arunbalan.in/2011/10/17/is-google-deliberately-crippling-opera-what-gives-google/

<comment><USER2> From the post:

"UPDATE: Turns out that the notifications/share button doesn't really work like it's supposed to on Opera. So Google was just hiding it (till they got it to work?) so people don't wonder why it doesn't work. Sorry! Really should have checked if it's working before posting this. D'oh!"</comment>


Now Is the Time to Dismantle Our Cities' Invasive Surveillance Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/now-is-the-time-to-dismantle-our-cities-invasive-surveillance-infrastructure-2c34c309b4fe <comment><USER2> Not gonna happen, surveillance is infrastructure, many have invested in this stuff, and it is actually working, you can catch lots of events. At this point many violent crimes, kidnapping have been solved using street footage, right out from the surveillance infrastructure.

Also, it is a technology, it is out of the box, nation-states, security forces are just two big players, MANY private organizations have their own surveillance systems deployed, even capturing nearby events of all kinds (cameras are just one type of sensor available, for few extra bucks you can catch as much wifi, gsm, bluetooth, infrarred footage data as you want).

Do not forget the millions of (personal) cameras already deployed maybe 10 years ago and its coverage enlarged in the last years (now most are wifi or connected to DVRs).

Not that I like it a lot, but this stuff is here to stay, not because anyone says it, but because everyone is asking for this technology.</comment>


You're easy to track even when your data has been anonymized - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613996/youre-very-easy-to-track-down-even-when-your-data-has-been-anonymized/ <comment><USER2> Different article about same study discussed here 3 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513521) (261 points/94 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> It is worse than anonymized data: you are easy to track in databases that are not storing data about you at all, only measuring the broader environment you operate in (typically for innocuous purposes). This data is inherently "anonymous" in that it was never designed to be associated with or track a person but you can nonetheless reconstruct identity and other information about people from this data.

Individual anonymity in a technical sense is impossible in an environment with network connected sensors. Above a critical mass of sensors, which we have _far_ exceeded in most urbanized areas, there are no technical measures that can keep a person from being tracked.

<comment><USER4> Example of what you are talking about specifically?

<comment><USER3> When you move through any environment, it leaves a discernible trace in a (to most people) surprisingly large swath of sensor platforms that exist solely for boring industrial purposes like building management, measuring the operating environment of equipment to improve efficiency, etc, never mind systems actually designed to indirectly capture people (like cameras). Your existence perturbs the environment and leaves a faint footprint in the data. As a trivial example, transient proximity of people creates small fluctuations in measured temperatures. There are analytical techniques that reliably and systematically isolate and amplify those traces so that you can fingerprint and track a person using them. The typical urbanized environment is _littered_ with these sensors and it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the measurements coming off these sensors can be used to constructively identify specific individuals in the environment.

I think the gap for most people is not the existence of these sensors, which capture nothing about a person in any kind of direct way, or that people perturb their environment in some abstract way, but the existence of analytic techniques that allow someone to reconstruct detailed personal information from large collections of extremely oblique measurements of the broader environment.

The analytic methods for doing this type of reconstruction are quite clever and non-obvious, which I guess would need to be the case for it to be surprising. It is nothing at all like typical web or enterprise analytics -- you are using measured physics and constraints on that physics to infer environmental dynamics that you can't measure directly.

<comment><USER5> The other comprehension gap is that, thanks to Moore's law, these methods can be deployed at scale. Everyone is now a target, 24/7\. In the good old days of XXth century and Bond movies, it took a highly paid analyst to target someone personally. Which economically limited the intrusion to a tiny sliver of the population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For many Internet related phenomena, you can find an example where it already happened a long time ago with AOL.

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

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if I'm missing the point. Using the reference link; I think they're saying there is a 75-85% chance you are the only person in your zip code with your gender and your birthdate.

This does not seem that surprising or a new technological development.

<comment><USER7> The Nature paper is about the use of ML to augment regular statistical methods with a higher degree of match quality. This is because the neural network is able to identify dataset features beyond mere obvious group intersects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lets say with web-logs. What is "Anonymized"? Even when the datasets get "anonymized", at scale, information leaks.

Some of those IP addresses are static IP addresses, how could you tell whose?

Some of those URLs may end up with some form of PII in the query string from some forgotten backend service

Some of those user agents ended up having a kaspersky unique identifier

someone saves your website and when they open it some tag re-fires capturing they opened from /Users/John.Smith/yourpage.html

Facebook and google and others add link decoration tracking in the url, and suddenly a unique identifier appears across various hits, even if it wasn't added by the site owner.

There may be account identifiers, hashes or tokens linked to emails, phone numbers. So while the log dataset is market as low risk if lost losing some of the mapping tables at any point in the future would turn it into full PII.

</comment><comment><USER9> The only way to properly anonymize data is to aggregate it in such a way that you can't undo the aggregation. Anonymized data can nearly always be de- anonymized if you have either a) sufficient volume of data or b) access to the raw non-anonymized source data.

The problem is that most data surveillance systems store the raw source data instead of just keeping metrics in aggregate form. Thus, it's almost always possible to de-anonymize data.

<comment><USER10> Yes. For example, the GDPR distinguishes full datasets where identifiers have been removed (calling it "pseudonymisation") from truly anonymized data. The former is still subject to the regulation, just like any other personal data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is yet another article that conflates de-identified data with anonymization.

There are ways to create anonymous datasets, but they generally involve aggregation, not just removing the identifiers.

It's unfortunate that general lay person understanding of the concepts at work here doesn't tend to extend to this distinction. It would help drive privacy conversations if this were more commonly understood.

</comment><comment><USER12> From the article:

> It isn't all bad news. These same reidentification techniques were used by > journalists working at the New York Times earlier this year to expose Donald > Trump's tax returns from 1985 to 1994.

Flippant comments like that make it hard to take the authors seriously. Their concern for privacy apparently evaporates when the techniques are applied against people they don't like.

<comment><USER13> The argument has been made that the public deserves access to every President's and Presidential candidate's tax records, so they can make informed decisions about whether to elect or re-elect them.

Things such as conflicts of interest, crimes, and lies about where/how they got their money and whether they're really as wealthy as they claim to be, whether they've cheated on their taxes or paid unfairly low taxes considering their enormous wealth are all things that could influence these critically important decisions on the part of the public.

A further argument is that officials serving in public office don't have the same expectation of privacy that private citizens do.

In view of these two arguments and others it's not difficult to see why the authors of this article need not consider the revelation of Trump's tax returns a good thing merely because they don't like him.

Further, there is no evidence in the article that its authors would not be concerned about the privacy rights of other people they don't like who aren't: 1 - the President of the US, and 2 - not public officials.

<comment><USER12> I'm not unaware of the argument that candidates should release their tax returns, but it is _not_ the law right now.

Up until the point that access to Trump's tax returns was mentioned the article was warning about the false privacy associated with anonymizing identity.

I can understand the argument that candidates should reveal their financial history. But that doesn't mean otherwise reasonable concerns about false anonymity should be suspended when talking about the anonymity of one particular person who has explicitly asserted their privacy rights.

Even if you think the authors were making a more general statement about all candidates and not just Trump, that seems like a terrible argument to me. In the cases of candidates for office, voters are free to penalize candidates who don't reveal enough information about themselves by not voting for them. There is no need to soften any privacy concerns about anonymized identities.

<comment><USER13> _" voters are free to penalize candidates who don't reveal enough information about themselves by not voting for them"_

Compare these two hypothetical scenarios:

1 - Voters don't have access to the candidate's tax records

2 - Due to released tax records, the voters know for certain all of the below facts about the candidate: A - The candidate paid no taxes, B - The candidate cheated on their taxes, C - The candidate is not as rich as they claim to be, D - The candidate's businesses lost money so they're not as good a businessperson as they claim to be

In the first hypothetical scenario the voters the voters know there's a possibility that the candidate might be hiding something, in the second hypothetical scenario the voters know for certain that the candidate is a lawbreaking, tax cheating, lying hypocrite.

In which of these hypothetical scenario do you think the voters are going to penalize the candidate more?

<comment><USER12> This is a false choice and a different one than I suggested. You would have to consider this scenario also:

A released tax records B released tax records C didn't release any records

FWIW, I've talked to an accountant about the idea of Trump revealing his tax records and the bottom line is that they would be sufficiently complicated that there is no possibility that the average person would be able to interpret them accurately, so you'll be left with the spin from the various media organizations, hardly a source of objective truth.

So I would assert that requiring candidates to release their tax records doesn't actually provide any useful information for a voter.

Remember that Trump's tax records, are already examined by the IRS and I believe have been audited. So there shouldn't be any question of illegal activity being hidden, unless you want to assert that the IRS can't be trusted either.

There are also other concerns about tax records revealing information about 3rd parties. And finally tax records aren't really a useful way to understand the intricacies of a business. If you are really interested in that you would want the audit report for the underlying business and not just tax records.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Solar BMS charger for any Lithium battery - <AUTHOR> http://electrodacus.com/k/

<comment><USER2> Finally - off-grid hacking!</comment>


Alias a domain to a local port (Mac) - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/3228103

<comment><USER2> Or alternatively use virtual hosts and have descriptive hostnames pointing to numerous web instances.

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked on superuser. Hopefully someone responds. [http://superuser.com/questions/456349/how-to-alias-a- domain-...](http://superuser.com/questions/456349/how-to-alias-a-domain-to-a- local-port-in-osx-using-pfctl)</comment></comment>


DuShare - a Dead simple file sharing - Would love to know your feedback? - <AUTHOR>

Guys, We launched dushare.com 3 months ago, we are trying to come up with a dead simple and fast file-sharing service. We appreciate your feedback and input regarding new features needed or any feedback?<p>Check out Dushare.com <comment><USER2> It's a nice concept, sharing the file directly. Sadly it's not working here past a basic stateful firewall. Is it capable of hole punching at all? I also wonder why it loads the entire file into memory. And a final nit, fixed whitespace on the left and bottom screw up the site in a small window, and it doesn't get working scrollbars either.

<comment><USER3> Hi,

Thank you for the feedback. There is a limitation in the technology used in dushare, it completely relies on UDP streaming which makes it really fast, but not firewall friendly. We are working on a potential solution (fall back to TCP transfer), to be released in the next cycle. Loading the entire file in memory before sending it is a flash-player constraint out of security concerns, it doesn't allow flash-player to manipulate files on the computer directly, no solution found to this problem yet.

and your UI problems are noted, thank you.

<comment><USER4> UDP seems like a really bad idea for a filesharing solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, UDP opens a lot of capabilities for real-time collaboration as in chat, ,audio, video transfer in a very quick and reliable manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> clickable <http://dushare.com/></comment>


The Champion Who Picked a Date to Die - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/05/sports/euthanasia-athlete.html <comment><USER2> A really wonderful story about a courageous athlete who lived life to the fullest before deciding to pass in a humane way. I wish America had laws like these.</comment>


The Game of Phones: How 5 Top Tech Companies Plan to Win - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_game_of_phones_how_5_top_tech_companies_plan_t.php#.TsrdZcfdi9c.hackernews <comment><USER2> This is a narrow-minded analysis that fails to expose what is really important in the competition between these giants.

The battleground is not the phones (devices) but the services that power the experiences consumers will use and pay for (often indirectly) over time.

A better pivot would be around the assets that each of these 5 companies must have to be a leader in the consumer space in the next 3-5 years:

1) Control of (or unfettered access to) a global-scale social graph

2) An efficient, direct-to-consumer commerce system allowing taking/making payments in micro amounts

3) A world-wide, scalable cloud platform

4) A set of consumer valuable services

I've listed these in the order I think most important. If you agree the social graph is important you'll understand why Google will do _whatever_ it takes to make G+ a real competitor to Facebook.

Microsoft will eventually get excellent at interfacing directly with consumers (or will partner with someone e.g. Amazon to do so).

Amazon is very well positioned across all four.

Apple struggles with the social graph and cloud platform. They are clearly investing in the cloud. Not clear what they think they will do about the lack of a social graph.

Google is in pretty good shape except the only "consumer valuable service" they really provide is search; they need more.</comment>


Need your feedback for this simple twitter bookmarklet that I put together. - <AUTHOR> http://140b.us

<comment></comment>


Show HN: An online interactive Kubernetes playground - <AUTHOR> http://play-with-k8s.com <comment><USER2> [https://www.katacoda.com/learn](https://www.katacoda.com/learn) is a pretty great site, that also has a "playground" mode for Kubernetes available (as well as others)

<comment><USER3> I've tried the katacoda kubeadm tutorial but it didn't work for me

<comment><USER4> I can access the 'playground' exercise, but you have to sign up to the site to access the other tutorials.

<comment><USER5> True, but it's a free signup and we don't send unwanted emails...

<comment><USER4> I can understand why you'd want to do this, but it would be great if it was optional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anyone wonders why it just shows a blank page, the error code is:

        503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity

TL;DR: We've slashdotted it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done. Should be working now.

<comment><USER7> You might want to put this behind kubernetes so you can scale it easier... It's down again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, good one! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://labs.play-with-k8s.com](http://labs.play-with-k8s.com) is not opening.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. Too much traffic in a short period of time. Sorry about that.

<comment><USER9> Will return later!

<comment><USER3> Thx, we appreciate the patience!.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As several people have mentioned already - Ben Hall is doing great work.

I'm happy to see this Kubernetes playground because it's an open-source alternative.

</comment><comment><USER10> This isn't working for me. The only thing that works for me is reCaptcha. Then it times out. Hug of death maybe?

</comment><comment><USER11> Related: Anyone got a guide for deploying kubernetes on hardware I would have at home? a full cluster, not minikube.

<comment><USER4> Yes - this has been doing fairly well and uses kubeadm on Ubuntu - [https://blog.alexellis.io/kubernetes- in-10-minutes/](https://blog.alexellis.io/kubernetes-in-10-minutes/)

<comment><USER12> I used to also recommend kubeadm, but then I recognized there is no HA whatsoever (and what's the point of a cluster that dies with the master?)

Issue to track: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm/issues/261](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm/issues/261) and [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44793](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44793)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is cool but I'm a bit unsure how to actually use this. Kubectl doesn't seem to be able to connect to the server from within the terminal. It just gets: `The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?`

<comment><AUTHOR> It should work if you are on the master node

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have no idea about Kubernetes, all i did is copy/paste. Any good resources?

<comment><USER5> Take a look at [https://www.katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes/](https://www.katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes/) and the official Kubernetes interactive bootcamp that Katacoda also powers at [https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes- basics/](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/)

We'd love to hear your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> broken

</comment><comment><USER16> Why you are not serving the site in S3 bucket? :] Or does it have some fancy server side functionality?

<comment><USER16> Now that I was finally able to load the site I must say I'd have liked to have had some basic tutorials to help me get started. It might haven't been in the scope of this site but surely it would have been nice. Also the recaptcha is just a kick in the balls when it starts asking to pick the right squares. I'd have been happy to sign in with G+ just to skip it.

<comment><USER3> Hi, thanks for the feedback. We're planning to add some basic tutorials soon like ([http://training.play-with-docker.com](http://training.play-with- docker.com)). We'd need the help from the community though as it's hard for us to grow an OS project by ourselves. Regarding the login thing, we're also working on that aspect. Expect some updates soon.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: So Long, and Thanks for All the Veggies - <AUTHOR> https://christianfei.com/posts/2020-02-13-So-Long-and-Thanks-for-All-the-Veggies/ <comment><USER2> Wow! How can a common vegetable (pomodoro) and a common productivity technique (timeboxing) be combined together and sold as a new product? Who really falls for this "Pomodoro Technique" hype? Can't one just start a timer and focus on their work? Does this simple idea need copyright, trademark, and legal hassles?

I am surprised that Francesco Cirillo has been able to create a business out of this. A very disingenuous business in my opinion.

<comment><USER3> Cirillo may have a reasonable trademark case that this specific name, 'pomodoro', & exact instantiation is something he 1st defined & popularized, as a trade, going back to even before there were websites/web-apps. See, for example, claims in the Wikipedia article:

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

But that is just a trademark claim to the name. This wouldn't appear to rise to the level of a patentable invention, and many similar incarnations of related ideas should be widely and independently implementable. They just couldn't use the same name as another's trade/business. (And yes, you can trademark a common plant aa your business name: America's most valuable company is "Apple".)

So I do wish the creator of the `pomodoro.cc` service would just slap a new name on it, so that it could continue to provide value.

(I perfectly understand someone deciding it's not worth the aggravation in the presence of veiled legal threats, but performing a name-patch might've been both faster & more effective than authoring a prickly "so long" message and urging people to share their opinions with Cirillo.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree to most things you said. Thank you for the feedback.

This is what made me take the decision to throw away Pomodoro.cc and get out of this BS:

> I don't think it will be enough to change the name to return to the norm

If the main problem is the trademark why changing the name is not the solution?

He couldn't provide more info on that.

If one wants to bully another person with legal action, you are free to do that, but I don't have the time nor energy to follow this absurd BS.

To me he will always remain the creator of "The Trademark Technique"

PS: Apple is a company name and has a registered trademark and copyright for that company. His "invention" wasn't Pomodoro, but rather "Pomodoro Technique"..

<comment><USER3> OK, so perhaps Cirillo said, cryptically and without willingness to clarify, "I don't think it will be enough to change the name to return to the norm".

So what? From your account, it doesn't even seem he's used a lawyer to communicate with you (which is what the most serious enforcers do), or worded it in the form of a "cease and desist" (a formal demand for changed behavior). He just reached out, one proprietor to another.

The logical and legal grounds of his complaint is a trademark claim. If you stop using the name – including in the domain – then he no longer has any complaint.

You likely could just:

• pick a new domain-name

• do a search and replace on your work, replacing all cases where you've named your work 'pomodoro' with a new name.

• add an explanatory note on your site, to the effect: "this was previously called, and inspired by, Cirillo's 'Pomodoro Technique', but as Cirillo claims a trademark on that name, its been renamed. go to _his site_ if you want his book or training/consulting services"

• for some initial transition period – say 90 days? – have `pomodoro.cc` redirect to a disambiguation page, explaining that your service has moved, and the "official trademarked Pomodoro®" consulting services is somewhere else

And there's still ways to be either more, or less, cooperative in such a change, depending on your tolerance for conflict:

• You could transfer the domain to him at the end, perhaps for some token consideration, or could simply have the website stop functioning entirely.

• You could try a new name that's a play on the original, but without any risk of confusion or implied endorsement, like perhaps "Nightshade Timer", or "Orodomop Timer", or "Marinara Timer".

• You could either include resentful indirect allusions to Cirillo & his services – expressing your disdainful opinion of his trademark strategy – or instead just give warm mentions and links, to recognize that he did popularize this name and specific formula.

Cirillo can cryptically say "not enough" to such things, but as long as you're not labeling your offering "pomodoro" (in text and domain-name), there's no grounds for further complaint or legal threat.

Note that exactly the way that Apple Incorporated of Cupertino, California, USA, has a registered trademark for the wordmark "Apple"...

[https://trademarks.justia.com/876/28/apple-87628828.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/876/28/apple-87628828.html)

...Francisco Cirillo of Berlin, Germany also has a registered trademark for the wordmark "Pomodoro", as of a 2012 filing:

[https://trademarks.justia.com/857/90/pomodoro-85790837.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/857/90/pomodoro-85790837.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> tomatillotimebox.cc !!! :)</comment>


Possible missing Boeing 777 #MH370 horizontal stabilizer found off Mozambique - <AUTHOR> http://www.airlive.net/breaking-possible-boeing-777-mh370-horizontal-stabilizer-found-off-mozambique/ <comment><AUTHOR> more images: [https://twitter.com/CNNJason/status/705127022222299136](https://twitter.com/CNNJason/status/705127022222299136)</comment>


Alexa researchers train speech recognizer on 1M hours of unlabeled speech - <AUTHOR> https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9e8392c6-5476-4a34-a2d8-c4e479677954/new-speech-recognition-experiments-demonstrate-how-machine-learning-can-scale <comment><USER2> Here's a direct link to the paper:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.01624.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.01624.pdf)

There was another paper two weeks ago:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02348.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02348.pdf)

For some reason, this submission isn't making it to the front page, even with 7 upvotes in the first 10 minutes.</comment>